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Grave Concerns

Zombie comic book series wants Eugene’s braaaains

This originally appeared in last week's Eugene Weekly, the February 16 issue. I angle for EW's cover story now and then, which is not to say I always land it, and I was honestly sort of surprised when my editor Rick Levin lobbied to put this particular story on the cover. I certainly didn't write it with that in mind. It does seem to have struck a bit of a chord, though, as more folks than usual have sought me out to tell me they liked it. Evidently the Association of Alternative Newsmedia was diggin' it, too, as they posted it to their top stories for the week.

Many thanks to Chris Roberson and Michael Allred for the interviews!

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Eugene can be a contradictory place. Some find numerous opportunities here, seeing Eugene as a community full of music, culture, good food and outdoor adventure. Others characterize the city more prosaically, as a nice place to live, but maybe a little … lacking in diversions.

Count cartoonist Michael Allred in the former category. “Growing up in Roseburg, Eugene was always the exciting place to go,” he says. Allred, creator of the independent critical-darling comic book Madman, moved on to college in Utah (where he met his wife, comic-book colorist Laura Allred) and eventually lived for a time in Eugene. He later relocated to various points all around the country, and even to Europe. But Eugene always held a special place in his heart.

Now Allred is the artist of a comic book series that is not only set in Eugene, but also embraces the line our city walks between the everyday and the extraordinary.

Published by DC Comics’ imprint for adults, Vertigo, iZombie follows the adventures of Gwen Dylan, a UO dropout who hangs out in a diner, makes her living digging graves in an eco-friendly cemetery and who just happens to be an undead zombie.

Gwen, helped along by her friends Ellie the ghost and Scott the were-terrier (yes, you read that right), solves supernatural mysteries, eats the occasional brain and dodges an ancient order of monster hunters … all punctuated by routine trips to the diner for chocolate and coffee.

Comparing his work to a cross between Archie comics and Scooby-Doo, iZombie series writer and New York Times best-selling author Chris Roberson, who lives in Austin, Texas, says that balancing the mundane and the fantastic sides of Eugene is one of his goals. Roberson’s stories cleverly subvert the standard monster-movie formula by showing how the undead spend their down time.

“It’s almost required that the moment that someone becomes one of these supernatural beings, they become angsty,” Roberson says. “If I became a werewolf, I’d still be the person I am now, I’d just have some personal hygiene issues once a month, or have some self-control issues.”

Roberson, who has never visited Oregon, relies in large part on online street views to inform the sense of place inherent in his writing. But his collaborator Allred just moved back to Eugene after a stint on the Oregon Coast. Having one half of the creative duo based in the city where the story is set has its advantages.

Besides advising Roberson on details of Eugene geography and daily life, Michael Allred incorporates real Eugene landmarks into the comic’s illustrations, which are in turn brought to colorful life by Laura Allred.

In the Eugene of iZombie, vampires troll for dates at the Downtown Lounge. A UO science lab is used as a staging ground for communing with extra-dimensional beings. The Shelton-McMurphey-Johnson mansion at the base of Skinner Butte doubles as the home of a centuries-old Egyptian mummy. And the diner where Gwen and her spooky friends hang out is modeled on Fins Drive-In in Springfield.

Continue reading "Grave Concerns" at Eugene Weekly.

Better Read than Dead: Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans

Inkville's "mostly New Orleans, much of the time" coverage continues with this installment. And by the way, the images after the jump sort of stray into NSFW territory. And definitely stray into "Ewww" territory.

The book pitch I have been kicking around for a few years now centers on ghost stories of old New Orleans. So what better research item than, well, Ghost Stories of Old New Orleans, Jeanne deLavigne's 1946 treatise on supernatural hauntings throughout the French Quarter and other NOLA neighborhoods?

The book is sadly out of print and going for around $125 online, so I'm indebted to the University of Oregon's interlibrary loan program, and to the libraries of the University of Texas at Austin and Brigham Young University.

