MY BATMAN DAY 2020 OFFERING

 

THE BLACK WIDOW IS MAKING THE LEAP TO THE BIG SCREEN, SO HERE'S A WEE PRIMER FOR THE LAYMAN

NOTE: This was originally posted on THE VAULT OF BUNCHENESS back in 2009.

Okay, I gotta admit that I wouldn't have known Scarlett Johansson if she were standing right next to me, despite having seen her in EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS a while back. I mean, I'm mostly familiar with her as a voice actor for animated projects like ROBOT CHICKEN or as the charmingly dorky-looking mermaid Princess Mindy in THE SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS MOVIE.

Princess Mindy, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

When people told me Scarlett Johansson was a righteous cutie who had to be seen to be believed, I paid them no mind because I'm not too keen on a lot of today's seemingly factory-issued hot actresses/celebs, but then I found out that the lady looks like this (plus she's a nice Jewish girl, so win):

Yowzamagowcha! That image is straight out of a mid-1970's-era PLAYBOY spread, the kind of thing that very much fit my aesthetic choice back in the days, so when I heard she'd been cast to play Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow, in the upcoming IRON MAN 2, I almost had a heart attack.

Get those two dudes outta the way, goddammit!!!

I have no idea how well Johansson will pull off bringing Marvel Comics' number two super-spy — number one being Nick Fury — to life, but however it pans out I'll be there with bells on because I've been in love with the Black Widow since the very beginning of my geek's journey.

The Black Widow with Marvel's numero uno super-spy, Nick Fury.

Let's set the Wayback Machine to 1971 as a six-year-old Bunche journeyed with his parents to Reno, Nevada. Car trips generally suck out loud at any age but when you're a restless kid they really try one's patience, and I was going mad after hours in the family's leviathan of a green station wagon. When we pulled over at a gas station for a much-needed bathroom and refreshments break, I wandered into the station's general store and looked at all the fascinating items on the magazine rack. There in front of me stood a colorful display of comics featuring characters I knew from the old and horrendously-animated THE MARVEL SUPERHEROES cartoon show (don't get me started on that one; it's fodder for a whole post of its own!), and while I was excited to see the likes of Thor, Captain America and of course the Sub-Mariner, my attention was drawn to a cover featuring a guy in a garish red getup whom I'd never seen before. Curious, I picked up the comic book and flipped through it. In no time I'd decided to give it a try and asked my folks if they'd shell out a quarter to keep me quiet and happy for the remainder of our trip. The twenty-five cents parted company with my dad's wallet and in no time I was introduced to the joys of my very first comic book.

DAREDEVIL #81 (Nov. 1971): My very first comic book and my introduction to two of my all-time favorite characters.

Looking back on it now, DAREDEVIL #81 was a rather tepid affair but it introduced me to Daredevil and, much more importantly for a number of reasons, the Black Widow. The Widow appealed to me because my parents were fans of THE AVENGERS on TV, and the Black Widow in her jet black catsuit reminded me more than a little of the equally-badassed Emma Peel.

The Black Widow swims to Daredevil's rescue and unwittingly begins one of the great partnerships of superherodom.

What I didn't know at the time was that the Widow was originally conceived as a villain during the early days of Iron Man in TALES OF SUSPENSE and in her original incarnation she was pretty much just another in the line of Cold War-era commie bad guys Tony Stark did battle with during what I call his "Red-Baiting" period.

The Black Widow, as seen during her first appearance (TALES OF SUSPENSE #52, April 1964).

Very much an enemy agent from the "moose and squirrel"-accented school of femme fatale villainy, Natasha Romanoff slinked into the life of billionaire playboy Tony Stark and wreaked considerable havoc.

An early cover appearance by the Black Widow. The art's obviously by Jack Kirby, but don't ask me what's up with those magnetic emanations...

The Russkies may have been a pack of un-American, Elvis-hating commie bastards, but they certainly were not stupid. Pitting Natasha against notorious pussy-hound Tony Stark was a brilliant move and our priapic tech-genius took the bait so fast you'd swear you heard a sonic boom in his armored boxer shorts.

Tony Stark, about to discover the meaning of "From Russia With Love."

But Stark soon twigged to what was up with the Russkie redhead and in no time kicked her to the curb (there's a surprise...not!), but she was soon back with a vengeance and seducing a fresh-out-of-the-gate Hawkeye to do her dirty work.

