#my old star trek art got a bunch of notes and then i remembered that I still hadn't posted this

[inkfinch]

{ STYLE TREK }

Explore the wonderful n wacky world of fashion from the original Star Trek series! My fashion spread from the Ex Astris, Scientia zine (which fell through and I kept forgetting to post it) so please enjoy my 3-year old take on the space age of miniskirts and sparkly tunics.

[tessatechaitea]

Cerebus #7 (1978)

Elrod's boots have toes.

This cover proves that with Issue #7, Cerebus had outgrown its "sword & sorcery parody" roots. I would now define it as "madcap sword & sorcery parody." Elrod deciding he needed a little guy in a bunny outfit after hanging out with Cerebus for a short afternoon only makes me love Elrod even more. This issue is also proof that Dave Sim didn't earn his "first man to write and draw 300 issues of a monthly comic book all by himself" award because he didn't do this cover; Frank Thorne did. I don't mind that Gerhard did all the backgrounds for most of the series because without Gerhard, the comic could have been the same just with crappy backgrounds. But Dave Sim not doing the cover art for an issue?! That seems, well, actually, it seems on par with Gerhard doing all the backgrounds. Never mind. Elrod was last seen in Cerebus #4 which might make this the fastest return of any guest character in any comic book ever. I'm not a comic book historian but I'd stake my mother's life on that previous assumption. Hopefully the previous sentence will not start a rumor that my mother is a vampire which I don't think she actually is. I'm not a vampire historian so I wouldn't stake my mother's life on my mother being a vampire. That's a clever line, isn't it? This month's "Note from the Publisher" (which I guess I've incorrectly been calling "A Note from the Publisher") has been renamed "A Brief Note." Unless this "Note from the Publisher" is named "A Brief Note." And it's always possible that it's just called "Brief Note" since I've made that error with the article previously. Getting to the bottom of what this column is called is more interesting than the content of the note which is why I'm done writing about it this month. Dave Sim explains how this issue was the issue that freed him from writing a Barry Smith barbarian parody comic book as he began to take chances with the art and develop more of his own unique style. See? Just like I said about the madcap sword & sorcery designation earlier! He also points out that this is the second issue in seven issues that hints at aardvarks being important and Cerebus being some sort of Messianic figure. He wouldn't revisit that for some time because it wasn't important yet and also he probably didn't really know what to do with it. But it was a good idea because how can you not get a ton of great stories out of a character who is some kind of paradigm changing religious MacGuffin! Plus Elrod! Elrod was sure to make the readers laugh uproariously so that their parents would look over annoyed and ask, "What's so funny?" To which the comic book reader could respond, "Sheesh! Mind your own business! You wouldn't get it anyway!"

Is it more or less manly to admit that I would fuck Cerebus' horse?

Last issue, we learned that Cerebus gets super horny when he's had apricot brandy mixed with Rohypnol. We also learned that once he has sobered up, he forgets about the woman he thinks he loves but really only sort of likes the idea of her loving him. But he doesn't forget about the location of the treasure he learned about! You might be thinking, "That's because he learned about the treasure before E'lass slipped him the date rape drugs." But then I'd say haughtily and super condescendingly, "Yes, but he also learned more information from Jaka while totally stoned out of his mind which was essential to realizing just where the treasure was!" Then you'd secretly begin to hate me and start ignoring my texts and start the slow and silent process of breaking up with a friend. What I was trying to express was that Cerebus is hunting for the Black Sun Temple's treasure! By the end of this issue, he maybe he'll be super rich but still totally alone. I can't stop thinking about that horse. I just remembered, upon the appearance of Elrod at the beginning of this comic book, that the guy in the bunny suit isn't with Elrod. At least, not at first. He's just some flim-flam man trying to become the next aardvark Messiah, I think. But that's okay because I'd use anything as an excuse to say that I love Elrod even more. I'm guessing a lot of Cerebus readers told Dave the same thing which is why Elrod is back so soon.

How have I been a fan of Cerebus for thirty years and never made a Black Sun cocktail?

Elrod has come to the Temple of the Black Dog's Hole Sun for all of the wrong reasons unless getting shitfaced is a right reason and then I stand corrected. I'm pretty sure I'm standing corrected right now. Cerebus doesn't really want him tagging along but he also doesn't want Elrod wandering around to be discovered by the priests which might put their security on high alert. So he drags Elrod into the temple with him to find the treasure. Once inside, Elrod eventually wanders off to find some treasure of his own after Cerebus points out that a quiet living albino and a quiet dead albino are practically the same thing.

I'm sure all the riches are consolidated in the head priest's chambers for safe keeping.

Meanwhile some short priest named Mit is busy sewing a bunny suit. It looks just like Cerebus but is meant to represent one of the Black Sun's oldest and most revered nameless gods! Mit had studied all of the past prophecy and scripture of the Black Sun's theology so that he could represent himself as the coming Messiah and be worshiped as a god. So basically he's doing what Jesus did. Or Ardra! That's a Star Trek: The Next Generation reference which is better than making a reference to the comic book I wrote and drew in my late teens called Arrogance because nobody would get that reference. But, like Ardra and Jesus and Mit, I had a character who represented himself as the prophesied Messiah. Seriously though, who can trust a Messiah that was spoken about in prophecy?! Prophecy isn't a predictor of future events; it's a blueprint for some con man to come through town pretending to be a God and/or selling pool tables. I should scan in my comic books some time! I think it went five issues (at, like, five pages per issue!) and the later issues are really inspired by Jaka's Story: lots of text next to one or two large static images per page.

