There's Sometimes a Buggy

Who would've thought Dave and Elise'd miss Zandia? The title's grand arc storytelling takes a temporary back seat this time out to a pair of less-than-compelling orphaned tales. Thunder and Lightning? Triton? These are not villainous names to conjure with. However, your faithful hosts were buoyed up in their banter by the survival of those Wolfman/Perez subplots! Raven's grim struggle for self-mastery! Dick Grayson's search for a new psychotic dad! Wally West's "normie" dreams! And Terra's... whatever she's trying to accomplish.

Bonus! More Stan Lee talk, prompted by this excellent Andrew Rilstone piece (suggested by friend of the pod Franz Fuchs!) Audio

 

Credits: Intro music:

Debbie Harry - "Comic Books"

Happy holidays from Elise and Dave!

This year's X-Mas offering was inspired by Elise's new piece in The Threepenny Review and by Dave's lifelong obsession with New England Transcendentalism.

See you in 2019!

Join a radically divided panel as they discuss and dissect the biggest film Ronald Reagan made during "Hollywood's Golden Year" of 1939 - Dark Victory. Is this a prime example of "Prestige""/"Too-Extra-By-Half""/"Middlebrow"/"White Elephant" filmmaking?  Or is it a gossamer haymaker born of the nearly miraculous fusion of Edmund Goulding's auteurist preoccupations and Bette Davis' acteurist ambitions? Are we to interpret Judith Traherne's autumnal days in "that pinched up little state on the wrong side of Boston" as evidence of a sad capitulation to heteronormativity? Or as an Emersonian triumph of open-air gladness to the brink of fear? 

One thing we did agree on is the Gipper's "epicene" effectiveness in the role of "funny old Alec", despite the moral majority darling's latter-day disdain for his own performance.

What's your prognosis?

Novel suggestion:

Peter Delacorte's Time on My Hands

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Brother (Blood) fights Brotherhood (of Evil) - with the Titans trapped in the crossfire! Big doings in these issues. Terra joins the team, with absolutely none of the fanfare promised on the cover of #30; the team gets Bethany Snowed with some wacky story about Zandian meddling in the American electoral process; Kid Flash considers the Greeleyan dictum "Go away, Young West"; and Raven's Dark Phoenix-like descent reaches a possible turning point.

Audio Credits:

Intro music: Debbie Harry - "Comic Books"

Received as an innocuous time-waster on first release, Bedtime For Bonzo later blossomed into the go-to "President Cheeto"-style resistance pseudo-witticism of the '80s. However, from your panel's point of view, this film furnishes nigh-inexhaustible avenues of inquiry into mid-20th Century American modalities and myths.

 

Join us as we delve into/debate the semantic availability of proto-animal rights discourse in 1950 (alongside the monstrous treatment of animal actors themselves), the reconstitution/invention of the nuclear family in post-World War II suburbia, the amorphous language of populist protest, the figure of the “Egghead”, the ever-present threat of eugenicide, the New Model Moguldom of MCA/Universal maestro Lew Wasserman, and the defensibility of human species exceptionalism itself.

 

Also: Romy urges the team to pin down the Gipper’s sexual persona; Gareth finds ample support for his Reagan-as-mediating-figure thesis; and Dave celebrates the career of Walter Slezak. Everyone loves Diana Lynn (some a little more passionately than others).

 

We didn’t even come close to completing our analysis of this Reaganite Rosetta Stone, so look for a sequel in 2019!    

 

 

Novel suggestion:

Peter Delacorte's Time on My Hands

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Follow Gareth on Twitter at @helenreddymades

Follow David on Twitter at @milescoverdale

 

"Driving Reagan theme' by Gareth Hedges

This time on Terra Talk: Gar's obsession with his Earth (moving) Angel takes deep root; Dick lives up to his name; Donna throws some (lamp)shade; and Zandia is back in the news, big time!

