Since Starburst was relaunched in May 2011 I have been inundated with news and press releases from publishers in the UK wanting to promote original comics and graphic novels.  Having associated myself with the comic industry in the UK for the past decade I can honestly say that I have never seen a landscape that looked so promising for UK fans and comic creators, with publishers like SelfMadeHero and Blank Slate Books producing some stellar work and British anthologies like Mark Millar’s CLiNT soon to be joined by The Phoenix and STRIP Magazine.  As a writer this is brilliant news for me because for the first time in years there are new platforms on the horizon that could potentially act as a showcase for my writing, but as a reader this is even more exciting because the quality of the comics being created by some of my contemporaries is phenomenal.  I aim to cover as many British comics as possible in the coming months, but with the imminent planned release for STRIP Magazine in October I took the opportunity to catch up with John Ridgway, one of STRIP’s contributors and a legend in his own right among the UK’s comic community.

Starburst: To get the ball rolling could you please tell our readers what to expect from STRIP Magazine and why we should be excited about it?

John Ridgway: STRIP Magazine is an anthology. As such, each issue is a varied showcase for work by creators who have ideas but, until now, have had no place for their creations to be seen. Now they have the chance to produce their best work and this can only benefit the readers.

In Europe there is an enormous variety of work in graphic novel (or graphic album) form, which, because of the language barrier, we have little access to. Until now, this country has lacked, or rather, has lost the variety our comics once had. STRIP Magazine is endeavouring to bring back what we have lost. There is science fiction, fantasy, action, adventure and humour. But more than that, the people behind STRIP Magazine are prepared to listen to what readers request. This is something the readers can be a part of.

Your own resume speaks volumes about the level of talent involved in STRIP. Can you name one other contributor that we should look out for particularly?

Actually, I’d like to name two artists: Julio Radilovic and Michael Penick. That’s not to say that the other artists aren’t good – they are – but these two appeal to me personally. Julio (Jules) for his remarkable range of styles – Hemlock Sholmes is his humour stuff, but I’ve also seen his Western and Spy stuff. Michael Penick’s work is brilliant – take a look at his website for samples of what he can do.

Your work on Age of Heroes looks fantastic. Where would you direct readers that wanted to see more of your work?

My work on Age of Heroes is work I have enjoyed producing – both in its original black and white form, and in the coloured version I am producing for STRIP Magazine. I can think of no other work I have enjoyed anywhere near so much since my work on Warrior and Doctor Who but that was in black and white. Collections republishing my Doctor Who stuff have been produced by Panini and IDW.

If STRIP Magazine is a success where would you like to go from here? Will Age of Heroes be an ongoing story or do you have another project lined up to succeed it?

Ivo Milicevic, the publisher, appears to like my work. I will continue to work on Age of Heroes – completing the original story arc and going on from there – for as long as Jim Hudnell wants to continue writing it, or for as long as I am capable of drawing it. This does not mean that I will not be working on other things. Another series – Frontiers (a science fiction series) – is something I am writing for artist Nick Spender to draw. Nick was trained at Epson Art College by one of this country’s greatest comic creators – Frank Hampson

Before we finish, could you name one other British or European comic creator that you’d like to draw our attention to? Anybody that’s showing a promising start to their career or perhaps somebody whose work you always felt deserved more acclaim?

I’d like to put forward the name of my pal, Tim Perkins. He has worked for a considerable time in comics but his name is not known to many outside the business. This is not through lack of talent or ability – Tim is a very fine and dedicated artist. It is really through a lack of outlets for the work he does best. Tim’s solution has been to self-publish, and this is a long and exhausting process. I admire Tim’s dedication to the task and the enormous effort he has put in. I admire the support his wife, Margaret, has provided over the long period. Self-publishing is a terribly risky business – something I could never contemplate attempting. With the advent of STRIP Magazine, and the facility for graphic albums that will provide, much of the risk will be reduced for creator-owned projects.

Of course, some of the risk in self-publishing has been reduced by e-publishing (which eliminates printing and distribution costs) but, for me, there is nothing like the feel of a “real” comic or book. To me iPad’s and Kindle’s are sterile devices and what is on them are things of the moment without any permanence – the difference between listening to a rock band on the radio and seeing them in live concert.

(Tim Perkins’ graphic novel World’s End is now available to pre-order on his website)

STRIP Magazine Issue One will cost £2.99 and includes Black Ops Xtreme, drawn by PJ Holden; Warpaint by Phil Hester and John McCrea, Age of Heroes by James Hudnall and John Ridgway; Hookjaw, re-mastered by Jim Campbell and Gary Caldwell; ‘Hush Hush’ a prequel story to Stephen Walsh and Keith Page’s Iron Moon graphic album; Recovery Inc. by Michael Penick and Dean Deckard.

From October 2011 STRIP Magazine will be distributed by Diamond to comic shops in the UK with a planned roll out to the UK high street in 2012 after assessing how all the different content in STRIP is received by readers.  If you have a passion for comics or any vested interest in the UK’s comic book community then I implore you to seek out a copy of STRIP Magazine and show some support for an anthology that fills a niche left empty for far too long.  2000 AD is, of course, a British institution, but there must surely be room on our shelves for an anthology of comics that might not fit their remit.  I don’t want my children to grow up in a country where comics are marginalised and misunderstood by the mainstream, I want our newsstands to be overflowing with more original comics than I could ever afford to subscribe to!

With Steven Spielberg releasing The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn this month, we take a look at the character and find out what really makes Tintin tick.

So, who’s this Tintin fella then?

He’s the Belgian boy reporter written and illustrated by legendary artist Hergé. He trots around the globe solving mysteries, thwarting crime and – most impressively – looking dashing in a pair of plus fours and a powder blue sweater. He does all this in the company of a small white dog called Snowy.

Snowy?

Yep, Snowy. Or Milou if you want to sound pretentious and/or French. In fact, while we’re on that subject, you’d better hold off calling Tintin ‘Tintin’. ‘Taaan Taaan’, if you please.

So a boy and his dog save the world, then? Who else?

A boy, his dog, a grumpy sea-captain called Haddock, two identical and utterly incompetent detectives called Thomson (and Thompson) and a host of other oddball characters. A cornucopia of dysfunction really.

He liked it literal this Herge guy, then?

Yes he did. He also enjoyed factual inaccuracies. Despite the Thom(p)son twins’ names, and the fact they look alike, they are not actually twins. Hence the slight difference in name. And moustache. Thompson’s is flat, Thomson’s flares out a little at the sides.

Wait, aren’t Simon Pegg and Nick Frost playing those two? They look nothing alike.

Well spotted. Pegg and Frost were cast because of their impeccable comic timing, a vital part of Thomson and Thompson’s charm. Performance Capture will turn them into the almost identical non-twins and perform the same feat for Jamie Bell (Tintin), Andy Serkis (Haddock) and Daniel Craig (Sakharine and, reportedly, Red Rackham).

Red Rackham? Sounds like he should be chopping down trees on a Discovery Channel reality show! Who is he?

Red Rackham is a villainous pirate who seized the eponymous ship The Unicorn from Haddock’s ancestor, Sir Francis Haddock. The story focuses on Tintin and co’s attempts to find the sunken vessel and discover the location of a mysterious lost treasure.

So, let me get this right. There’s an irritable sea-captain, two idiot policemen who look alike but aren’t twins, a teenage boy and his dog? And this lot go off on a treasure hunt?

Er, yes. Yes, that is correct.

And why is Spielberg making this film?

Fandom, plain and simple. Spielberg first read the character after a review of Raiders of the Lost Ark compared Indy to Tintin. He read the book entirely in French, but the language barrier didn’t put him off – he was attracted to the series on the basis of Herge’s art alone. That’s why he’s shooting with Performance Capture – to replicate the beauty of Hergé’s illustrations without having to stick within the limitations of live action.

What’s so good about them then?

Their simplicity. Hergé pioneered the linge claire style, drawing with beautifully clean, bold lines and colours that pop from the page. Herge’s world is one brimming with brightness, invention and detail, the writer always researching Tintin’s globe-trotting adventures rigorously. When Hergé died in 1983, we lost one our greatest artists and storytellers.

So why has it taken so long for a Tintin film to be made?

Ask America. As a uniquely European character, Tintin has never really broken the US. There are small pockets of fans, sure, but there remain real concerns about the commercial viability of the series across the pond. That’s why the film is being released in Europe this month and in America in December. The studio is hoping good word of mouth over here will generate interest over there.

Will it?

I dunno, I’m not a mindreader!!

Alright, alright. No need to get grouchy. So I’m liking the sound of all this and want to try the books. Where do I start?

Well, the best place to start is always…the start. Except in this case the start isn’t all that great. The first two books, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo, are highly controversial works, the first anti-Soviet propaganda, the second a rather Colonialist view of the eponymous location. To this day it has to be published with a warning.

Crikey! Did he ever express regret for those books?

Very much so. Repeatedly in fact, and as the Tintin series went on, Hergé aimed to atone for the errors of his youth through his fiction. Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks, in which our young hero fights slavery, and Tintin in Tibet, where he looks for his lost Chinese friend Chang, are both excellent examples of the liberal, learned attitude Hergé expressed through most of his work.

So a good place to start, then?

Yup, definitely. It’s also worth checking out the British-based The Black Island, the space adventures Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon, and the three books Spielberg’s film is based on: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure.

Anything else?

BILLIONS OF BLUE BLISTERING BARNACLES!!

No need to be rude about it. I was only asking a question!

TEN THOUSAND THUNDERING TYPHOONS!!!!

Fine then! I don’t have to take any more of this! I’m off!

No, no they’re quotes. From Captain Haddock. He’s…Oh, never mind.

Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn marks a significant moment in the director’s career for two reasons. Firstly, it’s the realisation of a long-held ambition. Spielberg first read the escapades of the Belgian boy reporter during production on Raiders of the Lost Ark and has been trying to bring them to the screen ever since. Secondly, it’s the first film of the director’s fifth cinematic decade (sixth if you count his early homemade features). Spielberg has gone from Movie Brat wunderkind to one of the venerable old men of Hollywood, guiding through as many films as producer as he directs, but there remain critics.

Check the IMDB message boards, go through the talkbackers on Ain’t It Cool News, take a browse on Spielberg fansites and you’ll see a growing fear mounting about the director’s career. Has he lost it? Is Tintin make or break? Is that trademark Spielberg wonder dead? The answers to these questions are: no, no and yes. But that’s no bad thing. The first signs of change came with 1985’s The Color Purple and he’s continued to evolve ever since, releasing Empire of the Sun two years later, Schindler’s List in 1993, Amistad in 1997 and Saving Private Ryan in 1998. The type of wonder he perfected in the 70s and 80s has certainly gone, but it’s been replaced by something much more interesting and it made his last decade of work his best ever.

The decade began with the release of AI: Artificial Intelligence in 2001. The project, an adaptation of the Brian Aldiss short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, began life in the hands of Stanley Kubrick, but the great director could never make the story of a mother and her android son work. Contemporary special effects couldn’t keep pace with his imagination and he struggled to find a young actor who could convincingly convey the pseudo-humanity of the central robot replica. Rather than abandoning the project though, Kubrick passed it onto Spielberg, whom he felt was a better fit for the story’s themes and whose effects work on Jurassic Park Kubrick had been impressed by. Hesitant at first, Spielberg eventually took the project on after Kubrick’s death in 1999 and so began an unlikely fusion: cinema’s Peter Pan with its Captain Hook. It couldn’t work. Could it?

It could and it does. Seamlessly. With its parent-child plot, AI is classic Spielberg, but the story is laced with a Kubrickian darkness that makes it a very different proposition to other sci-fi films in Spielberg’s cannon. Expanding Aldiss’s tale, the film introduces us to Henry and Monica Swinton, a married couple whose son Martin has a life-threatening disease and has been put into suspended animation until a cure can be found. To fill the hole left in their life, they adopt David, a first-of-its-kind Mecha child who has been created by the recently bereaved scientist Professor Hobby and who looks, thinks and feels like a real boy. They live a perfect life for a time, but problems emerge when Martin recovers and a dangerous sibling rivalry eventually forces Henry and Monica to abandon David. Alone, he is left to travel a labyrinth of locations, including a concentration camp-like Flesh Fair, the debauched Rogue City and finally a submerged Manhattan, in search of Pinocchio’s Blue Fairy, who David believes will make him a real boy and finally win him the love of his mother.

AI is a fairy tale then, but a twisted one – a fairy tale without the fairies. Spielberg shoots the film with a glacial realism, his camera remaining ghostly still, Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography sucking the colour from the bleached-out screen. Indeed beyond the pale blues and muted grays that dominate the picture, the only time any colour encroaches into AI is during the scenes in Rogue City and those at the Flesh Fair. On both occasions, the wonderful splashes of colour are man-made and representative only of danger and perversity and certainly not of Close Encounters-esque wonder. This is not a world for a child. It is grim, bleak and scary, and Spielberg trades on the audience’s understanding of that. We know that David does not. He’s not in a fairy tale. The Blue Fairy does not, and cannot, exist. He will never find what he’s looking for. He will never be loved.

In this sense, David becomes like Jack Torrence in The Shining or A Clockwork Orange’s Alex. He’s stuck in an infinite maze. Alex will never be cured of his ultra-violence, the Overlook Hotel will always claim another victim and David is doomed to live in an eternal fantasy. This happens literally in the film’s disputed ending, which seems to suggest the Spielbergian cop-out many critics feared when the project was announced. Stranded in a submerged Coney Island, staring and praying to the Blue Fairy statue that occupies the fairground, David is rescued far in the future by a group of advanced Mechas and taken off to be studied and analysed. The water of New York has frozen into ice, all human life has been eradicated and the Mechas scan the city looking for what so tragically evaded David: humanity.

They still can’t provide that, but they do grant one of David’s wishes and bring his mother back to life for one final day. Now Monica is finally able to dedicate her love to David, but she’s a fantasy based on his favourable memories, as false as the Blue Fairy herself. Watching on, the Mechas take note and so, not for the first time, David becomes a lab rat, an experiment in humanity. First he was created by Hobby to help him recover from his son’s death, then he was adopted by Henry and Monica to perform a similar task. Now he’s again being used. Spielberg plays on this in his final shot as he gradually tracks out from the picture postcard image of Monica and David reading a story. It looks like a dream, but it’s really a nightmare. David is trapped, his house a cozy prison, his fantasies separating him from reality, the Mechas’ dreams of humanity forcing them to enslave another sentient being. Their road to evil has been paved with good intentions and it’s a road Spielberg would travel throughout the rest of the decade.