Ha ha! He's an ablino so he's easily mistaken for a statue!

Realizing the guards are onto them, Elrod rushes off to find Cerebus and drag him away. But instead he finds Mit in his costume and hauls him off. Cerebus finds his treasure and realizes Elrod has wandered off which can only mean that everything is going to become chaos at any second. Cerebus, Elrod, and Mit engage in a slapstick pursuit reminiscent of any old television program that would make you think of a slapstick pursuit. Maybe Scooby Doo or one of the Abbott and Costello movies. It eventually ends with everybody running for their lives and Cerebus discovering the pit of the Black Sun Temple's god. Spoiler: the god is a giant spider. That wasn't really a spoiler because this issue begins with this image:

The old comic standby of starting the story in the middle for one page and then preceding immediately to the beginning and telling the story linearly. I don't think Dave ever did this again because remember how this issue freed him from copying styles and tropes?!

Hey, remember that horse? Let's look at it some more. Oh yeah. Hey girl. I've got a carrot for you. Cerebus is finally defeated by a combatant this issue. Sure, it's a giant spider whose web Cerebus fell into while also losing his sword. As a reader, I'll allow Cerebus to lose a fight when the conditions are stacked so high against him. The only reason Cerebus survives is because Cerebus has no soul which causes the sacrificial Black Sun ceremony to disintegrate into chaos. The spider, finding no nourishment in the sacrifice, falls deeper into the pit as the temple crumbles and explodes around Cerebus. He's flung far out into the desert, mostly unharmed from the violence. But his treasure and his sword are lost. I hope that sword wasn't important to his becoming the Messiah! I suppose it's okay because he still has his three medallion necklace! With Mit's people and religion destroyed, he decides to become Elrod's sidekick for awhile. I don't remember if he ever turns up again; I'm guessing this was his only appearance. In this month's Aardvark Comment, a writer grades the art of Cerebus as an "A" and the writing as an "A+" so I'm just using that as my rating. Why should I waste my time doing redundant work?! At the end of the original issue, there was an ad for a hand-sewn Cerebus plush toy. That means that a non-zero number of Cerebus plush toys have been fucked in this reality. Eddie Campbell wrote a one page comic for this issue called "Great Wasters from History Not Counting Dave Sim." This was about a guy named Jack Mytton who lived from 1796 to 1834. I could look up who he was but that would defeat the purpose of Eddie Campbell telling me who he was in Eddie's comic! If you're interested in learning about Mr. Mytton yourself, I highly recommend researching him. He was a rich drunkard who did a bunch of crazy shit and then eventually died in pauper's prison. He sounded like a fun guy to be the friend of a friend of! Cerebus #7 Rating: A and A+, remember?!

[a-man-adrift]

Writer Questionnaire

Internet hugs to the super talented @eluari​ for remembering that I exist, even though I’ve not been providing much evidence of the fact lately!

Short stories, novels, or poems?

I’ve written (or at least started!) all three, but I have a bad habit of not beginning a project unless I can see the path to the end, which usually limits me to shorts, or long-shorts/novellas at most.  Usually.  There was this one time when a whole novel plot sprang fully formed from my head… I’m still working on The Anti-Agathics War, I swear!

What genre do you prefer reading?

If I had to pick just one, I’d say SF, but I’m also fond of crime stories, thrillers, and Victorian novels.

What genre do you prefer writing?

Again, probably science fiction if I had to pick just the one, although examples abound of how you can tell almost any kind of story within SF… come to think of it, maybe that’s why I like it so much!

Are you a planner or a write-as-I-go kind of person?

A bit betwixt and between, really: I’ve not had a lot of luck with those writing exercises where you just start writing anything and try and bootstrap your way up to an idea, but on the other hand once I’ve had an idea I don’t need to do a lot of planning to run with it.  This does vary with length, though: I do have a skeleton for TAAW—one or two sentences per chapter, then sometimes divvying up chapters into scenes—whereas I can generally write a short story straight off the back of the idea for it.

What music do you listen to while writing?

Either something instrumental or something with lyrics I know really really well, so the words don’t distract me.  When I’m writing Mass Effect fanfic, as often as not I’ll put the game soundtrack on, since it’s one of the best things about Mass Effect, and has no distracting words!

Fave books/movies/tv shows?

Books: I love Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan novels: so much that I can’t pick just one, it has to be the whole series!  I’m also very fond of Wilkie Collins, with my favourites probably being Man and Wife, and the short story collection The Queen of Hearts, although his better-known novels, like The Woman in White or The Moonstone, are great too.  I also likes me some Isaac Asimov, particularly The Caves of Steel.

Movies: My absolute favourite is The Guard (2011).  Thanks to flickchart.com (which I recommend as an excellent waste of any superfluous time you may have hanging around!) I have a top 20, which you can check out at the link if you’re so inclined.

TV Shows: Breaking Bad absolutely deserves the hype, and I’ll always have a sentimental fondness for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, because it’s the Trek series I grew up with.

