Flashback Universe Blog

The Warlord Omnibus and Paper Stock

2026-04-02T07:00:00.003-04:00

Though I've mentioned it before, I haven't talked about DC's Warlord by Mike Grell Omnibus Vol. 1 here since it came out, which is kind of a lapse given how many years I spent blogging about Warlord!

Anyway, the first thing one notices about this omnibus is how much lighter it feels than most. Opening it, you can see why: it's on a different type of paper than most omnis. When it came out, there was a lot of discussion of it being "on newsprint" with some fans angry it wasn't on the glossy paper they were expecting, and others appreciating it being closer in appearance to the original issues. Well, it isn't on newsprint, but it is on a slightly off-white paper with a matte finish. I'm sure I've seen some trade paperbacks from DC on this sort of paper before.

Here's some images I snagged from reddit:

And here's a comparison with the interiors of an old issue. The omni is on the right:

Apparently, this new paper stock is the wave of the future for Bronze Age omnis at DC. According to Near Mint Condition, the Swamp Thing: Dark Genesis two-volume omnibus will be printed on a similar paper stock (with (re-)remastered color to match the original comics), and the solicitation for the new 2026 edition of the Kamandi by Jack Kirby Omnibus says it will be printed on "period appropriate paper."

I'm sure some fans don't like this paper, but I feel like it is truer to the original comics, so I think it's a step in a positive direction. I'd like to see Marvel do this, too.

Spells Against Civility Progress Report

2026-03-26T08:00:00.001-04:00

Jason Sholtis and I are still working on our 2-page comic for the first issue of the Swords Against! Sword & Sorcery anthology. Jason sent me the inked first page so I could start laying out the lettering, and that's what the images here are from, though there is a still some clean-up and shadowing to come on the art.

This is how it starts with the barbarian Karkath:

And this is how it ends for him:

Good Boy (2025)

2026-03-17T09:07:00.026-04:00

I watched Good Boy this weekend on Prime Video. It's an indie horror film that I had heard about due to it receiving a bit of buzz (and some festival awards). The directorial debut of Ben Leonberg, it stars his dog, Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. The high concept here: a horror movie told from the dog's point of view.

In the film, Indy's owner is Todd, a young man suffering from some sort of life-threatening, progressive lung condition. After a recent hospitalization, Todd gives up his apartment in New York and heads for his grandfather's house in a rural area, a house that has been abandoned since his grandfather's relatively recent death. His sister says it's cursed and we learn that apparently more than one of their relatives has died there.

Indy certainly experiences a sense of foreboding from the moment of their arrival, catching glimpses of a dark figure, moving shadows, and disturbing visions featuring Todd's grandfather's dog, who we learn has been missing since the grandfather's death. As Todd's condition worsens, and he pushes away both Indy and his siter, Indy has nightmares of being attacked by a figure drenched in thick, black mud.

The film is a bit of a slow burn, but it's only 74 minutes in runtime, so doesn't stretch things too much. Indy is an expressive and sympathetic protagonists, unprepared and alone facing the rising menace.

A spoiler but an important note for dog-lovers: Indy survives.

Now I want to get a bit more spoilery and discuss what I feel is an interesting aspect of the film. I don't think reading about this would diminish the enjoyment of it, but you have been warned...

When I first heard about this move, I assumed it was a horror film told from the perspective of the dog. And there's certainly an argument for that. Having seen it, though, I interpret it more as a film of a dog's horror. That is, it is a situation that would not necessarily be horrific (though likely traumatic) to a human but is horror from a dog's perspective.

I think the apparent horrors we see depicted are mostly in Indy's mind. They are his interpretation of his knowledge of his owner's impending death. Supporting this view is the fact that the same sorts of phenomena Indy experiences in the supposedly cursed home, we already see hints of in the New York apartment. Indy senses the approach of Todd's death, and he personifies it into a tangible thing, a darkness stalking his owner.

You could interpret the film as having no supernatural element at all but instead visually representing the psychological state of its canine protagonist. In fact, statements by Leonberg encourage this reading, not exclusively, but as an interpretation he wanted the film to permit.

My view, based on the events as depicted, is that Indy can in fact see ghosts, but there is no supernatural monster or curse, just death and the fear of the loss associated with it.

Spells Against Civility

2026-03-12T07:00:00.001-04:00

Paul Wolfe of Mystic Bull Games is starting up a Sword & Sorcery fiction magazine called Swords Against! The first issue is being crowdfunded now. It features stories by familiar names including Michael Stackpole and Dariel R. A. Quiogue, and interior art by Jason Sholtis (presumably among others).

If that alone isn't enough to convince to you, Jason and I have short comic that will appear in the issue now that that stretch goal has been surpassed. It's called Spells Against Civility. Here's the pitch:

Harken to this tale of two rival wizards, apprenticed together, now alike in Art, pettiness, and vainglory...

Marzomon, once the Golden, former hero whose reputation fell under shadow of cowardice and party abandonment. He now ekes out a living trading on his former glories and hawking dubious male enhancement magics.

Hokus the Black, who sold his soul and other vital constituencies piecemeal to various diabolic entities and must stay ahead of his creditors as he seeks to overcome his rival.

Jason and I are doing this story via the "Marvel Method" where I wrote a plot, he's drawing the pages, then I'll script (and letter). Here's Jason's rough of the first page:

If any of the above sounds cool to you--and particularly if all of it does--then head over to backerkit and give some support! Only a few days left.

Battle Chasers

2026-02-26T07:00:00.025-05:00

I think I read Battle Chasers #1 when it was released back in 1998. It didn't grab me. Primarily, it wasn't the sort of fantasy I was interested in at that (I was a bit more finicky then than I am now), and the delays I heard about that the series was plagued with never caused me to regret that decision.