Here's a photo of deLavigne, which she has signed as a gift for another favorite New Orleans author, Robert Tallant. Seem slike a nice older lady, doesn't she? You'd never expect she was a macabre freak.

deLavigne was part of the early-to-mid-20th century New Orleans artistic and literary renaissance as fueled by the Works Progress Administration, a contemporary of Lyle Saxon and a sort of spiritual inheritor of George Washington Cable. I haven't read an awful lot about this period of NOLA history, but on the surface, some of the relationships, artistic output, and activist bent of the whole thing seem reminiscent of the Irish Literary Revival's Yeats/Synge/Lady Gregory complex across the pond, just a few decades later.  It's temptingly easy, in fact, to cast deLavigne as a sort of Southern Lady Gregory, gathering the spooky tales of the common American.

Literary Arts Profile

Hey, cool. For the moment, Oregon Literary Arts has bumped a trimmed version of my profile and interview, as well as my smiling mug (okay, tight-lipped and smirking mug) up to their fellowships page. Dig:

 

In one of my trademark acts of shameless self-promotion, I figure my most effective strategy will be to ride the coattails of my own sweater vest until they fall off... like, say, cross-posting this to my blog. The full profile, by the way, can be perused on Literary Arts' Paper Fort blog.

And on a related note, I sure have gotten a lot of mileage out of that Isaac Viel-powered photo shoot.

Shutter Island: The Epiphanies of Confinement

In my recent video interview for the University of Oregon's Talk project, I was asked to name one thing I fear. I replied, "an enclosed space." I've always been somewhat claustrophobic. Recently the First Lady of Inkville and I were walking in the woods here in western Oregon, and we came upon a damp playground situated in a quiet campground. I remarked that the cement tubes painted in bright pastels, placed near the swings for children to crawl through, had always given me the creeps as a kid.

Back in the city, we watched a trio of films that, coincidentally, each address notions of confinement, claustrophobia, and the epiphanies that arise from confronting oneself in a closed system. Be forewarned, for herein lie mild spoilers for Shutter Island, Coraline, and, yes, believe it or not, Couples Retreat.

Scorsese's noir Shutter Island is a lush, beautiful film. It's not the visual confection of Coraline or Amelie, but the saturated color, beautiful stars, and unforgiving, verdant landscape are visually compelling. And while Shutter Island is, indeed, frightening, it's not the slasher thriller the trailer makes it out to be; its heart-in-the-throat thrills derive as much from the plot's implications for its protagonist's life and lifestyle, as from any shadowy boogeymen.

The film opens on a Boston harbor ferryboat in 1954, with a pair of U.S. marshals, a surprisingly likable Leo DiCaprio and the reliably wry Mark Ruffalo, assigned to investigate the disappearance of a violent escapee from an island mental institution. What they uncover, of course, is not so straightforward.

With its forbidden zones, violent secrets, abandoned facilities, and requisitely spooky graveyard, the closed system of the Shutter Island prison is as much a stand-in for the human mind as it is an actual filmic environment. This is a "locked room" mystery adventure writ large, and it's only through the DiCaprio character's' submersion into his own psyche that said mystery can be solved. Along the way, the protagonist must abandon his detective smarts, and ultimately, his very identity, to emote his way through a maze where logic fails. Eventually he must face the reality of what Shutter Island represents for him personally, and, related, what sort of man he has become. It is only through the confinement, the enclosure, of the island that DiCaprio's character is able to grow.

OMG! Steampunk!

Sent:      February 02, 2007 1:22 PM
From:     Every Studio Head in Hollywood
To:          Every Studio Executive in Hollywood
Subject:  OMG! Steampunk!

Dudes, have you seen the dailies rolling off the Golden Compass set?  That movie is gonna be OFF THA CHAIN, you guys.  I don't understand what this "steampunk" thing is, but it seems to have something to do with women in hoop skirts and men with mechanical eyeballs, or some stupid thing.  Knowing this stuff is why I keep you army of jokers around in the first place.  But whatever steampunk is, it is MEGA HOTT.  So I want all of ya to just back-burner whatever you're working on, get out there, and find me a bunch of Victorian-era action/adventure fantasies to get into pre-production, like, pronto.  And I want all of 'em to hit around the same time, three years from now.  That puts us in the December 2009-February 2010 corridor, 'kay?

 

Sent:      March 22, 2007 10:04 AM
From:     Every Studio Head in Hollywood
To:         Every Studio Executive in Hollywood
Subject:  Re: OMG! Steampunk!