While Hawkeye thinks with his pork-arrow, Natasha rocks it brunette-style. Sorry, baby, but you should never "fix" red hair. It just ain't right! All hail the "ginge minge!!!"

As the Cold War gave way to the Vietnam conflict in the public's consciousness, Marvel re-tooled the Black Widow into a good guy (or gal, if you prefer), giving her a truly ludicrous costume that was later dumped in favor of John Romita Sr.'s famous black catsuit with funky accessories (a cool belt and those big-assed bracelets).

The Widow's original, horribly generic costume...

...thankfully kicked to the curb by John Romita's now classic Emma Peel-inspired look.

Her spy status was upgraded in the wake of the 1960's spy craze, so the Widow found herself a trusted and respected agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., working closely with Nick Fury and Captain America and eventually earning a place among Marvel's preeminent super-team, the Avengers. During all of this she also teamed up with Daredevil, the two of them sharing billing in DD's book, and their romantic relationship served as a defining period for both characters. Looking back at it now, their daily workouts were more or less as close as Marvel could get to depicting foreplay and highly-charged sex of a uniquely athletic variety and I suspect that's one of the draws that kept the readers coming back month after month.

Natasha was certainly Marvel's sexiest female hero at the time and remained so for years — this was before Dave Cockrum breathed life into Storm — thanks in no small part to her being drawn by the likes of Gene Colan during her AMAZING ADVENTURES and DAREDEVIL days, and later Paul Gulacy in a memorable issue of BIZARRE ADVENTURES.

An early Gene Colan take on the Widow.

Colan is best remembered for his hyper-kinetic and moody work on books like DAREDEVIL and TOMB OF DRACULA, but let us not forget that the guy was a master at drawing hot redheads, the other being Beverly Switzler in HOWARD THE DUCK.

Two Gene Colan Beverly Switzler panels (with one in the middle from Frank Brunner), including the classic ship deck bikini figure.

Paul Gulacy, on the other hand, made a name for himself as the dynamic artist of Marvel's Bruce Lee-inspired SHANG CHI: MASTER OF KUNG FU, and since his style already owed a heavy debt to Jim Steranko's legendary 1960's NICK FURY: AGENT OF S.H.I.E.L.D. run, he was a natural for handling the Widow in 1981's excellent BIZARRE ADVENTURES #25.

BIZARRE ADVENTURES #25, featuring what may be the best-drawn Black Widow story ever. And not only that, but you also get Michael Golden on Lady Daemon (sadly a one-shot) and Marshall Rogers and Joe Rubenstein on Daughters of the Dragon, so track this sucker down on eBay right now!

Confusing Ralph Macchio script aside, the black & white artwork on the Black Widow story in that issue is incredible and ranks among the best stuff ever to come out of Marvel, and is easily Gulacy's magnum opus. He clearly gets the James Bondian aspect of the character and renders her as a lithe, lethal and totally efficient master of hand-to-hand combat and weapons skills. Seriously, check out some of this stuff:

A hungover Natasha receives a note at the beginning of the story.

Oooh, that's gotta hurt!

There are times when martial arts are appropriate, but some situations just call for a good ol' service rifle. Namely when you absolutely, positively gotta kill every muthafukka in the room!

A terrific portrait of Natasha that reminds me more than a little of British actress Jenny Agutter. (I think it's the eyes.)

Now that you non-geeks have some small clue who the Black Widow is and why she's so cool, I've gotta say that though I'm psyched to know she's in IRON MAN 2 and looking hot as a motherfucker, I doubt Johansson will make the character work. She just doesn't fill me with the sense of capable super-spy-as-superhero that Natasha exudes and she's way too non-Russkie-looking, but I'll see the film nonetheless. Let's just hope a rushed script and a questionable "moose and squirrel" accent don't make the bigscreen version of Natasha a laughingstock. (Not that the average horndog is gonna complain either way, mind you.)

Scarlett Johansson works the catsuit.

A WEE TASTE OF MANHATTAN'S SIDEWALK SLEAZE

From 2005.

While walking down 14th Street on Saturday I passed a thirty-something black dude who was manning one of the city’s donation posts for the homeless and witnessed the following smooth move directed toward a girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old.

