As the Center for Cartoon Studies students are pointing out to one another on the CCS discussion boards, comics are a hot item in the election season already — and it’s happening in the heart of America, folks.
A sample of the 16-page comic playing a role in the current Oklahoma County election — who can get me a copy? See the pdf download link, below — but this printcentric dinosaur wants the real McCoy! © 2008 Brent Rinehart
More election season zaniness, which emulates the style of Matt Feazell’s Cynicalman by way of Jay Kinney and Paul Mavrides’s classic “Anarchie” in Anarchy Comix — surely, not what the State Representative candidate intends? © 2008 Sean Tevis.
Open call to Myrant readers — send more links if you find campaigns in your part of the country using comics as campaign tools. This is a realm of comics I find fascinating…
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Wrapping up the procession of saucy passages quoted from Dean Owen’s 1961 novelization of Reptilicus — which frees me at last to get to the real point of interest, the behind-the-scenes legal battles that Dean Owen’s novel in part precipitated — we find Owen at last resorting to rape scenes to spice up the final third of the novel. Once the monster action becomes unavoidably the center of the novel, even Owen was unable to justify any more explicit sexual play between his leads.
Svend fans will be happy to know that Svend is back, though now he’s interrupting violent coitus amid the havoc Reptilicus wreaks (reeks?), and Lise — remember older sister Lise? — is rescued by –
Karen (Mimi Heinrich) and Svend (Bent Mejding) as they appeared in Sidney Pink/Ib Melchoir’s Reptilicus (1961), a timid hint of the blushing passion Dean Owen’s novel reveled in and as close as the original Danish version ever got to passion — all cut from the AIP edition we grew up with.
So, these are the last two passages, folks.
Set up: Chapter Sixteen finds Svend wheeling his Jeep through the catastrophic devastation Reptilicus is leaving in his wake in the city of Copenhagen. He glimpses “a frightened girl, her back to a wall. Two men seized her, pulling her into a building.”
Svend leaps from his vehicle …
Svend ducked into the building. Beyond a smashed door he could see a stairway that led to offices above. Then he saw the two men. They were holding the girl on the floor in front of the elevators. As she squirmed and kicked, one of them tore off her skirt.
When they saw Svend rushing toward them, they sprang up; one of them flashed a switchblade knife. The sobbing girl reached out and caught the ankle of the knife wielder. He lost his balance, Svend struck the other one in the mouth. The man reeled. Svend tromped down on the wrist of the prostrate man holding the knife. He let out a howl of pain. Then the two would-be rapists ran into the street. Svend kicked the knife away, turned to look for the girl. She had snatched up her torn skirt and had disappeared up the stairs….
A fat woman, wearing an open robe, fought her way to the Jeep. Her round face was livid. Through the front of her robe could be seen pendulous breasts. Her nightgown had been torn to her waist….
(Owen, Reptilicus, pg. 101)
Shortly after the mob violence subsides, Owen allows the strained triangle of Svend and sisters Karen and Lise to be emotionally resolved — based in part as it is on the end of Lise’s tragic affair with the German mountaineer Detleff Lamper — only to plunge Lise into the hands of another opportunist pair of rapists, Lars and Renn, amid the damage Reptilicus creates.
Lars and Renn have Lise at their mercy — Lise screams:
Renn clapped a hand over her mouth. Through frightened eyes she saw Lars come up with a drawstring he had pulled from scorched draperies.
Terror surged up in her and she felt the dagger point of fear under her heart. She had been too young during the war, but she had heard older women talk about getting caught alone on a deserted street.
“Please,” she said, her voice muffled by Renn’s hand. “I didn’t mean to get angry with you. Let me go and I’ll take you next door to my house. We have lots of liquor — “
Lars was grinning down at her. “Renn, she’s trying to talk her way out of this.” He was bending down, ready to wrap the drawstrings around her upper arms when the toe of a shoe at the end of a swinging leg caught him on the jaw. His head snapped back and, with arms loose, he struck the floor like a roll of carpet.
Her wrists, freed, began to come to life again. She looked up, saw the owner of the swinging leg — Detleff Lamper. The eyes in the flushed, Teutonic face held a steel-bright anger.
She couldn’t imagine how he had come to be here. She didn’t care. All she knew in this moment was that this young knight with the mountain-climber’s build, dressed in gray tweeds and a white shirt smudged with ash, had come to rescue her.
She saw his fist explode in the center of Lars’ face. He went down, landing beside Renn. Neither of them moved.
Then Det had swept her up in his arms and was running with her toward her house next door…
…[Lise] whispered, touching his cheek. “Only you and I matter now… Life could be so short, Det. Make me your wife. Here and now.”
(Ibid., pp. 136-137).
Six pages later, Reptilicus comes to its shocking final page.
But the fun was just beginning…
[To be continued!]
Hey, Steve – Those cartoons prompted this: have you or might you consider running for public office? Not me – too many skeletons.
Roger, I’ll never run for office, ever! My Dad did, when we lived in Waterbury and Colbyville — the campaign process was a killer, and that was just for a town office (I still remember his poster, with a photo from his military service and the line, “Now’s the Time to Hold the Line”). I worked for about two years on a town committee in Marlboro, VT in hopes of getting high-speed internet into the community, and found the hours, days, weeks and months of coordinating people, meetings and such pretty daunting — and we never did solve the problem.
I pour my social skills and organizational chops into the Center for Cartoon Studies and some community organizations (like WRIF — the White River Indie Film festival), and occasionally get involved with local boards and such, but office — nooooooo, it’s not the skeletons, it’s just not how I’m hardwired.
It’s obvious that if they’d done the Dean Owens version the film would have been a big hit.
Guys like Steve Bissette only achieve office when appointed.