But, you know, time passes. I have a greater appreciation for Madureira's influences today than I did then, and novelty and variety in my reading is more important. So, when I saw the entire series (Of the original run. The 2023 follow-up issues haven't been collected.) for pretty cheap in digital format, I picked it up.

The plot of Battle Chasers is pretty standard fantasy stuff. The young daughter of a warrior is pursued by the forces of evil, but luckily, she's able to assemble a band of reluctant heroes around her--and wield powerful magical artifacts that once belonged to her father--to save the land.

Late 90s time capsule that it is, it's a lot. There's a lot of detail on the page; bombastic characters with bombastic designs. Coloring and lettering are really in your face, exuberant with the capabilities that digital technology offered (and to be fair, a certain excessiveness is sometimes still observed today's comics in those areas). It also feels earnest and bursting with ideas, which if not really novel, are at least pretty cool.

I wish there had been more of it to see how it developed. I hear there was eventually an computer game, which is really probably bringing the concept full circle.

The Bravestarr Bible

2026-02-12T07:00:00.001-05:00

Poking around the Internet Archive yesterday, I discovered the series bible to BraveStarr, the 1987 Space Western from Filmation. The most interesting part to me was the illustration. They aren't credited, but some of them have a bit of Moebius vibe.

Others strike a gritty tone that the series and remind me of illustration in pulp magazines.

Nice and evocative, and a different tone than the eventual series.

Classic TV Flashback: More Thoughts on Space: 1999

2026-02-05T07:00:00.001-05:00

Anne is a friend and blogging compatriot (she has a rpg blog at DIY & Dragons and a book/film blog at The Lunar Flaneur), and since the algorithms now classify her as "old," she just started watching Space: 1999. I asked her to share her thoughts:

On most streaming services, the "recommended for you" section is usually just a mix of whatever's currently popular, plus advice to rewatch things I've already viewed on the service. But watching It's A Wonderful Life over the holidays seems to have unlocked a new tier of algorithmic recommendations, for what I might charitably describe as mature audiences. Yes, the robots have decided I'm OLD.

Scrolling through the "Shows for Old People," I spotted Space: 1999, a British sci-fi show from the mid-70s that I knew almost nothing about, except that Modiphius recently released a licensed game for it and it was previously reviewed right here on Flashback Universe.

As I write this, I've watched the first 9 episodes of the first season. Here are my thoughts so far.

My very first impression of the show was that they had clearly invested a lot of time, effort, and money into the props, the sets, the miniatures. Our setting is Moonbase Alpha, currently the distant and advanced scientific facility in the solar system. The interiors resemble the utilitarian aesthetic of a naval vessel or an Antarctic research station. We see halls, control rooms, laboratories, an atomic reactor to generate power for the base. The models representing the exterior of the station or its shuttle crafts are styled to look like something NASA might produce with enough budget, like something from the art of Robert McCall. When people go outside, they wear spacesuits. The action on the moon's exterior uses wirework and maybe a bit of slow motion to recreate the appearance of low gravity.

I find it impossible not to compare the show to Star Trek, and my initial impression of Space: 1999 is that it's intended to be more realistic than Trek, and that it's going to have better production values. We're on the Earth's moon rather than across the galaxy. We're in the near future of our own society, rather than centuries distant in a post-scarcity utopia. The models representing the exterior of the station and its shuttle crafts have nubbly, detailed surfaces like the Death Star or a Borg Cube rather than the smooth shell of the Enterprise. There's no warp drive, no matter transporters, no replicators.

The uniforms are drab jumpsuits, without the primary color vibrancy of Trek's outfits. The characterization, at least initially, is almost purely professional. These people have jobs, duties, roles, not personality or idiosyncrasy or charisma. It's hard to tell the extras from the leads. They're all on a first-name basis, so we get Alan, Victor, and John instead of Scotty, Bones, Spock, or Kirk. The computer has no voice. A dozen decisions have deprived these characters of Star Trek's techniques for giving them vitality and individuality, and too little has been done to put any back. Although each episode is under an hour, they're paced so slowly that they feel longer.

For all that, Space: 1999 is absolutely not a realistic show. What this setup accomplishes is to take an ensemble of hard sci-fi professionals and throw them each week into far more fantastical scenarios, which they are in no way prepared for. And they are, quite literally, thrown. By the end of the first episode, the moon has been knocked out of orbit by an atomic explosion on its surface, becoming a rogue planet on an unstoppable one-way trip to the depths of space. The mechanism is something like Iain Banks's Feersum Endjinn or Cixin Liu's The Wandering Earth, the effect like The Odyssey or Harry Martinson's Aniara or Star Trek: Voyager or any of a dozen other stories about lost ships that can't return home. The show's frisson comes from the contrast between the crew of contemporary scientists and the otherworldly, scientifically impossible threats they find themselves faced with. It's a style of science fiction that reminds me of Forbidden Planet or The Black Hole, a style that's about to be buried by the runaway success of Star Wars.

So far, I think I've identified two main types of episodes. In the first, our heroes find themselves trapped in the plot of a disaster movie or creature feature. In the second, they encounter psychic aliens from an ancient and highly advanced society that is nonetheless nearing the end of its lifespan, that will either be rejuvenated or utterly destroyed by contact with the modern day humans on Moonbase Alpha. In both cases, the lunar scientists are very, VERY badly outmatched by a situation that they can't possibly hope to overcome or master, only, at best, survive.

The disaster and monster episodes are almost like horror movies. In the first few, SO many people die and so many buildings explode that you have to think, if they carried on like that, it would soon defy belief that there's any moonbase remaining to carry on the voyage, or any survivors left to crew it. These episodes are LOUD. The difference between the sound effects and the dialogue level is shocking. Monsters scream, broken machinery wails, the wind roars as atmosphere escapes through a breach into space.

