Tales of the Uncanny is Coming!

In December from About Comics!

‘About Comics’ logo TM Nat Gertler; Tales of the Uncanny About Comics logo (for this project only, per arrangement with the publisher) revamped and designed by Mark Bilokur, N-Man portrait by Stephen R. Bissette.

[Right: Cover art by Jay Piscopo and Stephen R. Bissette; cover Design by Katherine Roy.]

Another peek — just a peek! — at the work underway for the upcoming Tales of the Uncanny – N-Man & Friends: A Naut Comics History Vol. 1.

Among the multitude of logos — company logos, pulp cover logos, comicbook cover logos, character logos and more — that the multi-talented Mark Bilokur has been creating for this project, this slightly revised logo for our publisher in this venture is among my favorites.

I drew up three different Naut Comics characters as possible ‘readers’ for our project logo (the other two were The Fury and Queep). Running them past Mark, co-editor Tim Stout, and book designer Katherine Roy, we all agreed the N-Man ‘reader’ portrait worked the best, and with About Comics’s publisher Nat Gertler’s kind permission, Mark worked up a surprising variety of variations on this image and the About Comics traditional logo.

It took a bit of back-and-forth with Nat, who was properly sensitive about preserving the key elements of his name-branding of his imprint, but we all settled on what I’m showing you here today.

More to come, as we move closer to solicitation time on this 340+ page book!

Coming in December 2010 from About Comics.

Tales of the Uncanny About Comics logo TM Nat Gertler; The Unbelievable N-Man © and TM Stephen R. Bissette, all rights reserved. Tales of the Uncanny and The Hypernaut TM and ©1993, 2010 Stephen R. Bissette; cover and art is ©2009 Stephen R. Bissette, all rights reserved.

Son of Godzilla Screens Saturday!

Saturday Fright Special Spooktacular Delivers Monstrous Matinee Madness This Weekend!

Here is the Gojira sketch I’ve donated to the Saturday Fright Special Spooktacular for this weekend’s extravaganza!

There’s only one way to make it yours — make the drive to Keene, New Hampshire’s restored Colonial Theater this Saturday, and get your raffle ticket when you purchase your admission to see the incredible 35mm print of the 1967 classic 怪獣島の決戦 ゴジラの息子 / Kaijū-shima no Kessen Gojira no Musuko / Monster Island’s Decisive Battle: Godzilla’s Son / Son of Godzilla on the big screen!

There will be plenty of other goodies in the raffle, too, including DVDs, signed Bissette monster comics, Godzilla collectibles and oh so much more!

Best of all is the movie and the live Saturday Fright Special stage show — before, during (intermission), and after the main event!

As I revealed this past Saturday night on the Sci-Fi Saturday podcast, I’ve waited just shy of 40 years for this show!

Those ‘other things’ include San Diego Comicon (and how it’s turned into the multi-media monolith it is today), why I’d rather see Son of Godzilla than sit through another Marvel movie, and much, much more!

But Saturday is the real thing, live and on-stage at the Colonial Theater in Keene, New Hampshire.

See some of you on Saturday!
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Holmes vs. Red Planet Mars, Part 6;

Or; Who Shall Have the Final Word, Mr. Holmes?

Continuing the discussion of Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman’s Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds (1975) and how a controversy over the conjectured romantic life of Sherlock Holmes spilled into the 21st Century… I apologize that much of the arcane information to follow may matter and/or be fully decipherable only to the most devout Holmes fanatics, but that’s the juncture we’ve arrived at, faithful reader, and so we must proceed…

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The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (hereafter F&SF) was reportedly a revelation in science fiction publishing when it hit in 1950. It began life as The Magazine of Fantasy with its maiden voyage, cover dated Winter 1949, and became F&SF with its second issue, Winter-Spring 1950. Along with Galaxy, F&SF upped the whole genre’s game for the coming decade+, and definitively marked the end of the true pulp era. For what it’s worth, F&SF was among the few sf digests I picked up from time and time throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s (and held on to some copies of for my permanent collection).

In Manly Wade Wellman’s career, F&SF was pretty important, too: his celebrated ‘Silver John’ stories began in their pages with the debut of “O Ugly Bird!” (F&SF, December 1951).

“…First out I saw it was dark, heavy-winged, bigger than a buzzard. Then I saw the shiny gray-black of the body, like wet slate, and how it seemed to have feathers only on its wide wings. Then I made out the thing snaky neck, the bulgy head and long stork beak, the eyes set in front of its head — man-fashion in front, not to each other….”