For his follow-up to AI, Spielberg made another film about lost children, but the innocents of Minority Report don’t even get their predecessor’s illusion of free will. Loosely based on the short story by Philip K Dick, Minority Report stars Tom Cruise as John Anderton, poster boy Captain of a new form of policing called PreCrime, which uses three precognitive siblings (Agatha, Dashiell and Arthur) to predict murders before they happen. The precogs spend their lives lying motionless in a pool of water, their slumber only interrupted by nightmarish visions of crimes to come. Even more than David, they are lab rats, housed in a cage, tended to by a doctor and never allowed to leave. The film poses a classic moral dilemma, positing the freedom of three orphans against the security of millions. Is it worth it? Spielberg offers no easy answers. PreCrime works, murder is at an all-time low, and the precogs’ dream-like state keeps them oblivious to their position in the world. In Spielberg’s last decade though, reality, no matter how bleak, is paramount. Dreams are dangerous.

Anderton is a willing participant in the dream, indeed arguably the key dreamer. Like Hobby and Monica, he’s a bereaved parent whose son was kidnapped during a visit to a public pool. He spends his life stuck in the past, watching dreamlike holographic home movies of his son and estranged wife during happier times. He literally relives the moments, reciting his part in them as if his words are dialogue in a play. PreCrime is Anderton’s way of atoning. Here, he can ensure history never repeats itself by controlling the future, but like all of Spielberg’s heroes from this decade he becomes trapped in his own fantasy. When the precogs foresee a crime perpetrated by Anderton, the cop is forced to go on the run. During these scenes, which constitute the film’s second act, Spielberg plays with perception and reality, repeating a common motif of sight and putting Cruise through the physical ringer, replacing his eyes and reconfiguring his face. Here, and in War of the Worlds three years later, Spielberg turns Hollywood’s most recognisible leading man into a monstrous mutation. The fantasy of the Hollywood star, the dream we aspire to be, is subverted.

The maze finally ensnares Anderton when he stumbles across Leo Crow, the man who he comes to believe kidnapped his son and who he is fated to murder. With Agatha in tow, Anderton is presented with a choice: confront Crow and fulfill his destiny or leave and deny it. In one of the film’s most enduring images, Spielberg frames Anderton and Agatha in a close-up, Agatha’s head resting on Anderton’s shoulder; her looking behind him begging him to leave, him looking ahead determined to stay. She has become his conscious, a human Jiminy Cricket, literally perched on his shoulder, trying to persuade him to do the right thing – the dreamer begging for reality, the ‘realist’ focusing on the dream. He ignores her, proceeds and eventually kills Crow, albeit accidentally. Before he fires his fatal bullet, it’s revealed that Crow is a stooge and the real kidnapper is still at large. The gun goes off accidentally and Anderton has submitted to the dream of PreCrime, his fate at the whim of destiny. The dream has become a nightmare.

Spielberg returns to the dreaming metaphor when Anderton is sentenced. Once convicted, offenders are put in a sleep-like state of suspended animation. “Some say they have visions,” explains Tim Blake-Nelson’s warden, Spielberg making explicit the link between PreCrime and dreams. Except, the fantasy can’t last. It’s built on a falsehood and in the film’s final reel, the net unravels. Anderton’s wife discovers the truth behind the organisation’s establishment, outing PreCrime’s Director Lamarr Burgess as a murderer who killed Agatha’s mother to kidnap the child and set the division up. The revelation takes place at a ceremony designed to honour PreCrime’s success. As a memento, Burgess is given a gold-plated Civil War gun, recognition of the violence that had gone before and a symbol of hope that such a weapon will never be needed again. Following the revelation, Burgess uses the gun to kill himself. The symbol of the dream’s success, now used to literally blow a hole in it. The dream over, Anderton and the precogs awaken, Anderton reunited with his wife, the precogs relocated to an idyllic country setting. Only when we acknowledge dreams for what they are and live in reality, Spielberg says, can we ever hope to progress.

This theme is writ large in Spielberg’s next two films, which are ostensibly comedies but have central themes in common with AI and Minority Report, both focusing on the dissolution of the self and the power of dreams to trap people. The first film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale Jnr, a young man who copes with the divorce of his parents by fleeing into the fantasy life of a con-man. He’s a kindred spirit to Elliot, but while Elliot’s fantasy life with ET proves beneficial, Frank’s fantasy is anything but. It’s a danger, damaging not only to himself but to the people his cons affect. Frank‘s fantasy is more tangible than David or Anderton‘s though – it‘s the 60s. Cultural icons from that decade litter the screen: Frank reads The Flash comic books, he parties to the sounds of The Kinks, he takes fashion tips from Sean Connery’s Bond. Even Tom Hanks’s federal agent looks ripped from a film, decked out in the pristine black-and-white suit and horn-rimmed glasses of a thousand fictional government stooges. The film opens with the black-and-white fuzz of a TV and that‘s what Catch Me If You Can is – a fiction, a dream.

The cold reality of Frank’s life resides back where Elliot’s warm fantasies emanated from: the home. While Frank takes to the skies, his father remains decidedly grounded and in one of his smallest but most memorable performances, Christopher Walken strips away the grandeur associated with his acting and turns his character into a broken husk of a man. His wife’s left him, his son’s gallivanting around the globe and gradually the financial realities begin to close in. He’s committed tax fraud to try to make his business work and the FBI is onto him. In one of the most devastating scenes Spielberg has ever shot, we learn of Frank Snr’s death in the same way his son does – second hand. Frank’s father, we are told, died when he fell down a staircase at Grand Central Station. It’s a sad and futile death for a decent man deserted by his wife and child. Could Frank have saved his father or at least made his life a little easier if he had stayed with him? Spielberg never answers this question, just affirmatively hints, making Catch Me If You Can a singular effort. The man who made films about parents abandoning children had made his first about a child abandoning a parent.

During all this, Frank’s mother is absent. As the film proceeds, Frank resolves to track her down, like David hoping for closure. He gets it, but not the kind he’d like. Instead of finding a woman eager to revisit the past and reunite with her ex-husband, Frank locates his mother on an idyllic snowy Christmas. She’s at home, enjoying the festivities with her new husband and their young daughter. Frank watches the scene from outside, the cold blue of his surroundings contrasting sharply with the warm reds and oranges of inside. Frank is trapped on the outside of his own dream, an onlooker to a fantasy he can never make real. It’s a key image for this film and many more Spielberg movies in this decade – the hero locked out of his fantasy. Spielberg would return to it in War of the Worlds and Munich, and base an entire film around it in The Terminal. Ostensibly a cute rom-com, The Terminal is a sly and duplicitous film. It’s as bleak as Minority Report, as hopeless as AI, and the first of three Spielberg movies to explicitly deal with the effects of the War on Terror.

Our hero is Viktor Navorski, a classic fish-out-of-water character struggling to get by in an alien world. Except here the fish hasn’t just been plucked from the bowl, he’s been thrown into the frying pan. In the film, Navorski finds himself homeless and alone after a revolution in his homeland Krakozhia took place during a flight to New York. With no official country, Viktor is refused entry to the US, meaning he’s got nowhere to go except the airport. He spends the film trapped here, a shimmering microcosm of modern Capitalist America littered with big brands and consumerist delights. Indeed, the film was fiercely criticised at the time of release for its abundance of product placement, but accusations of corporate shilling are false. Spielberg uses brand names so satirically it’s a wonder he ever got permission to include them at all. The Terminal may be dressed as a whimsical rom-com, but it’s one of Spielberg’s most political films, a fierce criticism of money-hungry America and an impassioned defence of immigration.

When Viktor arrives at the terminal, he is greeted with Capitalist excess – a landscape dominated by Starbucks and Burger Kings where the most common sound is that of the ringing cash till. It’s a whirlwind of modernity, a consumerist dream, and when Viktor asks what he should do to pass the excess of time he now has, he‘s bluntly told: “The only thing you can do here: shop”. But Viktor has no money, and the consumerist dream quickly becomes a nightmare. Stanley Tucci’s Customs and Border Protection Head Frank Dixon is his key oppressor, roaming through scenes in a sharp suit that bears an American flag pin. He‘s close to promotion, but Viktor, who has only flown to the States to gain the final autograph in his late father‘s jazz collection, is causing him a problem he doesn‘t need and Dixon thwarts the visitor at every turn. The country that once vowed to take “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is now refusing a simple act of familial love for a pay rise. America, Viktor is told, is closed.

Against this backdrop, Viktor becomes the spirit of everything that America once stood for. Befriending a melting pot of ethnicities, Viktor embodies the American Dream. He is a man left with nothing, except quite literally the shirt on his back, and manages to make a life for himself. He beats off hunger by scrounging condiment sachets from burger joints, he keeps clean in the airport toilets, he finds a job in construction after inadvertently helping builders with their work. Viktor is presented with a nightmare dressed as a dream and turns it into the American Dream – America as it is and America as it wants to be. Both are prisons though. Like David, Frank and John before him, Viktor has become trapped in fantasy. It’s only in the film’s melancholic coda that he escapes and triumphant reality returns. He is finally granted access to New York and after achieving his goal he hails a cab, saying simply: “I want to go home”. Even war-torn Krakozhia is better than fictional America.

Delusion rather than dreams plague the characters of Munich and War of the Worlds, the other two films in Spielberg’s unofficial War on Terror trilogy. But when reality descends on Ray and Avner, it arrives with the tremulous thump of an explosion. In Munich, the story of the vengeance mission Israel embarked upon after the massacre at the 1972 Olympic Games, the delusion is one of morality, Avner and his team pursuing their path of destruction with the unwavering assertion that they are right. Spielberg’s final image, where he frames the characters against a hazy New York skyline in which the World Trade Centre stands in ghostly remembrance, suggests far more ambiguity. Black and whites such as right and wrong, good and evil, are fallacies, Spielberg reminds us with this final shot, as fantastical as David’s Blue Fairy, but more real and therefore far more dangerous.

In War of the Worlds, Spielberg casts Tom Cruise as Ray, another failed family man. Here Cruise’s delusion is that he’s anything but a failure. An absent father, he believes he can ingratiate himself to the children he barely knows and guide them through the Martian attack. However, when his daughter starts having panic attacks, it’s his son rather than Ray who steps in to take care of her, and when his son demands to fight the aliens, Ray is powerless to stop him. The arc that normally accompanies such characters is notably absent.  Brody in Jaws and Alan Grant in Jurassic Park are similarly flawed fathers, but their heroics in protecting their children (surrogate in Grant’s case) against a monstrous menace help strengthen their relationships. For Ray, however, that remains an unattainable dream. The Martians defeated, Ray returns his kids to their mother and stepfather. We never see inside their house, we are never witness to a heart-warming reunion. Ray isn’t even invited in. The family remain outside, among the desolation, defeated but alive. In Spielberg’s last decade, that’s the only dream we can make real.

With the release of The Secret of the Unicorn, Spielberg will have bookended the turn of the decade with two anomalous throwbacks, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull being the other. It’s telling that these two films, driven by nostalgia, look like they will return the sanctity of the family and the dream to Spielberg’s filmmaking. Indy 4 ended with our hero finally settling down with Marian, while Tintin is likely to form a father-son bond with Captain Haddock. Both films are set in the 40s and 50s and time-hopping will be a feature of Spielberg’s movies for years to come. After Tintin comes the World War One drama Warhorse and Lincoln will follow next December. Futuristic sci-fi Robopocalypse is scheduled for 2013, while space odyssey Interstellar is on the cards some time after that. Spielberg currently has no films set in the present day on his slate. And perhaps that’s the only way he can dream again. The present is dark and scary, riddled with uncertainty. All we can do for hope is reminiscence about the past and dream about the future. Spielberg has turned us all into David, sat motionless, waiting and hoping for something better to come along.

DC’s big summer crossover is finished and everything is back to normal with the conclusion of Flashpoint. Not quite. DC chose the bold move to hit the reset button, wiping over 75 years of history. Or is it more like 25 years since the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986?

A mysterious robed woman hinted during Flashpoint’s finale that the DC, Vertigo and Wildstorm universes were deliberately split to weaken them before “they” came and only unification would save the day. Cue 52 new number ones released in August. Starburst examines the new line-up, each title summed up in exactly 52 words.

Action Comics #1
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Rags Morales

A new take on the Man of Steel. This Superman is a blue collar hero six months into his career in the rebooted DC universe, concerned with social injustice, capable of being hurt and a lot less powerful. No cod piece for this Clark Kent, just jeans, a T-shirt and cape. Excellent

 
All Star Western #1
Writers: Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray
Artist: Moritat

Face-ache bounty hunter Jonah Hex is out of his element (in a good way) when he’s drawn to Gotham to catch the prostitute-slaying Butcher with an unlikely accomplice, psychologist and infamous asylum founder Amadeus Arkham. This anti-Sherlock Holmes duo sees Hex’s frontier attitude clashing with the corrupt underbelly to unravel a conspiracy.

 
Animal Man #1
Writer: Jeff Lemire
Artist: Travel Foreman

Can Buddy Baker return to his Morrison-roots? This fresh incarnation is on the road to that rarely-duplicated cocktail of wacky supernatural/animal rights/family life. Animal Man doesn’t seem to be in the same universe of DC’s clean cut heroes – which, perhaps is a good thing, but the Red? A series killer last time.

 
Aquaman #1
Writer: Geoff Johns
Artist: Ivan Reis

Aquaman has always been a small fish in the big pond of the DCU and this is pointed out to Arthur Curry several times by Johns. But from the deeps comes a new menace with teeth, bringing with it a rare chance for the understandably surly Aquaman to establish himself post-Flashpoint.

 
Batgirl #1
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Ardian Syaf

Barbara Gordon’s back on her feet ‘three years’ after the Joker shot her and the police commissioner’s daughter finds herself on serial killer The Mirror’s hit list. Simone is no stranger to the former Oracle through Birds of Prey but will Gordon stay out of the wheelchair Alan Moore put her in?

 
Batman #1
Writer: Scott Snyder
Artist: Greg Capullo

Rising star Snyder and ex-Spawn man Capullo take the trophy for best Bat title in the 52 titles. Beginning with the most unexpected team-up and then poisoning it at the end is genius, with good old-fashioned clues, character building, a who’s who of villains and fine art between, this is a must-must-buy.

Batman and Robin #1
Writer: Peter J. Tomasi
Artist: Patrick Gleason

Like father, like son for Bruce Wayne and Damian. Jolly Batman and surly Robin are now surly Batman and surlier Robin. Wayne is back where he belongs, at the heart of a violent mystery in Gotham with someone killing Batmen. This doesn’t stop Batman from doing something unexpected in his parents’ memory.

Batman: The Dark Knight #1
Writers: Paul Jenkins and David Finch
Artist: David Finch

The third Batman title out of the stall sees a very poetic Bruce Wayne dampening down a breakout at Arkham Asylum, led by a very different Two-Face and a new squeeze is introduced. Solid Batman stuff but at this point you have to question – how will all the titles rub shoulders continuity-wise?

Batwing #1
Writer: Judd Winick
Artist: Ben Oliver

A new hero is added to the DC roster: Batwing of Batman, Inc. This Congo-based Batman is fresh into his career to clean up crime-ridden Tinasha and encounters his nemesis, Massacre. Batwing adds some ethnic diversity to the DCU but will he have longevity or become a cameo in the Bat family?

