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Rewind & Correction: Neil Gaiman, Phil Nutman and UKAK

Thanks to yesterday’s post, I’ve heard from some old amigos, including a very sweet email from Little Shoppe of Horrors publisher/editor Dick Klemensen, who indeed recalls my name among his first subscribers.

Though it’s true Dick has announced an end down the road to LSoH, he reminds me that’s still seven or so years away… so, more LSoH fun to be had in coming years, folks!

Ah, Bruce Timm’s delicious back cover to Little Shoppe of Horrors #20 — another reason to pick up your copy as soon as you can!

But the best bit of catch-up has been with Phil Nutman, who amid yesterday’s exchange corrected my faulty memory: “But…(and I forgive you for having a senior moment)…it was actually Neil who introduced us at the UK Comics Con in either 87 or 88 (whatever year you and John were there). We reconnected through Stan in 1990.”

Actually, I think we first met in 1985, Phil — and God, we were all youngsters then, you and Neil more than I! Neil was 24 when I met him in ‘84, then, so Phil, you were — what? 23? About the same?

Let’s see, John Totleben and I got to attend two UKAK conventions in London in the 1980s, thanks to Frank Plowright and his convention partners — and with Phil’s correction in mind, I can now accurately state that John and I met Neil Gaiman via Clive Barker at the first of those two conventions appearances, which had to have been in the fall of 1984. John and I were madly completing sketches when Alan Moore brought Clive Barker to the table to introduce us (Alan had been mailing us copies of the original Sphere paperback editions of Clive’s The Books of Blood 1-3 as they were published, so we’d been avidly reading Clive’s short fiction debut series), and Clive introduced us to Neil Gaiman a few moments later.

Don’t feel bad, Phil; Neil once had to remind me about our initial meeting once, too. I met so many people at the UKAK shows, some of whom have become lifelong friends, others I miss terribly, and many more I only met fleetingly.

Anyhoot, John and I were at that first UKAK by ourselves; we got to return to England a year later with our wives — John and Michelle, who are still together and now have two daughters, and me with my first wife Marlene, who was then named Nancy, very pregnant with our son Daniel, which would make it the fall of 1985. It was at that second UKAK appearance that Neil introduced Phil to me. We hit it off, and it was indeed Stanley who rekindled and fanned the flames once Phil was in the US.

At some point I’ll go back and check the actual years of those UKAK events — I think I’ve got it right, though, recalling it all in the context of Danny’s birth in December, 1985 (customs almost didn’t let Marlene fly out of the UK; we had no idea there were limitations on when pregnant women could fly) — suffice to say, though, I had one more trip to England in me, in 1991, when I got to spend time as a house guest of Neil and Mary Gaiman in Nutley, then off to Kent to visit Dave McKean, and winding up with a stay at Alan Moore’s Northampton digs — with a lovely little two-hour detour to Ray Harryhausen’s home in London, spending a precious bit of time with one of my lifelong heroes.

Ah, England. Marge and I hope to visit there together, if we can swing it.Anyhoot, big thanks to Phil for the memory redress. That said, check out yesterday’s post once more, and get your hands on Little Shoppe of Horrors #20 ASAP!
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Meanwhile, Back in Denmark, At Last Reptilicus Rampages as Lise Conjugates Verbs With Detleff from Hamburg…

Returning once again to our ongoing and purposeful (stay with me this week, folks) X-cerpting of the naughty bits from Dean Owen’s notorious Monarch Books novelization of Sidney Pink and Ib Melchoir’s 1961 Danish monsterpiece Reptilicus, I must inform you that at this point in the novel Svend and Karen are briefly at rest.

Sorry, Svend fans. You should know, for your own piece of mind, that his sex scenes are over. The lance of his manhood rose nevermore in the pages of Dean Owen’s oeuvre (and it’s unlikely I’ll type as exquisite a sentence again in my own lifetime).

In fact, Karen’s older sister Lise has by now spurned Svend’s tentative advances, so tentative I’ve chosen not to quote them here.

That’s pretty tentative. He just went for a kiss, really.

At this very point in the novel — Chapter Ten — we’re joining a pensive Lise in her bed on very the lightning-shattered, rain-lashed evening that the reconstituted Reptilicus has been resurrected!

Chapter Nine ends with ol’ Reptilicus at last rearing his ugly head, bursting out of the confines of the aquarium tank and laboratory, pausing long enough to grab his first snack, the hapless night watchman Dalby (“…He felt a sudden tremendous pressure against his body and realized that he was being crushed between the giant teeth of this thing he had helped to create…”). After stomping a streetcar, Reptilicus vanishes into the night — but Lise, Lise, Lise “lay in bed, listening to the pound of rain on the cottage roof, wondering if Mark and Connie would be able to get very far in this storm…”.