Any current WIPs?

The Anti-Agathics War is my main ongoing project.  I’m in the midst of the first of two chapters that form the climax of the piece, and I’m trying not to spook myself by angsting over whether I can live up to notes in my chapter plan like “Neela makes an awesome speech”!

I also have another Scene from the Life of Phil Shepard about two-thirds done, and generally I feel like I should keep adding to my Mass Effect fic output until I’ve gone from Phil’s parents meeting and deciding to move to Mindoir, all the way to Terri and Nezzy’s and li’l Ashley’s turn to save the galaxy!

If someone were to make a cartoon out of you, what would your standard outfit be?

Haha, probably chinos and an Oxford shirt.  I'd make up for it with wacky and memorable dialogue.  Hopefully.

Do you like incorporating people you actually know into your writing?

Really no. This was actually one of the things that killed a previous project: I tried joining the hallowed tradition of writing weird and wonderful events set in a university town and lab very much like the one I used to work at, but when I got to writing my viewpoint character meeting a bunch of grad students and post-docs very much like my real-life friends at the time, I found it incredibly skeevy.  Guess I’ll stick to aliens and space marines…

Are you kill-happy with characters?

Well, I did kill off Tali’Zorah, even though she’s one of my favourite canon characters, but no, on the whole I probably err the other way, on the side of keeping my character-babies happy!

Coffee or tea while writing?

No thanks!

Slow or fast writer?

Fast when I actually get down to it, which is at such infrequent intervals that, on average, glacially slow.

Where/who/what do you find inspiration from?

Well, obviously as a fanfic writer I’m inspired by my source material, but more generally my writing tends to owe a lot to whatever I’ve been reading most recently.  My saving grace, in that regard, if I have one, is that usually I know what source I’m riffing on when I do it, so I can turn it into a comment/reference/tribute to some source or other, rather than a plagiarism.

Most fave book cliche? Least fave book cliche?

OK, I’ll admit it: I like the typical Victorian/Edwardian male author’s conception of romance, where the hero loses his heart to the heroine on usually rather less than a paragraph’s-worth of acquaintance, and then suffers agonies of denial and self-doubt for chapter after chapter (in intervals of the plot moving itself along) until finally she admits that she quite likes him too!  I have to add a quote here, because it made me laugh:

'I say again that you are a foolish Robin,' said she, resting her cheek against my shoulder. 'You think your goose is a swan. But go on thinking it, and she will be as near a swan as she can manage, or failing that, a very faithful, affectionate goose.'

I don’t know about least fave, but one cliché I’ve been getting a bit impatient with lately is the one where the protagonist’s parent/mentor-figure dies at the most timely possible moment for the protag to step up and show that they can handle shizz on their own.  The man behind the curtain is so apparent in some of these that I wonder if the author just had really overbearing parents of their own, so that they can’t imagine any way a person could fully grow up without the olds getting killed off.

Fave scenes to write?

Fluffy home and family scenes always feel very self-indulgent, but they seem to go down well.  One of the perks of being a fanfic author, I guess!

Most productive time of day for writing?

This varies so much that I think the only honest answer is “any time when I don’t have something else I ought to be doing!”

Reason for writing?

Oh, some combination of “Liara is best waifu” and “BIOWARE U DUN GOOFED!”, probably…

I declare Omni-Tag!  If you see this and want to play, thou art subject to entagment!

[ethanalter]

'Star Trek: Discovery': Rainn Wilson on playing the mischievous Harry Mudd

Rainn Wilson as Harry Mudd in Star Trek: Discovery (Photo: Michael Gibson/CBS)

When he hosted the Star Trek: Discovery panel at San Diego Comic-Con this past summer, Rainn Wilson made it absolutely clear where he stood on the Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate. “Well, Star Trek is just better,” he told the assembled crowd. Granted, the former star of The Office is a bit biased considering the fact that he’s now officially part of the Star Trek universe. But as he tells Yahoo Entertainment, he earned his Trekkie cred well before being cast as a (slightly) younger version of Harry Mudd, the intergalactic rogue that Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew originally encountered in two episodes of The Original Series. “My family would watch all the re-runs all the time in the ’70s, so I was probably 6 or 7 years old when I saw my first episode of Star Trek. And I probably saw Harry Mudd right around that time!”

Flash-forward to 2017 and Wilson is exploring the final frontier as Mudd in a pair of Discovery episodes. He made his debut in the fifth installment, encountering Discovery captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) in a Klingon prison. When Lorca staged a jailbreak, he rescued the mysterious Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif), but pointedly left Harry behind due to the fact that his cellmate was spying on him. On this week’s episode, “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” Mudd makes his grand re-entrance… and he’s none too happy about how Lorca treated him. We spoke with Wilson about how he devised his own take on a fan-favorite Star Trek character and when we’ll learn the origin of Harry Mudd’s fabulous mustache.