Oh dear Lord, I was completely high on absinthe for most of last month.  Did I say Victorian?  I totally meant sword and sandal epics. Gladiator was da bomb, man, and I want Medusa to be in, like, every movie we release.  You haven't already spent a bunch of money on steampunk crap, right?  And you can still stick to a three-year timeline, yes?  'Cause at this point that'll position all our chain mail barbarian warrior movies for late winter through the spring of 2010. OK thx, u guyz R totally pros!

 

P.S.  My nephew Bob, who works in accounting, had this really sweet idea.  Could the marketing department make the posters interlock, so it looks like one guy is blocking a lightning attack from another guy by using a disembodied monster head as a shield?  That would so srsly RAWK.

A'ight, y'all.  I'm outie.

Jolly Good Fellow

I wasn't in the best mood, to be honest. I felt rushed and harried, and my million-and-one editing and web projects at work at the University of Oregon's Office of Admissions were keeping me hopping. I was just about to step out of my office to run an errand and clear my head, in fact, when my cell rang.

I don't often pick up personal calls at work, especially if I don't recognize the number. Too frequently it's "Vote YES on Measure Such-and-So," or Comcast trying to suss out some billing nuance. But it was a Portland area code, and I needed a break, anyway.

"I'm calling from Oregon Literary Arts," said the voice of Susan Denning on the other end of the line. I felt my hands go numb, the way they always do when I'm about to get really great news, or really bad news.

It was the former.

I'm the happy recipient of the 2009 Leslie Bradshaw Fellowship for my literary nonfiction work, specifically some of the ghost-hunting material I worked on while a grad student at the UO. I'm proud to hail from an institution and an academic program that has produced so many great writers, many of whom have been fellowship recipients in the past, most recently my cohort Sabena Stark. And I'm also glad to sweep the literary nonfiction awards section with my fellow UO writer Mike Copperman. Most of all, I'm proud I was even considered for a fellowship, and pleased that the selection committee sees value in the sort of pop culture writing I do. My alma mater seems glad to claim me, if nothing else, based on the digital ink they've given me.

I'm not sure how I'm going to utilize the nice chunk of change my benefactors have dropped on me. But one thing's for sure: now my project has a ghost of a chance. Nyuck.

Oh, and my mood has picked up considerably.

Say, you attended a conference, right?

Why yes, Johnny. Yes, I did. A few more words on the University of Oregon's recent "Understanding Superheroes" academic conference. I'll try to keep this post Teen Titans-sized, and not one of the Justice League-length diatribes of my last couple of superposts.

Perhaps my favorite of all the conference events I've attended to this point (yes, there are more upcoming; this conference and its schedule of attendant events are massive), was the panel "Being and Super-Beings: Existentialism, Temporality, and Eschatology." I knew I was among my own when I met a dapper Ph.D. student from UC Davis name Kane (or Caine?) who was dressed to the nines in a natty shirt, blazer, and Blue Lantern ring. I also met a wheelchair-bound comics expert from Tacoma who works for Twomorrows Publishing, who not only amused me with the tale of one Halloween when he won a costume contest dressed as a motorized Sherman tank, but recognized in me a kindred spirit when he realized he didn't have to explain the meaning of the phrase "Cei-U".

Both panel presenters were excellent. Professor Beth Davies-Stofka of Excelsior College spoke on the connection of superheroes and religion, arguing that comic book heroes are not the "modern day mythology" (yawn) fanboys make them out to be, but rather are representative of humanity, the religious themselves. Reading Comics and New York Times-published author Douglas Wolk also spoke about a connection of gods and men, helping this dubious nerd locate a logical through line in Grant Morrison's sprawling, metatextual Final Crisis storyline featuring DC Comics' so-called "Fourth World." (How could I never have noticed that the Omega Effect symbols on Darkseid's gauntlets on the cover of issue #4 form a "DC"? Jeez Louise.)

Both of the presenters were gracious and engaged in taking questions after their respective presentations, even when I pushed Wolk a bit to defend what I believe to be substandard work from Morrison. Davies-Stofka and her husband were also great fun to hang out with for the rest of the weekend.

The week prior, at one of the earliest conference talks, UO law professor Dominick Vetri, spoke about the complicated legal struggle of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, to regain control of their golden goose after a rash adolescent decision to sell the character to DC Comics for $130(!) in 1938. Vetri spoke at length about the legal ins and outs of the case, a superhero-style "neverending battle" that has risen, phoenix-like, from its own ashes countless times over seven decades...and which, believe it or not, is still taking place as I type this, long after the principle actors have all passed along to that great comics bullpen in the sky.

