Another Comic is Stillborn

A few years ago I wrote a comic book. It was kind of a test run for a new series that I wanted to do. After the book I'd written was completed, the publisher turned out to be something of a flake and, to make a long story short, neither the artist nor I were ever paid. After I'd written a short story introducing one of the major characters for the new book, the artist with whom I'd been working (wisely) decided that he didn't want anything to do with the publisher and opted out. After the rather nasty experience with the publisher, I had to agree with the artist, and so the new project (NEANDERGAL) never saw the light of day.

So here is a very brief story featuring some of the characters (and the world) from the stillborn Neandergal comic book:

A DAY IN THE LIFE
A Neandergal story
By James Robert Smith
(Neandergal and all characters copyright 2008 by James Robert Smith)

PAGE ONE

Panel One: Scimitar cat sitting on a rock ledge, looking down into an open area near a pond. POV is from slightly behind and to the left of the cat. POV should remain pretty much the same for the cats during most of the story.

Panel Two: A second scimitar cat has appeared from his left.

Panel Three: First cat remains lying down, paws crossed. They are snarling at one another.

The standing, smaller, younger cat: Hello Frank.

Second, older, reclining cat: Hello Ralph.

Panel Four: They are now sitting side by side, looking down from the height at the pond.

Ralph: Man, I’m hungry. Haven’t bagged anything in two days. You don’t have any carrion around, do you?

Frank: Nah. Not for you, anyway.

Panel Five: Silence. Frank is licking his paw.

Panel Six: They are snarling at one another again.

Frank: If Wynona goes into heat soon, I better not find you around here!

Ralph: Okay! Okay!

PAGE TWO

Panel One: A Neandertal man (Spike, the alpha male from Neandergal’s clan) is walking down to the pond. He has a small deer he’s killed.

Panel Two: Ralph, obviously agitated, has half-risen from the rock ledge, bunching his legs beneath him. Frank remains cool.

Ralph: Look! Look! He’s got something to eat! Let’s take it from him!

Panel Three: We can see Spike sitting down. Next to him, propped on a boulder, is his club and spear. He’s preparing to skin the deer. Behind him, upslope, we can just make out the heads of Ralph and Frank in the brush that conceals them.

Ralph: I mean, look at him. They’re so slow! They’re so small! I could just go down there and take it from him.

Panel Four: Close-up of the two cats. Frank is looking at Ralph. We see Frank in profile, left side. Ralph is still looking down on Spike.

Frank: Forget it, kid. Don’t mess with a Neandertal. They’re trouble.

Panel Five: Ralph is looking now at Frank, his jaws gaping. Frank is still cool. Always cool.

Ralph: Trouble? What kind of trouble? How much trouble can they be? I mean…look at him! They’re slow! He’s alone. I’m gonna…

Panel Six: Frank is watching Ralph retreat. We see Frank’s profile again, and Ralph’s backside as he goes off-panel.

Frank: Don’t do it, kid. I’m telling you…

PAGE THREE

Panel One: Spike now has the deer about three-fourths skinned. He’s holding his flint knife and the hide is peeling away. There’s a pile of guts on the ground, and the spear and club are just at his shoulder as he sits on a rock working on the carcass.

Panel Two: Ralph has sneaked up toward the pond. We see him from his POV looking out from brush at Spike’s back from about ten meters away.

Panel Three: Very small panel. Close-up of Spike’s wide, gnarled, oft-broken nose.

Panel Four: Small, side panel. Close-up of Spike’s eyes, narrowed suspiciously and looking back.

Panel Five: Large panel of Ralph clearing the brush with a roar. Spike is already rising, his club in his hard right hand, weapon in a downward arc toward the cat. There is a look of horror and determination (but not surprise) on Spike’s face.

Panel Six: We see Spike’s club smashing with absolutely crushing force on Ralph’s face, mainly smashing into the cat’s right eye.

PAGE FOUR

Panel One: Shot of Ralph running like hell away from Spike. There’s a bloody trail dripping from his face as he runs.