So this sounds like a dream role for you! Absolutely. Actors are always like, “This is a dream role for me,” and that’s become kind of a cliché. They’re doing some dumb show no one watches and are like, “It’s a dream role for me to play the dishwasher on the new action-adventure show, Chicago Pizza, on NBC.” [Laughs.] But I grew up watching Star Trek, so when they were doing this new Star Trek show, I had my agents call them up and beg for a meeting. They didn’t have anything for me, but I asked them to keep me in mind and months later the phone rang and they talked to me about Harry Mudd. I thought the combination of the dastardly rapscallion and the theatrically comedic was a perfect fit for me. So it really was a dream come true.

How closely did you model your performance after your predecessor, Roger C. Carmel? I had been lucky in that Dwight from The Office had the great Mackenzie Crook doing his version with Gareth, so I got to steal the best bits and make the other stuff my own. It’s the same with Roger Carmel, and his combination of the theatrical, the mischievous, and also the deadly. I wanted to accentuate that, and thought about how much fun I could have and how deadly I could be at the same time. That was really interesting, bumping up against the different colors of a character.

When I spoke with James Frain about playing Sarek, he talked about how he wanted to show how the character ends up becoming the one we remember from The Original Series. What was your mental image of a pre-TOS Mudd? There’s not a whole lot about Harry from The Original Series. I went back and watched his episodes, as well as the episode of The Animated Series. I think the Discovery writers did a great job fleshing out his backstory. The idea that he’s pursuing Stella and purchased a moon for her, and that she’s got a powerful dad he can never please. Also the idea that he’s got resentment for the Federation; he thinks their whole mission is ridiculous, the idea of boldly going where no one has ever gone before. Of course you’re going to end up in war if you do that! You’re going to end up bumping into a species that doesn’t want you on their front lawn. Of course, you don’t know how much of it is true, because he could be making up the whole damn thing!

Did you want to suggest how this experience informs the Mudd we meet later on in “Mudd’s Women”? You can’t link it completely because it doesn’t quite add up. When you look at “Mudd’s Women,” he’s had some interaction with the Federation before, but he’s a very low-level merchant trader. So it doesn’t quite add up exactly chronologically. But that’s OK — it’s the spirit of Mudd that’s the important thing. The Original Series had these really broad comedic episodes, so my larger mission was to be part of the great Star Trek tradition where these larger-than-life characters would be splattered into occasional episodes.

How do you feel about Discovery‘s darker tone in contrast to The Original Series? I think it’s a bold move. In today’s TV environment, you can’t really make a Star Trek show without the action element that J.J. Abrams brought to the movies. You can’t have an episode where they’re like, “Look here’s a planet! I wonder if there are Dilithium Crystals on that planet? Let’s go down and see! Oh, there’s a talking tree and a bunch of children running around by a brook. That seems mysterious, I wonder what’s going on?” You can’t do that kind of Twilight Zone-esque Star Trek episode; it’s not going to sustain for the audience. You have to be true to the original Trek and Gene Roddenberry’s vision, but also modernize it. I think the idea of a war with the Klingons — the darkness of it, and the action sequences it allows — gives the series a propulsion it otherwise wouldn’t have. Personally, I’m a fan of the episodes where the crew lands on a planet and there’s a reading they get from a rock that unravels this whole mystery. But I don’t know if those episodes can work now.

Rainn Wilson as Harry Mudd and Shazad Latif as Lieutenant Ash Tyler in Star Trek: Discovery (Photo: Michael Gibson/CBS)

Can you tease how Mudd will make his return on this week’s episode? Well, at the end of the fifth episode, he was abandoned in the Klingon jail by Lorca, which I think was a pretty sh*tty move! Lorca absolutely should have taken Mudd with him; that goes completely against Starfleet protocol. He should’ve taken him with him and put him on trial for abetting an enemy or something like that. So Harry is pretty pissed off and he gets onboard the Discovery and sh*t is about to get cray-cray. I will say that I do get to fire a phaser, use the transporter, and sit in the captain’s chair. So talk about an actor’s dream coming true!

It sounds like we’ll be seeing a more vengeance-minded Harry than we’re accustomed to. Do you still bring some comic notes to it? It’s definitely another color from Mudd than we’ve seen before. Though he was pretty dastardly in “I, Mudd” — wanting to trap the Enterprise crew on the planet with the androids. So we’ve seen him be dastardly, but this is much more of a straight-up revenge episode. I give all the credit to the writers for writing in most of the comedy. I do try to bring extra elements — physicality and other things. But I didn’t improvise so much on this show. It didn’t feel right to improvise on Star Trek!

When are we going to see the origin story of Mudd’s famous mustache? I had the idea for the beard. I told them that if I let the mustache grow and be part of a beard, it would be a little less like Dwight from The Office [in space]. But Discovery has gotten picked up for a second season, so I think that’s what we need for Season 2, episode 7. It’s just called “Mustache” and it shows Harry Mudd shaving off the beard. We’ve gotta do that! It’s the origin story the world has been clamoring for. [Laughs.]