In the second episode, a crew member is possessed by an alien entity that turns him into a kind of vampire for heat. He freezes half a dozen people to death just by touching them before eventually blowing up a nuclear reactor while trying to embrace its warmth. In the eighth, another crewmember is tormented by the siren call of a giant tentacled beast with a single glowing eye, a monstrosity that wouldn't look out of place on the set of Atomic Submarine, and that Trey informs me was likely inspired by a monster in an Italian sword-and-sandal epic [At least the internet thinks so! - Trey]. These episodes really feel like encounters with an earlier era of scifi storytelling. Compare those two to the salt vampire or the monstrous-looking Horta from Star Trek - in Trek both are motivated by comprehensible desires like hunger or protection, not just alien malevolence. And in Trek, both are intelligent and able to communicate; in Space they make noise but never speak.

The second type of episode is a little harder for me to classify. The aliens are all either literally human or human-looking, and they all wear colorful, flowy space fashion that contrasts with the crew's bland uniforms. They've all been from technologically and socially advanced societies, often worlds that've had spacefaring technology for longer than humans have had bronze tools or writing. But there's more in common than that. They're nearly all psychic, able to read the crew's thoughts. They're nearly all trying to deceive the crew in some way. They're all set in their ways, locked in some sort of pattern they would otherwise remain in indefinitely. For all of them, their encounter with the rogue moon is existential - meeting humanity will change everything, maybe setting them on a better path, maybe causing their extinction. For the crew of Alpha, finding a way through whatever trap's been set requires navigating a conflict between the ideal and the material, between mind and body, between appearance and actuality.

In the third episode, the moon is set to collide with another planet, but they're asked to take a leap of faith and believe that the merest touch will cause the fatal obstacle to sublime away to a higher plane of existence. In the fourth, aliens who can turn idea into matter show the crew a vision of the catastrophe that would result if they actually made contact. In the fifth episode, they're invited to join a society where everyone is immortal but no one can change, and every day is just like the last. In the ninth, they're again offered membership in an alien society, and again the offer carries much greater costs than are initially apparent.

I'm certain that Space: 1999 was influenced by the original series of Star Trek. Probably some aspects of the show are deliberate imitations, others I think must be attempts to improve on Trek or distinguish Space by charting a different course. I wonder, but I don't know, if Space influenced The Next Generation at all. The base's doctor, Helena, reminds me of Beverly Crusher. In the seventh episode "Alpha Child," an alien warlord implants his consciousness into the mind of a newborn and then rapid-grows its body; it's quite similar to what happens to Counselor Troi in "The Child." The ninth episode I mentioned, "Mission of the Darians," has a divided society that resembles the one in "Up the Long Ladder." It's certainly not conclusive, just enough to make me wonder.

American Flagg! Omnibus on the Way

2026-01-29T07:00:00.003-05:00

A week or so ago, I saw that Image was putting out a Howard Chaykin's American Flagg! Omnibus. There's now a pre-order listing up on Amazon. It says it will be 1064 pages and contain issues 1-30 plus the American Flagg! Special. That would leave twenty more issues for this first series and then the 12 issues of the 1988 series, Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!

I have the Dynamic forces definitive collection hardcover of the first 14 issues (which is really the best of the series), but it will be great to have the whole thing in an omnibus. It's a seldom discussed, but seminal in many ways, comic of the 1980s.

The omnibus is scheduled to be released October 27.

The Last Abraxan

2026-01-22T07:00:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a YouTube video about a recent Kickstarter by Mike Ortiz for a retro Bronze Age Marvel sci-fi superhero comic, something inspired by the works of the likes of David Anthony Kraft, Steve Gerber, and of course, Jim Starlin. Not only is the comic told in the particular idiom of 70s Marvel, colored in halftone dots, and features fake ads homaging common ones of the day, but the physical copy is also printed on newsprint.

Well, I had to get a copy, and I can safely say, this was truly a labor of love by Ortiz. The detail that went into the product is impressive. You can get a hint of all of that in the "making of" features on the website. In the physical copy order, there were also extras like stickers and hardcopies of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe style file entries.

The story is definitely in the Bronze Age style, though leans a bit tongue-in-cheek. The art and design complete capture the inspirations.

The Elusive Volume

2026-01-15T07:00:00.001-05:00

In try to run down various hardcover comics-related series, it always seems like there's one volume that's unusually rare and doesn't show up very often--and when it does people want more for it. You can get the others fairly easy, but that one elusive volume makes it hard to complete the set without really paying for it.

Lately, it seems like that volume is number 2.

Over the holidays, I was trying to complete the sets of Star Hawks, the newspaper strip by Goulart and Kane, collected in three volumes by IDW in 2017. I got volumes 1 and 3 fairly easily, but 2 doesn't seem to show up in a price range I'm willing to pay for it. It doesn't show up as often and some places goes for 4-5 times as much!

Then there's the Star Wars newspaper strip collections also from IDW. Here, there's supposedly a Marvel Omnibus coming, but I assume it will be based on the Dark Horse reprints that were arranged in portrait, comic book format and colored, and I don't think they are planning on reprinting the earliest, Russ Manning strips. Here again, the second volume with the great Al Williamson material is the tricky one to find. Not quite as bad as Star Hawks, but the available ones tend be in pretty heavily used condition. I finally relented and got one, though.

So what's the deal? Do these middle volumes just happen to get lower print runs?

Flash Gordon turns 92

2026-01-07T07:00:00.037-05:00

The Flash Gordon comic strip by Alex Raymond and Don Moore debuted on this day in 1934. The current creator on the strip Dan Schkade is doing an homage to that first story, "On the Planet Mongo" this week.