Panel Two: Frank is still sitting on his rock, looking down at Spike who has picked up the deer, his spear and club, and is hurrying off.

Panel Three: Ralph and Frank are facing again, snarling, blood and ooze coming down Ralph’s face.

Ralph: Look what he did to me! I can’t see! He hurt me!

Frank: I told you! Don’t mess with them!

Panel Four: Ralph is slinking off into the brush.

Ralph: Damn! Damn! I can’t see!

Frank: Stay out of my territory from now on, kid!

Panel Five: We finally see Frank head on. Close-up on his face. He has a very old scar that runs across the right side of his face, from above his eye down to his lip. As that made by a club.

Frank: Dumbass kids. Can’t tell them anything…

What is Fine with the World

Everyone spends so much time bitching and moaning about things they don’t like, or things that are wrong and which they can’t possibly fix. So here’s a list of what I like; things that are perfect and don’t need fixing.

The people I love:

My wife. I love Carole Henderson. She’s sweet and patient. She put up with me, and she put up with my horrid family until I decided to remove us from the circle of my family. She's the number one important person to me.


My son. Andy has to have one of the sweetest dispositions of any person I’ve ever known. I’d do anything for him.



The stuff I like:

Warm baths. What the hell? There are not too many things that feel better than a hot bath.

The mountains. Yes, I like the mountains. Among the great things that I do is to climb to the summit of a tall peak and look around. Sometimes the peak is exposed and I can see for hundreds of miles. And sometimes the peak is all in trees and I can hang out and observe the vegetation and all that lives in it.

Old forests. There aren’t many things more pleasing to me than sitting in an old growth forest and just being quiet. I love to see the country as it once was from shore to shore.

Beer. Oh, hell yes! I don’t know how long humans have been making beer, but I’ve been actively drinking it since I was in my late 20s. An acquired taste? Maybe. But I do love the flavor of a good beer.

Cheese. Once again, humans at work with fermenting stuff! There’s not a lot better than sitting down to eat with some kind of cheese, some good fresh baked bread, and a big mug of beer. My, my, yes!


Books. Oh, my life has been the better because of books. I love to read! I love fiction, and I love non-fiction. No matter where I am, I can stop and while away the time by reading a good book. Mankind’s greatest achievement has been Writing.

The things I enjoy doing:

Hiking. I love to hike. My first choice is a tough mountain trail tackling a steep slope leading up to a high mountain peak. But I also enjoy hiking the flatlands and wandering around the low country. There is no better way to spend a day than hiking a nice trail through a forest, whether it is a cove hardwood forest in the Smokies, or a maritime forest on the South Carolina coast.

Camping. Once again, it could be anywhere. But it’s the thing my family and I enjoy doing the most together, as a family. As long as we’re in the forest or beside the ocean, together, away from the crowds.

Big Trees

I’ve always loved hiking in old growth forests filled with big trees. There’s something about walking beneath the canopy of such a woodland that makes me feel good. The landscapes inside this type of wood are open, the forest floor almost always in shadow, and the variety of trees and plants sometimes astounding. In the past few years I was on a mission of sorts to view the old growth hemlock forests of the South before they all died out from an invasive pest. I had already watched the old growth Fraser fir forests of my southern highlands die completely off from a similar insect infestation. The climax forests of balsam trees in which I’d hiked as a teen became standing snags of bleached tree trunks when I was in the thirties and forties.

In the past five years I watched with great anguish and horror while the old hemlock forests went from healthy, to sickly, to dead. Now, inside most of the parks that I frequent, the hemlock groves are merely horizontal trunks, bark peeling, bereft of needles and life.

There are a few areas remaining where hemlock groves still stand and are as yet free of the infestations that have destroyed their more easterly counterparts. The Cumberland Plateau of middle Tennessee so far seems to be relatively untouched by the hemlock wooly adelgid. We can only hope that some of these amazing stands of Eastern and Carolina hemlock trees can be treated against the insect pest and saved until such time as a clever team of biologists can conceive of a biological way to eliminate the invasive species that has done so much harm to our Southern forests.