You don’t need to know who Mark and Connie are, but Detleff — “She felt restless, her nerves on edge. And she knew what it was. If only she hadn’t met Detleff…” — ah, Detleff. “Closing her eyes she could see him as vividly in the small dark bedroom as if he stood at the foot of her bed. He was tall, with the rugged, healthy look of the German hiker. Very white teeth and pink, well-scrubbed Teutonic skin. Mostly she remembered his laughter. He was twenty-two, taking this one last trip before settling down to the raising of grapes for his family’s winery. Det Lamper, from Hamburg — touring the north countries in his Volkswagen bus…”

Detleff wasn’t in the movie; Dean Owen just tosses him in here, to spice the night of Reptilicus’s rebirth and provide a bit of backstory for Lise. How thoughtful of Dean!

Here it is, the cover of Charlton’s comicbook adaptation of Reptilicus (1961), which featured an absolutely sexless cover and text and art and pages, sterile as can be. Let’s face it, Joe Gill was no Dean Owen, folks!

In fact, Chapter Ten is a bit of a cheat. I mean, Det and Lise’s sex scene is a flashback that ends with the heartbreaking information that Lise is pining for Det, laying there on her bed. And he’ll never come again. Well, not with or for Lise.

You see, Det, the heel, dumped Lise via an unsigned note delivered by messenger:

“I am returning to Hamburg. My wife was taken ill suddenly. It has been wonderful, Lise, I will never forget you.” Lise is of course heartbroken, and her father, Professor Martens, feels her pain: “He hurt you,” the professor whispered. “He hurt my Lise.”

But first, via flashback, Det from Hamburg takes her:

She lay there on the bed, feeling cheap, excited and not knowing just how far she should go with him.

“Do you want me to undress you?” he whispered, biting the lobe of her ear.

A faint churning of the machinery of her defense mechanism began to whir and she suddenly pushed him away. “No, I don’t want this.”

But he had unbuttoned the front of her blouse and pulled down her bra. Abruptly she pulled his face against her breasts and lay that way for a moment. Then she said, in a voice she did not recognize as her own, “Do whatever you want.”

He undressed her slowly, gently. His own clothes came off hurriedly and she was able to look at him. She had seen men before. On secluded beaches you ran into them. And there were statues. She wasn’t surprised.

And yet it wasn’t the same, because this man was naked for her, his excitement obtrusively visible, his eyes shining with anticipation. She knew what he intended to do to her. It all seemed very strange, in a way. And yet she responded instinctively.

She even expected the first blinding stab of pain, and when that had passed, the pleasure became intense… [Note: these ellipses are in the original text.]

He lay for a long time, face down on the bed, smoking, and at last he said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were a virgin?”

(Reptilicus, page 62)

Now, remember, I first read this when I was six and seven years old.

Of all the sexual sequences in the book, this was definitely the most confusing to me.

I mean, I sort of understood from this that for women, losing their virginity hurt. That jived with the dirty jokes I’d heard.

But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how Det could smoke a cigarette while laying “face down on the bed”.

Kids, don’t try this at home.

Coming this week: More Reptilisex and the reason for all these Reptilicus x-cerpts revealed, at last. My grand scheme, unveiled. Revelations and Reptilications. Wonder. Relief. Harmony and Peace and Beatific ReptiliJoy Rules Supreme.

But first: this sadness:

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The Gift That Keeps On Giving: Screwing Over Our Finest Once Again, Phishing for Phools, and I Shamelessly Blovate About Bush Blovating

As if the soldiers in Iraq and Iran haven’t been exploited enough by our Commander in Chief, the Administration and Pentagon (who this past week again pulled a fast one, extending tours in Afghanistan due to the ongoing abysmal mismanagement of that front in Bush’s “War on Terror” — just another little July 4th gift from President Bush to our soldiers and their families),

the following arrived in the spam box this AM — a new low in phishing expeditions from lowlife scumbags seeking to fleece $$ from whoever the hapless stooges are that actually respond to these con artists:

SUBJECT LINE: FROM SGT DAVE GODWIN (MESSAGE FROM IRAQ).

From Sgt Dave Godwin.

Good Day,

I found your contact particulars in an E-mail address guide that was provided to us here, as I desperately needed an urgent help to do this deal. I am seeking your kind assistance to move the sum of $15m {Fifteen Million U.S Dollars only} to you; as far as I can be assured that my share will be safe in your care until I complete my service here.

SOURCE OF FUND: A lot of money in various currencies were discovered in barrels at a farmhouse near one of saddams old palaces in Tikrit in Iraq during an operation Conquest in Fallujah north of Baghdad, and it was agreed by Staff Sgt. Kenneth Buff and I that some part of this money be shared among both of us before informing anybody about it since both of us saw the money first. This is quite an illegal thing to do, but well tell you what? no compensation can make up for the risk we have taken with our lives in this hell hole, of which my brother in-law was killed by a road side bomb last time.

The above figure was given to me as my share, and to conceal this kind of money became a problem for me, so with the help of a British Contact working here, at Southern Basra British fortified green zone, whose office enjoys some immunity, I was able to get the package out to a safe location entirely out of trouble spot. He does not know the real contents of the package, and believes that it belongs to a British/American medical doctor who died in a raid here in Baghdad, and before giving up, trusted me to hand over the package to his family in United States.