Flash started out as a Sword & Planet character, perhaps the most famous of those that followed in John Carter's footsteps, before going in a more Buck Rogers direction (though Rogers started out less spacefaring than he became) in the 50s and later decades. Much of the Flash Gordon media post the 1980 has moved the character in a Star Wars direction, at least visually, which is ironic given the influence Flash Gordon film serials had on the Star Wars films.

I enjoy Schkade's and other modern takes than all a blend of elements from multiple eras, but keep as the core Raymond's adventure story on another world.

I hope Flash Gordon continues his adventures for decades to come.

The Year in Review

2026-01-01T07:00:00.002-05:00

Over the holiday, I was looking back over the past year here at the Flashback Universe Blog, I'm pleased to see the top posts were old ones by Jim, the founder of the blog. His various posts of Public Domain characters seem just as relevant as ever to the reading public. "Is Dracula in the Public Doman?" from 2015 got the most views this year. That was followed by "The Top 10 Public Doman Heroes?" from 2010.

Various posts in Jim and my reviews of Wild Wild West still get a fair amount of traffic. "Revisiting the Wild Wild West: The Night of the Juggernaut" from 2021 came in in the top 20.

My top post after taking over the blog is from this year. It's my review of The Avengers in the Veracity Trap by Kidd and Cho from August of this year. My second biggest was also a review. It was in my occasional Paperback Flashback series and took a look at the restored edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Beyond the Farthest Star.

Thanks to those of you out there still reading, and Happy New Year.

My Favorite Comics of 2025

2025-12-18T07:36:00.003-05:00

Most of my comics reading in 2025 was of DC in the early 80s for my ongoing series on my other blog. I did manage to continue to follow I number of series I have enjoyed beyond this year: Batman/Superman: World's Finest (DC), Batman & Robin: Year One (DC), G.I. Joe (Energon Universe, Skybound), W0rldtr33 (Image), and Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (VIZ). I also checked out a number of other series, limited series, and graphic novels.

Listed here are my favorites. Some will be whole limited series; some will be individual issues. They are in no particular order other than when they occurred to me.

Batman/Superman: World's Finest (2022-) #44: This is another Robin/Supergirl team-up, a rare but recurring feature in the title, but always welcome. The interaction of the two junior heroes is always humorous in Waid's rendition of the characters.

Absolute Martian Manhunter #1: While this whole series has been good so far, the first issue was such a pleasant surprise it deserves special mention.

Hobtown Mystery Stories Vol. 3: The Secret of the Saucer: This might be my least favorite installment of this series, but it's such a good series that it makes this list. This one is told in reverse essentially, so that the main characters memory mental dislocation caused by exposure to an alien "spacecraft" can be to a degree experienced by the reader. It makes catching the flow of events and picking up the plot threads related to the deeper mysteries of Hobtown that much harder, though, so I'm not sure it was the best choice. Still a great read.

Drome: I've talked about this graphic novel by Jesse Lonergan before, so I won't repeat that all here, but it's great.

Bug Wars: I really enjoy "small hero" stories and genre works with good worldbuilding. This has both!

The Whole Bloody Affair

2025-12-11T07:00:00.001-05:00

Last week, I took in Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair at the theater. This is combined version of Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 (from 2003 and 2004, respectively). This version, which supposedly fits better with Tarantino's original conception of the film screened at Cannes in 2006, but this is the first time it got a wide release.

This version removes some material made extraneous by it being one film and adds an additional anime sequence, further detailing the background of O-Ren Ishi. Beyond that, it feels like there are some scenes that are cut differently in minor ways and perhaps some use some slightly different takes, though since I haven't seen the original films in a decade probably, I may misremember.

If you really liked Kill Bill, you should see this one, particularly if you haven't seen it in some time. The runtime is long, but there is an intermission, and honestly sitting through this one felt less of a chore than sitting through several of the merely over 2 hours Marvel installments or the theatrical cuts of the Lord of the Rings films. The scenes tend to be short enough not to overstay their welcome and what is going on is interesting. Actually, I feel like the pacing is better here even compared to other Tarantino works like Django Unchained or The Hateful Eight.

Seeing this move on the big screen again in 2025 made me nostalgic for another era in cinema that wasn't really all that long ago. Before the financial pressures of streaming left the studios chasing increasingly formulaic and assembled by committee franchise blockbusters.

Comics-Related Gift Guide

2025-12-01T07:50:00.001-05:00

Looking for a gift for a comic book fan you know (even if that fan is yourself)? Here are my recommendations for you to consider.

Absolute Martian Manhunter vol 1: Martian Vision

In the only one of the Absolute books that really caught me interest, Martian Manhunter is re-envisioned as a sort of memetic lifeform that invades the mind of FBI agent John Jones in a psychedelic story about alien invasion and family, among other things, by Camp and Rodriquez. This is, unfortunately, only the first 6 issues of the series, so not a complete story, but worth it, if only for Rodriquez's artwork.

Avengers: The Veracity Trap

I reviewed this gorgeous volume by Kidd and Cho here. The Avengers brawl with a host of Kirby-style Marvel monsters, courtesy of Loki, but soon develops in an even more metatextual direction as Thor pursues Loki outside the realm of the comic. The Avengers soon must come to terms with the sense-shattering reality of their existence and the fictional counterparts of Kidd and Cho finding the story becoming all too real!

Bug Wars Book One: Lost in the Yard

Teenager Slade Slaymaker, son of an entomologist who died under mysterious circumstances, finds himself shrunk and thrown in among warring tribes of diminutive insect-riding humanoids having epic battles in his unkept backyard!