Even as the Sherlock Holmes/Mars stories were appearing in F&SF, Wellman Sr. was launching a new phase of his South Appalachia-set stories in the same magazine, beginning with the October 1973 issue’s publication of “Dead Man’s Chair”:

“…Some 25 years ago, I began wandering the Southern Appalachians, looking for old songs & old tales, making friends with the mountain people, finally building a cabin among them where I spend what time I can spare…”

(Wellman fanatics should note that the fourth of the 1970s F&SF Appalachian tales, “Where the Woodbine Twineth” in the October 1976 F&SF, has inexplicably never been collected.)

Thus, the catalyst and gestation F&SF provided for Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds was of a piece with the role the magazine had played in many other phases of Wellman’s creative life.

One of the advantages of nurturing larger works – in this case, a novel – via publication of shorter, initially self-contained works is the opportunity provided for reader feedback. And that, above all, is what I’d like to discuss in this final phase of this serialized essay.

On the distant heels of “The Adventures of the Martian Client” (F&SF December 1969) and “Venus, Mars and Baker Street” (F&SF March 1972), reader feedback was indeed forthcoming on “Sherlock Holmes Versus Mars” (F&SF May 1975). I’m forever indebted to my friend Joe Citro for bringing this to my attention, and Rick (Roderick) Bates for promptly following up and steering me directly to the issue his own letter appeared in, from which I was able to track the Wellman reply (again, thanks to an alert from Joe that the reply existed).

As to “Sherlock Holmes Versus Mars,” the online F&SF index notes:

“3rd & last story in their Sherlock Holmes/War of the Worlds series; Wellman Jr as ps. John H. Watson MD has Holmes novels S. H. vs Dracula (1979), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes (1979), S. H. and the Golden Bird (1985), S. H. and the Red Demon (1996), etc.”

More on those other sequels at a later time.

Whether the following exchange played any part in how the father-and-son Wellman team expanded their narrative to create the novel, I will leave to you to surmise.

Now, on to the letters…

In the September 1975 issues of F&SF (“Letters,” pp. 159-160), two letters were published commenting on “Sherlock Holmes Versus Mars,” and specifically its conceit that Sherlock Holmes and Mrs. Hudson were romantically involved with one another to the point that Holmes spirited her from London before the arrival of the invaders from Mars, and ensured her safety before returning to London to join forces with Professor Challenger against the extraterrestrials invasion. They read complete as follows:

“Romance and Holmes

I am troubled by the short story ‘Sherlock Holmes Versus Mars,’ which appeared in the May 1975 issue of your magazine. The authors, Manly and Wade Wellman, have evidently researched their subject well – the 17 steps up to 221 B Baker Street, a note to Watson transfixed upon the mantle, references to Colonel Moran and Reichenbach Falls, the interesting suggestion that Morse Hudson, the Kensington road shopkeeper, was husband to Holmes’ housekeeper and son of the vile Hudson who drove James Armitage to his death – these and other touches amply demonstrate a deep knowledge of the affairs of Mr. Holmes.

By what error of judgement, then, can the authors suggest an affair between Mr. Holmes and his housekeeper? The authors say of Mr. Holmes and Mrs. Hudson, ‘they kissed, holding each other close, her rich curves pressed to his sinewy leanness.’ Further, they purport to quote Mr. Holmes as saying to Mrs. Hudson, ‘You never embarrass me, because I love you.’

What an outrage it is to suggest that Mr. Holmes would do or say such things. I refer to the writings. In ‘The Adventures of the Dying Detective,’ it is said of Mr. Holmes regarding women, ‘he disliked and distrusted the sex.’ Holmes himself states in ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot,’ ‘I have never loved, Watson.’ But it is in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ that all doubt is laid to rest. Watson writes, of Holmes, ‘all emotions, and that one (love) particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind.’

I am troubled that the authors could at the same time write so interesting and so bad a story. To mention the persian slippers in the same story as ‘rich curves’ and ‘sinewy leanness’ is in the poorest possible taste.

I can think of no more fitting punishment than that Mr. Holmes should leave his bees in Eastbourne, journey a second time across the Atlantic, and souse both Wellmans with a gasogene.

- Roderick G. Bates”

[Roderick Bates, circa approx. 1975 -- when he wrote the above letter to F&SF -- aiming what might be a rare gasogene pistol to prepare for the inevitable; photo ©1975, 2010 and compliments of Joseph A. Citro, all rights reserved, posted with permission.]

That caustic gem was followed with this even more curious letter, which claimed to be from the hand of the gentleman pictured here (at right):

“I must say I was rather disturbed to see your recent account of my brother’s activities during the so-called ‘War of the Worlds’ (May). Whoever wrote the story (certainly not the more-or-less truthful Dr. Watson), although accurate in many respects, was guilty of a romanticism far worse than anything Watson has written.