If you can find the time, at least go to visit such a grove of trees before they’re gone. At least you will have the memory of them and can tell others of what you once saw. If you feel more strongly about it, write to your senator or congressman or governor and ask that these forests be aided by the application of an insecticide that can halt the spread of the adelgid’s march across the South. And, if you truly wish to help, you can purchase the Bayer Company insecticide Imadacloprid (commonly sold as Merit), and treat hemlock groves on your own, at your own expense. But, as I said, at the very least, go to see these groves before they’re all gone.

Some places where hemlocks still stand in great, old growth splendor are:

Bridgestone-Firestone Wilderness

Virgin Falls Pocket Wilderness

Fall Creek Falls State Park.

Cataloochee Valley, where the hemlocks are extinct, now.
(All of the hemlock groves where I took these photos between 2004/2005 are now dead.)

My favorite horror movies.

For someone as historically fond of horror as I, there really aren’t a great lot of horror movies that I find effective. Very few actually frighten me, and very few are worthwhile as cinematic achievements. Most horror films that I’ve watched over the years were frankly rather lame and very disappointing in failing to evoke a feeling of unease, or to achieve any emotion in me as something worth seeing.

Here are the exceptions.

The Body Snatcher

This Val Lewton-produced gem is one of the darkest movies I’ve seen. The movie is at once disturbing because there seems to be no solidly delineated good or bad. Everyone in the film moves about in a kind of gray area between light and dark. The villain of the piece, Gray the Cabman, is capable of great cruelty, and yet is somehow sympathetic in his loneliness and thirst for companionship and (perhaps) some kind of revenge for a past wrong. The apparent hero, Dr. Toddy MacFarlane, a surgeon, is not so good as we are first led to expect. And even his assistant, who provides a romantic interest for the audience, can be led astray by duty. For its visual accomplishments, and for Karloff’s performance as Gray, this movie deserves a place on my all-time favorites list.

Night of the Living Dead

George A. Romero’s landmark horror film is easily one of the most emotionally wrenching stories I’ve ever watched. Cheaply made, starring no one who made a name as an actor, the movie presents a claustrophobic and paranoid atmosphere that has been pretty much unmatched in all the years since I’ve seen it. And this is the seed of his zombie mythos, the beginning of an entire genre of film that scratches at the itch of paranoia in every person. His zombies are frightening in their sheer plainness, and implacable in their thirst for the destruction of the living.

Dawn of the Dead

Romero returned some years later with this fantastic sequel that doubles as a superlative commentary on the consumer society of the USA. This time, the heroes are not confined to a fragile house, but are able to roam in a kind of wonderland of commercial delight inside of a shopping mall walled off from the zombie hoards who wait outside. Finally, in this movie, we see the zombies not as someone coming to get us, but as ourselves willing to destroy those who are different. This film rivals its predecessor in its effects of generating a sense of horror and dread.

The Haunting

If there is a more atmospheric horror movie, I have yet to see it. The Haunting is a series of visual and auditory illusions whose whole effect is to completely unsettle the viewer. One identifies immediately with the most vulnerable of the characters, and the witnessing of the downward spiral, mentally and physically, of this person is one of the most disturbing experiences in all of modern cinema.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

The greatest horror novels and films prey upon human paranoia. Finney’s novel that spawned these films is a classic, rivaled in the category of paranoid fantasies only by Matheson’s I AM LEGEND. Both of these versions of Invasion are superlative films, and while generally I disdain remakes of classic and perfectly fine movies, in this case the remake was worth the doing. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is both effective science fiction and evocative horror. The fifties version relied on the Red Scare, perhaps subtly or maybe on the surface—but who’s to know. The paranoia of being ratted out for being different (leftist) could also be the germ that created the fear in some viewers of that era.

The later version has a cast at least equal to that in the 50s film, and a script that goes the original one better in having the courage to end with a far more horrifying and downbeat ending. The small changes in the storyline were startling and make the film different enough so that what was familiar is made strange enough so that the experience is new.