BLACK DUDE (to teenage girl): Girl! I said GIRL!!! Yeah, YOU! When you eighteen, IT’S ON!!!

You may now shudder as the creep factor engulfs your very soul.

A JAW-DROPPING TIME WARP BACK TO THE SEVENTIES: THE 1976 ABC PAUL LYNDE HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

From 2004.

A while ago, I got my hands on what amounts to a wrenching time warp gene-spliced with a memory-jogging roundhouse kick in the skull, and that item is a DVD of the 1976 Paul Lynde Halloween Special. I know it isn't a movie per se, but I include it here because, well...

Holy fuckin’ Jesus…

If you are of an age that recalls the truly out-of-control excesses of the 1970’s occurring right around the time that you were either waging battles with rudely autonomous public hardons or your crotch hemorrhaging on a monthly basis while your nascent jubblies were first making themselves known, then you no doubt remember the loopy television of that era, television that reflected the “who gives a fuck?” vitality of that cocaine-fueled decade; TV fluff that literally was an opiate for the masses, granting us adolescents refuge from the steadily escalating rigmarole of leaving childhood behind. It seemed that after the cookie cutter, antiseptic fare of the 1950’s and the increasingly bizarre offerings of the 1960’s — to say nothing of the social upheavals that shook the US in both of those decades — network execs had an anything-goes attitude and approach to programming, no doubt spawned by massive consumption of booze and illicit recreational pharmaceuticals, and a veritable avalanche of cheese cornucopiaed its way out of our cathode ray altars.

The networks latched on to whatever was the current fad — disco (original flavor and the roller variety), CB radios and truckers, the kung fu boom, nostalgia for “the good old days,” sci-fi that was more action-oriented than cerebral, hot chicks with feathered hair and nipples as hard as your thumb — and quickly spewed it forth in a diluted fashion onto the airwaves. And then there were the “celebrities” who appeared on virtually every show under the sun, stars like Charo, Dick Gautier (remember him?), Charles Nelson Reilly, Ruth Buzzi, Joey Heatherton, Rich Little, John Byner, and the cultural criminals responsible for subjecting us to mime in primetime, Shields and Yarnell. The list is just as endless as it is riddled with mediocrity.

And the grand poobah of showing up on TV specials and guest starring all over the whole of creation was everyone’s favorite vicious alcoholic queen, the incomparable Paul Lynde.

Legendary throughout Hollywood for his downright sadistic wit and rampaging homosexuality (that was not, technically speaking, public knowledge but was as obvious as the dick on a bull elephant), Lynde gained a name for himself first as a stage actor and standup comedian, achieved TV immortality as the irrepressible and flaming Uncle Arthur on “Bewitched,” and reigned supreme as the resident snarkmeister on “The Hollywood Squares,” a show that he would tape after sucking down copious amounts of booze. It was widely agreed upon that Lynde was already a sharp-tongued S.O.B., but when he had a few drinks in him he became Josef Mengele (according to latter day raging Hollywood queen and bear, Bruce Villanch, who incidentally co-wrote the Halloween special this article will shortly get around to recapping), and nowhere was that more apparent than on “Squares,” a long-running gig that made Lynde rich and introduced us impressionable youngsters to rude, raunchy and hilarious gay humor that went as far as Lynde could get away with for the time; even today some of his quips would never have gotten past the watchdogs at Network Standards and Practices, especially after Janet Jackson so kindly treated us to an unwanted glimpse of her right dairy during an annual festival of man-on-man brutality and ads for Viagra and beer and the networks went into an Islamic-jihad-like frenzy of shielding the public from “indecent” material.

Needless to say, Lynde was extremely popular and, never too slow on the uptake when it came to potential ratings, the networks milked his catty groove for all it was worth and shoehorned him into any available showcase, no matter how ill suited to his unique brand of bitchery. He appeared in an avalanche of absolute garbage that would have amounted to career seppuku for anyone else, but since he was savvy — and drunk — enough to be aware of just how lousy much of the TV gigs he got were, he rose (or sank) to the level of what he had to work with and became the shining yellow nugget of corn at the precipice of a mountain of shit; no line was too corny and no bit was too shameless for Paul Lynde, and he camped it up to such a degree that one had no conscious choice but to sit in front of the tube and stare like a drooling mongoloid.