I have spoken to Sherlock on the matter, but since his retirement he has taken little interest in the published accounts of his cases, real or otherwise. Indeed, it is difficult these days to get him interested in anything but his bees. ‘After all,’ said he, ‘it is a fiction magazine; as long as they call it fiction they may say anything they like about me.’

Nevertheless, I would like to set the record straight. At no time, contrary to your story and others, has Sherlock been in love with anyone, let alone his landlady, Mrs. Hudson. Naturally a certain fondness existed, but certainly not to the degree shown in your story. In any case, Sherlock says he has never met the Wellmans, and idly wonders how they could possibly know what went on in Mrs. Hudson’s private apartment.

Moreover, Mrs. Hudson’s first name was not Martha. Martha was the woman Sherlock hired from 1917 to 1929 to keep house for him in Sussex. To imply that his landlady of many years would later work as a menial is irresponsible.

- Mycroft Holmes
London”

In short order (F&SF, January 1976, “Letters,” pg. 157), Manly Wade Wellman himself replied to this dismissive duo — and did so as the man of letters he undoubtably was (photos below: left, Manly Wade Wellman; right, Roderick Bates perhaps upon getting the news of Wellman’s passing in 1986?; photo ©Elizabeth Bates,  from the collection of Joseph A. Citro, posted with permission):

“My son Wade and I feel obliged to comment on two letters in F&SF for September, which challenge our argument in ‘Sherlock Holmes Versus Mars’ (F&SF, May) that Holmes and his lovely landlady, Martha Hudson, were lovers.

To Roderick G. Bates, we respectfully point out that only the excellent but unperceptive Watson argues that Holmes never loved. True, he told Watson as much, and was only courteous to many a lovely lady – because he had the best of love with the best of sweethearts.

Why was Holmes so anxious to lodge with Mrs. Hudson that he accepted a haphazard stranger to share the rent? Why, on returning from his 5-year absence after Reichenbach Falls, did he have a reunion with his landlady before seeing his brother Mycroft or his dear friend Watson? We can give numerous telling references in the Sacred Writings and cheerfully will do so on request.

As to the letter signed Mycroft Holmes, we are naturally dazzled by such distinguished interest. Yet we diffidently suggest, Brother Mycroft is now somewhere past 120 years old, and must be fixed more than ever in his favorite chair at the Diogenes Club. And even his brilliant mind could be foiled by the circumspect Sherlock. I hope it is not the advance of years that makes him bobble when he denies that Mrs. Hudson’s name was Martha, that Martha was another retainer ‘Sherlock hired from 1917 to 1929’ to keep house for him in Sussex. Martha, we know from ‘His Last Bow’ was helping Holmes usefully in thwarting Von Bork. And we hold that it is significant that Holmes made a date to meet her at a London hotel.

We are honored to hear from Mycroft that Holmes noticed us. If, as Mr. Bates recommends, he comes visiting us armed with gasogene, we will welcome him with a flowing tantalus.

In conclusion, both of us wish Holmes and Martha every joy of a romantic relationship which, we feel, does both of them credit.

- Manly Wade Wellman
(Holder of the Baker Street Irregulars investiture, The Dying Detective)”

Alas, Rick Bates has outlived Manly Wade Wellman, and is a friend of mine. Manly Wade Wellman died in 1986, and as best I can tell, there was no evidence of gasogene involved in his passing.

So Rick gets one more lick in, 35 years later:

“Some may think it unfortunate that Sherlock Holmes himself did not respond, but I can only assume that when he saw that not only had his smarter brother, Mycroft, spoken up for him, but so had Roderick Bates, he felt it quite unnecessary to add his faint voice to the choir.”

[via personal email to yours truly, July 26, 2010]

You’ve had the final word after all, Roderick Bates!
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[Photo: Roderick 'Rick' Bates and Joseph A. Citro, much more recently, no doubt chuckling over how gasogene is almost undetectable at most crime scenes. Photo from the collection of Joseph A. Citro, posted with permission.]

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Next: Holmes & Watson Battle Martians Anew in the Sleaze Pits of Putrid Paperback Hell!

Stay Tuned…

Tales of the Uncanny is Coming!

First Look at the Cover; Coming in December from About Comics!

Cover art by Jay Piscopo and Stephen R. Bissette;
Cover Design by Katherine Roy.

Coming in December 2010 from About Comics.

Tales of the Uncanny and The Hypernaut TM and ©1993, 2010 Stephen R. Bissette; this cover and art is ©2009 Stephen R. Bissette, all rights reserved.

