Of Horn and Horse: The Last Unicorn #2

Between working and writing and wallowing, I haven't given this ol' chunk of cyber real estate the attention it deserves lately, and I've especially been neglecting accumulating any content or ideas that one might deem -- I don't know, "geek worthy." I'd like to uphold at least a semblance of the image that I am a geek's geek, that I'm a stereotypical, misogyny-minded geek, at least, who gets excited by Green Lantern and watching Bane rip the arms off of a man and beat him to death with them, but let's face it: the Comics blogosphere -- or, if I may play Scott McCloud for a moment here, the Sequential Art Community(TM) -- has these angles covered, brother. No, I prefer to be the novelty of the comics internet, the Warhol to Sims's Boticelli, if you will: I write about Captain Canuck, unhealthy obsessions with the products of mass culture, and, yes: goddamned unicorns.

So, it is with that rambling monolog that I ease you, gentle reader, into the world of Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn, as filtered through the art of a woman who never quite outgrew her first screening of a Rankin & Bass classic. The legendary journeys of everyone's favorite doe-eyed monocerous continue into issue #2 with the unicorn, whom I have named Mia to avoid having to come up with synonyms for the titular species, held under the thrall of an evil carny and her cohorts.



The book opens at the carnival of one Mommy Fortuna, who remains off-stage and unrevealed, lest we, I don't know, not go back and watch the movie or look at the preview from last issue, or, hell, even look at the cover of ol' No. 2 and ruin the surprise. She's talking to her two lackeys: Rukh, the big guy, kinda dumb, who likes to shout the travelign carnival's catch phrase, "Creatures of night brought to light!" with allt he gusto of Billy Mays; and Schmendrick, the lamest magician in all of literature, who is a god among men. Seriously, look at that face:



The perfect skin, the jaw line, the tender eyes... he's Ewan McGregor in a pointy hat.

She asks them what they've just seen, and Rukh, itellectual giant that he is, says he saw a dead horse. Schmendrick, though? He's a clever one; you can tell by the way he says "white mare," which must be code for "a goddamned unicorn," because people only seem to use the expression when they know what they're really looking at. One has to wonder how this hunky chunk o' good-lookin' even met up with Bumblebee Tuna and her merry band of would-be creatures of night (brought to life!), because I have to believe that the job market, terrible as it is, cannot possibly be so bad that you have to be reduced to performing coin tricks for a reject from the Mos Eisley cantina.

Anyway, Crummy Bobuna's carnival is a bit like the Royal Ontario Museum. You head over there with a fine lady on your arm, ready to impress her with your knowledge of ancient history, only to discover that most of the shit that's on display is so terminally boring and un-mockable, being dressed up for display.



Yup, ol' Rumble Racoona's monsters and creatures of the night (brought to light!) are only figments of the crowd's imagination. There are really only three real creatures in the place: our aforementioned Mia, our lovely hostess, and the terrible, utterly horrible, indescribable-in-a-Lovecraftian-way HARPY.

The harpy helps facilitate our unicorn's escape, sapping Mommy Fortuna's magic to the point where Schemndrick the Unstoppable can use his magic to bust open the cage housing Mia.



Or not. After disparaging Momma's skills earlier in the comic, we find out that ol' green eyes is even worse a magician, and perhaps even more of a showman, than the good Mommy herself: he attempts to use his powers to open the cage, when he could have stopped dicking around twenty minutes ago and just opened the lock using the key he pilfered from Rukh the Intelligent. K.I.S.S. - Keep it Simple, Schmendrick.

One short fight scene later, and the harpy is loose and snacking on Grandma Dynamite's roostery jowels while our heroes make a slow and deliberate getaway. And now we're one character up and another issue down.

I gotta tell ya, despite Schmendrick the Hottie, the art in this issue just falls flat when compared to the fucking Elysian Fields-like majesty of the opening panels of #1. The colors are dark and grey, which, I guess, are more suited to the increasing pessissism, loss of hope, and feeling of dread that can accompany being abducted by a zombie lady. But, goddamn, a couple of pages into the 2nd issue and suddenly I'm Hunter S Thompson, yelling at a book about how it's letting me down.

Next issue: DEVELOPMENTS!