Lynde’s 1976 Halloween special is nothing less than a spectacle of cosmic awfulness, something so mind-warping that you could no sooner turn away from it than you would turn away from witnessing the president holding a press conference and suddenly seeing him whip out his turkey neck of a pecker and actually piss out a surf board-riding Jesus Christ who was not only on fire but wearing assless leather chaps while screaming “Hey, kids! It’s the Second Coming!,” at which point Condaleeza Rice begins savagely masturbating on camera with a gravy-smothered leg of Kentucky Fried Chicken and singing “Old Man River.” It’s on a level with the infamous “Star Wars Holiday Special” but unlike that dead-in-the-water Hiroshima of the small screen, Lynde’s show at least has the decency of being mesmerizingly, entertainingly bad.

So just what is contained in the special that makes it so Christfuckingly bad? Here’s a play-by-play breakdown:

SCENE ONE- Paul Lynde is gaily mincing around his home in full Santa Claus drag and singing “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” and decorating a Christmas tree when his housekeeper (Margaret Hamilton, best known as the Wicked Witch of the West in THE WIZARD OF OZ, and later Cora the Coffee Lady in Maxwell House adverts) shows up and lets him know that it ain’t Christmas. Lynde snippily dismisses her with a disdainfully sneered “Why don’t you go dust?” and the camera zooms in on his face as we see that he has just had a clever idea. Cut to Lynde starting the scene over again in an horrendous Easter Bunny outfit, singing “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” (by this point during the original broadcast I would imagine that thousands of closets across the nation flung open with a sonic boom as many “sensitive and artistic” young men burst forth and said “fuck you” to a country that hates fags yet gobbles up entertainment created by gays like it was a really good batch of General Tso’s chicken, this particular special being a case in point), only to be clued in on the fact that it ain’t Easter. Lynde again gets an idea and suddenly we are treated to him in a Hugh Hefner-style red smoking jacket holding a huge heart-shaped box of chocolates while mangling “My Funny Valentine” and sitting on one of the ugliest couches in the entire history of furniture, even by the questionable standards of the mid-1970’s. Again, Hamilton shows up and finally clues him in to the fact that it’s Halloween, amidst much allegedly witty dialogue. Then we get the announcer stating:

“It’s the Paul Lynde Halloween Special! Starring Paul Lynde! With Paul’s special guests Tim Conway! Roz “Pinky Tuscadero” Kelly! Margaret Hamilton! Billie Hayes! (NOTE: she is best known as Witchie-Poo from “H.R. Pufnstuff”) Billy Barty! (the legendary dwarf actor) And special guest star Florence Henderson! A special appearance by Betty White (before she was two-hundred)! And a rock ‘n’ roll explosion, Kiss! And now, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special!”

SCENE TWO- Lynde launches into a staggeringly stale introductory monologue, followed by a re-written for Halloween version of “Kids,” his signature number from his role in the Broadway show “Bye Bye, Birdie.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, the stage is suddenly infested with poorly choreographed dancers in cheesy devil outfits — accessorized with dime store plastic pitchforks — who antagonize Lynde, but don’t have the decency to kill him, thereby preventing this atrocity from continuing. After being tied up and forced to dance in a satanic chorus line while lyrically bitching about how “there’s too much Alice Cooper, not enough Alice Faye,” Lynde is unceremoniously dumped into a garbage can by celebrated Mormon icons of ‘70’s TV schlock Donny and Marie Osmond (who happen to be dressed in devil suits). The garbage can then explodes for no adequately explained reason.

SCENE THREE- Lynde’s housekeeper drives him to her sister’s house in order to keep him away from the horrible kids of the previous scene, and we immediately discover that the housekeeper and her sister are actually card-carrying witches, specifically the Wicked Witch of the West and Witchie-Poo, both in their famous costumes and totally in character. They let him know that they want him to help them soften the worldwide image of witches despite centuries of evidence which they both deny, with the exception of the torments that Dorothy went through, which were justified because “she had it coming.” Then, Miss Halloween 1976 shows up, courtesy of a terrible video special defect, and it’s Betty White. She totally disses Paul Lynde, disappointed that he’s not Paul Newman (who was supposed to be her prize for winning the coveted title), and she bitches out the two witches as to why they couldn’t have gotten another famous Paul, such as Paul Williams, Paul McCartney, Les Paul, Saint Paul or even Pall Mall. She then disappears after pronouncing Lynde “a nobody.” Anyway, the witches promise him three wishes if he helps them in their cause, and his first wish is to be — now get this — a trucker. He is immediately transformed into what appears to be a Village People reject in a silver, rhinestone-studded jumpsuit with “Big Red” inexplicably emblazoned across the back, and a Tom of Finland-style matching cap.