Yes, it’s true! New Englanders have a shot next Saturday at seeing a glorious 35mm print of Jun Fukuda’s original 1967 怪獣島の決戦 ゴジラの息子 / Kaijū-shima no Kessen Gojira no Musuko / Monster Island’s Decisive Battle: Godzilla’s Son / Son of Godzilla on the big screen of the fully restored Colonial Theater in downtown Keene, New Hampshire!

including links, directions, etc. If you live anywhere in sane driving distance, this is not to be missed!!!

– but note that I’m not doing a signing at the most excellent comic shop, Comic Boom, this summer. I will be doing a signing at Comic Boom at the next Spooktacular (which I hope is coming up this Halloween!), but not this time around.

I will, however, be donating an original Godzilla sketch, signed comics, and a special preview edition comic to the Spooktacular Son of Godzilla raffle — so get there early and get your raffle tickets for a shot at winning!!!

There’s nothing like savoring a classic ’60s Toho monster movie on the big screen with a jam-packed audience; don’t pass this up!

More info and a personal Son of Godzilla story to share next post…
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Holmes vs. Red Planet Mars, Part 5;

Or; Is That A Horla In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Continuing the discussion of Manly Wade Wellman and Wade Wellman’s Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds (1975) and how possessive aliens can be…

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As already noted, Manly Wade Wellman was one of the pioneers of 20th Century genre literary ‘mashup’ fiction. I’m not well grounded enough as a reader to say with any certainty he was the first or even among the first. But I know enough about Wellman’s body of work — and the context of the weird, horror, fantasy and sf pulps and (post-1950) the sf digests his work debuted in — to confidently say he was among those writers who first played such games with his short fiction.

I also mentioned (in part 3 of this essay) the Ellery Queen-edited uber- rare anthology The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (1944, reportedly suppressed by the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Estate immediately after publication) included a Wellman Sherlock Holmes story entitled “The Man Who Was Not Dead” (1941), so Wellman was already dabbling in Conan Doyle’s turf over three decades before Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds was published.

In the pages of the justly celebrated fantasy pulp Unknown, Wellman had earlier crafted a tale involving Edgar Allan Poe himself entitled “When It Was Moonlight” (February 1940), and pitted Bram Stoker’s Dracula against the invading Third Reich in “The Devil Is Not Mocked” (the June 1943 issue) — before the end of WW2, mind you. The latter was later adapted into a Night Gallery episode (first broadcast on October 27, 1971, featuring the 1958 The Return of Dracula’s Francis Lederer as the Count) and Wellman’s story is a precursor to F. Paul Wilson’s classic novel The Keep (1981, and far superior to Michael Mann’s misbegotten 1983 film adaptation).

I could go on, but you get the idea: Wellman was an old hand at this game before 1950.

Wellman was clearly a man of letters; in this, too, Wellman is a significant predecessor to Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, et al who have carved significant careers from similar constructs. He seemed to retain everything he’d read, and deftly reference it as subtly or overtly as he felt the need to, story by story. I have no idea how much of that was passed on to his son Wade Wellman, but judging by the book at hand, they were kindred souls in more than blood.

One component of Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds, the novel, that is unique to the novel (in that it did not appear in either of the two short stories/novel chapters originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), bore further evidence of the Wellman’s insightful knowledge of genre literature.

The context for this reference isn’t as obvious as the Wellmans’s adoption and appropriation of H. G. Wells’s “The Crystal Egg,” though that very story is the springboard for this other literary aside. This arises (bear with me, I’ll soon define what ‘this’ is), somewhat obliquely. It is presented before the events of Wells’s The War of the Worlds intrudes upon Holmes’s London; after Holmes’s purchase of the crystal egg, and the beginning of Holmes and Professor Challenger’s observations of Mars and the ‘Martians’ via the viewing device of the crystal egg. This arises as Holmes, Watson and Challenger are pondering precisely why Holmes was drawn to a certain antique shop to purchase a certain crystal egg – the action that opens the novel expanding upon the two previously published Fantasy and Science Fiction stories.

It is Holmes who places the egg in Professor Challenger’s hands and initiates the study of the object, which leads directly to Challenger establishing (via the ‘egg’) direct observation of and communication with the invading force on Mars, prior to the launch of said invasion.

The ever-self-analytical mind of Holmes is clearly concerned with the ‘why’ of that purchase. Why was he drawn to purchase the egg, and do so with such urgency? (He snaps it up seconds before the scoundrel Morse Hudson was intending to do so, instantly setting up another subplot I won’t get into in this essay.)

Later in the same chapter, when Holmes and Challenger are face-to-face with a ‘Martian’ via the ‘viewscreen’ of the egg, Holmes says,

“…What if I acted under some sort of direction in buying the crystal and giving it to you [Challenger] for joint scrutiny? What if this Martian is trying to say that? Perhaps thought waves come through the crystal; perhaps they came to me in the shop.”