Ad copy calls this "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids meets Conan," but I feel like Aaron and Asrar are fulfilling the promise of Sword of Atom or the Hulk stories set in Jarella's world in a gritter, modern way. The thought but into the various cultures of the yard is one of my favorite parts.

Drome

This one has got a fair amount of buzz online, and I think with good reason. Check out my review here. Lonergan weaves a creation myth in a world part Kirby's New Gods and part Metal Hurlant in a unique style.

Hobtown Mystery Stories

The release of volume three "The Secret of the Saucer" just this week has given me the only excuse I need to put this series on the list again this year. Bertin and Forbes created a series that is sort of "Twin Peaks meets the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew" as teens in a small, coastal Canadian town uncover weirdness.

Marvel Age of Comics

I wrote about the Mighty Avengers volume in this series here. It's the only one I've read so far of these 33 1⁄3 explorations of Marvel history, but it got me interested in reading more.

The Seasons Vol. 1

Young Spring Seasons is the last hope to save her sisters and parents from the grip of sinister carnival that invades their home town. This series by Remender, Alzaceta and Lopez has been called a "dark fairytale" and "whimsical horror," which seem apt descriptors. Remender has said The Adventures of Tintin and the works of Miyazaki were inspirations, which I can also see, particularly the former as it seems a very "European style" comic to me

The Mighty Avengers Vs. the 1970s

2025-11-20T07:00:00.001-05:00

When I saw the announcement for the Marvel Age of Comics series, I said to some friends of mine that they seemed like the comics-related version of the 33 1⁄3 series, and apparently, I was more right than I new. They are published the same publisher (Bloomsbury), and I came across a press release that that says they were "inspired in part by Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 books."

Where the 33 1⁄3 books gave an author's idiosyncratic take on an album, the Marvel Age of Comics seem to cover a notable storyline or era in Marvel history. I decided to sample the series with The Mighty Avengers Vs. the 1970s by Paul Cornell. I suspect that, like the series that inspired them, these books will vary in how they are written and the insight provided, but on the basis of this one, I plan to check out more.

Cornell gives a compelling overview of the decade, breaking it up into the runs of the various writers (Thomas, Englehart, Shooter, and the fill-in writers), and examining how their approaches and concerns influenced the title. In centering the narrative on the writers, the artists are perhaps given short shrift, though George Perez is singled out for a good deal of praise. Cornell his talent for scene composition and character expression likely influenced writers both working with him and thereafter on the title.

Cornell's description of the series and its virtues is personal, reminding me at time of Morrison's Supergods, but is more concrete and informative rather than speculative. The complete Marvel neophyte will be confused, probably, but and the Avengers scholar might find it shallow. It appears to be gauged for the familiar, but not the expert, which is probably the right approach.

Hardwired

2025-11-13T07:00:00.010-05:00

Recently, I decided to fill a gap in my cyberpunk awareness and check out Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired (1986). I've sampled Williams' short fiction before: his contributions to the Wild Cards shared universe, "Wall, Stone, Craft" from my years subscribing to the Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy; and "Red Elvis" and "Prayers in the Wind," stories that left an impression even among other worthies in Dozois' Years Best Science Fiction collections. I figured I was long overdue to read what is perhaps his most famous novel.

In the near future of Hardwired, the Earth has lost the Rock War (a kinetic orbital strike) with the Orbital stations in the control of various corporate blocs. The territory that was formerly the United States has fractured into the rival states, scrambling to hold onto what they can in the face of environmental degradation and exploitation by the Orbital blocs. The novel has two protagonists. One is Cowboy, a cybernetically enhanced ex-pilot, now a panzer (a hovercraft or ground-effect type vehicle; storywise a futuristic truck) driver, running contraband from the relatively more prosperous West to the beleaguered East Coast. The other is Sarah, an enhanced street tough and bodyguard in Florida, trying to keep herself and her prostitute brother alive after she becomes a "loose end" following a job she took for a corporation.

Hardwired seems clearly post-Gibson, but Williams crafts a cyberpunk future all his own. No Blade Runner-inspired Sprawl here really or heavy Japanese overlay. Hardwired sets much of its action in rural areas, even more rural in his future than today, on lonely, roads, or in smaller cities like a partially drowned Tampa that becomes an evocation of the developing world under the colonial boot heel.

William's Cowboy has a much more on-the-nose name than Gibson's console cowboys. The callbacks and parallels to the Old West of reality and of celluloid myth are much stronger. Hack science fiction of the past was often derided for utilizing plots cribbed from horse operas and given a futuristic veneer, but William's work recalls the Western in a way that gives it resonance similarly to how the work of Leigh Brackett so often does. In fact, Cowboy reminds me more than a little of Brackett's outlaw protagonist in "The Citadel of Lost Ships," even down to their "the family lost their land" backstory.

Beyond the Western, the run down and discarded nature of Hardwired's America has a very 70s feel. There are echoes of car movies like Vanishing Point, but also 70s Neo-Noir. It prefigures Cowboy Bebop a bit in some of its worldbuilding and influences.

I enjoyed the novel a lot. It's fairly pulpy, I suppose, though that's never been a downside to me. It is very 80s, too, in how it is written. It's prose in interesting enough and quintessential early cyberpunk: Chandlerian simile and metaphor with a science and technology obsession. The occasional snippets of news or ad copy go for black satire at times similar to Robocop, still a year away. It's themes, though, are just as relevant, today, perhaps even more so.

Flashback Radio: "The Dark"

2025-10-28T07:40:00.005-04:00

For the month of October and the Halloween season, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, was up for it. We started with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."

For this our last episode of the season, I wanted us to return to Lights Out in the Arch Oboler era. "The Dark" aired (possibly, there is some disagreement) on January 19, 1938. In this story, a ambulance crew responds to a routine call and finds something decidedly nonroutine.