Paul Lynde as The Rhinestone Trucker. No, you have not gone completely barking insane. This actually happened!

He also sings the indescribably trite “Rhinestone Trucker” jingle and hops into the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. We are then “treated” to the romantic rivalry between the Rhinestone Trucker and another rig jockey (Tim Conway, proving just how unfunny he was when not on “The Carol Burnett Show,” a trend that would continue in his later efforts as the vertically-challenged Dorf) over the attentions of Kinky Pinky (Roz Kelly). This sketch goes on for a short eternity and is replete with gags that were old when dirt was invented. The whole car wreck culminates in an overwrought square dance/disco number that will make you want to eat your own buttocks while jamming a rusty screwdriver into your eardrums. The unhappy ending features the Rhinestone Trucker marrying a woman.

SCENE FOUR- after the previous idiotic scenario plays itself out, Lynde returns to the witches’ place and is offered some soothing chamber music by Kiss. They lip synch through “Detroit Rock City” with all the convincingness of Ashlee Simpson on “Saturday Night Live” while a smoke machine is truly put to the test (or maybe it was the runoff from all of the joints that surely blazed on set during this fiasco). And not that we didn’t already know they looked like idiots, but Kiss’ makeup gimmick has seldom looked more stupid than it did here.

SCENE FIVE- Lynde then goes for wish number two, namely being turned into a Valentino-esque desert sheik, complete with enormous hoop earring, who is vastly wealthy and a master seducer who goes by the name “Florence of Arabia.” He then attempts to force his lusty will upon captive Englishwoman Florence Henderson… Their lip lock will make you cringe, I swear to God. Tim Conway shows up again as a member of the French Foreign Legion who attempts to save Florence Henderson from the swishy sheik. Sheer torture, folks.

SCENE SIX- The Wicked Witch of the West engages in painfully unfunny banter with her diminutive butler (Billy Barty) until Lynde pops back to the scary house. Paul selflessly sacrifices his last wish to the witches, who want nothing more than to go to a Hollywood disco; at this point, the show becomes truly impossible to turn away from since it is a cavalcade of bad TV-friendly discotheque antics such as Lynde spewing forth wretched one-liners (one of which involves bestiality between Tim Conway and an unwilling monkey), Florence Henderson performing a “disco” version of “That Old Black Magic,” and Peter Chris subjecting us to that wimpiest of Kiss tunes, “Beth” (in which the endless close-ups prove that Chris was bloated even then and that though his makeup is allegedly supposed to represent a cat, he looks like a “kitty”), as the band nods in approval as if to say “Yo, man. That shit is deep.” Then Lynde trades ultra-pitiful quips with Kiss until they take pity on the audience and lip synch “King of the Nighttime World.” Then, in a sequence that nearly caused me to have a seizure, Paul asks Roz Kelly to teach him some happenin’ disco moves and she launches into a version of “Disco lady” that somehow manages to be more noxious than the actual hit version. Then, incredibly, Lynde trumps that by singing the song himself; you have not lived until you witness all of the guest stars awkwardly shaking their groove thangs as the queerest man in the universe utters the lines “Move it in, move it out, move it in, and about, disco baby! I like that funky stuff!” Yes, you read that right.

EPILOGUE- Paul Lynde takes time to thank all of his guests and then commits the ultimate Halloween prank by ending the show on a freeze-frame of himself kissing the Wicked Witch of the West full on the mouth as his voice-over exclaims “Happy Halloween, everybody!”

I now have a perennial to run each Halloween, a confection more horrifying than THE EXORCIST, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and FACES OF DEATH combined. Fuck, I miss Paul Lynde…

THE SUBWAY AT RUSH HOUR AND THE UNWELCOME PROXIMITY OF HUMANITY

From 2004.