Batwoman #1
Writers: J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman
Artist: J.H. Williams III

Openly-gay Kate Kane and sidekick Flamebird are knee deep in a watery urban legend that’s kidnapping children, giving Williams scope for his signature panel breakdowns to ripple across the pages with plenty of spreads and non-linear storytelling last perfectly executed in Promethea and Swamp Thing. Worth picking up for the art alone.

Birds of Prey #1
Writer: Duane Swierczynski
Artist: Jesus Saiz

The Charlie’s Angels of the DCU are back but this time without Oracle/Batgirl and rather reduced in the roster stakes, with just Black Canary and gun damsel Starling signed up to protect a journalist linked to clandestine enemies of theirs. Katana and Poison Ivy are tipped to swell their ranks soon, though.

Blackhawks #1
Writer: Mike Costa
Artist: Graham Nolan and Ken Lashley

A Thunderbirds concept is reinvented as G.I, Joe as a buttoned-down paramilitary outfit with access to bleeding-edge weaponry in a metahuman world. The cast looks big but everyone has a nickname and a role when they go up against nanocite-infected terrorists. Surprisingly good black ops fun, well distanced from its original concept.

Blue Beetle #1
Writer: Tony Bedard
Artist: Ig Guara

A new origin tale for the modern scarab-wielding Blue Beetle plays out similar to Spider-man’s, albeit in El Paso, Texas. Teen Jaime Reyes becomes joined with an alien weapon of mass destruction which turns its host into a one-man army. Think a Puerto Rican Guyver but with an enmity for Green Lanterns.

Captain Atom #1
Writer: J.T. Krul
Artist: Freddie Williams II

No-one’s known what to do with Captain Atom before but Krul takes the ex-air force captain in a new direction.  Looking more like Watchmen’s Dr Manhattan, the hero’s Firestorm-esque abilities open up new vistas of science – and new dangers. Is Atom powerful enough to sustain both himself and his own title?

Catwoman #1
Writer: Judd Winick
Artist: Guillem March

Selina Kyle’s life starts at square one in the new 52 when her apartment and everything she owns is firebombed by intruders unknown. Out to make a score in the Russian underworld, two faces from her past resurface, one of which she beds, the other she shreds. Guess which one Batman is.

DC Universe Presents: Deadman #1
Writer: Paul Jenkins
Artist: Bernard Chang

Deadman Boston Brand goes all Quantum Leap with a more clearly-defined mission from his spectral boss Rama. A neat visual metaphor of Boston taking steps to rebalance his selfish life through a selfless afterlife is a good touch and an imaginative display of his powers show what he’s capable of. Solid stuff.

Deathstroke #1
Writer: Kyle Higgins
Artist: Joe Bennett

Wade Wilson jumps into his own series after Flashpoint – think The Punisher except on the criminals’ side – and makes it his mission to carve back respect in the DCU as a top player. Great Simon Bisley cover of the newly-armoured mercenary and a plot twist that shows Wilson hasn’t mellowed with age.

Demon Knights #1
Writer: Paul Cornell
Artist: Diogenes Neves

The form of demon Etrigan rises in the Dark Ages of England in a Magnificent Seven style romp with other medieval DC characters like the Shining Knight, Vandal Savage and Madame Xanadu versus the Questing Queen. A clean reboot of the Kirby classic with lots of blood and thunder. A must read.

Detective Comics #1
Writer/Artist: Tony Daniel

Despite the 52 revamp Batman is still very much Batman, in slightly new costume, on the cusp of a mystery surrounding the Joker with a shadowy Dollmaker lurking in the background. A solid Batman tale, yet nothing original. But what an end splash page. Will we be seeing a new look Joker?

The Flash #1
Writers: Francis Manapul and Brian Buccelato
Artist: Francis Manapul

The (fastest) man who caused 52 new titles bursts into the new DCU with vibrancy in art, colour and plot with Barry Allen using fast-thinking and faster legs to keep up with a plot involving a former friend. A great All-Star Superman style credit page and a Silver Age style of narrative.

Frankenstein: Agent of Shade #1
Writer: Jeff Lemire
Artist: Alberto Ponticelli

The monster squad that debuted during Flashpoint moves into DCU continuity with Morrison’s creation teaming up with a vampire, wolfman, fishwoman and mummy to find his wife in a town overtaken by thousands of monsters. Much more impressive than their last outing but still lacks that Morrison characterisation that made Frankie super-cool.

 

The Fury of Firestorm: The Nuclear Men #1
Writers: Ethan van Scriver, Gail Simone
Artist: Yildiray Cinar

A clunky name for this title but an intriguing plot that starts pulling in all the strands of the complex Firestorm history and variations into one uber version featuring two nuclear men who hate each other. Nice to see contemporary physics like Higgs Boson and Large Hadron Collider used in a superhero.

Green Arrow #1
Writer: J.T. Krul
Artist: Dan Jurgens

Another reboot for the emerald archer. This new Oliver Queen, looking more like his protégé Red Arrow, is mirroring Marvel’s Punisher by going up against low-key superpowers – without the killing – and has more gadgets than Bond up his sleeve. He still espouses liberal philosophy but seems much more a man of action.

Green Lantern #1
Writer: Geoff Johns
Artist: Doug Mahnke

Recent events have turned Hal Jordan’s life on its head. Booted out of the Corps and out of his pilot career, a down-on-his-luck Jordan finds himself out of touch with his fellow humans and love interest Carol. Meanwhile, his replacement, Sinestro, is also battling upset – and the corps that bear his name.

Green Lantern Corps #1
Writer: Peter J. Tomasi
Artist: Fernando Pasarin

Guy Gardner and John Stewart turn their back on civilian life and stick to what they are good at – galactic crime solving, starting with a massacred world with all its water robbed. It’s good to see the corps strike out on their own without being mothered by Hal Jordan or Kyle Rayner.

Green Lantern: The New Guardians #1
Writer: Tony Bedard
Artist: Tyler Kirkham

Artist Kyle Rayner leads up this extra Lantern series and any fears he would be forgotten in the new 52 are extinguished with six other job offers from the other Corps. It’s good to see Jordan’s more imaginative stand-in lighting the way, joined by the leading cast members from the emotional spectrum.

Grifter #1
Writer: Nathan Edmondson
Artist: Cafu

Cole Cash, aka Grifter, lives up to his namesake as a conman but stumbles out of the Wildstorm universe and into the DCU when extra-terrestrials steal 17 hours of his life. Pursued and looking for answers, Grifter feels like Lost meets The Fugitive with an inspired background touch for introducing a flashback.

Hawk and Dove #1
Writer: Sterling Gates
Artist: Rob Liefeld

The odd couple are back, riding on the success of their bit parts in Brightest Day. The war and peace pair face a science terrorist and an unknown avatar of the gods who gave them their powers. Hawk and Dove, like Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger, have appeal but a continuing series? Hmmm.

I, Vampire #1
Writer: Joshua Hale Fialkov
Artist: Andrea Sorrentino

The commercially-powerful genre that is ‘Vampires’ is slotted into the DCU with gorgeous Jae Lee-esque art and clever storytelling. Andrew is the conscience-hounded vampire protecting humanity from his less scrupulous cohorts who plan invasion. Sounds a bit twee but has the hallmarks of a Vertigo title. Will vampires and spandex mix, though?

Justice League #1
Writer: Geoff Johns
Artist: Jim Lee

The tentative first steps towards putting a new league together, beginning with the fugitive Batman and Green Lantern stumbling onto a Darkseid plot and coming up against a rough-and-ready Superman in his movie-friendly new costume. Expect a team-building story arc though the real cliffhanger is: will Jim Lee meet his art deadlines?

Justice League Dark #1
Writer: Peter Milligan
Artist: Mikel Janin

Most of the Vertigo refugees and some C-list DCU ones have been snowballed into this “adult” league thrown together to combat magical threats, beginning with Enchantress who smacks down Superman and co. Milligan can be hit or miss when it comes to weird (and Shade in particular) but this one’s on target.

Justice League International #1
Writer: Dan Jurgens
Artist: Aaron Lopresti

A rival Justice League toeing orders from the UN, with Booster Gold in charge, sees the team hunting missing scientists without their heaviest hitter, Guy Gardner. Great banter between Russian Rocket Red and China’s August General In Iron but most surprising is Batman’s faith in their PR-obsessed leader. This one’s got potential.

Legion Lost #1
Writer: Fabian Nicieza
Artist: Pete Woods

The Legion of Super-Heroes are flung back into the past on the trail of a criminal who has released a pathogen into Earth’s atmosphere. Newcomers can expect to be overwhelmed by a large cast and a lot of references to off-panel adventure. Will the Legion get back to the future? Who cares.

Legion of Super-Heroes #1
Writer: Paul Levitz
Artist: Francis Portela

With half the roster stuck in Earth’s past and their own title, the others remain in the 31st century, moaning about being short staffed (though there’s still like 30 of them). A lot of references to continuity and a quick who’s who combine to make this title a bit impenetrable to newcomers.

Men of War #1
Writers: Ivan Brandon / Jonathan Vankin
Artists: Tom Derenick / Phil Winslade

Sergeant Rock returns as a young infantryman in the modern age. His squad get embedded in hostile country while an unknown metahuman brings the city down on their heads. In the back-up story, the Seals go Full Metal Jacket against a surprising sniper. Not quite Garth Ennis’ War Stories, but refreshingly different.

Mister Terrific #1
Writer: Eric Wallace
Artist: Gianluca Gugliotta

Follow the science with this refreshing combination of Sherlock Holmes derring-do, James Bond action and bravery to touch upon race issues with the JSA’s criminally underused Michael Holt aka Mister Terrific. The comparisons with Batman are there – billionaire, genius, athlete – but this series stamps out its own identity. Terrific from word one.

Nightwing #1
Writer: Kyle Higgins
Artist: Eddy Barrows

Stand-in Batman Dick Grayson is back in his own tights but still in Gotham. Claiming to be on top of his game, the ex-Robin is quickly beat down by a mystery opponent whose timing coincides with the return of Grayson’s circus. But how does this tie in with the events in Batman?

OMAC #1
Writers: Keith Giffen and Dan Didio
Artist: Keith Giffen

OMAC gets reimagined from Greg Rucka’s complex Machiavellian spy drama into a Kirby-esque Hulk-a-thon. Brother Eye has co-opted a young scientist into breaking into Cadmus for reasons unknown. Great homage art throughout from Giffen and a clean-cut, simply told story riding that 1960s vibe of misunderstood monsters and science-bending Flash Gordon adventuring.

Red Hood and the Outlaws #1
Writer: Scott Lobdell
Artist: Kenneth Rocafort

An intriguing reintegration of ex-Robin Jason Todd into the DCU under his moniker of the Red Hood. He’s putting his own band of outlaws together, starting with Red Arrow Roy Harper and Starfire before being dragged into an alien conspiracy which could drown the impatient reader in questions. Gorgeous art by Rocafort.

Red Lanterns #1
Writer: Peter Milligan
Artist: Ed Benes

The success imbued into the Green Lantern titles spills out into a new one focused on another pantheon of colour. Atrocitus finds a new goal after the events of War of the Green Lanterns but will rage fuel this into another on-going addition alongside New Guardians, Green Lantern and the Corps titles?

Resurrection Man #1
Writers: Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning
Artist: Fernando Dagnino

Mitch Shelley, one of the DCU’s more unusual powers, has been resurrected into his second series after a cult run in the 90s. This time he faces Heaven and Hell but with so much of his convoluted history mopped up first time is there anything left on his bones to pick over?

The Savage Hawkman #1
Writer: Tony S. Daniel
Artist: Philip Tan

A solo outing for Carter Hall with nary a thought towards his mixed-up past as Egyptian king-cum-alien space cop who has lots of regrets. The concept of a man with wings has always been a weak one but this new Hawkman hopes to take his alien nth metal to the nth degree.

Static Shock #1
Writers: Scott McDaniel and John Rozum
Artist: Scott McDaniel

Virgil Hawkins aka Static jumps from the Kids’ WB! TV show into his own title after a seven-year hiatus. There’s a lot of big-brain science in this juvenile superhero romp which assumes you watched the show but you have to admire its ballsy final page. Anyone remember Animal Man #1 from 1988?

Stormwatch #1
Writer: Paul Cornell
Artist: Miguel Sepulveda

Wildstorm’s premier team The Authority is folded into the DCU under its former guise of Stormwatch. The team of familiars – and new faces like the Martian Manhunter – is put together to stop something cosmic. This is also the first cross reference to another 52 title, Superman, and is definitely one to watch.

Suicide Squad #1
Writer: Adam Glass
Artists: Federico Dallocchio, Ransom Getty and Scott Hanna

The best and most gruesome, beginning pages seen to date. With some titles graded ‘edge’ or ‘dark’ this is definitely the latter and topples Marvel’s Thunderbolts from the top of the bad boy league. Inspired casting with Harley Quinn, twists following twists, Suicide Squad is the hidden ace in the 52 pack.

Superboy #1
Writer: Scott Lobdell
Artist: R.B. Silva

A new origin story for the Man of Steel’s teenage clone. Very different from the cocksure young man who emerged during Reign of the Supermen, this Kon-El is positively alien, passively studying humanity with an unseen before intelligence from the confines of a virtual lab before being set upon the Teen Titans.

Supergirl #1
Writers: Michael Green and Mike Johnson
Artist: Mahmud Asrar

First she was a cousin, then an angel, then a retcon of a parallel world cousin, now she’s a full-blooded Kryptonian who’s crashed onto Earth before being attacked by armoured forces in Siberia before a timely rescue from the new-look Superman. No answers revealed this issue, just a lot of burning questions.

Superman #1
Writer: George Perez
Artist: Jesus Merino

New cloth for the Man of Tomorrow, and a new status quo with the Daily Planet absorbed into the less-ethical Morgan Edge media monopoly. Clark Kent’s unease grows with a new alien threat and there’s that cryptic Stormwatch link. Action Comics is Superman in his infancy; this is him at his peak.

Swamp Thing #1
Writer: Scott Snyder
Artist: Yanick Paquette

Alec Holland is back in his own series set firmly in the DCU – and so is Swamp Thing. The pair are not the same entity anymore but that doesn’t prevent birds, fish and cattle dropping dead and dinosaur bones reanimating. An intelligent return to DC’s former crown jewel and one to watch.

Teen Titans #1
Writer: Scott Lobdell
Artist: Brett Booth

Tying into Superboy and mimicking the team-forming adventure of Justice League, Red Robin proves to be as bad-ass as Batman in squaring up to shadowy meta teen-snatchers N.O.W.H.E.R.E. with some equally new personas for Wonder Girl and Kid Flash. A clean, fresh start for a title once bloated with cast and continuity.