The episode as it aired is lost today, though it was remembered well enough to form the basis of a segment in The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror V." This likely came from a truncated vignette that appeared on the Oboler's LP Drop Dead! An Exercise in Horror in 1962. That 7ish minutes version is on YouTube and elsewhere.

How could we listen to a lost episode? Well, a group did a recreation based on the existing script. If you want to see the actors actually doing the recording, that's on YouTube:

Trey: Jason, did this episode make you afraid of the dark? Or at least steer you away from a second career as an EMT?

Jason: I don't know that I am permanently scarred by the experience, but I was again surprised by the intensity of this program's fright factor, and just how outré such a mass media production managed to get in it's short run time.

Events were skewing fairly mundane, if horrific, until the climactic minutes, when all bets were off and no holds were barred in terms both of graphic (or should I say sonic?) violence and a sharp turn into the unexplainable so profoundly weird that it gives Lovecraft a run for his money.

I'm once again avoiding spoilers because the big reveal really must be heard to be believed.

My only criticism lies in the challenge of reviving a piece of media from a bygone era. The performances make an admirable attempt at reproducing period acting styles, which lends an air of goofiness a bit at odds with the tone of the events portrayed, until the bitter end when the viewpoint character is left alone to face existential terror.

But man, that last 5 minutes!

Trey: Yes, no slight to the recreation voice actors who do a great job, but I would like to hear the original crew because there would have been a "naturalism" for them in some of those lines and those performances.

Flashback Radio: "Evening Primrose"

2025-10-23T07:00:00.001-04:00

“Evening Primrose” first aired on Escape on November 5, 1947. It proved so popular it was repeated on September 12, 1948 and August 25, 1949. This dark fantasy story of a poet who, fed up with the modern world, goes to live in hiding in a department store, only to find there's already a whole wainscot society living there. I society who employ the shadowy Dark Men to keep their existence hidden.

The teleplay is based on a 1940 short story by John Collier. It was also adapted into a musical by Stephen Sondheim, starring Anthony Perkins, in 1966 as an episode of ABC Stage 67.

Trey: I first encountered the story in Dennis Hartwell's seminal 1987 horror anthology The Dark Descent. It's perhaps less pure horror story than some of the others we've listened, but I think suitably uncanny for the season. What did you think?

Jason: Suitably peculiar! The story's atmosphere of strangeness was enhanced by the now-distant cultural norms of decades long gone, the past being a foreign country, as they say.

The elements of world building presented were, for me, the most interesting aspects of this tale.

This society of nocturnal free-loaders is noted as accumulating in their secret havens following periods of economic upheaval and seem symptomatic of modernity. Their cultural enforcers, the mysterious dark men, could plausibly have been with us since about the same time as the proliferation of department stores in the US, with the funeral industry becoming a widespread phenomenon at approximately the same time in the late19th century.

I particularly enjoyed the revelation that the society of store-dwellers were socially stratified by the perceived status of their home shops.

The next time convenience or necessity drives me into a Walmart, or some similar purveyor of goods, I will have a close look at the nooks and crannies. I have joked in the past about Walmart adding a funerary department to its extensive list, so it can truly provide cradle-to-grave services, but if such a thing should ever come to pass, I'll know what's really going on.

Trey: Keep us updated! Yeah, the worldbuilding was good. I particularly liked the hints that the store-dwellers had become something other than completely human, much in the same way subterranean peoples tend to change or "degenerate" in the works of Machen, Lovecraft, or Howard.

Flashback Radio: "Poltergeist"

2025-10-21T07:00:00.001-04:00

"Poltergeist" was the October 20, 1942, episode of the series Lights Out. The series was created by Wyllis Cooper (who we mentioned previously in regard to his later series Quiet Please) but was eventually taken over by Arch Oboler. Lights Out was one of the earliest radio horror shows and was perhaps the first to gain a large following. It ran from 1934 to 1947 and eventually transitioned to television.

In this episode, three young women discover that the dead expect a certain deference from the living and to transgress these limits can bring their vengeance down on you.

Trey: I think the opening to Lights Out is perhaps my favorite in old time radio: the foreboding drone, then the monotone voice, "It...is...later...than...you...think..." This episode feels more modern than some of the others we've heard. It could be translated into a horror film--but then I think seeing it on film would diminish the horror of the particularly visceral sound effect that accompanies the deaths. What did you think of the episode?

Jason: I very much enjoyed this surprisingly effective tale. I was skeptical at first, again owing to the condensed nature of the short form storytelling. As events began to unfold, one of the character's immediate and extreme reaction challenged my credulity, but everything that followed assuaged my concerns.

I agree with your thought about the possible diminishment of effect if this tale was presented visually. Could a talented director pull it off? It's possible, but as you suggest, and for me, the biggest strength of Poltergeist is the images it provokes in the mind of listener.

I'm thinking of course of the sticky ends met by the characters, but particularly of the horrific moment at the very end, when listeners had every right to expect a denouement that ties things up in a nice bow. What is delivered instead is a description of a final, nightmarish image so effective that it stuck with me long after my morning commute listening time.

If I were a child listening back in the day, I would have had to contend with unpleasant and intrusive thoughts once consigned to bed!

Flashback Radio: "The Shadow People"

2025-10-16T07:00:00.001-04:00

For the month of October and the season of Halloween, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, was up for it. We kicked it off two weeks ago with "The Thing on the Fourble Board."

For our fourth, frightful selection, I chose "The Shadow People," which aired on the program Hall of Fantasy on September 5, 1952. The episode was written and directed by Richard Thorne. Thorne borrows the character Dr. Hesselius (or at least his name) from the short stories of Sheridan le Fanu.

