From a new comics imprint of Abrams ComicArts comes Hardears, an alternate fantasy world inspired by the Caribbean cultures of Barbados. Barbados writer Nigel Lynch joins Barbados artist Matthew Clarke in the next alternate world. It is too lazy to refer to Hardears as another take on the Wakanda of Black Panther (it’s actually more like Alan Moore’s Watchmen).Hardears is worthy of a deeper analysis.
Taking place in an alternate version of Barbados called Hardears (which seems to mean a particularly bad future ahead), this graphic novel is as unique as Frank Miller’s look at ancient Sparta in 300. The artwork of this fantasy society has the flowy aura of P. Craig Russell’s interpretation of Wagner’s The Ring, and the mythology will spark curiosity like we saw in Paul Guinan’s Aztec Empire.
It’s the latest in what has become a packed 12 months of studios releasing animated movies. And it carries a common theme for a venue families once could prop their kids up in front of for easy content to enjoy. The subject again is death and dying, and more to the point, what happens to you after you die, It’s the Disney-Pixar movie Soul, a big-budget movie that at first blush is about a musician and his love for jazz. Starring the voices of Academy Award-winning actor Jamie Foxx and the versatile Tina Fey, the animation is the best of merging digital animation with stunning real-world imagery. The musician theme is great, and directors Pete Docter and Kent Powers do their best to juggle humor and humanity’s most age-old questions: Who am I? Why am I here? And what’s next? This Disney+ offers some impressive visuals and ideas, but it also might be more for the older tier of kids and audiences ready for the thoughtful themes.
For every new movie you watch, you need to go back and see a classic, right? If The Hunt for Red October is Star Trek in the ocean, then Outland is The Sand Pebbles in outer space. A predecessor to science fiction staples like Total Recall, Blade Runner, and Firefly, Outland is still one of the best depictions of what life actually may be like working aboard a space vessel, once modern technology figures out how to get past that zero gravity issue. Isolation rarely has been portrayed as believably as directed here by Peter Hyams(Timecop, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, The Star Chamber, Amazing Stories). The 1981 Academy Award-nominated classic, Outland is now streaming on Starz, Hulu, Amazon, and Vudu.
Audiences never saw Sean Connery so average as he was playing Marshal William T. O’Niel. In a very low-key role more frequently seen played by someone like Steve McQueen, Connery is a federal cop in space, assigned to the titanium ore mining outpost Con-Am 27. He was selected because he was likely to phone in his job, and not ruffle feathers. But he finds himself when he learns the outpost is a haven for drug smuggling and worse, using drugs to work crews to their deaths, all part of a cover-up. The film’s own predecessors were any number of cop shows, and it has themes from Westerns, too, especially High Noon, another lone lawman trying to take out a local band of ruffians–and another man with marital problems. Critics accused the film of being thin, but it’s exactly why the film works so well and holds up well still today. In many ways the film is better, and even scarier, than Alien and Total Recall, proving you don’t need monsters to be truly alone and unprotected from life-threatening elements in space.
O’Niel’s only help is from Frances Sternhagen(Doc Hollywood, Cheers, The Closer) as Dr. Marian Lazarus, a no-nonsense crewman who is sympathetic to O’Niel as the newbie having to dodge the unfamiliar “way things are done.” Dr. Lazarus is one of sci-fi’s least known but toughest sci-fi heroines, and her chemistry with Connery as comrade-at-arms is superb. Another crew member is played by sci-fi and Western veteran James Sikking(Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Hill Street Blues, Doogie Howser, MD), who would continue for decades to play similar roles. And the baddie of the bunch is played by your favorite film Frankenstein, Peter Boyle(Young Frankenstein, Johnny Dangerously, The X-Files, Everybody Loves Raymond).
M.F. Gibson′s new novel Babylon Twins doesn’t seem to be targeted for the Young Adult section of the bookstore, but it should be. Following a pair of twins who share a secret language whose lives take a turn as a big pharma-virus, artificial intelligence experiment, and robot war collide to take down and remake civilization. The novel fits well with Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games novels and would make a good follow-up for fans of the series, especially older teens. More focused on their survival in a Creek Stewart sort of way (move along if you can’t stomach animal hunting for survival purposes), these girls don’t ever get the kind of gourmet food the competitors land in The Hunger Games. We meet the girls both when they’re young and later as young adults, and their lack of contacts and traditional educational resources keep their dialogue and needs more child-like than adult.