What Holmes ponders initially here, and again later in the novel, is whether the ‘Martians’ are capable of mind control, and whether he and Challenger are susceptible to it.

This speculation was set into motion by an apparent non sequitur while Holmes and Watson were alone in their Baker Street apartment. Holmes was reading something he commented upon, which Watson naturally asked about. This passage also played upon the particularly extreme loathing the British have for the French. In this case, Dr. Watson articulated that quite eloquently even as Holmes did his utmost to prompt the good doctor to transcend that national revulsion and just listen:

“What is your book?” asked Watson, stirring sugar into his coffee.

“A collection of the writings of Guy de Maupassant. The section I am reading is a chronicle – it is almost like nonfiction – in the form of diary entries.”

Watson’s mouth drew thin under his moustache. “Maupassant was a man of dissipated life,” he remarked austerely. “I have always thought that he preached immorality in his stories.”

“I fear I must disagree with you,” said Holmes. “Maupassant, as I think, has always striven for objectivity. In any case, much of what we consider immoral is merely pathological. Oscar Wilde, for instance, was imprisoned under our English laws for a morbid aberration. He would have been shown more mercy in France.”

“But what is this particular chronicle you are reading?” asked Watson.

“It is entitled ‘Le Horla,’ fully laying bare the soul of the diarist. It tells how he came under the power of some unknown, invisible being. Apparently the power departed, for the writer in the last entry is threatening suicide in despair, yet there is no evidence that the threat was carried out.”

Watson bit into a buttered crumpet. “Maupassant died a hopeless madman. I’ve read that Horla story you mention. It struck me as complete proof that he was losing his mind as he wrote it.”

“No, Watson, it is too well organized for that. Even if we choose to read the story as fiction, as a highly imaginative tale, I must argue that only a clear, sane mind could have conceived it so artistically, written it so vividly….” (quoted from the novel, pp. 38-39)

[Tales of Tomorrow's glimpse of Mars in their adaptation of "The Crystal Egg" -- remember? Below: two more Lou Cameron panels from the Classics Illustrated adaptation of The War of the Worlds, 1955.]

Here’s the de Maupassant passage Holmes references:

“There was no moon, but the stars darted out their rays in the dark heavens. Who inhabits those worlds? What forms, what living beings,
what animals are there yonder? What do those who are thinkers in those
distant worlds know more than we do? What can they do more than we can?
What do they see which we do not know? Will not one of them, some day
or other, traversing space, appear on our earth to conquer it, just as
the Norsemen formerly crossed the sea in order to subjugate nations
more feeble than themselves?”

That is all Holmes (and the Wellmans) cites — but here is how the complete passage in “The Horla” ends:

“We are so weak, so unarmed, so ignorant, so small, we who live on this
particle of mud which turns round in a drop of water.”

This is indeed evocative of the opening lines of H. G. Wells’s The War of The Worlds, and many other passages in that classic novel:

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water….”

It is historically true that many speculate de Maupassant was perhaps succumbing to mental illness brought on by syphilis at this point in his life; de Maupassant suffered from syphilis to his dying day. He tried to cut his own throat in January of 1892, and was thereafter committed to an asylum, where he died on July 6, 1893.

H.P. Lovecraft cited the story as a key work, writing that it related “…the advent in France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without peer in its particular department…” (Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927, revised 1934). It was this interpretation of “The Horla” the Wellmans obviously shared and were voicing via Holmes.

After reading the cited passage aloud, Holmes concludes, “Confess, Watson, is that not a fairly sane and rational proposition?”

“If it is fiction, I consider it high-flown, fanciful writing,” said Watson stubbornly. “I remember, incidentally, that the diarist burns his house at the end of the account. Wasn’t Maupassant’s house burned?”

“It was burned, as a matter of fact, but Maupassant never admitted to setting the fire, unless in this account,” said Holmes. “If he is confessing that act, we may take the whole as offered for fact.”

“Suppose it is factual and sane,” said Watson. “If beings such as the Horla did actually exist, do you think that you could be subjugated by one of them, like Maupassant or his fictional diarist?”

“Perhaps not,” said Holmes. “A man of sufficient intellect and will might resist such subjugation, or find a way of defeating it.”

Key to the characterizations of Holmes and Challenger in the Wellmans’s novel is the ways in which Challenger’s egotism impacts the partnership of these two great intellects, and how Holmes manages to deftly negotiate that potential minefield. It is Challenger’s enormous egotism that makes him susceptible to the ‘Martian’ influence (though that is subtly drawn) – and it is “The Horla” references that both establish the possibility of the coming invasion, man’s place in the cosmic food chain, and Holmes’s acute perception of his own vulnerabilities.