 (photo cribbed from BUSINESS INSIDER)

So I decided to venture into Manhattan and hit my favorite comic shop despite the cold, wet and generally foul weather. For those not residing within New York City's five boroughs, service on its infamous grafitti-bescrawled subways can be pretty bad and it only gets worse during rush hour and especially the weekend hours thanks to track maintainance and construction; today I had to put up with the inevitable delays spawned by the double whammy of both rush hour getting underway and the weekend schedule buttfuckery commencing at the same time.

After conducting my business at the comic shop I waited for quite some time to board a very late R train back to my little oasis in Brooklyn and finally secured a seat in the humid, puddle-ridden car. The PA squawked out an announcement that informed riders that the train would be making express stops from 34th Street through Canal Street, and while that announcement deterred those members of the sweaty throng who needed the local stops there were still more than enough willing riders and presently the car was packed tighter than the ass of a kid during a sleepover at Michael Jackson's house.

I found myself fortunate enough to obtain a seat right next to the door, but my good fortune quickly turned into a stiff-fingered "fuck you" from the subway gods when a huge, sweaty food giant wedged his three-and-a-half-foot wide asscheeks right next to my head. As his sandbag of a butt hung over the seat's sidewall and wobbled like a seizuring Jell-O mold mere centimeters from my face I became aware that this snacking gargantua was clearly ignorant of the most basic rule of human hygiene: YOU GOTS TA WASH YER ASS.

The flabby cheeks exuded a pungent bouquet of unscrubbed feces, sweat and old Romano cheese, a stench so strong that I could have sworn that it was being blown directly into my face by a powerful gust of wind (which in fact it may have been), and though this ill zephyr tortured my nostrils I was not about to give up my seat; there was nowhere to move to and I would have ended up standing for god knows how long, and if you have ever been stuck in such a situation you know what a short-fused agony that can be. Sadly, I resolved to endure the unwelcome ass-fest in hope that the offender would eventually disembark in order to continue his perpetual search for the perfect bag of pork rinds.

All of the mind-clearing meditative aspects of the Eastern disciplines that I have dabbled in were summoned up in order to ensure my survival of this most hostile ass-ault, and the shambling mound of flesh stayed put all the way to DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn, bringing my nasal violation to a running time of twenty minutes.

And to add insult to injury, when the train reached the stop just before mine it was announced that in order to make up for the previous delays the train would once more be making express stops, skipping my station and continuing on for another forty blocks. If I wanted to make the local stops I would have to stay on until 36th Street and head back on a Manhattan bound train, thereby extending the trip by at least another half hour. I opted to get off and walk the ten blocks to my apartment, rain be damned. Well, after two violations I figured that I could handle the comparatively mild inconvenience of a bit of drizzle, and the fresh air certainly cleared the last fetid vestiges of sweaty buttcrack from my olfactory system, so I sort of won after all.

MOON DANCE by S.P. Somtow (1989)

A review of a must-read novel for horror fans. Especially for those of us who favor werewolves.

I'd heard of this described both as "the Great American werewolf novel" and also "the GONE WITH THE WIND of lycanthropy," so as a fan of lycanthropes how could I not be intrigued?

Somtow crafts an epic tale of European immigrants coming to the dying Wild West in hope of setting up a colony where their community of werewolves can hunt and thrive without being hunted to extermination by normal humans, but what they don't take into account is that the area they've chosen might already be home to another community of shape-shifters, this time of the Injun variety. Anyone who's read a western novel or seen a western movie in the past forty years knows that situation will lead to a clash of native spiritualism and European devaluing and destruction of a "lower" culture, and that's exactly what this book is about.

This epic unfolds amid a framing device where a young writer in 1963 seeks out a mental institution in South Dakota that's home to an aged inmate with multiple personalities who committed a series of hideous psycho-sexual murders, violent atrocities that earned him infamy as "the Laramie Ripper." As the writer interviews the madman, she discovers that he, or rather one of his personalities, was prophesied by the shapeshifting Shungmanitou tribe as a messiah who would bridge the gap between man and beast and heal the world in the process. But the road to that clearly failed mission is a long, hard and cruel odyssey of genocide, unbridled racial hatred, scads of brutal western-style violence — i.e. loads of shootings, scalpings, torture and rape — Native American metaphysics and examinations of exactly what may or may not separate man from beast, all populated with a cast where every single character is earmarked for some sort of tragedy.

