Fans of DC Comics from the 1970s will recognise Neal Adams’ distinctive style on this true story about an artist’s struggle to recover her artwork from the Auschwitz Museum.
Tag Archives | Science Fiction
Different Lives
I’ve written before about the difference between the James Bond of the movies and the one of the books, and why I prefer the latter. Time for another example.
Here’s how the movie version of Moonraker ends:
(Hey, my new blog allows embedded videos! The old one wouldn’t.)
And here’s how the original novel ends:
He looked up. She was standing a few feet away from him. He noticed that she was wearing a black beret at a rakish angle and that she looked exciting and mysterious like someone you see driving by abroad, alone in an open car, someone unattainable and more desirable than anyone you have ever known. Someone who is on her way to make love to somebody else. Someone who is not for you.
He got up and they took each other’s hands.
It was she who released herself. She didn’t sit down. … Her eyes were soft as she looked at him. Soft, but, he thought, somehow evasive. … She looked over his shoulder.
Bond turned round. A hundred yards away there was the tall figure of a young man with fair hair trimmed short. His back was towards them and he was idling along, killing time.
Bond turned back and Gala’s eyes met his squarely.
‘I’m going to marry that man,’ she said quietly. ‘Tomorrow morning.’ …
‘Oh,’ said Bond. He smiled stiffly. ‘I see.’
There was a moment of silence during which their eyes slid away from each other.
And yet why should he have expected anything else? A kiss. The contact of two frightened bodies clinging together in the midst of danger. There had been nothing more. … Why had he imagined that she shared his desires, his plans?
And now what? wondered Bond. He shrugged his shoulders to shift the pain of failure – the pain of failure that is so much greater than the pleasure of success. … He must get out of these two young lives and take his cold heart elsewhere. There must be no regrets. No false sentimentality. He must play the role which she expected of him. The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette.
She was looking at him rather nervously, waiting to be relieved of the stranger who had tried to get his foot in the door of her heart. …
He touched her for the last time and then they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives.
I’m just sayin’ ….
James Bond on the Drug War
From Goldfinger (the book, not the movie – duh):
A big man in Mexico had some poppy fields. The flowers were not for decoration. They were broken down for opium which was sold quickly and comparatively cheaply by the waiters at a small café in Mexico City called the ‘Madre de Cacao’. The Madre de Cacao had plenty of protection. If you needed opium you walked in and ordered what you wanted with your drink. You paid for your drink at the caisse and the man at the caisse told you how many noughts to add to your bill. It was an orderly commerce of no concern to anyone outside Mexico. Then, far away in England, the Government, urged on by the United Nations’ drive against drug smuggling, announced that heroin would be banned in Britain.
There was alarm in Soho and also among respectable doctors who wanted to save their patients agony. Prohibition is the trigger of crime. Very soon the routine smuggling channels from China, Turkey and Italy were run almost dry by the illicit stock-piling in England.
Though it’s off-topic, I can’t resist adding the following, rather less insightful passage from the same chapter:
James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death. … He stubbed out the butt of his cigarette and sat, his chin resting on his left hand, and gazed moodily across the twinkling tarmac to where the last half of the sun was slipping gloriously into the Gulf.
James Bond must have unusual eyesight to be able to see the Gulf of Mexico from Miami.
Minus Six
I was saddened to read of the death of Patrick McGoohan. I discovered him in high school during the late 80s, when PBS was replaying the two groundbreaking series which he both starred in and helped to create – the surreal, libertarian-ish science-fiction drama The Prisoner (which might be summarised as “an Ayn Rand hero in a half-Orwell, half-Kafka universe,” and whose famous line “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered” is an evident echo of Proudhon’s “To Be Governed” passage) and its quasi-prequel, the clever, realistic, often bleak spy drama alternately known as Danger Man and Secret Agent (with different opening musical themes for the British and American markets), which gave the world the line “My name is Drake – John Drake” a good two years before Sean Connery was saying anything similar. (In Danger Man, McGoohan’s character was originally introduced as an American working for NATO, and later retconned into being an English – or, according to some episodes, Irish – agent of Britain’s intelligence service. Given McGoohan’s indeterminate accent – his own upbringing was partly English, partly Irish, and partly American – it didn’t make much difference; he always sounded slightly wrong but not too wrong.)