The momentary discussion of the fiery end of the story — and its association with de Maupassant’s own tragic final years — serves the multilevel purpose of elucidating de Maupassant’s true story, sketching the conclusion of “The Horla,” and chillingly foreshadowing the smoldering ruins of London Holmes, Challenger and Watson will soon be crawling in and around to evade the invaders.

Again, this is brilliant writing, by any measure, and very sharp associative adoption of the Wellmans’s literary precursors.

[Above: Charles Gemora as the Martian glimpsed in the Byron Haskins/George Pal War of the Worlds, 1953;

In the ‘Two Authors’ Notes’ introduction to the novel, Wade Wellman writes:

“…it seems evident that Wells’s The War of the Worlds was to some extent influenced by Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Horla,’ though the influence has never, to my knowledge, been observed by a critic.”

Nor has it ever since been noted anywhere that I’ve noticed, making the Wellmans’s observation still quite unique.

I hasten to mention, too, that Manly Wade Wellman wrote a sort-of sequel to “The Horla,” the supremely creepy “The Theater Upstairs” (1936), involving – get this – an actor who stumbles upon a tiny theater showing what appears to be an adaptation of “The Horla” in which he recognizes an actress he once knew and spurned, prompting her suicide. Alone with a friend, the only two people in the audience, the actor becomes even more disturbed as he film unreels and he recognizes other deceased actors in the movie – who seem to be paying unwelcome attention to the lone pair watching the movie…

I wonder, is this one of the first ‘haunted movie’ tales? I leave that to wiser genre scholars than I to ascertain. It’s a great fucking story, though! I’ve never forgotten it.

Just as the Holmes-vs.-Jack the Ripper movie A Study in Terror was the springboard for the initial father-and-son collaboration, Wade Wellman cites another forgotten 1960s low-budget horror movie at this point in his introductory note to the novel:

“Readers of this saga should take notice of an excellent moving picture based on de Maupassant’s tale, Diary of a Madman. The bad title has damaged the film’s reputation, but the title character, superbly played by Vincent Price, is a man who outwits and destroys a superior being in a fashion well worthy of Holmes. Two motion pictures, then, have played their parts in the various inspirations for these five tales.”

I won’t go into Diary of a Madman (1963) with the same intensity I brought to A Study in Terror (see part 3 of this serialized essay), but it does merit some attention.

Like A Study in Terror, it’s a completely forgotten film that isn’t legally available in the US on DVD, which is unfortunate. It was released legally twice on vhs – once by Wood Knapp Video/UA, and again by MGM back in 1998, both with completely nondescript box art — but it was hard to come by even then. I first caught it on a late-night TV broadcast in the dead of winter around 1968-69 (when I was 12 or 13 years old), and it made quite an impression on me.

It’s among the first non-alien ‘possession’ movies I recall seeing – though the Wellmans might argue that point with me, as they clearly are proposing (via Holmes’s dialogue) that de Maupassant’s protagonist may have indeed been possessed by an extraterrestrial being.

Historically, having never seen films like Der Dibuk/The Dybbuk (1937) until much later in life, this film definitely predated the ‘demonic possession’ films so prevalent later in the ‘60s and throughout the ‘70s. That may have been why it so impressed me as a teen, though I still find much to enjoy in the movie.

It has the feel of most of the Vincent Price gothics from this period, and that was calculated: here, from the American-International Pictures (AIP) Edgar Allan Poe movies Roger Corman directed Price in, is more of art director Daniel Haller’s work, milking all the period atmosphere possible from a meager budget — so visually Diary of a Madman naturally feels in ways like those. Producer/screenwriter Robert E. Kent and coproducer Edward Small carefully cultivated that association, as they had with two of their other Admiral Pictures efforts (the moniker for Robert E. Kent Productions after 1962): Edward L. Cahn’s lycanthropy take on Beauty and the Beast (1962, with a very Wolfman-like ‘Beast’ makeup on Mark Damon designed and applied by Jack Pierce, creator of the classic Universal monster makeups) and the Vincent Price vehicle Twice-Told Tales (1963). The latter film was even closer to the Corman/AIP/Price/Poe films, adapting three of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s genre stories. Of the three Kent horror films, Diary of a Madman is the best.