 

Audio Credits:

Intro music: Debbie Harry - "Comic Books"

This week, we find the Gipper embarking upon his self-described "Errol Flynn of the Bs" period with the first of 4 "Brass Bancroft" not-so-extra-vaganzas. Loosely based on "material compiled" from the memoranda of ex-Secret Service honcho W.H. Moran (a close second in sexiness to Admiral Chester Nimitz), the films deliver a nice little wallop on behalf of the New Deal Deep State.   This unassuming programmer comes out swinging with a scene of callous criminality that's sure to shock even the most jaded connoisseur of contemporary borderland psychosis. The rest of the film doesn't quite live up to its demented overture, but it zips along at a nice clip (at least when Little Foy Lost Eddie Jr.'s limp clowning isn't center stage) and it certainly marked a step up in the studio standings for its aspiring star.   The film also features the brilliant James Stephenson in a sinister supporting role, Ila Rhodes as the fungible fiancee, Rosella Towne as a rather more interesting trysting partner, and the immortal John Litel as... Saxby!    Novel suggestion: Peter Delacorte's Time on My Hands

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"Driving Reagan theme' by Gareth Hedges

Join Elise and Dave as they tackle Wolfman and Perez's omnibus "Very Special Issues" of the New Teen Titans, wherein our intrepid creators and superheroes bear witness to the threat of DRUGS (and teen prostitution, and parental violence, and homelessness, and rogue district attorneys, and telepathic assault, etc.) Also: Tara Markov attacks the Statue of Liberty and Elise brings in another 1980s Marv Wolfman interview from The Comics Journal (this one conducted by Heidi MacDonald)  

 

Audio Credits:

Intro music: Debbie Harry - "Comic Books"

The Last Outpost aka Cavalry Charge is the quintessential (although certainly not the best) "Civil War Western", a staple mid-century genre which performed yeoman ideological work on a pair of dubious fronts: 1. Doubling down (often literally, by offering up equally likable brothers on either side of the conflict) on the "revisionist" take on the "War Between The States" that dominated the historiography from the 1920s into the early 1960s; and 2. painting the "unsettled" western frontier as the staging ground for a post-bellum American "reunification" through genocidal race war against the region's rightful inhabitants.

  The Gipper delivers a terrific performance as Capt. Vance Britten, a character whose psychological underpinnings are so vile that they cannot even be acknowledged by the film. He's a dashing Baltimorean who has crossed over to the Rebels as "a matter of principle". What principle? Well, it's not defending his state, obviously, since Maryland remained within the Union. Guess what that leaves? You have to guess, because this screenplay doesn't come anywhere near mentioning slavery. It does, however, wear its white supremacist heart on its blue and gray sleeves when it fabricates a ridiculous pretext (out of whole cloth) for a temporary North/South alliance against righteously enraged Apache warriors.   This is our earliest Pine-Thomas Reagan, and here we find the original template for the now-famous Fruit Company Gunboat Charge which furnished the climax of Tropic Zone. And it's our last chance to see friend of the show Rhonda Fleming.    Pretty much forgotten (and nigh impossible to find) today, this movie was a big hit for Paramount in 1951, and was so fondly remembered that it was mustered out of mothballs ten years later in an effort to capitalize upon the Civil War's centenary. Enjoy!      Novel suggestion: Peter Delacorte's Time on My Hands

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Follow Gareth on Twitter at @helenreddymades

Follow David on Twitter at @milescoverdale

 

"Driving Reagan theme' by Gareth Hedges

 Dave takes a little time at the beginning of this episode to laud Stan Lee and express his continued dissatisfaction with The Comics Journal. Then your hosts launch into a discussion of Wolfman and Perez's most space operatic effort yet. Topics include: the narrator's shabby (and contradictory) treatment of those cuddly purple Branx warriors, Dark Phoenix/X'Hal, the Titans' tenuous-to-nonexistent commitment to the sanctity of non-human life, and the utter useless of Demonia. 

We conclude the episode with some thoughts occasioned by Elise's discovery of a 1983 TCJ Interview with Marv Wolfman (speaking with Dwight R. Decker). 

 

Audio Credits:

Intro music: Debbie Harry - "Comic Books"