Summer Vacation: The Vertigo Project

Continuing an occasional series in which I share how I wasted spent my summer vacation. The First Lady of Inkville and I decided to spend a week in San Francisco.  Here we are hanging out in the stables of an old Spanish mission just a little over an hour south of the city:

Oh, whoops.  That's actually a shot of James Stewart and Kim Novak in Hitchcock's 1958 noir masterpiece Vertigo, one of our favorite films here in Inkville.  How'd that get in there?  Here's a photo of us in San Francisco:

Hm.  You know, come to think of it, Vertigo coincidentally takes places almost entirely in San Francisco... 

Hey, I have an idea!  Wouldn't it be really nifty if Aaron and his wife totally took a pilgrimage to all the shooting locations, and photographically recreated the high points of a fifty-year-old film storyline panned by contemporary critics?  By golly, I think it would! 

But wait, what point would such a jaunt serve?  Well, perhaps it would make a statement about the continuity of fan culture, or comment on the subversion of traditional American gender roles and filmic tropes, or serve as a sort of urban archaeological expedition.  Or heck, maybe it would just be an excuse for Aaron to to annoy his wife all week with Jimmy Stewart impressions.

Or maybe it would be all of the above.  I think we should find out.  Let's skidoo, shall we?

Like all mid-century detective thrillers, this one begins in a flower market.  Okay, maybe I'm reaching, but that is in fact where our journey began.  Vertigo is about a retired police detective hired to tail one looker of a suspicious character.  Kim Novak plays the distant, ethereal Madeleine Elster, the object of our hapless ectomorphic detective's passions.  It seems Madeleine has been zoning out of the here-and-now of 1958, falling into a trance in which she believes herself to be 18th-century Spanish gentry. It's up to Stewart to bust this case wide open, Scooby-Doo style.

So why a flower market?  Over the course of the film, Novak, in fact, dies three times.  (Uh, right.  Sorry.  Spoiler Alert.  The movie is half a century old, people.)  Novak and her freaky, romantic longevity are represented in the film by means of a visual device: flowering perennials, which bloom everlastingly.  Or, um, is that annuals?  I can never remember. 

At any rate, like Jimmy Stewart says of the redwood trees, "Their true name is Sequoia sempervirens, 'ever living.'"  Kim Novak's connection to the natural world and plant life is typified by her penchant for gadding about the Presidio sporting a small, trim bouquet like the one she has seen in a painting of her Spanish noblewoman...

...which is my roundabout way of explaining why we started at a flower market.  My wife's bouquet, however, was neither small nor trim:

Kneel Before Zod

What’s fluffier and more appealing for a summer weekend than a Top Ten list?  About comic books, no less?  While Batman arguably has the dubious honor of being hounded by the best rogue’s gallery in comics, Superman’s own collection of world beaters, miscreants, ne'er-do-wells, and extraterrestrial bullies ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at.  Listed here are a top ten of Superbaddies, ranked not by their level of villainy or ability to cause the Man of Steel a kryptonite headache, but simply in the order of my preference.  Ten’s a nice, round number, so apologies in advance to also-rans like Toyman, Mongul, and the Cyborg Superman.  But sorry, no love whatsoever for goobers like Terra-Man and the Composite Superman.

That's right: Inkville is runnin' the geekery straight up, no chaser, this time, so, y'know, forewarned is forearmed, for all you civilians out there.

 

#10  Darkseid

Just thinking of the intergalactic, semi-divine tyrant takes me back to mid-1980s Saturday mornings and Challenge of the Superfriends.  More of a general all-around DC Universe bad guy, Darkseid is a relative latecomer to the decades-old mega-storyline that is DC’s shared universe, but so fully imagined in 1970 by his creator Jack Kirby as the final word in alien evil, that Darkseid has suffered through virtually no rebooting or re-imagining, unlike most major comic book characters.  Some geeks have even posited the guy was an inspiration for Darth Vader, and I can certainly see a resemblance in the supervillain family tree.  Darkseid and his anti-pantheon of evil New Gods were used to great effect last year as street-level gangsters in Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis.