The Woman in Black

This is, to my way of thinking, the most frightening ghost story ever put to film. Based on the very popular novel of the same name, and the stage play, The Woman in Black is a ghost story with a grain of logic behind it. This is the key to creating a good ghost story—if one is to accept the perfectly ridiculous idea of a ghost, then one must be presented with a kind of twisted logic to make it all seem believable (on some level). This movie does that, and brilliantly. The ghost in the film (the Woman in Black) appears tenuously, at first, her presence building and building as the protagonist of the film slowly realizes just what he is dealing with. The movie has the single scariest ghost encounter I have ever witnessed, and every time I see it (even in daylight), I never fail to be literally scared and to feel the gooseflesh creeping up my spine.


Alien

Alien is probably the scariest pure science fiction film I’ve seen. The movie relies not on a single fear to generate dread, but on many different fears. There is the fear of the unknown, the fear of one’s own body, the fear of betrayal, the fear of violence, fear of the dark, claustrophobia, and on and on. Ridley Scott has succeeded in crafting not only one of the finest horror films ever made, but also one of the best science fiction films ever. This one works on so many levels that it’s hard to understand how it works so well. Add to all of this the most disturbing film monster of all time, and it’s a recipe for total horror.

Jesus Allegory Films

I’ve seen a lot of films which are allegories based on the Jesus myth. Most of them were quite good movies. I’m going to list my five favorites here.

First and foremost is BLADERUNNER. Rutger Hauer made a very strange Jesus figure, but an effective one nonetheless. As I tell everyone, BLADERUNNER is my all-time favorite movie, so I dissect it every time I watch it (about six times a year).

Second on the list is the absolutely kickass film, COOL HAND LUKE. Paul Newman is the most human of all of the allegorical Jesuses. This movie also had the neatest film version of Pontius Pilate (Strother Martin) and Apostle Paul (George Kennedy). For a thinly veiled religious movie, this one seems to be on everybody’s favorites list.

Third is the recent, but no less impressive NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. Now, to my way of thinking, it’s more of a Satan movie (Javier Bardem), but Josh Brolin puts in a very good turn as the Jesus figure (Llewellyn Moss), and is probably the most stubborn of the bunch of cinematic Jesus dudes.

Next is Keanu Reeves as Neo, in the most heavy-handed Jesus allegory of them all in THE MATRIX. You have to be total dunce to miss the religious imagery and references in this one. I have to say, though, that Lawrence Fishburne made one hell of a John the Baptist (he even got to keep his head).

Last on my list is Christopher Reeve as Superman/Jesus. Probably the most noble of all of the Jesus folk. He’s pretty much the god aspect of Jesus with not much of the human side visible (except when he’s being Clark). And who better to have portrayed God, than Marlon Brando?


Well, there it is: the list of my all-time favorite Jesus Allegory Films.

The New Karloff

On another occasion my pals and I were discussing the old movie stars. We quickly began to talk about the various actors who had staked their careers on being monsters of various stripes, or playing second fiddle to monsters in films when they weren’t actually being the monsters.

Of course the king of all of these actors was Boris Karloff. He was the best of them, and the greatest.

Then we began to wonder who the “new” Boris Karloff was. Surely there must be an actor among the modern crop who filled the same niche as the old master, Karloff. One reason the list is short is because some actors, fearing themselves being typecast, will run from genre offers in hopes that something “better” will come along. Anyone remember Jonathan Frid? So, knowing there weren’t a lot of actors to choose from, we began to run through the very short list.

Brad Dourif?

Nope. One-off guy. Good actor and all that, but voicing a murderous doll in a series of movies doesn’t quite count.

Robert Englund? Nah. None of us figure he’s much of an actor, and all he ever did was play Freddie. A neat character and all that, but a one-note actor.