In de Maupassant’s story, the act of waving at a mysterious passing ship (a “superb three-master”) inexpicably initiated the possession, inviting the demonic presence into the first-person narrator’s life. In Diary of a Madman, Price starred as magistrate Simon Cordier, whose prison visit to the condemned Louis Girot (Harvey Stephens) leaves him open to possession by the ‘demon’ that drove Girot to murder – the Horla (voiced by an uncredited Joseph Ruskin, who appeared in and/or voiced almost 150 films and TV episodes, and had then most recently appeared on the tube as Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter on The Untouchables). The Horla forces Girot to try and kill Cordier; when Cordier kills Girot in self-defense, the Horla in turn plagues Cordier. As the Horla nibbles away at Cordier’s life and sanity, the magistrate’s amateur sculpting efforts culminates in the film’s most effective shock, which I won’t give away here.

It’s not a particularly faithful rendition of de Maupassant’s story – the movie title is lifted from Nikolai Gogol’s classic 1835 short story (Записки сумасшедшего), the morality play completely antithetical to de Maupassant but very much typical of early ‘60s mainstream gothics – but Reginald Le Borg’s workmanlike direction is solid, Ellis Carter’s cinematography is effective (my favorite of all Carter’s efforts remains his work on The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Monolith Monsters, both 1957), and Price is quite good here, ably supported by Nancy Kovack (Medea of that same year’s Ray Harryhausen classic Jason and the Argonauts) and character actor Ian Wolfe.

FYI, Le Borg directed a lot of westerns (movies and TV), and had helmed a couple of the 1940s Universal Inner Sanctum movies, along with Jungle Woman and The Mummy’s Ghost (both 1944) and a string of comic-strip adaptations (at least seven Joe Palooka movies and Little Iodine, 1946) before the rather dreadful but fun The Black Sleep (1956) and Voodoo Island (1957). This was his last decent horror film, and arguably his last decent movie, period. It’s frankly a little amazing how much Wade Wellman professed liking this movie; given his curt dismissal of Byron Haskin and George Pal’s superior The War of the Worlds (1953), one can imagine some readers might take Wellman’s recommendation of Diary of a Madman with a grain of salt. But I quite agree with Wellman on this one: Diary of a Madman is well worth tracking down and spending an evening with, particularly if you’re a fan of 1960s horror films.

It’s also a rather important little movie, given how vital ‘possession’ themes became in subsequent years. Let’s forget, for the moment, about William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and all that followed. Along with Robert Bloch’s ‘demon Ripper’ stories (his 1943 Weird Tales classic “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” the December 22, 1967 Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold,” etc.), “The Horla” and Diary of a Madman were the precursors to what became a subgenre in and of itself in the 1980s and ‘90s, in which various versions (demonic, alien, etc.) of ‘evil incarnate’ leapfrogged from person to person as if from vessel to vessel: The Hidden, Shocker, The Exorcist 3, Fallen, etc.

Back to the Wellmans’s Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds: The “five tales” Wellman referred to were the chapters of the novel, which may indeed have been written as five separate short stories, three of which were previously published: “The Adventure of the Crystal Egg” (“by Edward Dunn Malone,” pp. 9-50), “Sherlock Holmes Versus Mars” (also credited to Malone, pp. 51-93; original version published in F&SF for May 1975, cover at left), “George E. Challenger Versus Mars” (Malone again, pp. 95-143′ original to the novel), and as chapters IV and V, the two slightly revised Fantasy and Science Fiction stories wrap up the novel, “The Adventures of the Martian Client” (credited, as in the original publication, to “John H. Watson, M.D.,” pp. 147-172) and “Venus, Mars and Baker Street” (also credited to Watson, pp. 175-201), followed by “Appendix: A Letter from Dr. Watson” (pp. 205-208; original to the novel).

“Venus, Mars and Baker Street” was effectively a sequel and coda to the original The War of the Worlds, which was how it read to those who first lucked into the tale in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for March, 1972…

To be continued: What’s Wrong With Holmes’s Love Life?

MIA on DVD!!!

This Week: Nest of the Cuckoo Bird (1965)

Off and on over the past year, I toyed with launching a new blog dedicated to writing up movies not on DVD. I talked about it with my computer guru Cat Garza, but we’ve barely seen one another in weeks, months it seems, I’m sad to say.

But there are so many movie blogs; there’s so little time; and so meager a revenue stream from any of this online activity that I finally scuttled the plan. I’ve known so many folks who schemed setting up blogs with ads to generate income, and frankly, almost none of those have generated anything but lost time.

So, amidst drawing, teaching, writing and working on various book projects, I did work up considerable content for the planned blog. I’ve offered that material to my friends Tim and Donna Lucas at Video Watchdog (no response yet), but thought some of you might enjoy getting a taste for what might-have-been, if I have 48 hours a day instead of just the 24 we’re given.