MOON DANCE is first and foremost a western on an operatic scale, and if not for the lycanthropy hook it would have been a straight-up downer western to rival SOLDIER BLUE (although much better written). It is utterly unflinching in its depiction of a filthy, nasty west whose spirit is being ravaged by the juggernaut of Western Expansion and the decimation of indigenous peoples (and the Chinese, in sequences that are genuinely stomach-turning), and the violence and gore will no doubt be extremely off-putting to some readers (but not me, lemme tell ya!).

The other element that might not sit well with some is the rather sensible depiction of the habits and behaviors of the werewolves, both Eurotrash and Injun, which includes such wolflike traits as relentless scent-marking (even when in human form), disturbing displays of dominance that are equivalent to rape and torture (depending on how one looks at it), and the powerful and visceral effect that certain smells have in causing sexual arousal in the werewolves and the humans caught helplessly in their thrall. The description of a redheaded female werewolf's shameless presenting of her befurred, menstrually-dripping nether parts to a cavalry officer she seeks to mark as hers is at once utterly revolting and highly erotically charged (the bit where she pretty much paints his face is so graphic that you'll damned near feel like it's happening to you), so if grotty imagery of human and inhumanly bestial shape-shifters engaging in all kinds of ultra-animalistic sexual shenanigans disturbs you, I suggest you give this one a miss.

MOON DANCE is extremely well written and is much better than many horror stories I've read, especially those featuring werewolves — my favorite archetypal monster, but they always get the shit end of the stick when it comes to fiction, although the wolves in this book probably wouldn't balk at a doody-covered stick — and its epic length is definitely worth making one's way through. My only real caveat is that it's a major downer from start to finish, and even the bright spots that really communicate the sacred and beautiful connection between the shape-shifters and the natural order of things cannot lift the tale's inevitable and depressing conclusion. We know what happened to the Indians in real life so you already know how this story ends, but the storytelling magic lies in the book's ability to compel as we journey along with the characters to a bleak oblivion.

And if there is a Hell for fictional characters, I sincerely hope that both the incredibly evil and sadistic Cordwainer Claggart and United States Cavalry Colonel Sanderson are suffering an enduring and vitriolic torment for the agonizes they wrought upon many characters in this book. Both are among the most heinous villains I've ever encountered in literature, and they will leave an indelible mark upon any who read MOON DANCE.
Lastly, what with Hollywood mining all corners for movie fodder, I strongly doubt that MOON DANCE could ever be successfully translated to the big screen with its spirit and intent intact for a number of reasons. Its scope alone would prove cost-prohibitive, and then there are the understandably touchy depictions of Native American genocide — something covered to nigh-unwatchable effect in SOLDIER BLUE — and the ultra-gory ravaging and gleeful disembowelings perpetrated by the werewolves. The assorted acts of cruelty and gender-regardless rape and torture committed by Claggart and Sanderson would push this straight into instant NC-17 territory, even if handled with restraint (how?), and don't even get me started on all the territorial pissing (even on people) and wolf/human sex... The MPAA's collective head would explode!

THE ROMANTIC FLOWER (1990)

Nothing major, here. Just a recommendation of a graphic novel that I adore.

I'd recently had it on my mind, so I dug around through my apartment's stacks and unearthed THE ROMANTIC FLOWER (1990) for a long-overdue read. At first glance it appears to be a standard European erotic graphic novel, perhaps a Milo Manara knockoff, that might be read and swiftly forgotten among the legion of such material, but this effort rises above the pack by virtue of its truly gorgeous art and a touching, lyrical story. 

 

The titular character is an anthropomorphic bit of flora that learns to adore the Earth and its inhabitants thanks to being influenced by and participating in acts of human sexuality. Though technically X-rated in content, the story is in no way offensive and the sexual encounters are never portrayed in a less-than-warm and positive light. In fact, it's downright sweet and has a truly feel-good tone throughout, even when its surprisingly downbeat ending hits. (The plant does not die but events take a quite unexpected turn...) 

Highly recommended, plus it makes a great gift for those who won't be put off by its frank (but utterly charming) nature, so pick up a copy. (Used copies are available on Amazon for very reasonable prices.)