Christopher Lee? Well…maybe he would have fit the bill twenty-five years ago, but he’s rather long in the tooth (haha). He might count, as he’s quite the actor and has played quite a lot of monsters, including Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. But we struck him off the list since he’s all but a contemporary of Karloff’s.

And then…for the longest time, we were just stuck. Finally, though, it occurred to me. Who was the actor I’ve seen the most who’s almost always covered in prosthetic makeup whenever he’s appeared in a feature film?

Ron Perlman.

He’s quite good, as actors go. Maybe not at the top of the heap of actors, and he could never really be a straight leading man (not with that mug!). But he’s quite effective in every role I’ve seen. And, of course, he’s almost always a monster or creature or in some altered state in just about every film.

The first time I saw him (Quest for Fire) he was a Neanderthal man, or some kind of archaic human. With that simian face of his, they didn’t need to add a lot of makeup. He played a retarded hunchback in The Name of the Rose. In the TV series, Beauty and the Beast…well, he was a human lion. In Enemy at the Gates, he was a steel-toothed sniper (really! Steel teeth!). In Blade II, he was a blood-sucking vampire. Perlman was The Sayer of the Law in The Island of Doctor Moreau. The muscle-bound strongman in The City of Lost Children. The man was a scar-faced mercenary in Alien: Resurrection. He was an extra-terrestrial humanoid in Star Trek: Nemesis. And in my favorite of his performances, he was the all-too human demon, Hellboy in the film of that name (a role which he is about to reprise in a sequel).

As a voice actor, he has appeared as any number of monsters and villains and super-heroes in a range of cartoons, both theatrical and for TV.

So, there you have it, folks. There is a modern-day Boris Karloff. His name is Ron Perlman.

Joe Turkel, Damn Fine Actor

I was talking with a friend recently, musing over great roles by under appreciated actors. One of the first who came to mind was Joe Turkel who gave flesh and voice and presence to two very striking, and very different characters in a pair of 1980s films.

One of the creepiest characters I’ve ever seen in a movie is Lloyd the bartender in Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING. I’m not here to discuss whether or not the film is any good, but I am here to state that Turkel’s interpretation of Lloyd was chilling. His eyes almost appear to be those of a dead man. (Which is what he was supposed to be, yes.) How’d he manage to do that?

Another great role for him was that of Tyrell, the genetics manipulating capitalist in my all-time favorite movie: BLADERUNNER. Again, I’m not going to list why that film is at the very top of my movie list, but I am here to mention Turkel’s work in that flick. Although he doesn’t have a lot of screen time, he makes a huge impression as the rich and powerful Eldon Tyrell. His line “More human than human is our motto” rings long after I view the film.

So, go watch those movies. Pay special attention when Joe Turkel’s on the screen. Of course, I probably didn’t have to tell you that. Turkel’s work will do that on its own.

Evil

He Saw Evil
By
James Robert Smith

His younger brother
married a whore.
His older brothers,
of whom he had several,
married women.
This whore, though,
was a working class
psychologist.
The Johns, the
endless line of Johns
even at her young
age
had taught her that all
she had to do
was stroke whatever made
them
feel good.
This whore,
had learned that
everyone
liked to be
stroked.
Even gay men
could be moved to
fall in temporary
love
with her when
she rubbed
what made them
emotionally tick.
And women, she’d learned,
had conceits
that could be
massaged to pleasure.
Eventually, she tried it
with him.
“You’re so smart,” she’d say, when
his kid brother was not
around.
But he already knew that.
“I admire people
who read,” she’d pout,
when his little brother was
somewhere else.
Good for you, he’d think.
“Your lips are
very pretty,” she lied,
when her husband was
not there.
He wanted to puke.
Eventually,
she gave up on him.
And then
he saw
the only true
emotion
that a whore
possesses:
HATRED.
She hated his
guts,
and showed it
at every
opportunity.
Ah.
That was much
better.
He could deal with
that.
He felt he’d
accomplished something
good
and decent,
since, as you now know,
his little brother’s wife
was
a
whore.
But,
worst of all, her husband
was
a pimp.