The best comparison to this story of dystopian, post-apocalyptic sci-fi is the classic 1970s sci-fi film Logan’s Run. Like the Runners of that story, Clo and El live the best they can after escaping the new norm thanks to their mother, but when their mother leaves their forest hovel they decide to take their brother and return to the city to find her, ten years after the “end of the world.” This is far more classic sci-fi than zombie horror, a good entry point for young adult readers dabbling into the short stories and novels of Philip K. Dick (like Minority Report) and Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog. Encounters with freakish new lifeforms that aren’t what they seem as found in classic sci-fi like Logan’s Run or Beneath the Planet of the Apes combine with a setting sharing a lot with that of Dawn/Rise/War of the Planet of the Apes, or the Jessica Chastain movie Mama (without that movie’s kind of horror).
Readers of John Christopher’s Tripods series will also see parallels in Babylon Twins. Gibson’s wooded home for the girls conjures a loneliness oddly akin to Christopher McCandless’s grim solo journey in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, yet their path is much different. Girls with younger brothers may particularly love the book, as the older sisters really never give the poor little brother a break across the entire story, including chastising him, berating him as bigger sisters do, and even tying him up and throwing him in the car at one point. It’s all written with a dose of humor. And the youthful voice of the narrator and characters reveals a coming of age story for the twins, sometimes dipping into the stuff of middle grade stories from Judy Blume.
The Crazy Top Shop was my early 1980s experience with heat-press printed T-shirts. At Southridge Mall you could show off your fandom with slogans or images from your favorite shows. Who can forget the smell of the melting glue as the clerk ironed your selection onto your favorite baseball jersey? I remember getting one shirt with the Three Stooges, one with The Fonz, and one with Yoda right after seeing The Empire Strikes Back.
An online shop is now offering shirts for all sorts of fans with some great throwbacks to pop culture’s past. From mash-ups, humor, and obscure references, many we haven’t seen elsewhere, Retropolis has an incredible variety of printed logos. We’re betting everyone can find something on the store’s website, where it currently is offering more than 900 retro-themed shirt styles. What’s it going to take to get you nostalgic, and what kind of nostalgia defines you–enough to display it for everyone to see on your shirt? Do you like classic television shows? How about toys and toy companies from the distant past? What about forgotten advertising campaigns and the earliest pop culture slogans? Retropolis may not have everything, but it has plenty. How about a shirt with a vintage comic book logo, like the old Charlton Comics brand, that crazy Hey Kids! Comics, or the memorable Comics Code Authority stamp?
How about a shirt with an image of that yellow plastic 45 RPM record adapter? How about T-shirts regularly seen worn by characters inside TV and film, like Three’s Company, John Ritter’s Captain Avenger from Hero At Large, the jersey from Teen Wolf, Snoopy’s Joe Cool shirt, Mork and Mindy, or Pigs in Space? And a few hundred of the catalog listings are for shirts sporting famous and not-so famous superhero logos. From Super Grover to the Flash, several 1966 Batman characters, and even Captain Carrot, if you can think of something, it’s probably there.
You can also find several mash-ups, allowing you to show off your own twisted sense of humor, like an unforgettable Marvel Star Wars comics character colliding with a Carl Weathers movie for an Action Jaxxon logo. We also spotted Atomic Blondie, Cap’n Crunch on a Big Wheel, Fonzie’s Jump the Shark episode from Happy Days meets Jaws, and other shirts featuring Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots, Monster Cereals, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Planet of the Apes.
Along with the superhero shirts, we spotted four big categories to choose from. Like fake pop culture. We saw Amalgamated Ice Cream(Batman),ACME(Looney Tunes),Arnold’s(Happy Days),Athlead (The Office),Advanced Idea Mechanics (Marvel),Chop Suey Palace(A Christmas Story),Camp Crystal Lake(Friday the 13th),Child Detection Agency (Monsters, Inc.),Cocktails and Dreams (Cocktail),Frostbite Falls(Rocky & Bullwinkle), Fox Force Five (Pulp Fiction),Hill Valley Police(Back to the Future),Rockford Agency (Rockford Files), and Wimpy Burgers (Popeye).
You still haven’t found something you must have yet?
Steve Rogers. John Spartan and Simon Phoenix. Han Solo. Austin Powers and Doctor Evil. George Taylor. Mr. Scott and Khaaaaaan!
Now meet Chen Andalou and Dark Horse Comics’ new mini-series, Astro Hustle.