Star Trek: Discovery airs Sundays at 8:30 p.m. on CBS All Access.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment: Review: ‘Stranger Things’ is better than ever in Season 2 Saturday morning scares: Animation writer Buzz Dixon on the art of creeping out kiddos #TBT: Celebrity Halloween costumes 2016

[its-just-like-the-movies]

Horror For Horror’s Sake

Looking at the (albeit few) films I’ve chosen to review, the ones I’ve been willing to dive into blind, the expectedly shitty ones I’ve willing put up with, it’s fair to say I have a bias to exploring horror films more than other genres. At the very least I’m more interested in exploring scary movies when looking for something to watch than other genres. And in some ways, they’re more rewarding on a base level than say, romantic dramas that are equally good or bad. I’m sure Death Note is worse than Tulip Fever, but lord knows I’m not gonna go watching the latter for “fun” the way I got wine drunk with friends and tore at that racist, unscary piece of shit. On the other side of that spectrum, I went and saw It with that same dynamic duo as Death Note roughly a week later and had a ball, premised around actually having a wonderful time with a great film that all of us liked on its own merits and as an adaptation. It was all we talked about during dinner, and if I didn’t have to run home before meeting them at Tommy’s place we probably would’ve talked about it even longer. The film is a monumental step up from the original TV adaptation (obvs), but I sincerely hope that we’re at a place where the culture can stop being as reverential as it is with Tim Curry’s performance - one I liked but couldn’t quite be impressed by - in favor of the truly horrifying wraith that Bill Skarsgard has created. Andy Muschietti deserves plenty of credit for Pennywise too, but also for negotiating such a dense source novel, a mostly child cast, a more elastic range of tones than necessary, a time period wholly original to this adaptation, plus all the hokum reputation surrounding the author, and doing justice to all of it. Never in my life would I have expected the director of Mama to have succeeded in marshalling all of that into such a purely enjoyable, scary, funny, and utterly full film as It. Yes, it’s not perfect in parcelling out equal screen time to every member of The Loser’s Club or establishing what their lives are like when they aren’t hanging out together, but if that’s the worst this film has going for it, I’m absolutely delighted to recommend it to everyone and go along with friends who’re too scared to see it alone. Maybe with a red balloon in hand, and a severed arm to hold it for me.

I originally intended this to be a sort of two-shot with mother! but, given how absolutely insane that film is and the likelihood I’m going to ferry David along someday soon, I’m going to put off a formal review of it until another showing. I think I have my reaction to it sorted out, though another trek through it would do me good. The last scenes recontextualize the whole film so fully, even one as bluntly allegorical as that one, I think it’d be worth checking out again before I dive into it. With that being said, and to give me something fun to write about, I’m gonna just jot down some favorite memories of horror films I’m really in love with. You can consider this a recommendation list, I’d be more than happy to elaborate on full-throttle reviews and explanations of any of these films. Hopefully there’ll be another list of five tomorrow. Either way, sit back and enjoy the ride, dear reader.

To start off with the recentest features, I think one of It’s greatest successes it that each of its characters has pretty individualized embodiments of fear that Pennywise deploys, each scene delivering its own unique terror. That being said, there’s no way the film’s most utterly terrifying scene isn’t its first, where Pennywise lures poor Georgie into reaching out his hand for a little paper boat. For all I said at the top about Bill Skarsgård’s interpretation of It - and I’ll be shocked if I don’t write up this performance on my year-end list - credit must also be given to Jackson Robert Scott’s sweet, almost saccharine take on Georgie Denbrough. Watching Pennywise somehow circle this poor child even from within a sewer grate, convincingly entrancing by the standard of a six year old even if he can’t help but notice how unhinged this clown is, it’s maybe the only film I’ve been around for the release of that palpably conjured the same kinds of lumps in my gut I got watching Ileana Douglas and Juliette Lewis wrangle with Robert De Niro in Cape Fear (minus all the sexual overtures of Cape Fear, thank god). It’s the only time Pennywise is patient enough to even try and lure in his prey like this, more eager to eat the boy than he is to prey off his fear. The tension here is so efficiently realized I had to wonder what a version of It that drew out a few more of these encounters into their own short films would look like. A little longer, sure, but when the result is more scenes that make your skin crawl and your stomach churn, we’d all be winners.

mother! was an insanely vexing experience, purposely so, but in many ways a virtuoso one. A lot of it comes down to how marvelously it’s crafted, plus Michelle Pfeiffer’s deliciously crafted turn as a home invader, and I’d love more time to sit and think about Aronofsky’s script. Pfeiffer is the only ingredient missing in the film’s most stunningly crafted scene, where the house of Jennifer Lawrence’s nameless character is beset by an seemingly infinite swarm of her husband’s idolaters. Her painstakingly assembled home, one she made all by herself with her own two hands, is torn apart by the mob of fans proclaiming the poet’s will of sharing all that he has. One hangs up the phone as she calls the police only for another to yank it out of the wall, each hurling the philosophy of sharing at the other to justify their actions as though the other is stupid for not expecting them to do this. The police arrive a few minutes after, and suddenly her house seems to be divided into factions of SWAT members, violent cabals of her husband’s words, and those directly loyal to him. It’s almost impossible to imagine how long this sequence takes, especially since mother! often presents its sequences as though they’re happening in real time, but it’s stupendously mounted and realized by everyone involved. The transformation of Lawrence’s home from an idyllic, rustic nest for her and her hubby into a war-torn wreckage plucked straight from Children of Men isn’t the film’s scariest scene - that would be everything immediately after something delicate is inevitably, disastrously shown off - but on a sheer technical level it’s the film’s most impressively realized scene, and one of many I can’t shake for the life of me.