Voodoo #1
Writer: Ron Marz
Artist: Sami Basri

This Voodoo is a far cry from the Alan Moore version steeped in New Orleans hoodoo, posing as an alien spy with a talent for shape-shifting and learning how to be human. The art is full of nice touches, with lots of clever effects done with reflective surfaces.  Another strong Wildstorm evacuee.

Wonder Woman #1
Writer: Brian Azzarello
Artist: Cliff Chiang

Diana Prince is back in her short-shorts and pulled into protecting the consort and unborn child of Zeus from a mysterious queen. We learn how centaurs are made, that Hermes looks like a sick chicken and one of Zeus’s sons plots in the wings, waiting for his father to be created …

DC Comics were roundly criticised for resetting some 75 years of history. Credit where it’s due, the opportunity to do it right wasn’t squandered. Some will undoubtedly sink, however, so here are our predicted sure bets, titles worthy of attention but unlikely to attract it, and rank outsiders worthy of cult success.

As for the mysterious purple lady who started it all. She’s been lurking in the background in every title. She hasn’t done anything, yet, but the aforementioned threat of something big and powerful coming could be a crossover event aimed at killing off the weaker titles. Let’s hope it’s not another crisis.

Have you read the New 52? Which is your favourite/most hated? Is it a work of genius or a fool’s errand? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below or on twitter @STARBURST_MAG

During the most recent run of the BBC comedy The Armstrong and Miller Show, there was a sketch featuring two old school vampires in a pub on the look out for virgins…

One of them (Count Anton Schleisinger van Hoekenhoek von Horschtadt) is modelled on Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of Dracula while the other (High Prince Alto Pharius) is clearly based on Gary Oldman’s. Bemoaning the arrival of a group of more modern, trendy vampires in the bar, The Prince reminisces to his companion about the good old days: “Twas on this very day in 1862 I seduced the Comtesse di Vittoria to the soaring violin of Johann Strauss himself. I drained her body of life on the balcony of the Schloss Charlottenburg while the crowned heads of Europe thronged below.” To which the Count replies “I ended up with Pat from Barnsley the other night”. The scene ends when they spot an attractive virgin at a nearby table and glide slowly across the floor in her direction, fangs bared and talons raised, only to be beaten to the punch by the superhuman speed of one of the younger vampires who gets there first. Prince Alto deadpans “Since when could vampires do that?”

Amusing though the scene is it highlights just how much vampire movies have evolved over the last three decades and the extent to which Dracula has in many ways been outgrown by his own brethren. A character who could once lay claim to the title of the undisputed Movie Monster of all time has, since the late 1970s, retreated into the shadows while others of his cinematic ilk have thrived in contemporary settings, looking as though they’re having a great time doing so into the bargain. Since the character’s heyday from the 1930s through to the end of the 1970s, the once copious amounts of blood that would accompany the release of yet another Dracula film have dried up to a trickle, the only major cinematic release to feature the Count in the last 20 years being Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). The only other versions have been spoofs (Dracula Dead and Loving It, 1995), duds (Dracula 2000 and its straight to video sequels Ascension and Legacy, 2003 & 2005) and a ballet (Dracula Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, released in 2002 and filmed in the manner of a silent movie set to the music of Mahler). Of course, Dracula has popped up in other stuff, making guest appearances of variable success in the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2000), Van Helsing (2004) and Blade Trinity (2004) but nonetheless, an honest assessment of the character’s history on film over the last century or so would have to conclude that (yes, I am going to say it) fangs ain’t what they used to be and, compared to how things were back in his pomp, Dracula just isn’t as popular as he once was.

However, in May of 2010 it was announced that there would be a new version of Stoker’s tale, scheduled for release in 2012. Since then, Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D has generated considerable interest not least because it brings together one of the great screen villains with one of the horror genre’s greatest directors. Despite any misgivings fans may have regarding his more recent output, as well as reservations over the fact that it will be filmed in 3D, Dracula is an interesting choice for Argento and it will be fascinating to see how he brings his distinctive style to bear on a story that has been told so often. Also, if there is one director who knows how to utilise colour (and all I’m really thinking of here is red) it’s him. But if he is to deliver something that can stand alongside the very best Dracula films, Argento will have to negotiate a graveyard of clichés housing over 200 tombstones, each of them marking the resting place of a different on-screen incarnation of the eponymous Count (The Internet Movie Database carries 274 entries for actors who have played the role on film or television since 1922). Not only that but he faces the challenge of rehabilitating the Count and making him into a figure who is worthy of a place in our darkest dreams once more. Although the supernatural still flourishes on screens big and small, the Count very rarely features and while other vampires seem suited to the 21st century, Dracula is looking very much a 20th century boy. Therefore, Argento’s film will also be interesting because it may tell us, one way or the other, if the 20th century is where Dracula should have stayed.

There was a time when it seemed audiences couldn’t get enough of the old parasite. Vampire films had actually been a fairly popular staple of the silent era throughout the first two decades of the 20th century, the first example, Georges Méliès’s Manor of the Devil, appearing in 1896 (a year before Stoker’s Dracula was published). A whole series of shorts and features were released throughout the 1910s, stories that were often concerned with predatory female vampires who drained the life from unwary men too weak willed to resist their seductive advances, while others featured Svengali type figures who exerted a hypnotic influence over their victims. Some weren’t actually vampire films at all, at least not in the supernatural sense, films such as Louis Feuillade’s 10-part serial Les Vampires exploiting the aesthetic of the genre but applying it to very human villains. Musidora, as the catsuited Parisian thief Irma Vep, was a vamp who looked like a vampire; a seductive, dangerous femme female whose allure was the antithesis of the wholesome hero and heroine of the tale. Although many of these films have now been lost, those that do survive show that European film makers in particular were intent on exploring and exploiting the eroticism inherent in the vampire mythos, and that from the beginning this was something that had huge popular appeal.

It wasn’t until the early 20s that Dracula made his first appearance on screen, the earliest surviving version being F W Murnau’s Nosferatu (Hungarian and Russian films featuring Dracula that were made the year before Murnau’s film are now lost). What is remarkable about Murnau’s picture is that it remains one of the most effective adaptations of the story ever put on screen, with Max Schreck’s Count Orlok (they couldn’t use the name Dracula due to copyright issues) enduring as the stuff of nightmares. His eerie and unsettling performance is enhanced by a film imbued with a haunting, dreamlike quality, where events unfold with a hallucinatory feel, all of it exacerbated by the fact that it is a silent film. A movie to be watched alone in the wee small hours, there are several scenes still capable of eliciting goosebumps: Orlok emerging from his coffin bolt upright, his spindly frame defying gravity; the shot of him framed within a window as he stares across the street at a sleeping Ellen (Mina in the book); and the iconic moment when his shadow is seen preceding him up a staircase as he makes his way to Ellen’s room. It’s worth noting as well that this was a portrayal of the Count, not as a dark seducer but as a repulsive monster, an approach that has rarely been taken since and although there is nothing seductive about Shreck’s Count, that is not to say that sex and sexuality was wholly absent from Murnau’s film. Orlok’s undoing turns out to be his yearning for Ellen as she entices and seduces him so successfully that he is unaware of the approaching dawn and pays the price for his desire by dying in the rays of the early morning sun. She dies as well unfortunately but hey, this was German expressionist cinema folks and she did at least give Orlok the distinction of being the first on screen vampire to prove susceptible to sunlight (Stoker wrote that Dracula’s powers were diminished in the day time but he was otherwise unharmed). About as serious a Dracula film as has ever been made, Nosferatu remains a true horror film in terms of its themes, its aesthetic and its central character and although there have been more commercially successful Counts there have been none as disturbing.

Thanks in part to rights issues and the take no prisoners approach of Stoker’s widow (she managed to have most copies of Nosferatu destroyed for copyright infringement) it would be almost 10 years before Dracula returned to the screen but when it did it would be in the most famous version of the story ever made. Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi in the lead role, was a film that (along with Frankenstein) kick-started a whole new cycle of monster movies for Universal Pictures, many of them going on to generate highly lucrative and popular sequels. Although the pace of the movie is rather slow, one of its most striking aspects is the way Browning films Lugosi, often framing him in close up and lighting him so that the viewer’s gaze is inevitably drawn to his eyes and a stare that pierces to the core. The first time Lugosi is seen this way is on the horse drawn coach that goes to fetch Renfield to his castle and it remains a chilling piece of film making, something that may surprise those whose only experience of Lugosi is the “I vant to sack your blad” stereotype that has endured for over half a century. It is certainly the case that only by going back to the original film is it possible to appreciate the impact of Lugosi’s performance; melodramatic maybe and occasionally mannered but it is never anything less than thoroughly mesmerising. Something Browning’s film has in common with Murnau’s is a somewhat unnerving physicality in many of the performances, something that once again lends proceedings a distinctly dream like quality, a scene early on when Renfield faints and Dracula’s brides move slowly and silently into his room being a notable example. The lack of a musical score at such moments increases their impact.

With Dracula Universal created a phenomenon and their subsequent run of monster movies largely defined what cinematic horror was for well over a decade. With The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Mummy and Phantom of the Opera, Universal created a sort of Justice League of horror, and in Dracula of course they had their very own Batman (chortle). Indeed, it’s possible that the character remained popular partly because he was a member of this cadre. As creatures that all belonged to the same fictional universe and who came as a pack, the success of the Frankenstein, Invisible Man and Mummy films enhanced rather than diluted each other’s appeal. However, considering how inextricably linked Lugosi now is with the role, he only ever played it one more time in 1948’s Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, this being the first real indication that, no matter how strong the initial impact, there seemed to be something about all of these monsters that would inevitably lead to comedy.

In retrospect it is easy to see how Lugosi and Schreck established a template for many of the subsequent portrayals of Dracula and vampires in general, offering two very different interpretations that have proven difficult for others to ignore. As memorable as John Carradine, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman would be in years to come, Lugosi is present in all of them. Say the name Dracula today and it is still Lugosi that many people will immediately think of, despite the fact that it is unlikely they will have seen the actual film. His physical appearance was especially influential and he made it almost impossible for anybody else to play the role with an East European accent without sounding like a poor imitation. As for Schreck’s Orlok, vampire characters such as Kurt Barlow of Salem’s Lot (1979), the Gentlemen of the Buffy episode Hush (1999) and even the feral creatures of 30 Days of Night (2007) and Stakeland (2011) would all draw to some degree from the well of a monster born way back in 1922.

Before and during Dracula’s Universal years other vampire movies remained popular, one of the most successful being Tod Browning’s London After Midnight (1927), starring Lon Chaney as a Mr Hyde type figure in the tale of a creature who turned out to not actually be a vampire at all but a policeman in disguise. Hugely popular, Browning remade it in 1935 with Bela Lugosi in the Chaney role. The 1930s also saw Carl Theodore Dreyer tackle the genre with The Vampyr (1932), Fay Wray star in The Vampire Bat (1932) and Humphrey Bogart attempt to quench a thirst for the red stuff in The Return of Doctor X (1939). Yet none of these made anything like the sort of impact of Lugosi’s Count.

Dracula then went into a period of relative hibernation throughout the forties as did the vampire film itself, only a handful of productions (the 1944 Lugosi vehicle Return of the Vampire being one) making any sort of impact in a decade when more immediate horrors were occupying the minds of many. This lull was broken in spectacular style from the late 1950s through to the late 70s, with Dracula films averaging just short of one a year, the majority of them released in the 10 years between 1965 and 1975. The catalyst for this golden period was the success of 1958’s Dracula (or Horror of Dracula as it was known in the U.S.). Starring Christopher Lee in a role that redefined the character for a generation, Dracula and its sequel Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), were thrilling movies of real pace and excitement, possessing a look, a sound and a cast that has rarely (if ever) been bettered since. Each has a swashbuckling appeal that many versions have lacked, the first movie moving towards a frantic and thrilling crescendo as Van Helsing (the peerless Peter Cushing) pursues Dracula through his castle in the film’s final act. They also feature scenes that, although tame by modern standards, shocked audiences at the time who were used to more anaemic and stately fare when it came to mainstream horror. For instance, Christopher Lee’s disintegration into dust when exposed to sunlight at the conclusion of Dracula was too much for many, as was the scene in Prince of Darkness where his ashes are soaked in the blood of a human sacrifice hung upside down over his sarcophagus, the victim’s throat cut with casual indifference by Dracula’s underling as he attempts to resurrect his Master. Moments like this were a radical departure from the approach taken by Universal, the contrast provoking reactions such as a review in The Daily Worker, when film critic Nina Hibbins wrote “I went to see Dracula prepared to enjoy a nervous giggle. I was even ready to poke gentle fun at it. I came away revolted and outraged. This film disgusts the mind and repels the senses.” She wasn’t alone and if there had never been a reaction to a Dracula movie like it before, there certainly hasn’t been one like it since.

Meanwhile, Mario Bava was taking horror and vampires further than even Hammer was daring to go, directing The Mask of Satan in 1960, a film that depicted atrocities such as a spiked mask being hammered into Barbara Steele’s face. Steele’s role as the Vampire Witch Asa Vajda also conveyed a powerful subtext about the power of female sexuality, something that acted as a driving force enabling her to return from the dead to carry out her revenge on any who would suppress it. It would take Hammer another 10 years before they would tackle vampires and sexuality as overtly and in the meantime Bava also made Black Sabbath (1963), a portmanteau film in which Boris Karloff starred as a father who returns home to his family one evening as a vampire. Both of these movies, along with Roman Polanski’s affectionate Hammer spoof The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) (also known as Dance of the Vampires) were set in a historical milieu that mirrored that of many of the Hammer films, a world of atmosphere and superstition in which vampires seemed to thrive. However, when such movies attempted to set their characters in the modern world it felt as though a spell was broken, especially so for Dracula whose potency (in Dracula AD 1972) seemed to diminish, not as the result of a crucifix or a stake but rather the film’s groove-tastic proliferation of hot-pants (AD 1972 being a movie that possesses many charms but an effective horror film it is not).

However, the series had already  ran out of steam before then and from the third film onwards (1968’s Dracula Has Risen from the Grave) Lee’s Dracula appears far less impressive each time he returns, a succession of writers and directors struggling to find new and interesting things to do with the character. In particular it became increasingly difficult to find ways of both killing Dracula off and then reviving him for another set of adventures, a problem that in the manner of its resolution sometimes has the effect of making him appear rather inept and even comical. After his relatively straightforward death by sunlight in the first film, he subsequently comes a cropper as a result of running water (stranded on a frozen moat as the ice is shot up around him), impalement (falls off a church roof and is skewered on a crucifix), faith (distracted by the Lord’s Prayer, he collapses onto an alter and turns to dust), wooden stakes (falls into a pit of the things prepared by wily old Van Helsing) and a hawthorn bush (he becomes entangled in one long enough for Van Helsing to finish him off). This was Dracula as Wile E Coyote, the nadir coming in 1970’s Scars of Dracula when he is electrocuted by lightening just as he’s about to launch an iron spike at a cowering Dennis Waterman. Lee’s horrified and incredulous expression as Dracula is fried to a crisp is the perfect visual articulation of the thought “You’ve got to be kidding me?” Thankfully, Hammer didn’t go the whole hog and have him run off the edge of a cliff, hanging in mid air only long enough to look forlornly into camera before plummeting to the ground, his demise signalled by a puff of dust far below. But they came pretty close.

