I don't dispute that reading the script to a play can have scholarly advantages in terms of examining how the lines are put together. Or even dispute that you can enjoy reading a play as if it was a book. It's just that reading the script is not how the playwright intended you to experience the work. A play only really comes to life when you watch it being performed by a group of talented actors on a stage.

It's much like poetry in that respect. I mean, I actually really enjoy reading books of poetry, but in all honesty a poem only really begins to live and breathe when you read it aloud or, better yet, listen to the author read it aloud.

I just think that ultimately, these things are best experienced in the format that they were designed to be experienced in. It's also why you should never recite song lyrics as if they were poetry; they aren't! Though song lyrics can absolutely have a poetic quality to them, they are not poetry; they are words that are meant to be heard sung, not spoken aloud.

Peril On Ice Planet (Perry rhodan 23)
by Kurt Mahr






This volume, as expected, features Tiff and friends (who are always divided as 'the cadets' - the other two males he has with him that seem to have developed into his minions, and 'the girls', who seem to have no purpose but to hide from peril. This begs the question, why are they there in the first place?)
being reinforced by Pucky and getting some intel on the Springers.

It turns out, since Tiff is some sort of living telepathy beacon, he's a great spy, so Perry left him there on purpose to give the Springers a reason to hang around. Pucky seems alot more competent than the last story he was in.. he not a mascot with weird powers anymore, he's a supermutant spy. He and Tiff and the cadets jump around the various Springer ships and get some intel, the find a new place to hide. Turns out the Springers know about the Wanderer and are hoping to interrogate Tiff and co for it's location... because who doesn't want to be immortal?

Perry (who actually in only in the book as a cameo) seems pleased by the info. Seems like this Ice planet (now named Snowman) will be around a bit.

The new serial is by a mostly 'lost' writer, Richard Vaughan.. featuring a mad scientist that tries to take over the world some time a bit in the future, but claims to be prepping it to save it from future destruction. He is banished (but nicely) in a well furnished space ship.. he lands far from Earth only to find a human woman. Not a bad start... definitely better the the terrible War of the Worlds sequel (though I'd rather they go back to 2 Perry stories)

The Masters of Comic Book Art by P.R. Garriock



Early attempt (circa '78) at comic scholarship exploring comics as not only an art form but as an Avante Garde art form. It has short (and mostly shallow) essays on a handful of creators and then 6-8 pages of samples of their art. Reproduction is mostly good, and larger than a comic page, so it's a ie look at some of those pieces, but what's there is a hodge podge.

The artists presented include:

Will Eisner
Harvey Kurtzman
Frank Bellamy
Richard Corben
Barry Windsor Smith
Jean Giraud
Philippe Druillet
Wallace Wood
Robert Crumb
Victor Moscoso

It is a product of its time-it makes a big deal about the launch of Heavy Metal in the Us as a revolutionizing force that will bring Avante Garde comics to the mainstream (a little off on that, but HM did move the needle some), but side form a couple of interesting insights in his introduction (that were not followed up upon), there's not much here that I didn't know or that piqued my interest. Part of it, is a lot of his predictions proved inaccurate, and part of it was that this was so early in the "revolution" of comics (at the burgeoning of the direct market but when newsstands still dominated) that it couldn't account for the radical changes that comics would see in the 80s nor could it account for the blossoming of comic scholarship that gave us a much broader language with which to discuss and analyze comics, so he has to rely on putting forward some half-formed thoughts not fully articulated and then showing a bunch of random art to try to (literally) illustrate the points he was trying to make because he didn't have the critical language he needed to do so effectively.

If I had come across this in the late 70s or early 80s, it would have had a much bigger impact on me than discovering it in 2023 does, where what he presents is no well trodden ground, but then it would have been eye opening to a lot of comic fans and to those dismissive of comics as "kid stuff" so it has value as a historical relic moreso than as a living piece fo scholarship still relevant today.

-M

I actually haven't read that book precised because I watched and loves Justifed. I read the first Longmire novel, and I was horrified.. the characters were similar to the show, but different enough, and in ways I hated, to make it so I couldn't enjoy the book at all. It sounds like it may have been more different, but still.