If you’ve never seen [safe], I beg you to go see it right now. Surely everyone who loved Carol has gone back and examined some of Todd Haynes’s filmography, if not looked up his Wikipedia page and seen this film, whose heroine has the same first name as his 2015 masterpiece. [safe] is about as asphyxiating and antagonistic to the audience (while still being immensely hypnotic) as any film can get, and one I had difficulty rewatching last semester in the hopes of finding a screencap to use for an art project. I ended up not using what I got, but there’s so many indelible moments picking one feels difficult, let alone throwing my hands up and just reveling in what Haynes’ direction does to make the film so menacing. And yet, there’s that one object that I instantly thought of for this little piece, in some ways the one that convinced me to do it at all. Early in [safe], Carol White (a genius Julianne Moore) orders a couch to her house and starts to help the movers arrange it in her house, only to find that it’s seemingly the most antagonistic shade of black on the planet. Carol is horrified to see this thing in her carefully constructed beige palace, as was I when I first saw it. Never has an ordinary couch been so pointy and prickly and out-of-place and threatening in a film, and never have I wanted to leave a room so much once I saw it. Pressing against everything pale and beige and carefully styled in her home, this couch doesn’t just look out of place but as alien and invasive as any of the houseguests in mother!, and even more unwanted. [safe] isn’t necessarily a horror film, but it’s still the most unsettling feature on this list, one that’s even more horrifying for all that it has to say on the human experience, and for the tremendous filmmaking (and actressing) that makes it such a seminal, terrifying film.

Suspiria, on the other hand, is nothing if not an exercise in how many scary, go-for-broke aesthetics you can grate against each other and mold together and throw at the audience at once. The production design can be summed up as though the art directors of Wes Anderson and Pedro Almodovar had a child that was trying to kill you, specifically, but of course the real star of this entry is the vicious score of Dario Argento and the band Goblin. Much like Get Out, you have the distinct feeling that somehow the score itself is going to slaughter our hero before the actual forces of evil hunting them do. Even in scenes that don’t seem overtly menacing, the orchestra shrieks at you to remember that Jessica Harper and her friend are always being watched, always in danger, always among those who have killed before and would kill them if they got the chance. And somehow, this only makes the scenes with an actively dangerous presence more affecting rather than less so. In the words of Decider’s Joe Reid “Everything is heightened, so everything is fuckin’ heightened”. Suspiria is so heightened it’s a wonder the central school doesn’t just fly off into the upper echelons of the Earth’s atmosphere, which is probably close to where the film is heightened to, but thank god it’s stuck to the ground. Not all stories work in space, and sometimes all you need is a man, his dog, a weird gargoyle, and a bunch of nice looking buildings to make a scene as tense as all hell. And, of course, a bullying, visceral score.

There’s a multitude of great performances from David Cronenberg films. In truth, the best two probably reside in the duet between Jeremy Irons and Genevieve Bujold in Dead Ringers, if not the duet between Irons and Irons in the same film. But we’re really here for The Brood, which boasts the most volcanic performance I’ve seen among Cronenberg’s filmography in the form of Samantha Eggar’s ferocious, unstable shrew of an ex-wife and absent mother. The entire film is premised on her rage, literally summoning embodiments of her anger to carry out acts of vengeance against those she decries in therapy sessions. These sessions have the head physician role-playing as the target of his patient’s psychosis in the hope of provoking a real break in their psyches, and take place in a facility miles out of town and built like log cabins, resembling a hotel from a distance. Her character’s ex-husband is right to suspect something’s amiss here, that Nola isn’t getting the treatment she needs, but even as he finds the corpses of the gremlins whacking their family members it takes until he witnesses the creation of one of these rage babies for him to fully grasp a situation that’s actively threatening everyone he loves. Eggar’s vitality and commitment gives the film a beating, potent heart that The Brood otherwise wouldn’t have, in spite of its crazy conceits and directorial strength. Without her exorcising fury, The Brood would be a weaker film, and it needs Eggar’s to power the whole thing through its demented thesis and towards its inevitable, monstrous climax.

[aion-rsa]

INTERVIEW: Dark Horse Crowns The Once and Future Queen of Camelot

With their now-concluded ongoing Monkeybrain Comics series “Amelia Cole,” the team of D.J. Kirkbride, Adam P. Knave and Nick Brokenshire literally took a wrench to the concept of magic and mysticism, in the process creating one of the publisher’s most beloved and acclaimed comics. This year, however, the team have reformed for a new series – and this time they’re swinging from the hilt, sword in hand.

“The Once and Future Queen” is a re-imagining of the legend of King Arthur, but sees the sword in the stone pulled by Rani Arturus, a teenage girl living in the modern day who travels to England to participate in a chess tournament. Having somehow ended up pulling out a mythical sword which entitles her to reign as Queen, Rani has to deal not only with all that brings – but also the arrival of Merlin, magic, and a whole mess of trouble coming directly for her.

As pencilled by Brokenshire, this looks to be a classically madcap take on the legend of Arthur. CBR spoke with the creative team about everything they have planned for their new series at Dark Horse. Also, we spoke about “Silverhawks” for some reason.

Cover art for “The Once and Future Queen” #1

CBR: How important was it for you all to be involved in this one – to have Frank, Nick, Adam and D.J. all working together again?