 

#9  Doomsday

One of only two characters from the modern era of comics to make it onto my list, Doomsday is the guy who first got me hooked on this stuff, as the titular murderer behind 1992’s “The Death of Superman” storyline.  The character appeared from nowhere, a being of mystery, and dispatched his Super-foe with such apparent finality, that the teenaged Aaron was quite shocked.  Ill-used by various appearances in the 1990s (seriously, a “Joker-ized” Doomsday?), ol’ Doomie has lost some of his luster.  The character has been given a second lease on his rampaging life, and an actor in a poorly-lit rubber suit to boot, in the most recent season of teen action soap Smallville.

 

#8  Silver Banshee

The only other Post-Crisis character to creep onto my list.  She's also the only woman... Who knew the Legion of Doom had a glass ceiling?  Banshee adds a bit of occult noir to a roster of evildoers who usually like to attack the Big Blue Boy Scout head on in the skies over Metropolis in big purple-and-green rockets. Seriously, how can I not like Silver Banshee?  She's a supernatural, Irish femme fatale, for God's sake!  Banshee can only kill people with her ear-splitting, vitality-draining wail if she knows their names.  That's so weird.  I’m such a sucker for weirdly Byzantine superpowers.  And, evidently, for chicks with skull-shaped earrings.

The UpStairs Lounge: Dead Men Do Tell Tales

This article originally appeared in the Winter issue of Etude: The Journal of Literary Nonfiction.  A much expanded version of this story was incorporated into my final project for my graduate program.

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The psychic is already on his second glass of cheap red wine, and he’s been in the bar only ten minutes.

Phillip is in his late thirties, slight of stature, intense in disposition and nearly bald. He sits stoically, cloaked in the gloom of murky bar air at the head of the table, regarding his fellow ghost-hunter Kalila, her dark, straight hair bobbing as she dances along to the routine of four muscular young men, a Village People tribute group.

The costumed performers, on break from a show at a competing club down the street, are in the throes of an impromptu performance of the disco hit “Y.M.C.A.” here in Jimani Lounge, an Italian bar at Chartres and Iberville, in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Kalila seems especially enchanted by the cop character, a friendly African-American man in an incredibly tight tee shirt.

Phillip is hitting the red hard.  He’d much rather be ogling the beefcake, but he’s already picking up strong psychic impressions from the floor above, and the wine, he explains, “smoothes out the edges.”  He’s more forthcoming when pressed: wine drowns out the telepathic barrage of voices and impressions constantly battering at his consciousness. His daily intake is in the neighborhood of fifteen glasses.  Phillip makes a point of never beginning a supernatural investigation without first bellying up.

Instead of watching the high kicks, Phillip has busied himself unscrewing the top of a plastic salt shaker.  He neatly dumps the contents into a small plastic baggie he has produced from somewhere on his person. Phillip twists the baggie tightly closed and pockets it, as if squirreling away an ounce of cocaine.

“Do you believe in coincidence?” Phillip drawls at me, in an accent that reveals his backwoods Oklahoma origins. “I don’t,” he states flatly. We’re here tonight to investigate the site of the gay bar that occupied the space one floor above us in the 1970s, and Village People look-alikes “randomly” showing up feels like fate.  Or prescience.   

Just a quarter-hour ago, Phillip left his night job at Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo, a French Quarter occult supply shop catering mostly to tourists. Phillip is one of the store’s in-house psychic readers, advising vacationing secretaries and sloshed frat boys how to get laid or get loved.

 The Jimani, pronounced like “Gemini” but misspelled to incorporate the given name of its founder, Jimmy Massacci, Sr., occupies the first floor of a building whose second story once housed the UpStairs Lounge, the gay club. The UpStairs had been a gathering place for the Quarter’s nascent gay scene, even hosting homosexual-inclusive church services, until a Sunday evening in June of 1973, when someone lit an incendiary device, lobbed it into the stairwell leading up to the club and locked the street-side door from the outside.

Twenty-nine people, mostly homosexual men, died in the flames that night, while another three victims succumbed in the following days.  The destruction of the UpStairs was the most deadly fire in the city’s history, and an event that quickly evolved into a rallying point for gay rights in the Crescent City. The arsonist-murderer was never caught.

Continue reading "The UpStairs Lounge" at Etude.