I Can Whip Any Man in the House, and Ride any Philly in the Place

I was watching the latest offering from DC Animation, the well-acted by ultimately predictable Batman: Under the Red Hood, when I finally got to the good stuff: the DC Showcase-branded Jonah Hex animated short. Now, what really got me in Jonah Hex wasn't the story or the animation, as both are derivative and stylistically similar to the 2008 release, Batman : Gotham Knight, but, rather, the few seconds prior to the film's opening.

The DC Showcase brand of animated shorts feature a sort of "title sequence" which takes viewers through a comic book shop full of DC comics properties before finally settling on a book featuring the character that we're about to see in the presentation proper.

And I fucking love this.

In addition to being a comic book geek, I harbor a passion for stuff: people's stuff, businesses' stuff, all kinds of stuff. I see the mass market, modern culture, and "consumerism" as a fascinating network of systems, inventions, and creativity all interconnected to form our modern lives. What does a person's stuff say about him? Why did he choose to buy this, or why did he have to buy this? We take home products as a given, when really --

Well, I'm getting off topic. My point here is that the opening was far more interesting to me than the Jonah Hex short. SO, I decided to slow it down and try to see exactly which products the fine folks at DC Comics had decided to draw my attention to, and ponder the reasons why.



As we fly through Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash accompanied by some very John-Williamsy-spacey-like-twinkly music, our gaze is directed toward various properties: there's Showcase #4, the issue that ushered in the Silver Age of Comics with Barry Allen way back in 1956; there's an appearance of everyone's favorite BustyAirborne Lass in Showcase #99 featuring Power Girl; followed by more issues of Showcase, natch. There's a few Showcase Presents collections scattered around, including The Elongated Man (hint hint), Ambush Bug, and Booster Gold, and I think I even caught a glimpse of a few collections from "the other guys."

And then I saw this:


May whatever heathen god you pray to bless the production intern who whipped out a copy of Showcase #78 to shove into the hands of COMIC SHOP PATRON #6. Everyone knows that the imagineers here at Blackmarket Pies love, love, love the obscure and the underappreciated, so when I saw a character that I had never heard of before being absorbed with care and attention by a hip twenty-something, I had to jump into the fray.

Showcase #78 features the man known as JONNY DOUBLE, whom wikipedia describes as "a down-beat Don Quixote in a society that frowns on windmills. A once white knight in rusty armor searching for that last dragon to slay. The poor man's Peter Pan."

Hmmm. While very British-invasion-esque for a comic from 1968, it sure doesn't explain a whole lot. Sort of sounds like Nemesis as written by Peter Milligan.

You all know what this means, lads: it's time to dig deeper into the cavernous bowels of the DC Unvierse and discover exactly who Jonny Double is, and why he came to be (hint: Chinatown had been released four years prior, and The Fugivtive had just endd its run). But that'll have to wait until I actually find a copy of Showcase #78. For now, it may be back to the unicorn well...

The Last Review

There was something strange about the animated films of the 1980's - Walt Disney's efforts notwithstanding. The kids movies of the 80's shared common themes and even designs, all melting into some sort of grey Rankin/Bass/Bakshi soup that featured chunks of environmentalism/primitivism, fluorescent pink sparkles, blond-haired princesses, and irritating Casio keyboard-infused soundtracks. These films culminated in the 1990's with the release of Felix the Cat: The Movie, which put the much-overdo final nail in the coffin; but they began, arguably, with 1982's hugely successful The Last Unicorn.

I had an ex who loved this movie. She fucking loved unicorns to the point where I tried to find her some kind of effigy of a unicorn at my local malls for her birthday and discovered, in line with true monoceruses, that representations of them are entirely mythical. Searching on eBay near the end of our relationship, I found an old beat-up, original theatrical poster for this flick, and, having since become an "ex," had no idea what to do with it up to this point -- there it sat, always mocking me, letting me know that my room was now dressed like a little girl. "How would this look during a home invasion?" I thought. Truly, that was the most rational query that could enter my brain while staring at a poster of a doe-eyed Kardunn.

As an aside, I wonder how many synonyms for "unicorn" I'll have to look up to actually finish this post and keep it from getting repetitive.