OTOH, I was able to enjoy Bosch both on TV and the books I've read... while Bosch is pretty similar, the supporting cast is very different, and that worked ok. I guess you just never know.




A Talk in the Park
by Curt Smith

I grabbed this at a not all that local library as I was tagging along with my wife on a library 'tour'. The title grabbed my attention. It was a good trip, besides borrowing this, I picked up a couple other baseball books and a pile of Clifford Simak paperbacks from discards/local sales.

The book is not really a book, but rather a collection of hundred of quick stories from broadcasters, of the type and length they would tell in a boring game or a rain delay. Some were great, some less so.

The issue is really the format. If this was coffee table book, nicely organized with good pictures and maybe some stats, it would be fantastic. As is, it's kinda random, and, just like a 3 hour rain delay, you eventually get kinda bored and have to flip a channel.

Slam_Bradley-You mentioned wanting my thoughts on this book over on Goodreads, but they're getting posted here...

Of Dice and Men: the Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It by David M. Ewalt



Another "history of D&D" book, among many I have read (in addition to several documentaries viewed) recently. Two quick impressions 1) there's a very interesting essay about the history of D&D inhere, but its intertwined with a much less interesting account of the author's personal campaign and D&D experiences. 2) The interesting stuff in the essay I've seen/read elsewhere and covered better, but those works were produced after this book was published, so comparing it to those is a bit unfair on my part. That said if the early history of D&D is of interest, particularly the business side, check out Slaying the Dragon that I posted about a few weeks ago-it goes into much more detail than this, but it does acknowledge this book so I am thinking it built on what was presented here first. Also, if you want a much more in depth look at the Arneson and Minneapolis gaming group connection to the origins of D&D, watch the documentary The Secrets of Blackmoor: The True History of Dungeons & Dragons as it is all about that group , Arneson's role in early D&D and the development of roleplaying form wargaming in that social circle.

As to this book itself. It's prose is well written, perhaps with a bit too much snark and wink wink nudge nudge (particularly in the footnotes which only explain detailed game rules for things he mentions in the chapters themselves, and are otherwise utterly irrelevant to his themes and narrative, and seem to be there only to pad his nerd cred or to try to dazzle someone completely unfamiliar with D&D with his D&D erudition. The early chapters are spent mostly with trying to establish the authors bonafides when it comes to gaming, and only served to remind me how much I disliked the game play of 3rd Ed and 3.5 Ed D&D and make me realize how much I would not enjoy playing in his home game. It got more interesting when he actually started exploring the history of the game, and this is where that really interesting essay gets off the ground. There's a lot of good stuff here. Again, most of it I have see or read elsewhere recently, but this predates them so it's interesting to see where the state of the scholarship was when this came out, and how much it's expanded since then. He does a really good job of covering the early days, and he's done his homework and legwork interviewing folks who were there and researching that era. A couple of suppositions he makes seemed logical, but additional evidence presented in those later works show they were offbase, but he hits the nail on the head with some others. If he had continued with this type of research and presentation throughout the book, I would have liked it a whole lot more, but he seems to trail off after the Satanic Panic of the 80s and the coming of Lorraine Williams, and give very short shrift to the TSR of the AD&D 2E era, and gives only the barest sketch of the troubles the company faced in the 80s and the takeover by Wizard of the Coast. Instead he writes more about his home campaign in what looks to be vignettes from a frustrated (and not that good) fantasy novelist.

The other section I did find interesting, and one that I haven't seen covered much elsewhere, is his reporting on the D&D Next Playtest that lead to 5E. I was particularly interested in his chapter on his experiences as the D&D Experience in Fort Wayne, IN, in part because Mrs. MRP and I also attended that event where D&D Next was introduced and opportunities to playtest it were made available, launching a massive playtest that informed the development of that new edition that was published 2 years later in 2014. Of course, he left off of that to write about how it inspired the development of his own campaign as a first time DM and then his quest to go to Lake Geneva to attend Gary Con to play with the grognards to learn how to be a better DM. And it really went off the rails with the whole chapter of the LARPing weekend he spent, which his whole conclusion seemed to be it offers an experience I didn't need because I already play D&D.