Nick Brokenshire: I feel that we communicate very easily. And after having played in the all ages sandbox, I wanted to see what we as a team could do with something a bit meatier. Also, I was ready to try some different things with the art and figured the lads would trust me enough to do it… I hoped they would, and they did.

D.J. Kirkbride: Nick, Adam, and I learned so much over the course of 30 issues of “Amelia Cole,” not only in terms of working together, but of making comics in general. Adam and I have also done several books with Frank, together and separately, and we knew he’d work well with Nick, too. This is our dream team here.

Adam P. Knave: We all work with other people, and other teams and we enjoy that too, but you get a certain creative matrix going and you can just lean in. It’s like, remember that old cartoon “Silverhawks?” You had all those dudes who were fighting crime in space and what-not, all silvery and decked out with fancy wings that somehow worked in space and all. And sure, they could fight crime apart, but when they’re together, well then you really get a sense of “Man you guys need to stop coordinating your outfits quite so much and why does that one guy have a bandana and cowboy hat anyway?” it’s like that with us. Except in all the ways it’s different.

Kirkbride: The bandana and cowboy hat is applicable to our team, too, though. It’s about style, Adam.

Knave: Oh, right, good point.

How does the collaborative process work between you after your long run on “Amelia Cole”? Do you find that you can almost work shorthand with one another now?

Brokenshire: It feels very similar but with wondrous added sparkle of our editor, Shantel LaRocque, keeping us straight and giving course correction. It’s very pleasant, from my perspective. I like working with the chaps and they pity me enough to give me stories to draw.

Kirkbride: It’s great to have her editorial perspective. She’s very involved in an encouraging way. In terms of the writing, Adam and I always want to impress Nick first, so if he’s excited to draw, we know we’ve got something potentially good on our hands. We live to impress that guy. Maybe it’s his cool Scottish accent…and the fact that he can write, too…and draw…and, c’mon, he’s an awesome musician, too! All that talent in one person is unfair, frankly. Oh, speaking of, Frank also chimes in with his take on some of the story elements, which has been invaluable. He saved our butts recently.

Knave: Look at these guys giving you smart simple answers. This is why they keep making me answer last, Steve. This. Is. Why. Because I’ll give you the truth they fear! They fear as if Mon*Star and his mob were after them. No, wait, never mind. But yeah, we admit, there is a level of shorthand that creeps in on any group working together for long enough. We all built these characters together so D.J. and I can type “Rani’s mad” and Nick knows what that means from a body language perspective and how it shapes a panel in ways we might have to use twenty words with for someone else.

We also just have a huge amount of trust in each other at this point. So there can be notes telling Nick to go a bit nuts, and we’ll leave him alone for certain scenes and when we get ultra-specific he trusts we’re not doing it to annoy him and he can see the reasons behind our choices. Also knowing Nick’s approach so well lets us craft pages specifically to him in even deeper ways.

If “Amelia Cole” was for all-ages, then “The Once and Future Queen” aims at telling a YA story. What is it that you find so interesting about writing into that demographic, and changing up your approach and audience?

Knave: One of my biggest personal challenges on “Amelia Cole” was the language use. I curse. A lot. Like, too much, probably. It’s an issue. Frankly, I wasn’t raised right. So I had to rein all that in super tight for years. Now we can use some good ol’ light PG-13 cussin’ and it makes me happy. But also thematically, pushing this up to YA from all-ages allows us to explore more mature themes, in the real sense, not just “Adam like to curse” sense. It’s not that the story is darker (though it can be at times, a lot of them) but there is a different perspective at play here, a more adult one. You’ll see it in relationships, in actions, and choices made.

Kirkbride: When we were starting “Amelia Cole”, our goal was to make a truly “all-ages” comic. Not a “kid’s” book. They’re often awesome, but kids seem to always want to read up. We wanted it to be like a kid watching Star Wars with her folks, for example. Everyone’s enjoying it, not just the youngster. For “The Once and Future Queen”, one of our goals was to age up in part so that Nick could stretch his artistic style while Adam and I challenged ourselves to dig into some deeper themes, but also in the hopes that if a reader grew up a little reading “Amelia Cole” over its four year run, they’d be ready to follow us onto something that skewed a little older.

And now Adam gets to use type the “s-word” and whatnot in scripts. It makes him happy, and that’s all any of us really want. That, and pizza.

What was it that first interested you all in taking Arthurian mythology and redefining it within the series?

Knave: I have always wanted to work on an Arthurian story. I had outlines of novels dealing with it, I read a bunch of it, it’s a capital-T Thing for me. And yet, until D.J. mentioned going there for the story I hadn’t thought of doing it with this approach. Which thrills my cold, dead, heart.

Brokenshire: For me, Arthurian Legend is in my creative DNA. Also The Brokenshire’s have a deep connection to Cornwall (among other places) so it’s very groovy for me to tell this tale. I read “Le Morte D’Arthur” when I was 16 and Boorman’s “Excalibur” is in my top 10 movies.

Kirkbride: Everyone knows of the legend, even if it’s in a tangential sense. Even if you’ve never read the stories or T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King”, there’s Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone” and the fact that “Star Trek” has a very round table feel to it. It’s in our collective consciousness.