Finding Science in the Mountains.

(Written in response to the musings of a religious moron.)

By

James Robert Smith.

When I was sixteen years old, I was sitting on the cliff face of Charlies Bunion in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with one of my best friends, T---. We were in the midst of a two-week backpacking trip with a pair of other friends from school. Part of this excursion was a series of very leisurely strolls of only a few miles from shelter to shelter along the AT before we would reach Newfound Gap and a ride from his parents to another point farther south along the Appalachian Trail.

As T--- and I surveyed the amazing topography before us, under ideal conditions of clear, blue skies and cool breezes, my friend sat up from where he was reclining on the ancient rock and exclaimed, “How can anyone look at this and not believe in God?”

And I said, as I generally do, the first thing that popped into my head. That thing was, “How can anyone look at this and not believe in Plate Tectonics and erosion?”

“You asshole,” T--- exclaimed, rising and stalking off to where our other two friends were standing, joining his Christian company. Leaving me, as usual, sane man out.

This has always been an amusement to me: how others see supernatural silliness in the landscapes of the mountainous terrain of this planet. I can understand how any person can be emotionally spurred by a panorama of peaks and ridges and forests and gorges and hollows and canyons and ice and rock. But to see the hand of a super-being that doesn’t exist is laughable. I finally understood that this tendency to see this kind of thing in the workings of physical science lay not in spontaneous emotions, but in lifelong brainwashing that generally begins in very early youth.

When I look upon the mountains, I see the real world in action. I see how the movement of tectonic plates grinding one against the other can thrust the very crust of the planet skyward. I see faults in the Earth, forming commanding ranges that loom above lower terrain. I see rift valleys created by the moving away of one plate from another. I see volcanic peaks rising high above hot spots. I see wind and rain and snow and Mr. Gravity (Ha! Let’s personify physics!) pulling and drawing inexorably on the work that opposing forces have made in molding the ranges.

When I was sitting there in the middle of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, I knew that I was within one of the world’s great areas of floral diversity. In this park alone, there were almost three times as many species of trees than there was in the entire continent of Europe. Almost everywhere one looked in the forests and on the rocks and in the dark loam there were blossoms of many types. Here, there were dozens of mammal species, reptiles, amphibians; hundreds of types of birds; and as-yet uncounted kinds of insects, arachnids, and other invertebrates. From whence this dizzying array of living things?

Well, not from any god.

I have never, in all of my life, seen the hand of anything supernatural in the vast lands where I most love to hike. In fact, my longing for the solitude of the mountains comes not from seeing any weirdness such as religious origins to the Universe. The reasons that I go to walk these ridgelines and to explore these valleys and walk among these forests is to escape from the insanity of religion, the most evil creation of Mankind. I go there to get away from your god, whichever god others may believe in and worship.

For myself, I don’t see any wacky god in the phenomenal details of a butterfly’s wings. I don’t see any god at work in the absolutely astounding complexity of a red newt. When I see a newt consuming a worm, I don’t for one second think that this tiny drama was wrought by some silly god existing with his googleplex of fingers on every atom. The idea is inherently preposterous and, I would add, insane.

There is no magical power at work in the science of mountain building. There is no incarnation of some religious idea in the tearing down of thrust faults by wind and rain and the constant drag of gravity. There is no god in the mountains. There is no god in the valleys. There is no god on the cliffs. There is no god in the gorges. There is no god in the trees. There is no god on the forest floor. There is no god in the sky. There is no god.

However, I am there. And my companions are there, when I hike with friends.

But, best of all, there is solitude when I go to hike alone. There is, quite often, only me and the physical world that amazes me when I go to hike and scramble and sleep among the mountain peaks in the high country that always draws me up to the highest points. Sometimes I encounter insects scrambling across the earth or up an old tree. Occasionally I spy an elk in the woods at the edge of a field. There are times when I see a raptor soaring on thermal waves that I cannot see. But the nicest thing about these times and these encounters is that none of them bring along a god; and I am content.

Ah! No other people!