Hometown Christmas dinner cancelled or delayed

The boy and my partner have the cold-like symptoms of you-know-what. The Covid Omnicron strain, or a bad headcold. Headache, chills, upset stomach-those sorts of symptoms.

They say you should assume that anyone with these symptoms likely has Covid and to isolate for ten days.

There are no more PCR tests (the rapid test you take if you have symptoms) available in our city. Ottawa Public Health is no longer taking calls or providing individual guidance, as they are overrun.

We are looking at isolating for ten days. Christmas in my hometown, where we were going to gather to honour the memory and Boxing-Day-supper tradition of my recently deceased sister, is essentially cancelled. We are staying put. 

Suffice to say that I have had it with 2021, with Covid, with my sister dying of cancer, and any other aches and pains this bastard of a year has wrought. 

We always have our own Christmas here, before travelling Christmas day, at least, so we have that, and each other.

John Candy and Catherine O'Hara in "Home Alone"

So, here is one of many reasons Canada's John Candy was brilliant. In "Home Alone", the 1990 Macaulay Culkin vehicle of debatable merit, Candy portrayed Gus Polinski, the Polka King of the Midwest, in a cameo. Polinski kindly gives Kate McCallister (Catherine O'Hara, another Canadian great) a ride home to check on her abandoned son. Their exchange in the band's van incudes this wonderful bit. Gus explains that he was indeed, ah, forgetful with one of his kids.

(I had originally included the transcript, but think this post is better without. I could tell you, or I could show you. And with the clip at a mere 49 seconds, you could do worse trying to improve this abysmal year.)

So, merry Christmas, happy holidays, happy solstice and happy everything. And don't leave any loved ones behind, eh?

Here's the scene.

YOUTUBE.COM

Home Alone - "Kid Left at the Morgue" - John Candy. Best scene in the movie.

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Moon glimpse

Ah, there she is or he is, or they are. With cold yet dextrous fingers, I capture a fraction of the moon's waxing gibbous beauty.

Light: Another book review

I won't kiss and tell, but I will mention a good note, a literal one, to nearly close out desultory 2021. 

In the freelance writimg business, there still exist pro book reviewers such as myself who shop around pitches for reviews they want to do umtil the right editor answers "Yes". I got this reply after some follow up.

"This review sounds great and I'm definitely interested."

Fallow time

I have tried to be articulate, I really have, but I think I am in too much pain to blog much anymore, at least for a while. I externalize my pain, through frustration and anger and moodiness and acting impulsively, ritualistically, but it lurks still, on the periphery, waiting. Might be time to pull back and let this blog go fallow for a while I try to come to terms with my grief, or whatever the hell it is I  am attempting to do.

Used to; a note about loss

I used to take pictures of the moon, sepulchral, luminous, transfixing, displacing me and my thoughts, my ideas run amok, like one one of my characters far afield over brook and fallen log. 

Used to wander the streets at night, down by the river, down the street by an apartment with golden-glowing windows, like liquid welcome in the night. 

Also used to write and used to lose myself in flight of fancy. 

But now I have stopped snapping shots, stopped meandering, stopped writing, so that all that remains, as the tide pulls out, are my ideas. 

And they are fine ideas, perhaps superb ones, enough even for dreams, for stories, maybe even novellas or books, but I can only play with them and turn them over and not help them realize their true shape. 

It's grief, I know, but not the kind you see in so many films where characters burst into weeping. It's deeper. The tears are a release of the sadness, an expression, not the bereaving itself. 

I used to feel this stress and mournfulness in my hips and stomach. Now this heaviness has moved up to occupy my shoulders, my chest, my head. You think you know about sadness until you lose someone you love . Then all you've got is this weight in  your stomach, this pull, this leadenness, as everyone treats you as though you are fragile as glass. 

Comic scribe Al Ewing earns his Place among Incredible Hulk Mythos

I like this post about The Immortal Hulk issue 12 so much that I have decided to re-post it for fun, as the fifty-issue arc just wrapped up.

For both cover images - art by Alex Ross.

With issues 12 and 13 of The Immortal Hulk, British writer Al Ewing earns a place among Hulk myth builders such as legendary Incredible Hulk scribes Peter David and Bill Mantlo. Ewing knocks the walls down, expanding on Bruce Banner's abusive father, Bruce as a boy, the Hulk's multiple personalities, the nature of gamma radiation and the gamma blast, and the bond between Bruce and Hulk (which, surprisingly for a symbiotic relationship, or not so surprising, involves love). 

I should also add that these issues include Kabbalah metaphors, the rare redemption of an antagonist Crusher Creel (aka The Absorbing Man), and a battle between Hulk and a very Lovecraftian entity, The One Below All.

While Ewing has established an otherworldly, weird-horror tone for the title, the writer has proven he has things to say beyond a return of the character to his devious horror roots. Stan Lee originally envisioned the Hulk as a sort of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde/Frankenstein's creature hybrid, who shed the meek form of egghead Bruce Banner at sundown to prowl the land at night. He was devious, articulate and smart, as Ewing portrays him now. (Hulk was also grey, until Stan "The Man" Lee deduced that it was cheaper to print the character as green. But I digress. 

It has been years since the character had such interesting and intelligent treatment - likely since the grey Hulk (or Mr. Fixit) inhabited the title back in the late 1980's and early 1990's. I should know, as I first collected The Incredible Hulk in the early 1980's. I stopped seriously collecting back in '98, when Peter David left the book after at 12-year run that I grew up with. 