Back to the Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds essay next post — this is just a breather…
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Who was Bert Williams, and what the hell was Nest of the Cuckoo Bird? Nobody seems to know, which naturally makes the existence of this mid-1960s southern gothic (shot in Florida) all the more enticing.

I have this 1965 Variety tear sheet in my files, and scanned it to share with you here. I’ve never seen this ad art reprinted anywhere, ever, and I’ve got a pretty extensive international collection of genre zines (newsstand and fanzines, including mimeozines, photocopy zines, etc.) that I’ve devoured cover-to-cover since age 12.

I first saw this ad when the local downtown Waterbury, VT radio station WDEV used to let me drop in once a month and pick up their discarded copies of Variety, which I scoured and clipped for tidbits and reviews of odd movies I knew I’d likely never get to see. I recall Rusty Parker and Ken Squire (sp?) finding it amusing that a scrawny crew-cut kid like me was even interested in Variety. They had no idea!

I recall I’d found a bit more about Nest of the Cuckoo Bird back then, but not much. By the time I went to Johnson State College (1974-76), I’d amassed a sizeable file of Variety ads, reviews and clippings on obscure genre films. When I left JSC at the end of tutoring the summer session in ‘76, bound for my first semester at the Joe Kubert School, I had nowhere to store that file, and nobody I knew wanted or cared about it. I regretfully left it in my basement Governor’s dorm room as I left JSC for the last time, knowing it was likely bound for the landfill once the custodians cleaned up the place.

This clipping was one of the few I saved, along with my Mario Bava files (which I turned over to Tim Lucas for his Bava book project back in the 1980s).

These crude, raw ads are still captivating. I love the duplicity of the one above — “Williams’ Nest of the Cuckoo Bird“ made it read like it might be a Tennessee Williams shocker, which the title also evoked. 

Nope, it was Bert, not Tennessee, Williams — which leads one to ask, “who the hell was Bert Williams?”  

Isn’t that an astonishing drawing? An eye-popping ad? Man oh man, you could not make up this shit. These ads are still among the loopiest I’ve ever seen for a movie, and I’ve seen (and collected) some doozies, as I shared with y’all last summer on this blog.

Bert Williams was not ‘the’ Bert Williams, the most successful black comedian of the early 20th Century (born 1874, died 1922). That Bert Williams was actually Egbert Austin “Bert” Williams — he was huge on the Vaudeville circuit in the late 19th and early 20th Century, the best-selling pre-1920 black recording artist, and even in those racist times, The New York Dramatic Mirror dubbed the man “one of the great comedians of the world” (in 1918). I’ve got a couple of books on Williams in my library, the best of them being Louis Chude-Sokei’s excellent The Last ‘Darky’: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (2005, Duke University Press).

Here’s the only surviving bit of film of Williams performing, which he helmed and starred in for Biograph Studios in 1916:

OK, did you watch that? Again, that’s not our Bert Williams. But that is more than we have left of the 1960s Bert Williams — Nest of the Cuckoo Bird is apparently a lost film. An anonymous post on imdb.com offers this synopsis:

“Investigating Florida moonshiners, a detective is searching the Everglades when he discovers a remote inn managed by a demented showgirl, a taxidermist who stuffs humans for display in her grotesque Chapel Of The Dead.”

They also offer further ballyhoo copy:

“Actually filmed in the Florida Everglades…amidst snakes and gators!”

“Bloodthirsty! Raw! We defy you to guess THE KILLER!”

Nest of the Cuckoo Bird is the only credit I’ve ever found for this 1965 filmmaker; there’s nothing more about him online, not at imdb.com, not anywhere. Williams wrote, produced, directed and starred in this Everglades-set thriller, co-starring with Ann Long, Jackie Scelza and Chuck Frankle, and they apparently never appeared in a single other motion picture before or after, either.

However, Larry Wright of Cuckoo’s cast did work on Brad F. Ginter’s Dade Country, Florida-filmed biker mystery Devil Rider! (1970) and appeared in the immortal made-in-Florida Blood Freak (1972), Brad Ginter and Steve Hawkes’s insane anti-drug-anti-FDA-pro-Christian-biker-splatter-turkey-monster-horror opus. Wright is also listed in the cast of the direct-to-video Electric Shades of Grey (2001), so Larry, if you’re still alive out there, please, tell us whatever you recall about Nest of the Cuckoo Bird. The world must know before you go!

The full Variety ad offers what little hard info we have on the producers and distributors of the feature back in the regional southern drive-in markets, so I offer it up to you all here in hopes somebody, somewhere can offer further insights and info — and maybe even uncover the last surviving print of this “Sadism Quack Love Horror… Primitive Art Film.”

Mike Vraney, Greg Luce, Code Red, Blue Underground — you know what you have to do!!