Despite the huge variations in quality across the Lee/Hammer Draculas, one of the most enduring (and refreshing) aspects of Lee’s portrayal is the way he combined the debonair with the savage. His switch in Dracula from an aristocrat of sophistication and charm to a snarling red eyed demon is wonderful, and although the latter aspect of his performance would come to dominate subsequent films, he managed to convey the beast beneath the veneer better than any actor before or since (Lee also starred as a Dracula physically similar to Stoker’s original description in Jess Franco’s 1970 adaptation). In stark contrast to the love lorne, more sympathetic figure Dracula would cut in subsequent outings from other studios, Lee’s Dracula remains one of the most outright malevolent and evil the cinema has produced. It’s an aspect of the character that has been softened over the years, the compulsion of many actors and directors to portray him almost as a lover rather than an outright villain contributing to his increasing impotence as a figure of menace within the horror genre. Some women may have entertained dark fantasies about Lee’s Dracula and the predatory, sexual element was always there, but for all his Mediterranean good looks and regal bearing, his was a portrayal that never invited sympathy and he certainly never looked like he was nursing a broken heart. He was Ghengis Khan with fangs, a warrior noble who was also an undead monster with a thirst for human blood.

As Hammer’s Dracula films descended into self-parody their popularity declined while that of another sub-genre of vampire films grew. Jean Rollin had already set a precedent with titles such Rape of the Vampire (1969) and The Naked Vampire (1970) and Hammer’s lesbian vampire films (The Vampire Lovers in 1970, and Countess Dracula, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil all in 1971) were also movies that obviously felt sub text was for wimps, the eroticism of many earlier vampire films now transformed into outright titillation. Not without their merits (and I am talking about atmosphere, characterisation and story here) they did confirm two things about vampire movies at the start of the 1970s: firstly, that the genre was really about sex and second, that Hammer wasn’t taking Dracula seriously any more.

So at the beginning of a decade in which Dracula was about to go off in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions, it seemed like there were only two ways Dracula could go: embrace the comedy or go back to the source and begin again. However, radical changes were about to take place across the horror genre. A new breed of monster was about to emerge that would provide a challenge for the old guard unlike any they had encountered so far, The Devil himself was ready to emerge as the ultimate bad guy and horror films in general were about to get very messy indeed. As for the rest of the vampire world, it would soon undergo a brief period of moody introspection before the dawn of the aspirational 80s, when vampires seemed to decide along with everybody else that all they really wanted to do was have fun.

In next month’s part two: Amongst other things, Dracula gets a blow wave, vampires move in next door, the aristocracy makes a come back and the return of Nosferatu. Meanwhile, the Titty Twister opens for business, audiences go crazy for Mad Men and the Oscar goes to… 

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always triumph.” – Beyond the Black River by Robert E Howard, published in Weird Tales, June 1935

In clinical psychology there is something called the nature versus nurture debate which concerns itself with the two factors that are most influential in child development. The nature side of the argument goes that genetics are most important, whereas the nurture theory states that it is your environment that has the biggest effect on how you turn out. Max Cady put the former argument best in 1991’s Cape Fear when he said “Granddaddy used to handle snakes in church, Granny drank strychnine. I guess you could say I had a leg up, genetically speaking.” However, in searching the pantheon of fictional characters for someone able to advocate the opposite point of view, it’s difficult to find a more perfect candidate than a man who was born on a battlefield. Conan the Cimmerian was kicking arse in combat before he was barely in his teens and how could it be any other way when the scent of death was in his nostrils in the first moments of his life? Seconds old and exposed to bloody slaughter and the cries of the stricken, as nurturing goes, it is fair to say that this is one baby who probably wasn’t destined for a career in one of the caring professions. Well, Nursing’s loss was certainly violent slaughter’s gain as since his creation, Conan has gone on to become one the most popular fictional characters of the 20th century, appearing in literature, comics, television and films, and blazing a gloriously destructive path of daring do across all of them.

Like many a film lover of my generation, my first exposure to Conan and his world was the 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian, arguably the first picture to put Arnold Schwarzenegger on the movie map. Like many boys of my age I was immediately won over by the heady combination of bloody violence and copious amounts of female flesh on show. However, the movies’ charms faded with age and it wasn’t until I picked up the original Conan tales of Robert E Howard in my 20s that I really began to appreciate the appeal of the character. Howard’s tales have much to recommend them and apart from being largely responsible for inventing the whole sword and sorcery genre, they are also exciting, chaotic, blood soaked merry-go-rounds possessing a vitality that endures to this day. To be honest, I was hooked from the moment I read The Scarlet Citadel and Conan’s words “Free my hands and I’ll varnish this floor with your brains.”

A Cimmerian from the Northern wilds in the Hyborian age, Conan inhabited a land and an era for which Howard created a whole history, geography and mythology, not just to give his characters and stories a context that would increase readers enjoyment but also so that he wouldn’t have to concern himself with the sort of historical research required if Conan’s adventures took place in a real historical setting. Although he never went to the lengths that Tolkien would (who went as far as creating whole languages) Howard’s maps and history of the Hyborian age now lend the Conan stories a richness and depth, and are particularly helpful regarding the allegiances and enmities that exist between regions and leaders. As a reader I often found myself flicking back and forth between the tales and the maps as various peoples or kingdoms were mentioned.

Conan’s first appearance in print came in 1932 in a story Howard wrote called The Phoenix on the Sword. It was published in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine (so called because they were printed on low quality pulped paper) that also featured the work of H. P. Lovecraft, a friend and regular correspondent of Howard’s. Phoenix is a story that introduces Conan at a point in his life when he has become King of Aquilonia after a lifetime of wandering and adventure. Never one to do things by halves, he assumes the crown by strangling the former incumbent while he’s actually sat on his throne, Howard demonstrating Conan’s flair for the grand gesture very early on. Actually, an earlier story of Howard’s, People of the Dark, also featured a Conan (Conan the Reaver) who had much in common with the Barbarian, at least in terms of his physical appearance. Nonetheless Phoenix is an interesting introduction to the character, coming as it does at a time in Conan’s life when many of the adventures Howard had yet to write had already taken place, and also because it features many of what would come to be recognised as Conan staples such as monsters, demons and evil wizards.

Throughout the next 29 stories that Howard wrote, Conan was variously depicted as a pirate, a thief, a mercenary, a warrior and a king. By the time Howard had sold his sixth story to Weird Tales, The Pool of the Black One, it was apparent from a letter Howard wrote to his friend Clark Ashton Smith that Conan was a character Howard found incredibly easy to write about, detailing how for weeks on end he “did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan”. When he tried to write about something or somebody else, he couldn’t do it. Astonishingly, he claimed that the story Rogues in the House was published exactly as it was written, only one word being changed before he submitted it for publication. It’s something that is reflected in the style of many Conan stories, as not only are they exciting to read but they read as though written by someone who found it exciting to write.

By 1934 Conan had become the most popular character appearing in Weird Tales and Howard’s success had brought him considerable acclaim. Conan’s adventures became increasingly epic in scale, with the publication of multi-part serials, including such tales as The People of the Black Circle, Beyond the Black River, The Hour of the Dragon and Red Nails. The latter was the last Conan story ever written by Howard before he took his own life in June of 1936, while The Hour of the Dragon is the final story in Conan’s chronology, occurring at a time in his life when Conan is about 45 years of age. A development of the plot of the Scarlet Citadel, Conan finds his crown being threatened by would be usurpers who revive the long dead Xaltotun (an ancient necromancer and by far the most powerful villain that Conan had ever faced) to overthrow him. Dragon is a fitting conclusion to the Conan cycle, a novel full of action and intrigue, a story in which Conan has to confront not only Xaltotun but also ghouls, pirates, vampires and a murderous ape (these crop up a lot to be honest). True, it doesn’t have much in terms of plot development but the action moves along at such a relentless pace that it’s tempting to overlook its short comings and just wallow in a story that is one of the most fun reads in the Conan oeuvre, its episodic format building to a finale as Conan’s various adventures lead to him to a climactic battle and the moment when at long last he chooses a Queen.

As for Red Nails, it is one of the bloodiest Conan tales and has a pessimism that in retrospect revealed much about Howard’s state of mind when he wrote it (his suicide coming after he was told of his mother’s impending death). Howard himself acknowledged he had gone further than usual, describing it as “Too much raw meat, maybe, but I merely portrayed what I honestly believe would be the reactions of certain types of people in the situations on which the plot of the story hung.” It also includes a dubiously lengthy scene in which a female villain is whipped, echoing a similar passage in The Slithering Shadow that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Bettie Page short.

One of the things that strikes you immediately about Howard’s Conan stories is the break-neck speed with which events unfold, along with the incredibly vivid and visceral descriptions of combat and battles when the action kicks off (which in Howard’s stories never takes long). I’ve always been a huge fan of J R R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but the first time I read the Conan story Black Colossus, I couldn’t help thinking that Howard’s battle scenes made Tolkien’s read like newspaper reports. Whereas Tolkien maintains a certain distance when describing the major battles of the War of the Ring, Howard puts you right into the thick of the action. For example, in Black Colossus Conan commands an army against the invading hordes of the sorcerer Thugra Khotan, and during the concluding battle Howard’s narrative sweeps down into the thick of the battle as Conan grapples with and kills an opposing Prince:

“…the barbarian never exactly knew how he killed his man. He only knew that a stone in the Stygian’s hand crashed again and again on his basinet, filling his sight with flashing sparks, as Conan drove his dagger again and again into his foe’s body, without apparent effect on the prince’s terrible vitality. The world was swimming to Conan’s sight, when with a convulsive shudder the frame that strained against his stiffened and then went limp.”

It’s a passage that’s indicative of many of Conan’s battles, the intensity, confusion, brutality and sheer desperation of fighting for his life conveyed with an immediacy that has never been matched in either the Conan comic book series or any of the film adaptations.

Another great feature of Howard’s writing is his fascination with the far horizon and what may dwell just beyond it. This sense that the stories can take you anywhere and encounter anything is one of the central strands of all great fantasy writing but to be truly convincing it requires that the writer believe utterly in what he is telling you. Howard certainly had that gift. Conan is in many ways one of the original heroes (or anti-heroes) of Western popular culture, a character whose influence is broader and deeper than might at first be supposed. But look at fictional figures such as Leone’s Man With No Name, Stephen King’s Roland Deschain, or Pat Mill’s Slaine and the combination of loner, fighter, wanderer and pragmatist found within all of them was found first in Conan.

Conan went on to appear in four further Howard stories that Weird Tales had originally rejected, tales that were discovered amongst his possessions after his death. The Frost Giant’s Daughter, The God in the Bowl, The Vale of Lost Women, and The Black Stranger were all published between 1952 and 1967 in a variety of publications. However, none of these stories reach the heights of the very best Conan stories and for me they work better as comic book adaptations in both the Marvel and Dark Horse run of titles that were to follow.

When Conan first appeared in comics it seemed like a natural progression for a character whose original stories had often been illustrated; logical also for a set of stories that featured the powerful imagery Howard’s writing suggested. Marvel Comics launched its Conan the Barbarian title in 1970, adapting many of Howard’s tales along with original material. Illustrated initially by Barry Smith and written by Roy Thomas it ran for over 270 issues but perhaps its greatest legacy was that it led to the creation and publication of The Savage Sword of Conan. Also written by Thomas and illustrated by John Buscema these adaptations are the closest that comics have ever come to recreating the frenzied pace, adult themes, and sheer bloody excitement of the original Conan tales. Thomas’s adaptations were also enhanced by the artwork of Barry Windsor Smith, the stunning levels of detail in his depictions of both Conan and his landscapes still seen as breath taking pieces of comic art. Dark Horse comics have been reprinting the original Marvel stories for some years now and anyone with an interest in the very best of them should look no further than The Savage Sword.

When the Marvel run of Conan stories came to an end in 2000, Dark Horse subsequently picked up the licence three years later. Once again adapting many of the original Howard stories, Dark Horse’s approach evoked the more sensational style of the original Weird Tales covers, depicting damsels in distress in the skimpiest of garb, inevitably being menaced by a demon or sorcerer of some sort or being slung over the shoulder of Conan himself. The Kurt Busiek scripted Born on the Battlefield is representative of a further approach taken by the publisher, namely how these strips often go back over Conan’s history and attempt to fill in some of the gaps in Howard’s chronology. Howard had written little of Conan’s childhood, mainly concerning himself with Conan from his teenage years onwards but Born on The Battlefield tells of many of the trials and tribulations that a young Conan and his people were subjected to in the Cimmerian highlands (including a memorable encounter with a cannibalistic savage). Dark Horse continues to publish a Conan series today (Conan: Road of Kings) in addition to its earlier two series Conan (2004 – 2008) and Conan the Cimmerian (2008 – 2010).

Although the most famous on screen version of Conan was the Arnold Schwarzenegger incarnation, there have also been a couple of animated TV series, as well as a live action abomination that a friend of mine inflicted on me recently. Awful acting, crappy characterisation, mind numbing dialogue and a representation of Conan that lives up to almost every barbarian cliché in the book, it is a TV series that makes Xena Warrior Princess look hard edged. If you ever find yourself in a situation where someone offers to show it to you don’t panic. Just don’t make any sudden moves, establish where the nearest exit is and back away towards it very, very slowly.

Anyway, back to the films. 1982’s Conan The Barbarian and then its sequel Conan The Destroyer in ’84, both have their moments, the first film in particular featuring a number of set pieces that are highly evocative of the original stories. Director John Milius clearly knew his Howard as he actually incorporated some memorable moments from the stories, all of which helped to give the movie that Conan feel of authenticity (none more so than the sequence when Conan is crucified on the orders of Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), a scene taken directly from the Howard story A Witch Shall be Born). Based on a script Milius developed with Oliver Stone, Conan the Barbarian is the most impressive film adaptation to date and tells the tale of Conan’s origins and his quest for revenge upon the man who killed his parents. Thulsa Doom was actually a character taken from Howard’s Kull stories and therefore not responsible for the death of Conan’s mother in the stories. However, he is the perfect foil to Conan, in part due to Jones’s performance but also because he is a worshiper of the snake god Set and if there is one thing the original Conan stories didn’t lack (and one thing the movie benefited from) it was a giant, demonical snake. The sequel suffers by comparison, its ambition not matched by the special effects that were employed in scenes such as the heroes arrival in the sorcerer Toth Amon’s castle and the climactic showdown with the rubber suited demon God Dagoth, who looks very much like he failed the audition at a Jon Pertwee era Doctor Who audition. However, it has some nice touches, in particular the homage it pays to the Howard story Rogues in the House, when a red hooded figure reveals itself as a monstrous gorilla/werewolf hybrid, and of course Grace Jones is utterly splendid, terrifying and convincing as a female warrior.