As I sat in my room and contemplated this poster's fate, I took a quick look around the internet to see if anyone was in the market for faded-out childhood memories. What I found was so weird, so interesting, and, inexplicably, so entrancing that I could hardly wait to tell the blogosphere about what I had discovered:


IDW, a company that ostensibly employs an entire team whose sole task is to seek out any and all available licenses, had done it: they'd adapted The Last Unicorn into a graphic novel. And, coincidence of all coincidences, they'd done it at almost precisely the moment in which I actually remembered that such a work existed!

After hunkering down to watch the film, I went straight to my local comic book shoppe and picked myself up a copy, as should you all. My goal here is not to compare the two adaptations, but simply to - well, see which one I like best. I'm not a complicated guy.

The first thing I can tell you is that this adaptation blows the film out of the water right from page one. In the movie, we get a serene, idyllic foresty scene featuring two characters who'll never show up again. The book starts thusly:
fucking a. That is haunting. It's centered in a splash page that is nothing but the most peaceful, wondrous forest you'd ever see, but a prominent red flower in the foreground, and the tiny caption in the center, imparts the extreme loneliness that the last of her kind must feel.

The unicorn doesn't have a name in the book ( she does take on the moniker of Amalthea later in the tale, but that's another story...), but while I was writing a review for the film, I referred to her as "Mia," after the voice actress, Mia Farrow. I think I'll continue that tradition here, if only because it's easier to type "Mia" than it is to type "Amalthea" or "the unicorn."



After an introduction to unicorns offered by two hunters -- which is surprisingly moving in prose, compared to the flat, uninteresting delivery that the film gives us -- Mia appears, contemplating what one of the hunters had said: that she was the last of her kind, the final unicorn. Even more interesting is her internal dialog: she talks about not leaving, even to look for others; that she knows how to live where she is, and that she'd never want anything else. Is it rationalization? Does she maybe feel guilty that she's gotten complacent? It's revealed that she's never even spoken, not even to herself, in over 100 years. And then she must come face to face with the spectre of change: the knowledge that she can't stay in her own little forest forever.

When she heads out into the world, she's jarred by the sudden -- to her, at least -- change in man. It's not that no one can remember unicorns, but rather, that hey can't even see her as a unicorn. She encounters a butterfly who speaks in snippets of songs and poems, a medieval pop culture junkie who tells her what happened to the rest of the unicorns: they were all chased away by the Red Bull, who, presumably, merely wanted to give them wings.

Frustrated and longing for home, the unicorn lays down to sleep -- and his approached by three silhouetted beings. This signals the end of the first issue, which, lacking much of the action that one would normally expect from a first issue, is clearly designed with the trade in mind. This is unfortunate, as the art is wonderful -- if a little bombastic -- and the writing is golden, but there's not much here to convince someone who was wary of the book to continue on to #2.

Will I be going forward on this title? Probably, but only because I dig the writing. Unlike the aforementioned ex, I'm not a huge fan of unicorns. I don't hate them, certainly, but I suppose that I'm indifferent to their mythology. Maybe I'll become a fan after this series. ;) Here's to IDW makin' a believer outta me.

NEXT ISSUE: A woman with a head made out of a tree runs a travelling circus with a second-rate warlock.

Riddles

What could it mean?

The Return of the Cap'n

I've written about Captain Canuck before -- check out my entire week of Canadian goodness here -- and I think you get the idea that I'm absolutely enamored with the idea of a National Canadian Superhero, a comic book character who can somehow boil down to essentials what it means to be Canadian. And, like our comic counterparts to the south, this is true -- only backward. Captain Canuck was patterned to represent Canadian values, and now he's used as proof of those values, in some kind of twisted Disneyworld logic: if Captain Canuck is supposed to represent Canada, and Captain Canuck is "A," then Canada must be "A," as well -- even if the initial premise is incorrect. Captain Canuck was first created by Richard Comely in order to bring together the disparate visions of what a Canadian actually was, and the series tried to foist a Canadian mythos onto the popular culture of the Great White North, much as Canadian Nationalist ideas tried to do back in 1967, with the rise of Expo '67 and the ill-fated "Chimo" greeting. In the irony that we often find ourselves faced with today, the significant replaced the signifier; i.e. the symbol gave meaning to what was being symbolized.