I was also amused (and had a lot of bittersweet memories triggered) by his brief mention of Gygax's Zagyg project, which I worked on as a freelancer and turned in my supplement to the publsiher and it was in art direction phase when Gary passed and his widow Gail killed the project before my supplement saw print, so I never got paid for it. But while he was musing about his Six degrees of Gary Gygax status as being a 2 since he got to play with people who knew Gary, I couldn't help but smirk that I was a 1, as I met and worked with Gary; and that while he was seeing this as some kind of grail to unlock the secrets of gaming, I knew it didn't mean bupkus in that context, though it was rewarding in its own right.

But to put it succinctly-the parts of the book that deal with the story of D&D (or at least the early parts of that story) are good, possibly very good to excellent but it's hard for me to truly evaluate because that scholarship has been expanded upon or superseded by later works). There's enough there for a strong essay, that could have been expanded into a good book, but that wasn't the sole focus of the book. The rest of the book, i.e. the parts where it's about the people who play D&D is where the book falls down as it focuses too much on his home game and a small handful of people he met at a couple of gaming events or on business trips for his job. There are nuggets of what could have been a good book in there, but they were overwhelmed by large vignettes printed in italics that were essentially bad fantasy fiction accounts of his home game, or even worse, a bad quest journal for the fictional him on a quest for enlightenment that is some kind of bad allegory/symbolic parallel of his trip to Gary Con. If you had stripped out all the italic sections of bad fiction writing, and replaced them with more research and presentation about the history of the game or at least accounts of its impact on other people than his game group, (and he mentions in his afterword there were large chunks or research and interviews with folk sin the industry dealing with that type of material that he left out but you could go to the website to see some of, all of which was a bad choice by him and his editor), this could have been a very good book. Alas, it's not. It's worth taking a look at for the actual research and historical account, but if you skipped over all the italicized fiction vignettes, you wouldn't miss anything (and the book would by shorter by nearly 1/3 to 1/2).

-M

James Warren, Empire Of Monsters: The Man Behind Creepy, Vampirella, And Famous Monsters by Bill Schelly

It's probably odd that I not only read this book, but I devoured it.  I've never been a big horror fan (though I do love the Universal Monsters).  I've only ever read a handful of Warren magazines over the years.  They were obviously still being published while I was a young comics fan, but I never purchased any at the time.  I seldom ventured beyond the spinner rack to the magazine stand.  And on the rare occasion that I did I ended up with a Marvel mag (and one issue of Heavy Metal).  Now I did have a nearly full run of mid to late 70s Mad Magazine and a fair number of issues of Cracked, but those all came from garage sales.  I don't recall ever seeing a Warren magazine at a yard sale.  Or maybe I did and I didn't pick them up.  And I had and read the Warren issue of Comic Book Artist.  How much more did I need to know?  Quite a bit it turns out.  

I had read Schelly's bios of Joe Kubert and of Otto Binder and they were both very good.  And there's no doubt that Warren was not just an important publisher but also an iconoclast.  Really the only successful comics publisher to start up in the era between the implementation of the Comics Code and the rise of the direct market.  Obviously Warren did it different.  He started out by cashing in on the "monster craze" of the late 50s and 60s with Famous Monsters of Filmland.  He then bypassed the spinner rack and went to the magazine stand with something that wasn't already there, and that couldn't be put on a spinner because of the CCA.  Creepy and Eerie harkened back to the EC days with short horror stories, many of them, in the beginning, by EC artists.  Blazing Combat, even though it only lasted four issues, is still one of, if not the, best American war comics ever.  Vampirella was a phenomenon for a while.  I don't think that it's unreasonable to say that the Warren publications certainly influenced the underground comic movement, particularly considering Gilbert Shelton and R. Crumb both had work in Warren and Harvey Kurtzman's Help! magazine.  

This is the story of the success of a small-businessman who built a publishing business and was a true eccentric.  And as long as Jim Warren was interested in the business it survived and frequently thrived.  And when he lost interest, apparently through a combination of different interests and mental health issues, it quickly died.  It's a story well worth telling in depth and Schelly does it very well.