Thorne's version of Hesselius becomes involved when a family becomes the focus of malign forces that strike out of darkness. The story centers on a powerful, perhaps primal, idea, and one that made it into modern folklore either as a result of this story or parallel evolution.

Trey: So Jason, what did you think of "The Shadow People?"

Jason: The central conceit of this story is a powerful one, an ineffable horror intruding into the reality of the hapless characters, who turn out to be as powerless in its face as children afflicted by night terrors. It eludes rational explanation, despite the efforts of Dr. Hesselius.

Unlike Dr. Van Helsing, or other similarly situated occult intervention specialist types in horror media, Hesselius is flummoxed at every turn and ultimately unable to provide the hoped-for assistance.

I think this story suffers a bit from its brevity, in contrast to the pieces we've reviewed previously. We begin in media res and little time is given to establishment of character or setting. I've come to appreciate the economy of the short form radio drama, but in this case I think a bit more rooting in reality before its descent into the unexplainable would have served the storytelling.

That said, the concept of the Shadow People alone is potent enough to deliver appropriately harrowing thrills and chills.

Trey: I agree with all those points. It does feel a bit rushed. In a way, though that does add to the bleakness of the story. There is nothing the protagonists ever do that more than briefly delays the victory of the Shadow People. Not only is there no escape, but the protagonist are completely blameless in their doom. There are none of the even minor transgressions or bad choices that in these stories often bring about the characters' unfortunate fate.

Flashback Radio: "The House in Cypress Canyon"

2025-10-14T07:00:00.003-04:00

For our third selection, I chose "The House in Cypress Canyon." This was an episode of the series Suspense. Written by Robert L. Richards, and produced and directed by William Spier, it originally aired on December 5, 1946, on CBS radio. It stars film actor Robert Taylor and radio veteran Cathy Lewis. Despite being a well-regarded episode, it was only performed once on Suspense.

Despite their being a touch of the Gothic in it, the story here is relentlessly contemporary. A couple, moving for the husband's work to California, can't be picky due to the post-War housing shortage. Lucky for them, they happen upon a newly constructed house that has just been listed. Things take a take a bad turn when they begin to hear strange noises, and there's the matter of a mysteriously locked closet door. It appears the house is haunted.

Trey: So, Jason, as you sipped you Roma wine, as Suspense's sponsor would want you to do, and listened to this episode, did you get the sense that this one had more to say than our previous selections?

Jason: suspect some listeners back in its day would be inclined to throw back a bracer a bit more potent than those produced by the master vintners of Grand Estates after wading through this piece of fiction!

Rather than the primordial terrors evoked by our previous entry, this tales has plenty of undercurrents that hint at more modern anxieties. As with many entertainments of the mid-twentieth century, the long shadow of World War II casts its pall here, the reconfigurations of domesticity and gender roles perhaps chief amongst them.

The uncanny elements of the tale remain unexplained, and their ability to disturb benefits from this ambiguity. It's a haunted house story, but it's weird disturbances are triggered by future events, rather than those lingering from the past.

I have to wonder if the story has lost (or gained) any of its ability to invoke horror for modern listeners, or at least those significantly younger than I, who are less steeped in 20th Century media, especially with modernity's open examination and long-term experimentation with non-traditional gender roles. Or am I completely off the rails? Help, Trey!

Trey: I'm afraid I'm in no better position to judge how the kids might take it, but I think it's a remarkable story, in the sense that it is at once, I think, fairly obvious while being utterly uncanny at the same time--even if the point of it might be lost on modern audiences.

What I mean is that it is clearly about anxiety over women's changing roles post-war in society. There's closet, where things must be kept in check. The flow of blood evoking menses. The milkman, frequent foil for jokes about infidelity, as the first victim.

But then there's the framing sequence, making the story not a haunting so much as a dire portend. Likewise, the specific malign spirit inflicted upon the wife is unexplained. Despite its utterly mundane setting, it makes no effort to make its horrors make sense. There's a nightmare logic to it.

Both for its strangeness and for the perhaps outdated nature of the concerns animating it, I don't think you'd get a story like this today.

Flashback Radio: "Three Skeleton Key"

2025-10-09T07:00:00.004-04:00

For our second selection, I chose "Three Skeleton Key." This teleplay, based on a 1937 short-story by French author Georges-Gustave Toudouze, was original broadcast on Escape on March 17, 1950. It was a popular story, having previously been adapted for Escape with a different cast in 1949. It would again be adapted for Suspense, with Vincent Price again reprising the role of Jean, in 1956 and 1958.

The story involves a lighthouse on a tiny, rocky isle off the coast of French Guiana. The three keepers receive an unwelcome and terrifying visit from a derelict ship.

Trey: Well, did this make you want to go into lighthouse keeping?

Jason: Well, it wasn't a bad life, as Jean tells us early on, although I reckon the sliding scale of what constitutes a good or bad life has slid substantially since the era depicted here.

This is another strong entry in our seasonal survey. The tale measures up in terms of mounting suspense, frightful imagery, and compelling performances.

Like "The Thing on the Fourble Board," this story exchanges plausibility for nightmare fuel, and it is, in my view, a favorable trade off. We are expected to accept this terrible occurrence as a natural event and so must accept that we have entered a heightened version of reality.

Vincent Price delivers as per usual, especially as the simple-but-effective plot unfolds and conveys Jean's descent into (temporary) insanity with only the pitch and tone of his voice.

The same high marks go to the supporting cast, who also must portray the maddening effects of increasingly weird and dire circumstances on their hapless characters without makeup, mugging, or bugging their eyes. Well, maybe they did all that, but we can't see a damn thing!