But that's a story for another day. Because today, we have a story that couldn't possibly be tied to traditional, or even subversive, Canadian values. Unless, of course, Canadians are big on aliens that look like wads of splooge:

Yes, this is the story of Captain Canuck's unpublished fifteenth issue. Written and drawn before CKR Productions folded under the absurd conditions of the Canadian publishing industry, this issue would have seen the light of day if Comely and Co had succeeded in their scheeme to sell shares of the "Captain Canuck Corporation" to eager northern kids itching for a fix of down-home superheroics. Sadly, Captain Canuck, though wildly popular, could not make enough money to stay afloat, and the story of "The Stygian" -- no relation to the other Stygian -- would be denied to the kids of the 1970/80's.

Written by creator Richard Comely and the last Canuck issue to be illustrated by George Freeman, the story takes place after Tom Evans -- the good Captain's secret identity -- has been stranded in the "present" of the 1980's following an alien encounter in his future of 1993. In the dead of winter in Calgary, Captain Canuck has taken to construction work to support himself as he, presumably, tries to find a way back to his time. A fellow worker discovers a discarded purse, and, Canadian of upstanding character that he is, Mr Evans heads out to return it to its rightful owner.


Discovering that the purse belongs to a missing woman, he acts on a hunch -- literally, as there is nothing in the comic to indicate exactly where he gets the idea to go traipsing about government labs -- and visits the offices of the Stabler Research Group, where he comes face to face with every Canadian's arch nemesis: the locked door.

On the other side of the door are a group of scientists whose names and personalities are of absolutely no consequence. What does matter is what they've inadvertantly created: THE STYGIAN!

Part being of pure energy, part being of melty-cheese, the Stygian must feed off of the energy of people and electronics to survive. Other than this survival imperative, we don't know much about ol' Styg', but you can bet that if he does this to Captain Canuck:

then he's no damn good in my book.

Canukc, knowing nothing about the type science fiction aliens that he's battled for most of his life, inadvertantly lets the creature loose upon an unsuspecting Stampede City, where it's assumed that he passed up the great untapped potential energy of cow pats, instead settling on the lethargic energy of your average Canadian citizen. After a thrilling* chase throughout downtown Alberta, Canuck seems to be on the brink of finishing the creature off with a good whack on the side of the head with a manhole cover:

Unfortunately for the reputations of the boys in blue everywhere, the assault is interrupted by a group of vigilant police officers, who are far too focused on arresting the man in the arresting pajamas, and not the being of limitless power looming over him.

Our story ends with the Stygian getting away, and the poor boys and girls of 2004 (when this story was finally released to fans for the first time) are left on another cliffhanger that has yet to be resolved. But those aren't the only mysteries we're left pondering; I've got a few questions myself: for one, how does a being created from pure energy succumb to being smacked in thr skull with a steel plate? For two, can anyone in Calgary tell me what these terrifying, lanky giants in the background of this panel are supposed to be?


I'm going to assume they're some kind of artwork, and not, say, the Stygian's terrifying compadres.

Well, there it is -- the last, unreleased issue of the original run of Captain Canuck, killed in its prime by the realities of publishing in Canada. It wasn't lack of interest or sales that did Canuck in -- in 1979, the Captain was the highest selling comic book in all of Canada, as related in Captain Canuck #7, and you can tell from the panels I've reproduced here that Freeman's art was just gorgeous for an independent book in the late 1970's (or hell, for a comic book period). No, Canada's first and greatest superhero was deep-sixed by a government that, while claiming to value Canadian content, actually created conditions that were anathema to the continued existence of a true Canadian hero.

Updates

While there probably aren't too many return visitors these days, I just want to tell that one Google bot out there that I am planning to update this week with -- well, something special. So keep checking back. I haven't forgotten about you, Google bot.

THE FLIGHT OF THE BOUNCY, BOUNCY PHOENIX

Oooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhh yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah y'all. Guess what, sports fans?
SPEEDBALL'S BACK

If this is possible, then, pray, what other wonders might find their way back into my life?

Believe it.