I have now found a much secured way of getting the package out of Iraq to you, for you to pick it up, and I will discuss this with you when I am sure that you are willing to assist me, and I believe that my money will be well secured in your hand because you have fear of God.

I want you to tell me how much you will take from this money for the assistance you will give me. One passionate appeal I will make to you is not to discuss this matter with anybody, should you have reasons to reject this offer, please and please destroy this message as any leakage of this information will be too bad and catastrophe for soldiers here in Iraq.

I do not know how long we will remain here, but I hope to have a shift very soon for me to return back to the States. I have been shot and wounded twice and I have survived two terrible suicides bomb attacks just by special grace of God, this and other reasons I will mention later has prompted me to reach out for help, I will honestly want this matter be resolved immediately.

I thank you so much for everything and anticipate that you will be trustworthy and handle this transaction to the best of your ability to benefit both of us.

God Bless you and your family.

Yours Sgt. Dave Godwin.

Whoa — this is pretty staggering and shameless stuff.

It takes Major Balls to concoct as blatant an exploitation of US military service as this spam revels in. I mean — really. What the fuck??? The exploitation of our real military, and amazing conflation of current American attitudes about our soldiers, their plight, and the gross mismanagement of our military, sets this new spam apart from any I’ve ever seen before. The obsessions, fears, prejudices and attitudes it riffs off of are pretty remarkable, if you read it closely.

The scam in this repugnant shell game is self-apparent, but the way it tries to play on so many levels of American confusion and sympathies is a new low in spam con games.

It begs the questions anew: does anyone really fall for this crap? Somebody must, right? I can’t fathom it. Can someone really fall for this scheme?

But this is less than chicken feed, less than sub-plankton, less than a mere molecule in the vast polluted oceans of flim-flammery we’re all drowning in circa 2008.

Few predictions of our 21st Century reality included the absolutely shameless explosion of loan-sharking, shakedown con artists and snake oil hucksters that so dominate the internet, television, and our embarrassment of Federal government corporate handlers, movers and shakers (e.g., big oil, pharmaceuticals, credit cards, market speculators, etc.).

It’s 21st Century technology serving 19th Century con games, and what’s most jaw-dropping of all is the utter transparency of it all — but it must work, or they couldn’t afford the TV airtime!

I’m consistently astonished at the con artists running glitzy commercials round-the-clock on cable and network TV, and how completely subsumed our economy and day-to-day-reality is by what was once considered blatantly criminal activity. The unprecedented tsunamis of email spam are one thing; the commercials for self-medications, ‘male enhancements,’ drugs, loan sharking, credit cards (in a nation drowning in credit card debt), and now “mail us your gold!” (does anyone really just mail their gold to these hucksters?) scams are mind-boggling in their absolute omnipresence.

We are a nation of idiots, of dolts, of fools — that’s the only conclusion one can rationally reach given the vastness of the scams, on so many levels, from the subprime mortgage boom and bust to the current state of our elections and government; from the tarpit journalism has been reduced to to the daily rush of blatant buggery commercials, spam and you-name-it we’re drowning in.

No wonder we’re collectively in the toilet as a country, our dollar at its weakest, the recession deepening even as pundits debate whether we are in one or not. We’re savoring the rotting-on-the-ground fruits of over a quarter century of aggressive GOP economic policies openly celebrating chicanery while deregulating any sane restraint of flim-flam out of existence. Nobody is left watching out for the American citizenry. Why would any country re-elect the same party that has so openly damned the function of government, and then proven over the past three decades that they can manifest their own utter contempt for both government and the average citizen?

Somebody’s getting rich off all this, and they’re savoring the free-est free market in my lifetime — for blatant thievery and exploitation of desperation, utter ignorance and willful stupidity.

The professions of handling money and selling debt far outstrips labor, manufacture, and tangible goods and services in the 21st Century shell-game of the American economy.

Anything goes in the name of the almighty dollar being fleeced from the average citizen through any and all means possible; and what does our President do in the face of the highest gas prices ever (with record-breaking oil corporation profits) and worst economic times since his Daddy’s rule?

He shamelessly and relentlessly blovates about the urgent need to give more away to the oil oligarchs (who have actively resisted opening refineries, and in fact narrowed production, and who have yet to tap the US oil reserves they’ve had access to for decades).

The foxes not only own the hen house and White House, they’re ravenously devouring their own bloody feces at this point.

Too bad we’re living between the stools.

I’m increasingly curious about what President Bush’s presidential pardons will be. I’m wondering if he’ll actually try to ‘pre-pardon’ some key members of his Cabinet. Why not? Bush and Cheney and their cronies have so expanded and redefined executive privilege and powers, there’s no reason pre-emptive pardons won’t join pre-emptive strikes as the new paradigm of standard operating procedures we’ve never seen before.

And Br’er Cheney, he lay low, hoping the shit don’t really hit the fan until his last six months be over… then he and his cronies and apologists can blame the next President for whatever goes down.

And you can bet your ass they will.

Who could possibly fall for that line of shit?