If performances are perhaps a bit over the top vocally, it is incumbent upon the listener to recognize the need for this stylized approach in the audial medium and it's easy to forgive what might seem like excesses in other forms of entertainment.

Now, how about those sound effects and Foley artists, Trey? Bananas or what?

Trey: Ha! I think it's interesting that they used a relatively light touch here for rat sound effects. They could have definitely gone more over the top with that!

It's true events as presented are unlikely and seem inspired by fears of rodents that are perhaps seldom provoked for most 21st century Americans but were probably more common for urban and rural populations in the first half of the 20th century. Or perhaps this is the exaggerated tale our unreliable narrator Jean told later, rather than a documentary?

In any case, it's effective in making a swarm of rats feel like an elemental force.

Similarly, while I think you're right that the performances are of the era and medium, fiction often views the sanity of the lighthouse keeper as a precarious thing. Eggers' The Lighthouse (2019) is likely the most recent example.

Anyway, it's a good story. I can see why it was redone so many times, and why Price was brought back for a number of them.

Flashback Radio: "The Thing on the Fourble Board"

2025-10-02T07:00:00.001-04:00

For the month of October and the Halloween season, I thought it would be fun to revisit some classic Old-Time Radio horrors. My friend and former podcast co-commentator, Jason, hasn't heard many of these before, so he was up for giving them a listen.

The first one I selected is often considered among the great horror/fantasy anthology episodes: "The Thing on the Fourble Board." It was an episode of Quiet, Please broadcast on August 9, 1948. It concerns workers on an oil derrick having an encounter with something strange emerging from under the earth.

Quiet, Please was created by Wyllis Cooper who had worked on another, well-regarded anthology show called Lights Out (which we'll be sampling later in the month) before this one. For a long time, most episodes of Quiet, Please were thought to be lost but in the late 80s, recordings of the majority of the episodes were rediscovered. Now they can be found on the Internet Archive.

Trey: So, Jason, what did you think of the episode?

Jason: For our inaugural review, we got a doozy. I found the episode to be compelling from the beginning with its Lovecraftian invocation of deep time. I half-expected a rationalized fantasy along the lines of At the Mountains of Madness. What we got instead was decidedly more dreamlike, and firmly on the nightmarish side of the bed.

The performances were excellent, cliched elements enjoyed new life, not a moment of its scant running time was wasted, and the twist ending brought to mind the very best of the EC horror comics. I'd go into spoiler territory, but with its long years of obscurity I suspect many will not have heard this before, and I recommend they do.

If I would have heard this around the family radio as a child, I would have contemplated its subtleties long into the wee hours. As it was, I was suitably disturbed on my morning drive to work. Good fun!

Your thoughts?

Trey: I think two things standout to me, as making it work really well. The very grounded, realistic discussion of the oil worker's trade (including the definition of the obscure "fourble" of the title) and the uncanny vocalizations given "Mike", presumably by Cecil Roy.

Jason: The old-timey organ musical accompaniment had a potent, almost psychedelic effect during the description of the storyteller's dreams as triggered by the uncanny revelation. This episode was also a great example of how a strictly verbal/audial media avoided what could have been risible if presented visually, especially in 1948, regarding the description of the unknown entity.

Trey: It is definitely a story well-fitted to its medium. I think it will be interesting as we go through the month to compare how different shows take a different approach to sound effects and music to produce atmosphere

Paperback Flashback: Beyond the Farthest Star

2025-09-18T07:00:00.001-04:00

In 2021, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. released Beyond the Farthest Star: Restored Edition. It features two novellas Burroughs wrote in 1940, "Adventure on Poloda" and "Tangor Returns." The first of these was published in a reportedly abridged and altered form in Blue Book in 1941. The latter didn't see print until 1964, after his death.

The two stories are quite different from Burroughs usual Sword & Planet stories. Sure, a nameless Earth man is transported by occult means to a distant planet where he makes a life and (perhaps) finds love, but there the similarities largely end. First off, there aren't really any swords, making these stories more just Planetary Romances. Secondly, there is nothing of the swashbuckling adventure of John Carter or the wandering through weird societies of Carson Napier. And wooing of a beautiful princess? Forget it.

Instead, it's a relatively grim (for Burroughs) tale of a world ground down by endless war. A battle of civilization forced to live underground and devote itself to the war-effort lest it be destroyed by a relentless, totalitarian enemy. Tangor, as our nameless hero is called on this world of Poloda, joins the air force and flies a number of raids against Kapara, the enemy of hsi adopted home of Unis.

Clearly, Burroughs has the looming second World War on his mind. Is his typical, one might say simplistic, adventure-oriented fashion, Burroughs has his hero question the war or his side. His time is consumed with surviving. Telling, though, there are no heroic victories, no destroyed Death Stars or decisive battles. In fact, the story never lingers on the results of Tangor's sorties, mainly the difficulties he has making it home in one piece.

Illustration by Mark Schultz that doesn't capture much of the book's feel

The second novella "Tangor Returns" is even more remarkable among Burroughs' work. Tangor spends most of it as a spy living undercover in Kapara. He must deal with the constant surveillance and the inability to trust anyone. He is once beaten almost to death by the secret police after a jealous acquaintance has a fake diary planted in his home. He sees one of the few men he comes to trust there "disappeared" after his own son informs on him.

We are a long way from Barsoom or Pellucidar here. Tangor, while a man of accomplishments and ability is more an everyman than most of Burroughs' heroes, a status perhaps hinted at by his name which means "from nothing" in the language of his adopted people.

This is Burroughs more in the style of 1984 than Tarzan. It perhaps is a mode he is less suited to. Certainly, it doesn't capture the imagination in the way of his earlier works. But is interesting and short enough not to overstay its welcome.