As for Schwarzenegger himself, well he’s an impressive Conan in terms of his physicality certainly and the occasions when he is called upon to fight or react do provide a competent approximation of the Conan of the stories. However, it is in the delivery of the dialogue that Arnie just doesn’t cut it, as he’s not able to convey either Conan’s sly wit or his tactical intelligence. He does however give a first class portrayal of Conan as a drunk.

As for the 2011 version, with Jason Momoa as Conan, it certainly had its moments of bloody carnage and Momoa wasn’t an awful choice but he did have a bit too much of the pretty boy model about him for my liking (he does however deliver dialogue far more convincingly than Arnie ever did). Also, the film’s CGI rendered kingdoms were far less convincing than the look of Milius’s original vision. However, ultimately it failed to live up to its origins because it misunderstood them. Howard’s stories were pulp fiction, yes but that isn’t necessarily short hand for simple, sensationalist or sloppy, all deficiencies that the plot and performances of Conan 2011 too often exhibited.

In addition to the comics, the TV and film adaptations, Conan has also served as an inspiration for board games, RPGs, and adventure and video games, as well as being revived in fiction by authors other than Howard. However, although Conan’s appearances in other media have sometimes met with deserved success, none can live up to the original Robert E Howard stories. Some of the best examples of pure action and adventure fiction that one could ever hope to read, Howard’s Conan deserves to be read as widely as the tales of Tolkien’s middle earth. It is pure storytelling of a kind that gets the pulse pounding and the mind racing, where no sooner have you drawn a breath after reading one tale than you’re plunged into a maelstrom of page turning high thrills with the next. Conan has been devalued over recent years, viewed too often as a loin cloth clad cliché from whom the world of fantasy fiction has moved on. What needs to be understood and appreciated is that without him, much of the best of the fantasy genre may never have existed at all.

By the time you read this, the petition to save Doctor Who Confidential will have amassed over 30,000 signatures. This week, the anonymous Twitter campaigner who set the wheels in motion made a brief appearance on page 7 of the Radio Times – not bad, given publishing turnarounds and the fact that the axe only fell a mere six days earlier. Whether you watch it or not, it’s fair to say that the decision to cull the behind-the-scenes sister programme to the BBC’s most popular drama is causing quite a commotion.

But was it the wrong decision … or was it the right one? Or might there even be a third option?

Doctor Who Confidential was born out of a desire by the BBC to promote the new, revamped Doctor Who back in 2005. A lot of money had been spent on Russell T Davies’ revitalised show, and Confidential was a relatively cheap cross-promotional tool, designed to expand the ‘brand’; remember, at the time, no one knew if Who would be a success or not (and nobody could have foreseen just how much of a success). But here’s the thing: Confidential was commissioned for just the one series, and there was never any plan for it to be ongoing beyond that. Indeed, it wasn’t until the viewing figures started to pile up (Confidential was often amongst the most-watched digital programmes during its early days, and even topped a million viewers by the end of that first series), that a second series was hastily given the go ahead (and that’s why The Christmas Invasion is the only episode of Doctor Who that doesn’t have its own attendant episode).

For the first two series, Confidential ran to just shy of thirty minutes an episode (with a ‘cut-down’ repeat of roughly 10 – 15 minutes’ duration, which would eventually end up as an extra on the DVD releases), but when Music and Monsters was transmitted with a running time of an hour, following the 2006 Christmas Special, it was noticed that for very little extra outlay, considerably more screen-time could be filled, and from Series Three onwards, Confidential was extended to fill a broadcast slot equivalent to the episode of Doctor Who it followed. Although it might seem odd to say this now, given that the two series have run quite happily concurrently for the five years since, this was probably the first nail in the spin-off’s coffin.

There is, after all, only so much you can say about a 45-minute episode of a television programme (and the fact that it is broadcast while you’re still trying to digest the episode itself doesn’t help). Aside from the occasional special edition (Do You Remember the First Time?, which followed the transmission of Blink in 2007, was ‘directed by’ David Tennant, and featured the actor on a mission to discover just what was the secret of the show’s success, talking to a number of other ‘famous fans’ along the way), Doctor Who Confidential quickly became a rather predictable mixture of the same basic elements: the showrunner (and sometimes the guest writer too, if you were lucky) talking rather positively about the script, the executive producers gushing about how wonderful everything was, and then any number of sequences showing (in excruciating detail) how the specific special effects, prosthetics, and CGI sequences were put together; these days, even the shots of the regulars larking about on-set are losing their charm. In the original 30-minute format, Confidential was an exhilarating glimpse behind-the-scenes; with an extra quarter of an hour to fill, the novelty soon waned. It’s fair to say that, although the viewing figures have remained reasonably steady, a lot of the viewers who have stopped watching have been die-hard fans, tired of seeing and hearing the same thing week in and week out.

Which is not to say that there aren’t an awful lot of good things about Confidential too, and an awful lot of reasons why it shouldn’t be allowed to die.

Perhaps the most pertinent, is the view that Confidential will one day be seen as the breeding ground for the next generation of television professionals. There are an awful lot of people working in the industry right now, whose career track was first inspired by a love of Doctor Who, the programme whose history, background and development was almost as interesting as that which appeared on the screen. If there’s one thing that Doctor Who Confidential (and to a lesser extent, its short-lived junior companion show Totally Doctor Who) can be rightly proud of, it’s the level of interest it inspires in how television is made, and in how it works. Any number of Media Studies courses will struggle to impart the same level of wisdom and enthusiasm as can be gleaned from a single edition of the show.

It is also a massive historical archive, for which future generations of Doctor Who fans will be eminently grateful (and Doctor Who is a programme that now shows no sign of ever coming to an end; it may be rested again, but it will always return – and come 2050, 2150 and even 3050, the future fans of Doctor Who will look back fondly on Confidential and be thoroughly thankful it ever existed in the first place). The DVDs of the classic series are lovely, and the Value Added Material (or ‘extras’) that the producers manage to create are fantastic; but just imagine if 2|entertain had something of the ilk of a 1960s or 1970s version of Confidential to work with, too.

And viewed occasionally, intermittently, or enthusiastically, or even just because you can’t bear the thought of what the main channels are broadcasting elsewhere, Doctor Who Confidential is a great show. There aren’t many ‘parent programmes’ which command the love and – more importantly – the level of interest that could sustain a full-length behind-the-scenes spin-off for seven successive years (or even just the one). I can think of no other.

The trouble is, times are hard, and the BBC are being forced to cut 20% of their budgets. Something’s got to give. And Doctor Who Confidential is, sadly, a pretty easy target.

For one thing, it is – in real terms – considerably more expensive than much of BBC Three’s other output. This might sound crazy, but programmes like Young Dumb and Living Off Mum can be repeated several times across the course of a week, and so for a similar outlay actually cover many times the amount of airtime. Confidential is, essentially, a one-time affair, an appointment-to-view programme that doesn’t stand up to repeat transmission in its full-length version. Casual viewers tuning into the channel for a bit of easy viewing are not going to stick around if they happen to arrive during broadcast of a factual Doctor Who spin-off. Sad but true.

And the suggestion that keeping Confidential, but saving money by only making the ‘cut-down’ version, holds even less water. A quarter-hour Confidential would cost pretty much the same as the 45-minute one, and would therefore leave a half an hour of extra screen time to fill (and be budgeted for) too. If the axe had to fall on something, then the single-series behind-the-scenes show that grew legs and lasted an extra six years was always going to be at the top of the list.

But Doctor Who Confidential pays off on the BBC’s educational remit in ways that the rest of BBC Three’s output clearly can’t compete with, so here’s a suggestion: keep it, reformat it, and move it to BBC Four.

It was never fully at home in amongst the Two Pints of Lagers and the Snog Marry Avoids anyway. Doctor Who Confidential is a programme that would sit much more comfortably in the environs of the BBC’s fourth channel, and what’s more, if BBC Four is to survive, Confidential could quickly become its flagship show.

Streamlined to 30 minutes, cutting out some of the repetitive excesses, and with more of a focus on the moral issues and historical perspectives involved (there’s plenty of scope for a more interesting discussion of the subjects the programme raises), a new-look Confidential would probably pick up viewers rather than shed them, and not only that, a full-length repeat would be much more appropriate on BBC Four, meaning the BBC’s outlay would also receive a greater reimbursement.

The ‘Save DWC’ campaign has already achieved a fantastic level of support (how many of BBC Three’s other shows could petition 30,000 signatures in little more than a week? How many shows at all?), and it surely can’t be long before the decision to axe Confidential is at the very least questioned by those with the authority to repeal it. There will always be considerable scope for behind-the-scenes material on Doctor Who (even with cutbacks, the official website will be maintained at one level or another), but it would be a criminal shame to lose such a successful and often engaging show as Confidential altogether.

And with the parent show in such rude health just two years short of its fiftieth anniversary, the cancellation of Confidential is just one more sign that it’s actually not such a great time to be a Doctor Who fan: there have been recent years in which the extended Doctor Who universe has had more weeks on the television than off it, but with The Sarah Jane Adventures coming to an untimely end and Torchwood not looking good for another series next year, 2012 will almost certainly be the most Doctor-lite twelve months since the series returned. Screen-minute for screen-minute (and taking all of the spin-offs, Confidential included, into account), it definitely will be. Considering the overseas sales and merchandising revenues – and the fact that combined viewing figures and iPlayer numbers have never added up to so great an audience – the popularity and importance of Doctor Who to the BBC is something that such be rewarded, and not the victim of budget cuts.

If Confidential is seen as unsustainable in its current format, then the answer is certainly not to cancel it altogether, but to find a way to better make it work. It is not expensive television, and the budget savings made will not offset the damage that the BBC will be doing, ultimately, to their credibility as a broadcaster. The ‘Save DWC’ campaign might look, from the outside, a little like the kind of reaction that followed the news of the suspension back in 1985, but we live in entirely different times now, times in which Doctor Who is just about the most-watched series drama on British television, and times in which – because of digital avenues – programmes of Confidential’s ilk should be encouraged, not neutered. If the BBC need to save 20%, they shouldn’t just be looking at the easy targets, because Doctor Who Confidential is a great example of the kind of thing the BBC can do, and should be doing, and its commissioning and continuation have always been a feather in the Corporation’s cap. It’s a question not just of their broadcasting remit, but of their cultural remit, too: cancelling Confidential now would be seen as the BBC shrinking from their responsibilities, rather than flying in the face of regressive government and continuing with what they do best, making all kinds of television for everyone to watch.

And if you haven’t signed the petition yet, then here it is: www.petitionbuzz.com/petitions/savedwc. It’s your choice, and it might not make a jot of difference in the end. But even if Doctor Who Confidential isn’t to your own tastes (and the poll on this very website seems to indicate that for many, that is indeed the case), then I’m sure you must know of at least someone who does watch it.

Ask yourself this: would the world be a better place without Doctor Who Confidential?

In all the recent fuss about the Ian Levine-sponsored completion of the abandoned 1980 Doctor Who story Shada, another project that was also close to Ian’s heart seems to have all but been forgotten about. There are a couple of reasons for this, one of which being the excitement that surrounds the Shada project: the story never having existed in what many would think of as a satisfactorily complete state, it is therefore a much greater ‘Holy Grail’ to the average classic series fan than an episode that did once exist, and still does exist as a complete soundtrack (albeit that these are Holy enough Grails in and of themselves). The other reason is simply this: if 2|entertain were interested in buying and releasing this other recently completed animation, just exactly what would they do with it?

But I’ll come back to all of that.

The chief animator on this project was David Busch, and he takes up the story:

In 2008, I was working for an animation studio in Hollywood called Titmouse, Inc. While there, I was the production manager for Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse, and a producer and voice artist on Marvel’s Black Panther animated series. The Invasion had been released on DVD, with the two missing episodes completed with Flash animation, and was considered a great creative success. However, it seemed at the time that 2|Entertain were not going to be able to complete more missing episodes in this way, as the cost was too high for the DVD budget to allow.

As it happens, the exchange rate between the US and the UK that year was such that a production like The Invasion could be done in the States for considerably less money than in the UK, relatively speaking. This coincided with a period of downtime for some of my artists at Titmouse, so with the blessing of the studio’s owners, I decided to use that downtime to produce a pitch to get us the job of animating some (or all) of the missing episodes. I edited together a rough animatic of audio clips from missing episodes, using the telesnaps and bits of existing footage as reference, and we created an animated ‘trailer’ for a series of episodes, with scenes animated from The Power of the Daleks, The Moonbase, The Macra Terror, The Web of Fear, and Fury From the Deep.

I then showed this presentation piece to Dan Hall at 2|Entertain, and also gave him a budget breakdown for various numbers of episodes. (If I remember rightly, it was the costs involved for packages of one, two, four, and six episodes.) Dan gave me positive feedback on the animated trailer, but declined to give us a commission, on the grounds that what we proposed was still outside of the budget available. I then pursued a few other avenues to try and get the project off the ground, including talking to BBC Worldwide about purchasing a license to produce these animations ourselves, but it ended up amounting to nothing. After a year or so of trying to get the project commissioned, it seemed clear that it was not going to happen, so I moved on to other things, and posted the trailer on YouTube for fans to see.

In the autumn of 2010, Ian Levine saw the presentation piece on YouTube, and contacted me. He was impressed by it, and offered to raise some money to finance the animation of an entire episode in this style – the ultimate goal being to show 2|Entertain that we could do a full episode to professional standards on a reasonable budget, and hopefully get an official commission to do more episodes. As I was no longer working at a studio at this time, I felt I would be able to produce the episode myself on a freelance basis at a much lower cost than I had previously quoted to Dan, and we agreed upon a minimum amount of funding that would enable me to complete one episode. Ian’s idea was to do Mission to the Unknown as the test episode, for a variety of reasons that I agreed with:

1. It was a single, largely self-contained episode, which can be watched in isolation without any other context. (The only other ‘single’ missing episode is The Tenth Planet Episode 4, and Ian reasoned that if any episode would be likely to have been commissioned already for the animated treatment, it would be that one, so we might be duplicating work already in progress.)

2. It has a fairly small amount of characters and locations, which would keep the design budget low.

3. While there are no telesnaps for this story, there are excellent photos of the set designs and alien delegates (who differ somewhat from their later appearance in The Daleks’ Master Plan).

4. It features the Daleks. This was appealing for obvious reasons!

5. If successful, some of the designs created could later be used to animate missing episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan, of which Mission to the Unknown is the prequel.