How do you keep that connection to old-time myth but take a story like this into a contemporary, modern-day setting?

Brokenshire: I grew up in a very magical place in Scotland called The Hill Of Fare in Aberdeenshire, where fairies and goblins and all manner of creatures dwell. I would walk through the forest with my dog in he middle of the night singing and inventing nonsense. I draw upon that part of my life. As for the contemporary, I personally have a few people in mind when I draw these characters and I try to infuse as much of their personality into what I’m doing. Hopefully that gives them some contemporary realism… I hope it does!

Knave: Myths are about people. We’re still people. The point of the myths, a lot of what they dealt with, are still relevant just in new and strange ways. So the trick was always to find the threads and pull them forward, and then snap them off, twist and tangle them and get something new out of them. Something that wasn’t “Silverhawks,” because this could have been a “Silverhawks” book if we did everything totally differently and… good lord why can’t I stop thinking about that dumb old TV show today? I apologize, on behalf of myself and my ancestors. And Lt. Colonel Bluegrass.

“Silverhawks” aside for the moment, who is Rani, your lead character? What kind of a person is she, and what are her goals, ambitions, motivations?

Kirkbride: Rani’s a pretty serious and very intelligent person. She has an analytical mind and goes with her gut less than, say, Amelia Cole. Amelia was super “leap before looking,” especially at the start of the series. Rani likes to plan. We join her at a crossroads in her life as she pursues her passion for chess without a clear goal of what to do for her future. She’s taking a break before college, though that’s presumably the next step. Then we throw a spanner in the works with all this crazy Excalibur stuff, and while it’s terrifying and totally unexpected, it might help her reach her true potential.

Knave: And it might not, to be honest. Life is never a straight line and it’s always messy, and Rani always loved structure and held it close. Shifting isn’t easy for any of us, and with the pressure she’s under, well, it doesn’t always end well.

Kirkbride: So, to recap, we’re probably ruining Rani’s fictional life.

Knave: Which is, in fact, our job. Right? Not to say she doesn’t get big happy bits, too. She does.

There’s a chess motif running through the series, with Rani herself a chess prodigy. Is this story all about the Queen, then, or can we expect a full ensemble piece here?

Knave: This is a big ensemble piece with a central character to pin it in place. Like the original Star Trek, really. Sure Kirk was the main character and the story often revolved around him, but Spock and McCoy, and the whole bridge crew really, were fully formed characters and had important things to do and say, pushing story in different directions that if it had been The Captain Kirk show. The Queen might call the shots, for the most part, but any good leader knows you listen to the people around you and make them count. Even a pawn can be crucial, after all.

Kirkbride: I’m more of a checkers guy, so whatever Adam said is probably right. King me.

How did you approach the design of the characters? Nick, were you working from any particular inspiration or theme, here?

Brokenshire: I made it my aim to make these characters visually far more realistic than the Amelia Cole characters. Like I said, I do have certain people in mind as basic character templates for everyone. No-one famous, just people I know. Rani is something of an amalgam. The other major thing that I’ve done is create very specific wardrobes for the characters and I will literally don their clothes (or the closest thing I can find) and take reference pictures for almost every panel. I’ve paid attention to inventing body movements and postures that are particular to each character. I have folders full of me posing as the characters trying to find their style.

Clothes-wise, we decided early on that Rani would be something of a punk-rock girl so that’s quite a specific style. Gwen is a funny mixture, she’s totally badass but likes to wear powder blue and pink. Lance is a maker of things so he’s practical in his attire. The Fae, they are a mix of traditional Fairy, Uruk Hai and something more contemporary. I think about this stuff non-stop. I could go on!

Kirkbride: Nick’s attention to detail here really shows. Sometimes it’s tough in comics to tell characters apart if they don’t have fancy costumes (Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent used to be visually pretty interchangeable, for instance.), but Nick’s given them all unique faces and body types and poses. It makes the visual storytelling more sophisticated, and it gives Adam and me the ability to get into some more subtleties in the writing.

The creative team previously worked on “Amelia Cole”

Of course, though…. the story of Arthur is a tragedy, filled with villainy, betrayal, and torment. What sort of surprises can we expect from your story as it develops across the coming months?

Brokenshire: Jousting, Magic Rocks, Monsters, Bloodshed and a dash of “Dawson’s Creek”. Is that fair to say, boys?

Kirkbride: That sounds about right. While we’re using Arthurian Legend as a starting point, this is very much its own story. Some of the surprises and excitement will come in little twists to the familiar tropes, but it’s really its own thing. Our goal was to surprise each other when creating it. Part of the fun of doing an indie book with a publisher as encouraging as Dark Horse and an editor as open as Shantel is that no idea is too “out there”–at least not yet. She hasn’t read the script for issue 5 yet.

Knave: All I can really say is, to people who are familiar with our work on “Amelia Cole” – we planted stuff in issue one that didn’t pay off until the last arc. We build deep, and leave a ton of space to shift around our own plans and still land where we mean to. So there’s a lot going on under the surface here.

Issue #1 of “The Once and Future Queen” arrives March 1, 2017.

The post INTERVIEW: Dark Horse Crowns The Once and Future Queen of Camelot appeared first on CBR.com.

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