However, I check in every so often to see how my old friends are doing. And I'm very glad that I checked in last year when Al Ewing came on as the new writer and Joe Bennett as the new regular interior artist. I just have to see where Ewing goes with this, with surprise after chillingly weird surprise. And you should, too.

Musing about the Original Captain Marvel

 

Always adored the original Captain Marvel, from Fawcett Comics, depending on the skillful execution of the treatment. There's just something fundamentally appealing to me about a comic character steeped in magic. The Big Red Cheese is now more widely known as Shazam (long story, worth watching a Youtube show such as Casually Comics). This character's heartily 1940's pulp-era vibe also helps cement my appreciation of the character. With a magic word, an orphan boy transforms into an adult hero with obvious pulp-cinema, matinee-idol looks and inspiration.

Earlier versions separated the boy and man characters; with CM as a separate heroic identity from ... somewhere? Likely hanging around  the Rock of Eternity, waiting on-call? The trend the past few decades has been to have orphan Billy Batson in charge when he is Captain Marvel as well.

Some more strident fans of other flagship DC Comics superheroes seem to often dislike CM. I have wondered whether if it is because of the obvious parallels to Superman (also a long story, which gets down into the weeds if you like that sort of thing) or simply that Captain Marvel's superpowers are explained as magical,  and not with the at-best pseudo scientific theory (which is almost joyously risible) that allows for Superman to fly, etc. In Captain Marvel's adventures, also, magic allows for, well, anything to happen, which can get ... delightfully bonkers, actually.  Other readers perhaps need to have better rules, however arbitrary, about knowing where the walls are?

I also find fascination in artists who genuflect over such a character throughout their careers, because obviously that archetypal hero speaks to something in them. Case in point? Brilliant comics-famous artist Jerry Ordway, whose pencils—and colouring and painting!—are exemplified above and below. 

After years of fans demanding it, DC reprinted for the first time the first arc of Ordway's and Peter Krause's The Power of Shazam! series along with Ordway's The Power of Shazam! graphic novel that kicked the series off in this hardcover, The Power of Shazam! Book One: In the Beginning. 

In The Power of Shazam! graphic novel Ordway went all-in with a  glorious retro, pulpy, Raiders of the Lost Arc-colour palette, which he painstakingly illustrated over more than a year. 

For the following monthly series, Ordway modernized and updated the hero's origins for the late 1980's, keeping it in line with Legends, the 1987 six-issue limited series that rebooted the DC Universe. He stuck to painting the covers at a reduced rate, while Krause pencilled the interiors.

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From The Power of Shazam! graphic novel

Just trying to get through

Just trying to get through the days. There's no drink strong enough, and not green or beer or wine or spirts or distraction enough in the world to escape my sadness. So I stumble through. Some days are better than others. When I manage to get things done, whether cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming around the house, it's a small victory, to be sure, but a victory nonetheless.

Know what evidence of bereavement is? It is going to the downstairs bathroom and seeing piles of dust bunnies along the baseboard trim, a filth that has accrued during my two months of taking care of my sister, and living in two cities alternately, and not bothering to clean it. I don't clean the mess up, because. there is too much to do elsewhere in the house. In fact, there is two months' worth of things to catch up and resume some sort of semblance of a life.

I think about writing a lot. 

I let the most baroque ideas of the past weeks return from their safe submersion in the well, then let them age, like fine wine, to become what they want to become. As well, I glance askance at my incompletely revised second horror novel, cognizant of where I left things, characters paused, as though waiting for my directions or descriptions to continue them on their adventures. 

But generally, there's no writing lately. 

Also keeping a scant social media presence. I have limited patience for idle chitchat and moral indignation nowadays or educating others about whatever miscellany they insist on inquiring about, nor for people decrying having a bad year, for the reasons they cite. I am not in the business of citing my year's accomplishments at this stage, as I am not seeking approval or affirmation or encouragement or sympathy or, worse, pity. So I back-channel in and out of social media, making a connection here, a rare comment here, or there. At this stage of this miserable year, I am angry, saddened and removed, so it is just as well as I refrain from doom-scrolling or commenting ad much as possible. 

However, I must qualify my sentiments. Many friends, real-life, red-blooded friends, from my ex when I lived in London, England back in '98, to my crush in grade five to a friend in my hometown to my next-door neighbour to people I used to serve in comic-book retail to longtime friends of the family, have reached out with condolences regarding my recent death in the family. I find these missives touching and thoughtful. I'm grateful, although it has been difficult to read more than one or two of these messages of sympathy in a day.

In terms of a routine that I am trying to return to, I have some projects. One is a co-editing project, which I cannot reveal details about until the ink has dried on the contract. But I can say that it is a fun, macabre and delightful endeavor involving horror fiction, and a project unlike any I have never undertaken before.

Somehow, amid this turmoil, I landed some freelance reviewing work at a major U.S. speculative-fiction publication. There, I also found an editor sympathetic to my cause. Currently, I am reviewing U.S. writer Charles Payseur's short-story collection, The Burning Day and Other Strange Stories. While I can't give readers a glimpse of the betrothed before the wedding day (or the publication date of my review), I will say that Payseur's 22 stories are great bang for one's buck. He's also a very self-assured fantasy and sci-fi writer, both efficient and confident in his narrative voice. The lustrous cover, too, is likely my favourite of 2021, from any press, small or large (this one's Lethe Press, my publisher).

I have included an action shot of a freelance writer's life.