My first step was to contact some artists that I knew, and get to work on character designs and backgrounds. The incomparable Melissa Levengood had done some work on the original pitch piece, so I hired her to design all of the characters in Mission to the Unknown. Pam Friend is another fantastic artist who had worked on the initial presentation, so I recruited her to work on the backgrounds. Derek Handley provided us with as much photographic reference as exists for the episode, and Ian sent me copies of the hand-written notes which he had taken down upon the original transmission. We produced a 90-second animated demo featuring most of the characters of the episode, which Ian used to secure investors for the project. Once he had done this and raised the agreed-upon amount, I started work on the full episode.

Using the Loose Cannon reconstruction as a guide, I broke the episode down into roughly 250 individual shots, and started laying out the camera angles and character poses. I brought more artists onboard now that I could pay them, and got the backgrounds finished while starting on the animation. I animated approximately half of the episode myself, and split the other half out to 9 other animators. Once each shot was completed in animation, I did all of the digital compositing, adding lighting effects, mist, camera moves, etc. The final render of each shot would then be cut in over the rough edit, and soon I had whole sequences finished and sent off to Ian for his review.

From start to finish, the project took about eight months to complete and deliver. It was produced and composed in 16×9 widescreen HD, although since Ian preferred to see it in the 4×3 ratio that the original episode would have been made in, the version I sent to him was cropped on either side. I know that Ian has hopes for the episode to receive an official release on DVD, and if that happens, I would provide 2|Entertain with an uncompressed master of the widescreen version, and they could choose to release it in whichever format they wished (or both, potentially). We strove to make the episode as accurate as we could to what the original probably looked like, but as Mission to the Unknown is pretty much a stand-alone story, I personally feel that there is no reason not to make it in 16×9. But I understand that there are many fans who feel the exact opposite! I have no idea if such a release is going to happen, but I am hopeful that it will, or if not, that the episode will be made available to fans eventually in some other way. In any event, I am very proud of the finished episode, and I cannot give enough praise to the team of artists who worked on it with me.

So that’s the story of how a fully-animated version of the single-episode, 1965 Doctor Who story Mission to the Unknown (famously, the only episode of the entire television canon not to feature an appearance by either the Doctor or any of his companions) came into being.

And David Busch (and co)’s animation of Mission to the Unknown is lovely. Perhaps not as sophisticated as Theta-Sigma’s forthcoming recreation of the two missing episodes of The Reign of Terror is likely to be (if a recently escaped-to-YouTube trailer from Australia is anything to go by), but close, and undoubtedly less expensive. But more imaginative than the Shada animation (which is hindered by being a recreation of only the studio-bound sequences from recording blocks 2 and 3), and perhaps more consistent to boot. Again, without the resources to create something as refined as someone with the financial clout of a Disney Corporation would have been capable of, what we have instead is a more-than-serviceable alternative way of viewing the episode, which brings all of the main elements to life without compromising their credibility. It’s a joy to watch an episode that had previously (via soundtrack married to telesnaps) seemed a pretty worthless affair (no Doctor, no companions, and overall nothing much more going on, than being an extended prologue to a story that stands perfectly well on its own anyway), and to discover (for the first time, really) that it’s actually quite a moody and interesting piece, setting up the themes and atmospheres of The Daleks’ Master Plan while at the same time telling an admittedly rather slight story of its own. Of course, you can get all of this from the soundtrack or a Recon, but here, with the animation, the episode seems so much more immediate, and so much easier to follow. It’s quite beautiful, too, the opening shots setting the template to ‘special’ and the rest of the episode making good on that. If you know Mission to the Unknown well enough, you’ll be on the edge of your seat waiting for the alien delegates to turn up – and it’s in no way a disappointment when they do.

Now, until or unless 2|entertain should come to an agreement with Ian Levine over the release of the episode, then there’s precious little chance of the average fan-in-the-street being able to see it. But here’s a link to David Busch’s aforementioned ‘presentation piece’ on YouTube, where you can at least get a flavour of what the new Mission might look like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABuiYhIilUg

The big question is, of course, what to do with the episode?

One answer that is by no means as obvious as it sounds, would be to release it on its own. It is, after all, technically a standalone story in its own right, but while many fans wouldn’t balk at the thought of buying a single, 25-minute instalment of Doctor Who (at a reduced recommended retail price, presumably), there would no doubt be many who would – and Joe Public might find it surprising to have parted with his hard-earned only to discover a single, 25-minute instalment of Doctor Who on the disc, apparently leading into a story which is neither included in the package nor available separately.

Another possibility is to include Mission to the Unknown as an extra on the DVD of Death to the Daleks, the last as-yet-unreleased Dalek story from the classic series. But Mission, being as it is an entire story in its own right, would make for very unusual (and probably rather more expensive than is generally the case) Value Added Material on a story from another era of the programme entirely – although its inclusion might make up somewhat for the fact that Elisabeth Sladen is sadly no longer around to either commentate upon or talk about one of her favourite adventures. Including the episode with The Tenth Planet (the final William Hartnell story, and the debut for the Cybermen) might be just as, if not more, appropriate. But The Tenth Planet is an adventure that also includes a missing episode, that will almost certainly be included as an animated reconstruction, and there’s only so much budget to go around. Animating Episode 4 of the story and paying for the Mission animation might be just too far out for the boat to be pushed.

So the most sensible solution is probably also the least likely. On grounds of cost, appending Mission to the Unknown to a release of a completed Daleks’ Master Plan is akin to asking the impossible. For although as much exists of this epic first Doctor story as does of his swansong, with a total of nine episodes missing and in need of animating, recreating the adventure would be an undertaking almost as vast as its original production. And as happily as I or many other fans would be to pay double the usual asking price for a chance to own such an object on DVD, there would be many others who would scratch their head at such a thought and move on.

Perhaps the marketing of a Mission to the Unknown/The Daleks’ Master Plan release ought to take a priority, then. For with a broadcast span as great as that of an entire series of twenty-first century Doctor Who, it mightn’t be a bad idea to release the story as a boxed set across a number of discs, each in their own dedicated Amaray case and splitting the story up along similar lines to those in which Target books successfully released their novelisation 22 years ago. With Mission to the Unknown (and extra features) taking up disc one, discs two and three (and maybe even four) could be dedicated to the “Daleks’ Master Plan Saga”, with individual titles for the segments lifted from the episodes themselves. Target went with The Mutation of Time; to that you could add The Nightmare Begins for starters.

The additional resources that would become available should The Daleks’ Master Plan be released in this manner might make all the difference to the viability of animating the whole story, because even with the economies of scale involved in recreating nine episodes of the same adventure, there’s no question that it would be unaffordable on the usual budget. And even if the animation involved were of the relatively ‘cheap and cheerful’ variety, it would certainly make for a more complete viewing experience than the alternative (the three extant episodes have already been released as part of the Lost in Time DVD).

If 2|entertain are to keep their Doctor Who DVD range going beyond the spring of 2013, then it’s going to take a little lateral thinking on their behalf to devise ways of making the recreation of missing stories a viable and ongoing concern. Ian Levine and David Busch have shown, with their Mission to the Unknown, that it needn’t be so expensive as to be unaffordable, and that even with a lower budget magic can still be made. We know plans are afoot elsewhere to complete a six-episode Reign of Terror, and there is at least one other animated story in the pipeline too. So there’s a desire on the part of the producers to ‘fill in the blanks’ that – given that they too are for the large part fans of the series – must be almost equal to that of the fans who wish to see those 108 missing episodes somehow ‘returned’. Well, here is an episode that stands currently as complete as it is ever likely to be; all it needs now is a home.

Just like Shada, a lot of time and effort – and money (and love!) – has been spent on animating Mission to the Unknown, and it would be an enormous shame if the results were never to be made public. But unlike Shada, it is going to require more than merely the wherewithal to bring Mission to the Unknown to a wider audience to get it released; it’s going to take either some substantial reinvestment in creating a home for it, or an effort in lateral thinking in finding for it a home that already exists. Either way, and Grand Folly or no, Mission to the Unknown is an exercise in alchemy, and the result is simple and elegant and begging to be seen.

“Superman should be done by guys like me and Alan Moore to break him out of this straitjacket,” says Rick Veitch. And he’s probably right, too.

Fans of Veitch’s Swamp Thing run might remember what happened when he pitted  Superman against the green god trying to take revenge on an unsuspecting Lex Luthor.

Multiverse editor Mike Conroy, left, with Rick Veitch at Bristol International Comic and Small Press Expo

What would Jesus do?

An attentive audience at May’s Bristol International Comic and Small Press Expo heard how Veitch, under questioning from Multiverse editor Mike Conroy, was groomed as Moore’s replacement as “the next big thing” at DC. Until Swamp Thing found Jesus.

“DC knew all about what the book was going to be ahead of time and then at the last second pulled it,” Veitch said, with time being the appropriate word.

Swamp Thing meeting a white magician called Jesus did not go very well with DC execs

It was during Swamp Thing’s long crawl back from past to present where he encountered a white magician called Jesus. Then DC made the decision to pull the scene, interrupting Veitch’s careful orchestration of a character that Moore had taken from the Z-list to A-list, with Veitch keeping the vegetable one on the same path.

Veitch continued: “I still don’t know why they did it. I left for a lot of reasons but that’s the issue I went out on. I was out of work, my wife was pregnant with the baby due next month and DC cancelled my health insurance.”

 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Aardvark

But the move cost them a rare creative talent that had learnt comic craft in underground circles. So it was fitting that Veitch turned to the self-publishing movement sparked by Dave Sim and his sword-swinging aardvark Cerebus.

Work with the team behind cult classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles convinced Veitch that owning your creative projects from beginning to end was the way to go. And that’s where he has been ever since.

It mirrors his start in the field. “I was drawing my own comic books from the age of five,” he said. “It was a calling. But I came up against the adults, saying it was not a career. Comics were seen as juvenile. I had no art training. Art was seen as sorcery and people didn’t trust creativity.”

Early Rick Veitch on underground comic Two-Fisted Zombies

Back to school

Veitch lived in San Francisco in his twenties with his brother, becoming involved in the underground comic movement and selling his first comic, Two-Fisted Zombies. Then he joined the first class of the Kubert School of comic art with Stephen Bissette and John Totleben. By the time he graduated he had “unlearned everything I taught myself from copying Jack Kirby panels”.

He added: “The comic business in the 80s was in complete collapse. We were told to focus on some other form of graphics. We didn’t care. We were going to do comics.

“We went to Manhattan just at the right time. Heavy Metal had come out and we had a lot of underground samples, as that’s what Bissette and I were working on.”

The Heavy Metal adaptation of Spielberg’s 1941

The good old days

His first job was to adapt Steven Spielberg flop 1941, which he said Heavy Metal “blew up”. “Spielberg was apparently pretty mad,” he said. “Such a thing could not happen in this day and age. It was the good old days.”

After that he joined the Epic imprint at Marvel comics, recruited for his skill in soft tones. His first stories were admittedly “pretty rough but I was teaching myself” under the watch of Archie Goodwin. Remarkably, Veitch got paid the going rate and retained copyright on material still in print today.

Epic couldn’t match the underground comics’ ability to show truly graphic violence and sex. But Veitch didn’t want to. He understood underground comics wanted to push borders, but he knew it was more powerful to suggest awful things rather than show them.

Alan Moore’s Chronocops for 2000AD resulted in Swamp Thing going back in time

Time bandit

This leads to his story becoming entwined with then emerging talent Moore and his Marvelman for Warrior.

Veitch: “When Warrior hit in the States everyone in comics said ‘that’s it. Moore’s got it.’ Before Alan Moore got driven out by his fans, at comic expos, people were kneeling in front of him.”

Veitch drew the graphic maternity scene in the comic, but before that he was at an expo with Dave Gibbons and Bryan Talbot when Gibbons shared a 2000AD with him. Veitch said: “Inside was a story told backwards in time. Chronocops. I read it and thought someday I’m going to swipe that. It was written by Alan. One day Alan said to me on Swamp Thing, ‘I have no idea what to do next’ and I said about a story back in time and he was ‘you like that?’ It was his own story.”

Superman catches the incorporeal Swamp Thing with his X-ray vision

Roots

The Moore/Veitch team-up has its roots in Moore’s early Swamp Thing story, The Anatomy Lesson. Bissette called on Veitch’s help to meet a deadline in danger of being missed and the pair worked round the clock to get it done.

“Steve came to my house in Vermont with the script and it was incredible,” said Veitch. “Moore had figured it out. It was like a love letter to the artist. In the script he is completely self depreciating. The Anatomy Lesson was brilliant.

“We just banged the book out over three days. I did it as a friend, my names not on the book and didn’t get paid. But it was like making music with a great musician. So I got sucked into Swamp Thing.

“I did backgrounds and panels for Steve up to issue 50. Karen Berger became aware of me and I did a few fill ins. When Steve left I was the anointed one. Moore was familiar with my writing and saw me as the person to follow him. He talked me in to it and I joked about committing career suicide.”

And then Jesus happened.

Dr Blasphemy torments the Brat Pack

Brat Pack – 20 years ahead of its time

Following Sims’ self publishing inspiration, Veitch set up his own comics’ line: King Hell Press. His first work was The One – an abortive nuclear war between the USA and USSR instead that saw superheroes battling it out for supremacy. Then there was the satirical side kick romp Brat Pack, doing everything Garth Ennis’ The Boys does back in 1991.

Veitch said: “I was parodying the genre and taking swipes. But there are lovely people that work in the industry. You imagine the offices of Marvel are a fun place. It’s quite the opposite. The people I worked with were cynical and happy to see themselves as exploiting kids. They were aware of the subliminal impact of comics on kids.

“Then I made a bunch of money on 1963. Dealers were buying cases of comics like stocks. We sold 8,000 copies of a creator-owned book. I had enough money to do whatever I wanted for a couple of years and that was something for my artistic sensibilities.”

Those sensibilities turned into his dream-inspired books Rabid Eye, Pocket Universe and Crypto Zoo. But the superhero-verse came knocking when Veitch was brought into America’s Best Comics by Moore to work on masked private eye Greyshirt inTomorrow Stories.

The iconic Abbey Road cover by The Beatles, as seen in Army@Love

Welcome back

After DC bought ABC, Moore’s belief that there was a “firewall” between creators and publisher was doused and while Moore left, Veitch found doors opening for him at Vertigo.

“My first Vertigo graphic novel was Can’t Get No,” he said. “But Army@Love was a little outrageous. I was not waiting 15 years to do a satire on the Iraq war. I was doing it in the worst part in 2006. There were bombings every day, civilians being slaughtered. Full props to DC and Karen Berger for publishing it, it was a bit over the top.”

But Veitch had not forgiven and forgotten the comics’ industries darker side. He hooked up with web designer Steve Conley to create Comicon.com – what he calls the internet’s first comics’ website in the late 90s.