In both series, which make compulsive viewing, McGoohan is the epitome of cool – though not quite in the suave James Bond manner, as a rough-edged sense of not quite fitting into the world is frequently visible through the usually unflappable exterior. Even McGoohan’s not-quite-either-British-or-American accent contributes to his character’s presentation as an alienated individualist. (I own all three boxed DVD sets – one for the often-forgotten first Danger Man series (1960-62), which now bills itself as the “first season”; one for the second Danger Man series (1964-1968), which misleadingly bills itself as “complete” despite not including this “first season”; and one for The Prisoner (1967-1968). Lucky I bought them when did, since a glance at Amazon tells me that items 1 and 3 have since skyrocketed in price, while item 2 appears to be out of print.)
While Danger Man obviously drew inspiration from the Bond books (and certainly resembles them more than it does the movies), McGoohan disapproved of Ian Fleming’s womanising assassin, and reportedly turned down a chance to play Bond for that reason; in any case, he had written into his Danger Man contract that his character would have no romances and would rely on his intellect rather than on fists or gun, using violence only as a last resort. (If you were to conclude from this that Danger Man must be boring, you would be mistaken.)
In 1985, as my birthday present, I saw McGoohan live on stage in Boston, in Pack of Lies with Rosemary Harris and Dana Ivey. McGoohan played a secret agent once again, although this time a slightly menacing one (“At the risk of sounding rather unfriendly, it’s my duty to draw your attention to the Official Secrets Act”) as opposed to the often-rebellious agent of Danger Man and the totally-rebellious agent of The Prisoner; I’ve since learned that Pack of Lies (which also played on Broadway) was his only venture into American live theatre, so I’m glad I had a chance to see him.
Evil Reigns at DC
Comics readers – have you been a tad puzzled over how to keep the continuity straight in DC’s latest, ongoing universe-wide crisis – with, for example, Batman fighting crime as usual in one comic, M.I.A. in another comic, and M.I.A. for an entirely different reason in yet another comic?
You’ll get no reassurance from these comments by Grant Morrison about the continuity problems between Final Crisis and the series leading into it:
Why didn’t Superman recount his experiences from DOTNG [= Death of the New Gods]? Because those experiences hadn’t been thought up or written when I completed Final Crisis #1. If there was only me involved, Orion would have been the first dead New God we saw in a DC comic, starting off the chain of events that we see in Final Crisis.
As it is, the best I can do is suggest that the somewhat contradictory depictions of Orion and Darkseid’s last-last-last battle that we witnessed in Countdown and DOTNG recently were apocryphal attempts to describe an indescribable cosmic event.
To reiterate, hopefully for the last time, when we started work on Final Crisis, J.G. and I had no idea what was going to happen in Countdown or Death Of The New Gods because neither of those books existed at that point. The Countdown writers were later asked to ‘seed’ material from Final Crisis and in some cases, probably due to the pressure of filling the pages of a weekly book, that seeding amounted to entire plotlines veering off in directions I had never envisaged, anticipated or planned for in Final Crisis.
So, I wonder what DC pays its editorial staff? It’s clearly either way too little or way too much.
In related news, there’s some frustrating intel on Anarky; it counts as a spoiler so I’ll bury it in the comments section.
The Mask of Anarky
The latest issue (#181) of Robin features the return of Anarky – sort of.
At first I was annoyed, since Anarky seemed to be blowing stuff up pointlessly – “chaos for fun.”
But it soon transpired that the guy wearing the Anarky outfit is actually the Batman villain Ulysses Armstrong, who seems to have the real Anarky – Lonnie Machin – imprisoned and on life support (and looking in pretty bad shape). What all that’s about remains to be seen.