Not just another Space Station 76, it’s a four-part tale of space pirates out beyond Cosmic Coffee and the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It has the space action of Killjoys and the fun of 1980’s Flash Gordon. The lost ship Sinnematica has been adrift in space, and with it one Chen Andalou, preserved for the past 60 years in cryo-freeze. Another sci-fi fish out of water, Chen is unstuck in time, surrounded by a future costumed like Barbarella meets the 1979-81 Buck Rogers, and filled with the more off-the-wall elements of Spaceballs and the animated version of Space Ghost, all thrown in for good measure. And then what? Chen runs right into the cop–Captain Igor, a mix of Javert and Prince Barin who is all ready to arrest him.
Plenty of aliens are around to judge him, too–robots like the crazed guard in Logan’s Run and a mix of everyone else you might find aboard the Fhloston Paradise. Lucky for Chen he meets up with Carbon John the space pirate and his trusty Number One, Svetlana. But he soon learns while he was asleep his brother became President of the Galaxy. Wait–are they going to end up like the princes of England or the Kim Jong brothers?
What’s missing? The Cannon Films adaptation and a soundtrack by MECO (that’s the band with Tony Bongiovi, cousin of the Bon Jovi brothers, and Mr. Fabulous Alan Rubin of The Blues Brothers), and it should ship with one of those MPC model kits of a van with the space logo on its side. Astro Hustle has the crazy/cool of both Vandroid (the comic) and ManBorg (the B-movie), thanks to a creator-owned story by Jai Nitz(El Diablo, Toshiro, Kato Origins, Tron: Betrayal), artwork by Tom Reilly, color by Ursula Decay, and letters by Chris “Crank!” Crank (Rick and Morty, Ciudad, Toshiro).
The writer behind the graphic novel Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes has returned with a new novel of connecting stories, sporting another great Planet of the Apes title, Death of the Planet of the Apes (believe it or not, this title had not yet been used in the franchise). Andrew E. C. “Drew” Gaska dug into the original movie series and provides all the connective material that fans of the film series didn’t see on the big screen. What happened to Charlton Heston’s astronaut George Taylor when he left for the Forbidden Zone in Beneath the Planet of the Apes? What is his backstory before he lands with his crew and first confronts a strange, simian-ruled planet? But Death of the Planet of the Apes does more than follow Taylor around.
The best new features in the POTA-verse include Gaska showing us how our favorite chimps Zira, Cornelius, and Dr. Milo make the ANSA spacecraft work again, connecting the dots between their run-in with astronaut Brent in Beneath of the Planet of the Apes and their arrival at Earth of the past at the beginning of the most fun film of the series, Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Gaska provides some great prequel material, intertwining the ANSA space agency with the real-world NASA (something he began in his Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes). Taylor becomes a Chuck Yeager-esque flight pioneer in one of the subplots, a man with determination, insight, and the stoic outlook of a Scott Kelly. We follow more of Ursus, Zaius, and Nova, and meet a new gorilla and a new part human/part ape hybrid living far beyond the realm of the apes that appeared on film (a callback to an unused production concept from the films of the 1970s).
Official ANSA crew photograph.
With so many stories focused on Cornelius and Zira’s son Caesar, in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes,Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and the latest reboot trilogy of films, it’s refreshing that Death of the Planet of the Apes returns to these core characters. Gaska moves back and forth in time in his storytelling, weaving all the segments from the different eras into a grand-scale adventure. More so than the original, readers will revisit concepts of science fiction’s past: the Philip K. Dick-inspired telekinesis concept from Beneath the Planet of the Apes is fleshed out, the Forbidden Zone travels and robots conjure images of Logan’s Run, and Planet of the Apes as a retelling of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine becomes even more clear. Continue reading →
Bradley W. Schenck’s sci-fi-meets-retro novel Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom: A Novel of Retropolis, was our favorite read of 2017. Schenck created a unique story within a world we’ve never seen before, a world only hinted at in early 20th century pop culture, early pulp novels, and film. For fans of classic sci-fi and all things retro, Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom handled science fiction futurism like rarely seen before. With the same imagination and fun, Schenck is back again in Retropolis with a new book of short stories, Patently Absurd: The Files of the Retropolis Registry of Patents. All but one of the stories were originally published in 2016 and 2017 in Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, and the new story ties together the other stories in the volume, which all really read like a single narrative with clever titles to the chapters. As with last year’s novel, it’s all great fun and smartly written.
Readers again revisit Retropolis’s day-to-day, the mundane, and the ordinary, in an uncertain world of tomorrow where nothing could possibly be mundane or ordinary, but this time Schenck hones in on one segment of the city, the Registry of Patents and new heroes of the office: Ben Bowman, investigator of patents, and secretary to the Registrar, Violet the humanoid robot. Ben does not have aspirations of greatness, he’s content to do his job, but Violet is a robot who knows she was built to be an investigator. The problem is that she’s gone through more than 14 bosses now–the Registrars–and still hasn’t been promoted. Is it because they leave each other notes in the locked safe in the Registrar’s office about Violet? And is it possible the office keeps losing Registrars because Violet is working her way through them? Nah.