Veitch said: “I got a message from a friend laid off by Marvel during the bankruptcy. There were 500 people from Marvel being sued. So we put it on the website. I was getting emails from ‘moles’ in every comic company in America wanting to tell the truth. We caused a lot of people high blood pressure.”

Back to the future

More recently, Veitch has seen Brat Pack optioned by ARS Nova and being guided to the big screen by Metropia director Tarik Saleh. He’s also working on a September 11 series about the “Truthers” asking all the right questions about the terrorist attack while the World Trade Centre comes down around their ears, and a project for the University of Chicago to help kids with social issues through comics.

But if Veitch could do anything, he admitted he’d like to have a stab at a Jack Kirby style of space opera in the Fourth World vein.

But as the 60s were kind to music, he believes the 80s were the same for comics and laments the loss of anything goes style of creativity missing from modern comics where annual sagas are carefully choreographed to avoid sister titles stepping on each other’s toes.

“It’s way too tight right now,” he says. “Green Lantern does not have to be totally controlling and American. I think I’m the guy to do Superman if there were no corporations.”

The year is 1960 and Britain is overrun with monsters. Hammer’s Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy have recently made their way onto cinema screens and the Brides of Dracula are about to be unleashed.

In America though, things are quiet. The B-movie revolution of the 50s is all but over. The Incredible Shrinking Man has disappeared out of sight and the Creature has slunk back into the Black Lagoon. The Home of Hollywood is losing out to the Home of Horror and something needs to be done to redress the balance. Enter American International Pictures and Roger Corman.

Corman and AIP had a rich working relationship by this point. He had made a host of well-received pictures for the studio and they had always stayed loyal to a director who was churning out little movies for big profits. By 1960 though, Corman was becoming worn down by the grind of making several identikit genre films in a year. More importantly, Hammer‘s opulent set pieces and glorious colours had made even the best of Corman‘s films seem quaint. Corman strived for something a little more artistic, the studio for something to keep them in vogue (and profit), and they found both in the unlikely shape of Edgar Allan Poe.

Literature students looking for an easy introduction to the Master of the Macabre should visit Corman’s adaptations only as a last resort though. Absolute fidelity was the last thing on the director’s mind when he went about translating Poe’s work for the screen and at least one of the eight films (1963’s HP Lovecraft-inspired The Haunted Palace) is Poe in title alone. Instead, Corman adapted the mood and tone of Poe’s writing. Heavily indebted to that other famous author of the mind, Sigmund Freud, Corman’s Poe Cycle is steeped in psychological terror and subtle suggestion. It does away with Poe’s haunting prose and replaces it with a dark romanticism, brooding sense of paranoia and dreamy subjectivism that allowed Corman and his crew to go wild with the filming.

The two most celebrated components of that crew are Vincent Price (who took the lead in all but one adaptation) and Richard Matheson (who wrote four of them). Matheson was responsible for turning Poe’s shorts into fully-formed features, while Price took command of the frenzied lead, giving Corman a suitably over-the-top brush with which to paint his portraits of Poeian madness. Beyond these two though, two equally significant, if less famous, players make the Poe Cycle the genre-defining series it is: cinematographer Floyd Crosby and set designer Daniel Haller. These men had worked with Corman before, but as with the director, the Poe Cycle would bring out their best. Between them, Corman, Matheson, Price, Crosby, Haller (and Poe) made enduring classics out of B-movie quickies.

Budget certainly had a role to play in this. If AIP were going to compete with Hammer, they needed more money so Corman suggested a new approach to producers James Nicholson and Samuel Arkoff. Instead of making two black-and-white features on a ten-day shoot, as had always been the way at AIP, why not make one, full-colour picture on a fifteen day shoot? There’d only be one film to sell, sure, but it would be the biggest, most lavish film the studio had ever released. Both producers agreed, and Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher – the story of a hyper-sensitive paranoiac – seemed an obvious choice. Not everyone was convinced though. “Where’s the monster,” asked Arkoff. “The house is the monster,” replied Corman. When Arkoff still wasn’t taken, the director worked into the script the line “the house lives, the house breathes” and shooting got underway.

With a $270,000 budget, Corman and his crew could splash out as never before. Haller particularly benefited. He was given $20,000 to build the sets and went about creating grandiose surroundings that still take your breath away today. With its creaking exterior and spiraling staircases, the house of Usher itself is one of 60s cinema’s greatest stages, so impressive in fact that Haller re-used elements of it, both in future films and in this one. If you look hard enough you can probably spot the repetition, but it hardly matters. The familiarity, along with the slight falseness (even $270,000 isn’t enough to conceal Corman’s trademark artifice) only adds to the terror. The Usher mansion is a character. It really does live and breathe, and it dominates the film’s protagonists, haunting and consuming them.

Corman and Crosby’s ability to capture those sets in full colour adds to their depth and opened the duo up to an unexpected artistry when shooting. Untypically for a gothic horror film, House of Usher is drenched in colour, and not just the blood reds and pitch blacks you‘d expect. Rich purples, blooming greens and bottomless blues dominate the film. They set the mood, dictate the atmosphere and seemingly control the characters, luring them to their dreadful fate. What Poe did with words, Corman and Crosby do visually, but the results are the same. House of Usher is an intoxicating masterpiece that, quite appropriately for a film about a man suffering a hyper-sensitive disorder, makes a terrifying ordeal out of every minor detail.

Corman and AIP had only intended to make one Poe film and move on, but when Usher was a hit, a follow-up was prepared. Initially, The Masque of the Red Death was to have continued the Cycle, but with Corman engaged in other projects, the simpler The Pit and the Pendulum was put into production. The only problem was the story, or to be more precise, the lack of a story. The Pit and the Pendulum isn‘t really a story at all; it’s a scene, the film’s final scene, in which a man imprisoned during the Spanish Inquisition is subjected to the titular torture device. Told from the man’s point of view, the short lacks a real narrative too, so Matheson essentially created the film from scratch, building the story around Price’s character, Nicholas Medina, an Usher-esque waif haunted by his Inquisitor father’s murderous past and convinced that he too will fall foul of the same killer desires.

While Usher is about the slow, subtle slip into madness, Pit is about insanity’s swift and brutal descent, and the returning Haller is again key to conveying that. Though he would go on to make more artistic sets, and his work on Usher is arguably more effective in creating atmosphere, the one-off pit and pendulum stage he created here is an astonishing piece of work. The sheer scale of it, looming like a Goliath over everything else on screen, is impressive enough, but the spirit he and Corman infuse it with makes it a character in its own right, luring Medina into a trap and then feeding his final reel frenzy. Price would go on to call it the best set he ever worked on, and you can see why. It’s a beautiful sight.

As the human manifestation of Medina’s torment, Corman hired something that no Haller set or Crosby cinematography could ever hope to emulate: Barbara Steele. The English actress effortlessly gives the film‘s finest performance, her piercing eyes and glacial features burning through the celluloid and casting over the audience the same spell she puts Medina under. Her appearances are few and fleeting, but unshakably memorable. She closes the film out in one of cinema’s most iconic final images and appears in the Cycle’s most lyrical dream sequences, Crosby once again splashing the screen with colour, Corman stretching and contorting the frame to hallucinatory effect. More than any other Poe Cycle film, The Pit and the Pendulum visually evokes the subconscious lyricism Poe dealt in leaving you drunk on its power.

If Usher was Corman’s finest hour as a film-maker and Pit his finest moment as a director, The Masque of the Red Death is the helmer in full-on artist mode. Having failed to film the story in 1961, Corman returned to Poe’s most enduring tale three years later in what would become the Cycle‘s penultimate entry. Of the series’ three undoubted classics, Masque is the only one not to be written by Matheson, with Charles Beaumont taking over writing duties instead. With production now based in Britain, the film also lost the talents of Crosby, but in his place came up-and-coming cinematographer Nicholas Roeg, who years before The Man Who Fell to Earth and Don’t Look Now made a name for himself here. Arguably the least traditional of the Poe films, Masque strips away the Cycle’s traditional gothic stylings and replaces them with a regal grandeur wholly befitting this tale of decadent Prince Prospero (Price) and his hedonistic court.

Against this backdrop, Corman spins a rewarding and complex tale, certainly the most complex of the Cycle and arguably the most complex of his career, in which he explores the nature (and perhaps futility) of good and evil – Prospero representing the latter, Jane Asher’s kidnapped peasant girl Francesca the former. This juxtaposition is suggested with colours throughout and Corman, Roeg and Haller mix seamlessly to create a torrent of perfectly-orchestrated visual chaos that only lets up in the film’s gloomy coda. Here, the Red Death and his fellow reapers, who have also been busy on this night, meet up to discuss the film’s events. Only six of the bustling village and court remain from the Red Death’s massacre, we are told. Death, the film suggests, is merciless and relentless. Nobody is safe.

Masque, Pit and Usher constitute the holy trinity of the Poe Cycle, three films which expertly update Poe’s horror while still remaining reverent to the source. But not all adaptations succeed with such aplomb. Following Pit, Corman wanted a change of pace and made a race drama called The Intruder, but when the film flopped he returned to Poe – initially without AIP. The director and studio had fallen out in a dispute over money, and Corman approached Pathe Laboratories, who were AIP’s go-to printers and looking to move into production themselves, to make the third Poe entry. The result was a lower budget and a weaker film. Price, under exclusive contract at AIP, was replaced by Ray Milland, and Beaumont took over from Matheson for the first time. Crosby and Haller remained, but the substance didn’t.

Aside from the obvious (Beaumont lacks Matheson’s elegance and Milland doesn’t possess the tragic frailty of Price) the problem is the source material – there‘s just not enough of it. This had been true of Pit, of course, but The Premature Burial lacks even that short story’s punch; first published in The Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, it‘s a standard tale of a man‘s fear of early entombment – there’s really nothing new here. Consequently, the film lacks the mystery, atmosphere and artistry of the earlier films. Corman wouldn’t even get the pleasure of having the last laugh either. At the start of production, Nicholson and Arkoff made a rare appearance on set to inform the director that they were once again partners. AIP had threatened to withdraw their print work and bought the film’s rights from Pathe. Corman was back to square one.

Still eager to break from the gothic horror mould Corman followed The Premature Burial with two Poe comedies, a virtual oxymoron that gives an indication of the films’ qualities. Tales of Terror was the first in 1962, and it’s marginally the more successful of the duo – largely because it isn’t all played for laughs. A three-story portmanteau, it adapts Poe’s Morella, The Black Cat (with a little of The Cask of Amontillado thrown in for good measure) and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, with the middle story the comic one. Matheson returned for writing duty, submitting a delightfully wicked script, and his lines are delivered with ribald humour by Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone, who joined the returning Price on the marquee. The film should work, but it simply doesn’t.

Why not? Because Poe isn’t funny, not in the way Corman plays it anyway. He’s witty, he’s ironic, he possesses a dark humour that courses through most of his stories’ veins. But out-and-out funny? Not really. Not only does the reversion to humour undermine the author’s themes, it also plays against the key strengths of Corman’s films. The atmosphere is undercut by the jokes, the tone never really develops, and the pacing, so crucial to Usher and Pit, is strangled by the episodic nature of the portmanteau. For all its promise, Tales of Terror feels like what it is: a picture made for financial profit. Nothing more, nothing less.

But profitable it was, and after making $1.5million in rentals, Corman was inspired to translate Poe’s most famous tale: The Raven. The broadest and silliest of the Cycle, The Raven bears nothing more than a throwaway gag in common with the story it is based on. It is an adaptation in the loosest possible sense. Instead, Corman allows Price, Lorre and a frail-looking Boris Karloff free reign to bounce off each other as three feuding sorcerers. They do this wonderfully, of course, aided by another incisive Matheson script (the last Poe film he’d work on), but the movie is an uncomfortable fit, Poe’s creepy gothic story messily retooled into a knockabout contemporary comedy. Watching it, it’s difficult not to feel regret that Corman didn’t get round to filming it when he was still passionate about the series. If he could turn Pit into a masterpiece…

It wouldn’t be the only time Corman would play fast and loose with Poe though. He followed The Raven with The Haunted Palace, a Poe title supplanted onto a Lovecraft story. Ironically, it’s among the best of the Poe Cycle films, even if technically it doesn’t really belong with its siblings. Tonally, it’s also a markedly different film. Poe’s stories are dark, but they’re dominated by melancholy and paranoia, not despair. The Haunted Palace though is entirely desperate and comfortably the bleakest of the Poe Cycle. The lurid colour that dominated previous films is gone, replaced by empty blacks, muddy greens and lifeless grays. The story demands as much. Much more external than the inwards Poe tales, Palace extends the battle of the mind across the village of Arkham, with our protagonist Charles Ward (Price) struggling to keep control of his soul in a tussle with the spirit of Joseph Curwen (also Price), a warlock who has vowed revenge upon the townspeople for executing years previous. Should Ward lose, the entire village will fall and the sense of decay as the film progresses is impressively palpable. Arkham, almost literally, falls apart.

By the end of 1964, Corman’s relationship with the Poe Cycle was starting to feel equally broken. He was keen to move on, and The Tomb of Ligeia would be the Cycle’s swansong. Fittingly, it’s classic Poe, with Price playing Verden Fell, a man convinced his late wife’s soul lives on in the body of a cat. Price was the only one of the Corman crew to return though. Hammer veteran Arthur Grant took over from Crosby as DP and designer Colin Coulett was in for Haller, who was directing his own film for AIP, the Lovecraft adaptation Die, Monster Die!. Most significantly, with neither Matheson or Beaumont returning for this last entry, Corman turned to one Robert Towne to write the script, and the Chinatown writer created the Cycle’s most complicated (and at times convoluted) entry. However, beneath the confusion lies the very heart of Poe’s storytelling: the living, the dead and the relationship between the two.

Ligeia is notable for its use of real locations and it would mark the beginning of a move away from the fantastical in Corman’s filmmaking. During production, the director was approached by Columbia Pictures and, sensing a chance to advance his career, he signed on the dotted line. His first film was 1966’s Hell’s Angels picture The Wild Angels, and this was followed by Al Capone movie The St Valentine’s Day Massacre. It would be another two decades before he would make another horror film (1990’s Frankenstein Unbound). In the meantime, he turned producer, nurturing talent such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron and Joe Dante as part of his work with production house New World Pictures. The company also became one of America’s leading foreign film distributors, helping the likes of Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa gain exposure (and Oscars) across the pond.

Corman hasn’t directed since Frankenstein Unbound, but he remains one of Hollywood’s most fascinating figures. He is still producing pictures now and, appropriately, his life has been turned into a film itself, in the documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel. It’s a fitting description of the man. Corman is the classic Hollywood iconoclast, an inside man working both with and against the system. He’s the mechanic of the Hollywood machine really, greasing the wheels and bringing through the next generation with precious few actually acknowledging his work or appreciating his talents. As the Poe Cycle proves though, every now and then, he could grease those wheels with an artist’s paintbrush and poet’s lyricism. By its end, he’d made some of the greatest gothic horrors in American film history.