Big, bright, and detailed, like Tron, Logan’s Run, Walt Disney’s vision of Tomorrowland, a bit Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, a larger dose of Metropolis, and an equal dose of Office Space and The Office–readers won’t find anything like Scheck’s world elsewhere. The final story in the volume, “The Enigma of the Unseen Doctor,” is as compelling, rich, and poignant as any other master of science fiction’s take on what it’s like to be a robot. Scheck turns the tables as we meet a robot with compassion for what it’s like to be human.Patently Absurd provides the next step in science fiction’s investigation of the soul.
In her debut in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Captain Phasma was an enigma, the latest of the uniquely costumed bad guys in the Star Wars universe, following in a line that progressed from Darth Maul to General Grievous, Count Dooku, and Darth Vader in the prequels, and later into Director Krennic and Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One, and Grand Admiral Thrawn in Star Wars Rebels. In Delilah S. Dawson’s new novel, Star Wars: Phasma, Phasma finally gets the spotlight. Readers learn about her backstory through an interrogation of a Resistance spy working for General Leia Organa, by yet another aspiring Imperial/First Order warrior, Captain Cardinal.
The spy, Vi Moradi, is pressed to provide Cardinal with damning information to help him bring down Phasma with the current leader, General Armitage Hux, son of General Brendol Hux, the leader who ushered both Cardinal and Phasma from their primitive worlds to train the future warriors of the First Order. Dawson tells this story as a play on A Thousand and One Nights, where the reader is compelled to wonder whether the information is true or that the end will be of the Keyser Söze variety. Moradi reveals a story of Phasma’s rise to power among a tribe on the planet Parnassos, and her discovery by Brendol Hux when his ship crashes on the planet and his emergency escape pod leaves him and his Stormtroopers far from the wreckage and any chance to communicate back to the First Order for assistance.
Phasma’s story will be most familiar to readers of the Star Wars universe novel Thrawn (reviewed here earlier at borg.com). Both Phasma and Thrawn literally battled their way to the top. Those familiar with the third trilogy novels will find an interesting parallel in the selection of the stories released leading up to the new canon films, including Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel centered on the feud between Krennic, Tarkin, and Galen Erso, and Tarkin, introducing readers to Tarkin’s confrontations with Darth Vader. Star Wars: Phasma has much in common with the Star Wars Rebels prequel novelA New Dawn, and indeed Vi Moradi would fit in well with the crew of the Ghost. Dawson pits Cardinal against Phasma like the Emperor pitted Anakin Skywalker against Grievous and Dooku, continuing some consistency from earlier Star Wars stories.
The next effort at creating a complex and challenging role for a lead actress Orphan Black-style is coming in August from Netflix. It’s the dystopian sci-fi thriller What Happened to Monday, formerly titled Seven Sisters, written by Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson, and directed by Tommy Wirkola (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters). What Happened to Monday is sci-fi’s next new look at a bleak future world in the vein of Children of Men (hope in the face of global infertility), Logan’s Run (to battle population explosion a shortened life clock of 30 years is enforced for all), Never Let Me Go (clones are created for parts for the ruling class), The Handmaid’s Tale (remaining fertile women are forced to reproduce for those in power), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Harrison Bergeron (a twisted equality is enforced on the world), and Gattaca (only the genetically superior are allowed to succeed). It stars Noomi Rapace (Prometheus, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows) in seven roles as the seven sisters–seven identical septuplets to be exact–in a society where only one child is allowed per family. Willem Dafoe (Platoon, Clear and Present Danger, Spider-man) stars as their grandfather who raised them, Robert Wagner (The Pink Panther, Hart to Hart, Stars and Stripes Forever, The Towering Inferno) in an undisclosed role, and Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction, Reversal of Fortune, Guardians of the Galaxy) is a leader in the repressive future world.
The first trailer was released this week for What Happened to Monday, and it looks compelling, providing a peek at the plot. The septuplets’ father hides the sisters’ existence from everyone, allowing only one girl outside one day per week, corresponding with their names, each a day of the week. When Monday does not come home one day, the sisters must go about discovering what happened to her without revealing their secret. It’s a role that will certainly be compared, for good or bad, to Tatiana Maslany’s role as multiple clones on Orphan Black.
What Happened to Monday is the latest in Netflix purchasing first run otherwise theatrical releases exclusively for Netflix subscribers.
Check out this first trailer for What Happened to Monday:
