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Eve Tushnet / May 12, 2021

I came to Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, thirty years after its 1991 publication date, expecting sharp sociocultural observation and maybe some economic critique. After all, Coupland, who said that his generation was “sick of stupid labels,” inadvertently coined the self-effacing generational moniker under which my cohort has labored.

But Generation X is something stranger than a novel of social observation. It is a scrappy, almost zinelike collage of images, marginal text, and patchwork narratives, making it feel like a back issue of a magazine that never quite existed. It’s full of incisive nouvelle slang: “McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.” Coupland provides all the expected pleasures: lostness, drifting, downward mobility, a surfeit of irony and anti-politics; and over it all the fading shadow of global thermonuclear war, which still haunts the imaginations of this last generation of Cold War kids.

But Coupland’s characters long more for sublimity than for 1950s-style industrial and familial stability. They’re haunted not just by the mushroom cloud but by the monastery. Reading Coupland’s debut novel, you’ll be reminded that seminal Gen X lit includes not just Jay McInerney’s moral tales but Donna Tartt’s 1992 divine-madness pulp masterpiece The Secret History.

Generation X is about three friends, Andy, Dagmar (a man), and Claire. Their platonic cuddling and aggressively retro aesthetic create an odd, lightly ironized, closety vibe. A novelist more concerned with our moral life would explain this atmosphere: perhaps through parental divorce, which played such a huge role in the national psyche of the ’80s and ’90s. Divorce defines the cultural landscape of Generation X. As one of the marginal comics by Paul Rivoche puts it: “Don’t worry, mother… If the marriage doesn’t work out, we can always get divorced.” The atmosphere of divorce, its ever present possibility, shapes these characters’ contingent and uncommitted life—but it doesn’t define their psychological backgrounds. Unlike in much Gen X fiction (including McInerney’s Story of My Life and The Secret History), our hero’s parents are still married.

In 2019, the divorce rate hit a record low, as did the marriage rate and the childbirth rate. Divorce and the experiences of “children of divorce,” which shaped so many books and movies in the 1980s and 1990s, play a much smaller role in our cultural landscape now that nobody’s getting married or having children in the first place. This shift has not exactly reduced the ambient level of instability and precarity. The covert intensity with which Andy and his friends cling to one another, the mingled hope and guardedness in their promise-free love, is if anything even more striking in our current relationship moonscape.

The place of gay people and gay longings has shifted in a far more significant way since 1991, and here Generation X does feel even more retro than it’s trying to be. But although there are clues to the narrator’s sexuality for those who would like clues (it’s no coincidence that Claire’s awful boyfriend calls him “Candy”), Coupland doesn’t pathologize the unspoken quality of Andy’s sexual longings. Andy’s reliance on dreams and hints suggests an extended adolescence; that’s part of the experience of the closet, but it’s also something he can share with his friends, opening him to them as well as limiting him.

Andy and his friends are bracingly aware that they won’t do as well as their parents. I remember answering the phone when I was in middle school and finding myself in a poll: “Do you expect to have the same level of financial security as your parents, or greater, or less?” I said, “Less,” of course, with a suppressed duh. Doesn’t everyone expect less? And yet Andy and his friends live in their own bungalows, right next to one another. (Andy’s from Portland but fled to tend bar in Palm Springs with Dag; Claire sells Chanel at a luxury department store.) They don’t need housemates. They have pets! Who do you know, who isn’t rich, who can afford their own rental and a pet? There’s a chapter in here titled “Quit Your Job.” I enjoyed that slogan, but thirty years on, in the middle of the gig pandemic, I also thought, Gosh, remember when people had “jobs”? Andy and his friends come from the middle class or higher, true; they’re also part of a generation that could feel the floor tilting under them—even if they hadn’t yet slid all the way off. They’re able to choose between the service industry and a soul-crushing job with health benefits. We should all be so lucky!

The most powerful image of the precarity of these characters is not their withdrawal from romance or their bartending jobs. It’s nuclear war. When the novel was released, in March 1991, the Soviet Union still existed. It’s set in 1990, the year after the Berlin Wall fell. The old game of brinksmanship was rapidly changing its rules, and nobody knew how it would end. Dag is obsessed with the mushroom cloud; he accidentally covers Claire’s bungalow with radioactive rocks; he closes one of his many “end of the world stories” with “the silent rush of hot wind, like the opening of a trillion oven doors that you’ve been imagining since you were six.” Nuclear war is an ever present memento mori: a reminder that you’re a target, that political forces you can’t hope to affect may turn you and everybody you know into glass. 

But nuclear war also offers the promise of a totally different future. Maybe things won’t just keep going the way they have been. Maybe apocalypse will bring revelation. Dag’s vision of the mushroom cloud ends in communion and a kind of confession. His nuclear fantasies express deep-rooted fears, but also a longing for the ecstatic shattering of the self. Nuclear war would not just crack open the self-protective carapace of irony: the persona. It would not only be the ultimate shared experience in an atomized and alienated world (“We Will All Go Together When We Go,” as Tom Lehrer reminds us). It also represents the white-hot moment when loss becomes total. And it’s in this loss, a kind of mutually-assured asceticism, that Coupland’s characters hope to discover some form of transcendence. That’s vague, and it’s vague in the novel; maybe it has to be vague, because, having left the ornament and doctrine of religions behind, Andy and Dag and Claire have little idea what other shape transcendence might take.

We see this in their stories. One of the unexpected delights of Generation X is the way it turns the postmodern obsession with narratology into a game. The three friends constantly tell each other “bedtime stories,” with various rules and conventions. This is part of their self-protective irony (it’s not me, it’s not my heart). It’s part of the zine aesthetic of the novel, and it fits the characters’ directionless lives; no individual plotline can be sustained for very long. But Coupland makes this shared storytelling feel loving and genuinely communal. It’s a sincere statement that they may view their own lives as pointless and meaningless, but they want to hear their friends’ stories. There’s an uncynical lightness to the storytelling, which lets these characters reveal their secret desires as if at a slumber party, flashlights under their chins.

And so we get Claire’s fairy tale of the spaceman who persuades a girl stuck on the backwater planet of “Texlahoma” to give her life so he can get back to Earth. He’ll revive her, he promises. Her sisters know it’s a lie. But they still let her go to her ecstatic death: “And together the two sisters sat into the night, silhouetted by the luminescing earth, having a contest with each other to see who could swing their swing the highest.” This is a tale of deadly romance, appropriate for the sex-kills era. It’s a tale of economic marginality. But it’s also suffused with longing for the unknown, even if the journey into that black, star-studded expanse will kill you. And it’s a hint that death, at least symbolic death, may be necessary in order to touch the stars.

Claire is also the one who tells the most direct parable of asceticism. She tells this story soon after her sketchy grifter friend, nicknamed Elvissa, runs off to be “a gardener at a nunnery.” Dag says, “I don’t buy it”; but Claire retorts, “It’s not something you buy.” Generation X, in Generation X, shelters neither in the certainties of the ’60s revolt nor in the post-Great Recession certainties of the millennials, but in irony and delay. Elvissa’s flight suggests an unsheltered alternative. Not the convent—that’s too much certainty or the wrong kind—but something convent-like: some ascesis, some mystery, some intelligible loss and unintelligible gain.

Right after Elvissa leaves, Claire tells a story called “Leave Your Body,” about “this poor little rich girl named Linda.” Linda’s parents break up when she’s a kid; she becomes a “charmed but targetless” woman, restless and unhappy. And then in the Himalayas she learns about “a religious sect of monks and nuns… who had achieved a state of saintliness—ecstasy—release.” Linda accepts the sect’s strict rules (though it’s important to the generational portrait that they’re not the rules of kashrut or the catechism) and begins seven years of fasting and meditation. She misunderstands. She makes what is literally a fatal error, due to her ignorance of the Himalayan discipline. And yet that doesn’t mean she fails. The ultra-American’s quest ends not in humiliation but in mystery: even in her folly, she found the doorway.

This is Coupland’s attitude toward all his characters’ longings. He lavishes attention on their bright and curlicued foolishness, but he never holds their hopes in contempt. He suggests that they may someday find whatever it is they’re seeking, even if they never understand it. This is an unfinished book; it defined a generation by our unfinishedness.

Eve Tushnet is the author of two novels, Amends and Punishment: A Love Story, as well as the nonfiction Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith. She lives in Washington, DC and writes and speaks on topics ranging from medieval covenants of friendship to underrated vampire films. Her hobbies include sin, confession, and ecstasy.

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Demiurgus Dreams on Etsy

Sam Moore / April 28, 2021

One of the first, most potent images in Wakefield Poole’s groundbreaking 1971 adult film Boys in the Sand is that of Casey Donovan emerging from the waves before making his way onto the beach. The image feels like a queering of a common cultural touchstone: a figure of great beauty surrounded by water, as if the waves and sea came together to create it. From Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Ursula Andress in 1962’s Dr. No (subverted decades later by Daniel Craig in 2006’s Casino Royale), there’s something about the water as a site of (re)birth that’s full of power and myth. This idea of a loaded geography, at once physical and representative of something greater, runs deep in the DNA of Boys in the Sand; the film wouldn’t exist without the Fire Island locale that it calls home. 

Poole’s film explores both the reality and mythical unreality of New York’s Fire Island, a place that’s taken a heightened place in queer art and culture for decades now—a kind of sanctuary, a place of freedom, one made all the more tempting by the fact that it isn’t available for everyone. In the director’s commentary for Boys in the Sand, Poole says that when it came to Fire Island, “a lot of people had heard of it, but never seen it.” Boys is a kind of strange travelogue, capturing both the island’s reality—how elemental it is, the heat and the water—and also imbuing it with a kind of magic, helping to turn the place into a myth. The film is a perfect escapist fantasy: there are no straight people, there’s no violence, all the men are beautiful, and the sex is plentiful. It becomes something utopian, the kind of gay-only place that people might normally have only dreamed of. The nature of queer life at the time, the extent to which it was something that had to be kept secret, is one of the things that’s gone on to make Fire Island such a staple of queer culture, an iconic part of its history. This idea—attractive men bathed in a sunlight so bright that it seems almost unreal—is echoed in a lot of art that explores the Fire Island milieu, perhaps most explicitly in the images detailed in Tom Bianchi’s 2013 Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-83. 

Bianchi’s images echo the aesthetic of Boys in the Sand, and looking at Donovan in the film alongside some of the men who appear in Bianchi’s Polaroids, it becomes clear that they share the same approach to Fire Island: both artists echo the same Arcadian myth of the pines. A certain type of body populates the vast majority of the snapshots: buff, gym-going, masculine, tanned—the tan lines on Bianchi’s subjects, in fact, are often vivid in contrast to their sun-kissed bodies. Poole’s actors fall into a similar camp, and this creates the sense that Fire Island is a place that’s by and for a narrow group of people within queer communities: conventionally attractive men. The prevalence of these images inverts similar ideas in a straight tradition: tempting women on distant islands, stretching all the way back to the sirens in The Odyssey. From a queer perspective, this idea is both new and old all at once; while it changes the ways in which male bodies are viewed—and challenges mythical traditions that often only frame female bodies in this way—it continues to show that only certain kinds of bodies are worth immortalizing via images. 

For all of the possibility in the air, the bodies that occupy these spaces make it clear that the Fire Island that exists in queer art is a place to showcase a certain type of body, a way to look and a way to live that’s the price of admission for this very specific utopian escape. Boys in the Sand finds power in these bodies as objects of desire—a magical pill literally causes a boyfriend to materialize out of thin air in the film’s “Poolside” section—the currency with which the place is navigated. This is echoed in some of the queer art that comes in the wake of Boys in the Sand. The Andrew Holleran novel Dancer from the Dance (which uses one of Bianchi’s Polaroids as a cover photo in a recent reprint) is obsessed with the mythical image of Fire Island, populating it with characters who exist through gossip and assumption as much as through their own lives, much like the island itself, so it makes sense when Holleran writes: “we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, i think, in that order.” None of these things exist in the images of Fire Island put forward by Poole and Bianchi; the sun is always out, and the real world is always on the other side of the water. 

How one stayed at Fire Island is one of the other great dividers of the place. Poole himself acknowledges this in his Boys commentary, where he argues that the economics that defined much of the island came down to whether you came in on the ferry or owned your own boat. None of Poole’s characters seem to be on the lower end of the economic spectrum; the houses they stay in are nice, and the integration of domesticity—a lot of the characters in Boys want relationships beyond a sexual fling, and there’s an air of loneliness that exists in a push-and-pull dynamic with the possibility inherent on the Island—carries with it the idea of a kind of ownership that not everyone can afford. The idea of loneliness—both on and beyond Fire Island—is echoed in an interesting way in Bianchi’s Polaroids: it’s rare for any of his subjects’ faces to be seen, as if the specter of the world beyond the island stops them from revealing all of themselves to the camera. 

This is one of the things that makes Fire Island such a strange, liminal place in queer art. It exists in a singular way, unlike anywhere else, and also unlike a real place. There’s a scene in Boys where a door is opened to seemingly nowhere, a sort of non-space that’s divorced even from the rest of the island. The episodic structure of the film—”beachside,” “poolside,” and “inside”—break the place down into a series of fragmented landscapes, at once connected and not connected to one another. This is never a place that people will stay in for the long-term, we know. Even if the domestic moments suggest some kind of future, it isn’t a future that’s possible here.​

​And yet, queer art keeps returning to Fire Island, this place that’s at once impermanent and inescapable. For Poole, much of the drama in Boys is the act of cruising itself: the slow-moving camera that follows the movements of his lonely lovers, the immediacy and intimacy that’s only available on Fire Island. For Bianchi, it’s a bright escapism, even if his images don’t always show all of their subjects—that incompleteness allows viewers to fill in the blanks, imagining their own dream man.

Holleran’s novel makes for a fascinating contrast with both Poole and Bianchi. He seems more willing to engage with the idea of the myth, where the others, knowingly or not, contributed instead to the act of myth-making. The echoes of Fire Island also echo some of the problems inherent in the ways that queer culture is understood. There’s a reason that the bodies across all these different media are so uniform, and one of the strangest, most compelling parts of the Fire Island myth is how explicit it is about the fact that freedom and joy won’t be offered to everyone who arrives. The thing that most clearly, most viscerally ties together the film, the photographs, and the novel are these bodies—their conventional, masculine attractiveness serving as a kind of shorthand for the acceptable face/facelessness of Fire Island, a small sample of the kind of men who are most likely to be accepted here. Even though the entrance to Fire Island is restricted—by how you look, by how much money you have—the return, season after season, still seems inevitable. It makes sense. All of these people, fictional or otherwise, escape here because the island offers them something that the real world won’t.

Sam Moore‘s writing on queerness, politics, and genre fiction in art has been published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Little White Lies, Hyperallergic, and other places. Their poetry and experimental essays have been published in print and online, most recently in the Brixton Review of Books. If their writing didn’t already give it away, they’re into weird stuff.

Artist unknown. An earlier post on the Tarasque can be found here.

Noah Berlatsky / April 14, 2021

The Angel Levine was greeted with irritation, befuddlement, and a good amount of indifference upon its release in 1970. Organized and produced by Harry Belafonte, the movie is an allegorical discussion of Black-Jewish relationships using a mix of realism and fantasy that managed to appeal to neither Black nor white audiences. A contemporary New York Times review labeled it “a failure of major proportions.” The Black press barely covered it, despite Belafonte’s fame and standing as one of the leading Black entertainers of the time. After the DVD release in 2002, a mostly sympathetic critic admitted, “the best that can be said about it is that it doesn’t quite come together.”

Watching the movie now, it’s clear the film is not exactly ahead of its time. Even post-Get Out (2017), with interest in Black speculative fiction on film at a historic high, it’s difficult to imagine The Angel Levine finding much of an audience. The fact that the movie continues to alienate seems significant, though. Truly egalitarian cross-ethnic solidarity remains difficult for creators and audiences to imagine. 

The movie is based on a short story by Bernard Malamud, “The Angel Levine,” which was originally published in Commentary in 1958. Malamud was one of the postwar Jewish writers who took advantage of diminished antisemitism to celebrate his ethnic identity as a storytelling resource. His stories were often set in the Yiddish New York of the ‘20s and ‘30s, even as they dealt with contemporary themes. “The Angel Levine” is the story of Manischevitz, a Jewish tailor cursed with multiple catastrophes: his shop burns down, his insurance is insufficient, his back goes out, and his beloved wife Fanny becomes deathly ill. Burdened beyond endurance, he is startled one day by a Black man who appears unannounced in his apartment. The man says his name is Alexander Levine, and that he is an angel. Manischevitz doesn’t believe him, and the man leaves. But as Fanny grows worse, Manischevitz becomes desperate. He goes to Harlem, tracks Levine down, and finds him drinking and dancing in a very un-godly manner. Nonetheless, he tells the angel he believes in him. The angel returns to Manischevitz’s door, grows wings, and flies into the sky in a fluttering of black wings. Manischevitz enters his house and finds his wife has been cured.

Malamud’s story has Black people in it, but it’s told from a white Jewish perspective. Manischevitz is the main character, and the third person narrative is in his head; you see only what he sees, and he is the only character whose thoughts you know. The story is about the need to believe in others, and about welcoming Black people into the circle of Jewish ethical commitment. “Believe me, there are Jews everywhere,” Manischevitz says to Fanny in the story’s last line. But it is white Jewish people doing the welcoming. Levine merely waits to be summoned.

Belafonte was a singer who drew on a broad array of musical traditions, and who saw connections between working class struggle across racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. He was drawn to a story about mutual faith as a foundation for solidarity and transformation. But he didn’t want to follow Malamud in presenting that story entirely from a white perspective. Instead, he carefully assembled an interracial group of creators to work on the film. Slovakian Ján Kadár, who had been interred in a Nazi work camp, was brought on as director. Zero Mostel plays the lead, renamed Morris Mishkin, and Polish actress Ida Kamińska took the part of Fanny. But Belafonte also brought on writer Bill Gunn, who would later create the much-admired Ganja and Hess (1973). Gunn was specifically tasked with expanding the character of Alex Levine. There’s also a role for Levine’s girlfriend, Sally (Gloria Foster). Finally, Belafonte created an apprenticeship program so that young Black and Puerto Rican filmmakers, mostly excluded from the film industry, could get paid to work on set, contribute their talents, and gain experience for their own projects.

In short, Belafonte wanted Black experience to be at the center, rather than the periphery, of the filmed The Angel Levine. He accomplished this in part simply by appearing in the film himself.  Belafonte is an enormously charismatic presence, who effortlessly steals scenes even from a character actor as accomplished as Mostel. It’s impossible to see Belafonte as a figure in someone else’s drama, or as a kind of comical enigma. His smile manages to be both beatific and lived-in; you want to know more about him, because you know he has his own story to tell.

The movie, contra Malamud, takes pains to tell that story. Levine, in this version, is a small town hood who is killed by a car while trying to escape with a stolen fur. When he got to heaven, he says he was told to turn around and come right back. (“Every white mother” went right on to heaven, he says bitterly, “but me they put on probation.”) He is tasked with getting Mishkin to believe in him. That belief will allow him to miraculously heal Fanny, and become a full angel in heaven. In the meantime, though, he has his own unfinished business. He wants to reconcile with his long-suffering girlfriend Sally, apologize, and tell her he loves her.

Giving Levine a narrative of his own creates a clash of genres. In accord with the Malamud story, Mishkin is still the main character in a white ethnic Jewish tale about endurance, suffering, and empathy, told in a sentimental register.  But Levine’s story draws on the social realism of Black protest genres. His angry soliloquies (“Nothin’! Nothin’! A whole lifetime with nothin’ to show for it!”) and his quick rage at Mishkin’s casual racist slurs (“You call me a schvartze one more time and I’ll knock you on your ass!”) echo the inchoate, yearning despair and simmering righteous violence of Richard Wright’s 1940 Native Son.  

The film uses its magical elements to try to bridge these contrasting narratives. Levine simply appears in Mishkin’s kitchen, through uncertain means, and the two must then elbow around each other in the cramped set, their bodies and stories squashed in together for better or worse.  Mishkin bustles around and tries to make his wife comfortable while Levine in the next room embraces Sally in an effort to overcome her skepticism. Repeatedly, Mishkin looks through the window in the kitchen, or through a door jam, gazing at Levine just as the movie audience gazes at Levine. Those who came to see a white Jewish drama are encouraged to see, with Mishkin, another story. “Mr. Levine, you have meaning for me,” Mishkin says. That’s a demand not just for understanding, but for interest, investment, and a recognition of relevance across difference and across genre.

Being in one another’s stories should in theory provide a common ground for solidarity. The movie makes numerous efforts to show intersections of Black and Jewish experience, and to suggest that the story of one can be the story of the other. In an early scene, Mishkin applies for welfare to a Black woman caseworker—a reminder that, despite racist messaging to the contrary, it’s not only or primarily Black people who sometimes need state aid. Later, during Mishkin’s final trip to Harlem, he drops in to ask for directions in a Black tailor’s shop, looking for help from a member of his own profession.

The most obvious appeal across Black and Jewish communities, though, is the fact that Levine belongs to both. This is an approach that should resonate more solidly now than at the time of the film, more even than at the time of Malamud’s story. In 1955, Malamud could write that Manischevitz “had heard of black Jews but had never met one.” In the ‘70s, Black Jewish people still did not have much public visibility; James Baldwin doesn’t mention Black Jewish people at all in his famous 1967 essay “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” Some five decades later, however, intermarriage has substantially increased the number of Black Jewish people in the United States, and Ethiopian Jewish immigration to Israel has been a topic of international discussion. Levine in 2021 isn’t just a symbol, if he ever was only that. He’s a screen representation of people who are rarely portrayed in mainstream Hollywood films. 

Mishkin’s attitude towards Levine in 1970 is one of incredulity; he demands that Levine recite the blessing over the bread and, in a hugely inappropriate move, asks if he’s circumcised. Again, Black Jewish people are significantly more prevalent now, but Mishkin’s racist notion that Jewishness is linked to skin color persists. Sandra Lawson, a Black rabbi, wrote at the Forward that she’d “never been in a Jewish space where I wasn’t questioned.” Black Jewish Texan Tracey Nicole says that she always introduces herself to a new police officer at her place of worship because “I am the only Jew of color at our synagogue. So when I walk into situations like that, I’m wondering if people will acknowledge that I belong.”

Malamud’s story, which is rooted in Jewish experience, imagines shared suffering and marginalization as a path to renewal and resurrection. And that’s not completely fantastic; many Jewish people did work prominently for Black civil rights in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and some even died for it. But Mishkin’s racism, and the way it is still echoed in white Jewish treatment of Black Jews, should make viewers hesitant about taking away a too hopeful message. Belafonte himself approached his film about faith with a good deal of skepticism only two years after the assassination of his friend Martin Luther King Jr. “For me, the miracle in America was Martin Luther King,” he said in a press interview about the film. “In the years that King and SNCC were coming to the people with love, the people didn’t believe. They finally believed when it was too damn late.”

The difficulty in crafting a white Jewish story and a Black story simultaneously is underlined in one of the film’s most telling exchanges. Levine, distraught, has gone to the roof. Mishkin follows him and tries to comfort him by referencing white Jewish experience of assimilation and waning antisemitism. “They’re not very nice to you now, but tomorrow they’ll be ashamed of themselves and do better,” he says with complacent assurance. To which Levine responds, “Bullshit.” Black people have been in America a good bit longer than white Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Time brought them not apologies, but the opportunity to be exploited by a broader ethnicity of white landlords. When Mishkin suggests he wants to draw Levine into the orbit of white Jewish ethics and experience, it’s meant to be beneficent altruism. But it could also be a self-serving lie. How can you create solidarity without flattening difference? How do you make another’s story your own when it isn’t yours to own?

Malamud’s “The Angel Levine” mostly ignored those questions, which is why it feels finished and coherent, if slight. The film version, in contrast, tries to answer them, and seizes up in the process. It obviously doesn’t know how to wrap up its runtime. As the New York Times review says, it keeps “stopping and starting up again.” It finally dead-ends in melancholy ambiguity, with Fanny hovering between life and death back at the apartment while Mishkin stands in Harlem, reaching up to try to catch a floating black feather that eludes his grasp. He fails, and the movie largely fails as well. Belafonte was trying to rework a Jewish idiom into a Black one to create a story about universal solidarity that retained particularity without condescension. More than half a century later, American cinema, to say nothing of American society, is still unsure how to do that. It’s not even sure it wants to try.

Noah Berlatsky is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics.

Alex Adams / March 25, 2021

Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla is perhaps the most widely praised Kaiju film ever made. A special effects masterpiece at the time, the monochrome mother of all monster movies had bleak, fume-laden visuals, a gloomy, mournful tone, and an unambiguous anti-nuclear message. Even its conclusion, in which the pained Dr. Serizawa unleashes his hyper-toxic Oxygen Destroyer to finally rid Japan of its avenging lizard king, sees no redemption, as the weapon that banishes the beast also irreversibly poisons the Earth. Godzilla is rightly remembered as a serious, somber, and politically insightful cinematic monument with a powerful message and internationally historical significance. Its first dozen or so sequels, however, are quite another matter—a different beast, you could say.

For Godzilla would not remain an icon of manmade devastation for long. In the course of the next two decades, Godzilla would grow from a nightmarish God of Destruction into mankind’s dependable, child-friendly ally. “The dragon has become St. George,” wrote New York Times film critic Vincent Canby on the 1976 US release of Godzilla Vs. Megalon, in which Godzilla defends the Earth against the giant cockroach Megalon and his sinister ally, the buzzsaw-chested robot chicken Gigan. Godzilla’s role as the bane of modern Japan would be assumed by the many Kaiju successors he confronted, and the beast who had once embodied the apocalypse would now stand heroically between his antagonists and their desire to destroy the Earth.

Varying wildly in tone, the corpus of movies from the Shōwa era of the Godzilla series veers vertiginously between family-friendly entertainments—such as All Monsters Attack (1969), Son of Godzilla (1966), and Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1964)—and the more adult tone evident in the environmentalist psychedelia of Godzilla Vs. Hedorah (1971) or the WrestleMania spectacles of Destroy All Monsters (1968) and Godzilla Vs. Mechagodzilla (1974). These movies are fondly remembered by fans for their rough and ready practical special effects, their cartoonish, preposterous pugilism, and their deliriously inventive storytelling, which could use anything at all as the pretext for a monster battle—from an insect invasion of the Earth to a 24-hour dance competition.

Nevertheless, their lack of the thematic seriousness and visual restraint so evident in Honda’s first film means that they are often looked down on as a silly dilution of the original movie, a goofy world cinema novelty of interest only to kids, nerds, or the sort of weirdo who used to load up on caffeine and stay up late to watch men in rubber suits wrestling on cheaply painted sound stages. Naturally I, as just such a weirdo, think that this sneering, while understandable, underplays a great deal of the sophistication and interest of these wacky, silly, excellently distracting films. Not simply the impoverishment of a once-grand icon in the pursuit of ever-dwindling box office returns (although Toho has certainly never been shy of ruthlessly commercially exploiting Godzilla), Godzilla’s evolution from cosmic punishment to benevolent savior also makes him one of the most interesting, flexible, and dynamic popular cultural icons of the Cold War years.

Rumble in the Jungle: King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

King Kong vs. Godzilla is perhaps the best remembered of the Shōwa-era Godzilla movies, after the original Godzilla. The first time either creature would be seen in color, it remains the most successful and popular Godzilla movie to this day, in terms of ticket sales at least, perhaps due to the way in which it was marketed—almost like a high-stakes boxing match or wrestling bout. The genius of its combination of two iconic monsters at a time when both of them still remained fearful beasts, rather than comic or heroic figures, was powerful enough for the movie to remain a genre high-water mark for years to come.

This double-headliner structure, in which two A-list monsters were brought together in order to double the appeal of the movie, would initiate a run of versus battles that would last for over a decade. From 1964 onwards, Toho produced at least one Godzilla movie every year until the financial failure of Terror of Mechagodzilla drew the franchise to a screeching halt in 1975. Though Godzilla had fought against the Ankylosaur Kaiju Anguirus seven years earlier in Godzilla Raids Again (1956), it would be King Kong Vs. Godzilla that truly cemented the formal template for the many monster clashes to come: on some pretext or other, Godzilla would face off against invading life forms from outer space, such as his arch-nemesis King Ghidorah, or against creatures with more Earthly origins, such as the mysterious and oddly beautiful Mothra, the sea-monster Ebirah, or, indeed, the American myth King Kong.

At the same time as it is great knockabout fun at face value, the “versus movie” format also provides a tremendously flexible and rich conceptual palette for filmmakers to engage with social and political ideas. In his extraordinary book of mini-essays Mythologies (1957), French critic Roland Barthes observes that amateur wrestling is a kind of broad-brush theater in which good and evil battle for symbolic supremacy. “In the ring,” he writes, “wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.” The very simplicity and crudeness of the drama, he writes, is what makes these bouts transcendent. Further, he claims, its ramshackle nature—and the foundational role of the audience’s gleeful suspension of disbelief—also means that its value as symbolic play is brought to the forefront: “There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations.”

So it is in the Kaiju clash film, that unique brand of spectacle cinema that shares many formal and thematic traits with wrestling as well as other Japanese cultural forms such as anime and manga. The bold, lurid language of gesture, the vivid play of symbol and myth, and their open environmentalist and anti-nuclear ethical commitments make them a kind of powerful moral theater, at once sublime and ridiculous, at once ostentatiously silly and deathly serious. Crucially, it is equally redundant to point out that the special effects are unconvincing in King Kong Vs. Godzilla as it is to point out that wrestling is “not real” or that a play is made up (or indeed, that your Extreme Noise Terror record features a lot of shouting—what exactly did you expect?). What matters is not verisimilitude, or even a coherently sequential narrative, but the experience of grand moments of sensory power, scenes of epic destruction and wrenching pathos, and the realization of overwhelming visions of primal, fantastical worlds previously not imaginable.

You don’t, after all, go to a film about wrestling monsters expecting subtlety. But this doesn’t mean, of course, that they are without content. Even the original Godzilla derives its power from its total commitment to the enactment of one broad, bold idea.

The Meaning of Monstrosity

Toho’s first Godzilla film had such a potent social and political message that the creature would always be thought of in semiotic terms, always interpreted as a metaphor for the pressing concerns of the time. The subsequent Shōwa films, though, are chaotically flexible in this regard, and Godzilla cannot be read consistently as any kind of fixed or coherent symbol from film to film. More often, it is his foes who “embody” some social or political force against which the Earth needs to be defended, whether it is arms-race militarism (Mechagodzilla), pollution (Hedorah), renewed atomic testing (Megalon), or intergalactic imperialism (King Ghidorah, Gigan). Most of all, though, in his initial incarnation at least, Godzilla represents the unstoppable force, the mute, brute power of nature, the principle of sheer indestructibility.

This characterization of Godzilla remains, for many, the most compelling. Shusuke Kaneko, director of Millennium-era fan favorite Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), famously commented that Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Hollywood interpretation of Godzilla was disappointing in part because of its fear of American ordnance. “Americans seem unable to accept a creature,” he said, “that cannot be put down by their arms.” (Rather than an adaptation of the Toho legend of the mysterious force of nature, Emmerich’s version recalls nothing more than the climax of the previous year’s Jurassic Park: The Lost World, in which a T-Rex runs amok in San Diego.) Godzilla is at his most attractive when he is at his ugliest, when he embodies a total disaster that can be momentarily deflected but never truly defeated.

In “Mammoth,” the 74th essay in Minima Moralia (1951), Theodor Adorno writes that “the desire for the presence of the most ancient is a hope that animal creation might survive the wrong that man has done it, if not man himself, and give rise to a better species, one that finally makes a success of life.” Adorno’s reflections on the appeal of prehistoric beasts have more than a little relevance to Toho’s reptilian colossus. Very often Godzilla is conceived of as the resistance or revenge of the natural world, an embodiment of nature’s apocalyptic judgement upon mankind, a kind of demonic scourge unleashed by the obscure yet vengeful conscience of the wronged planet. He retains this character in King Kong Vs. Godzilla—when he bursts out of an iceberg at the start of the movie, nobody is pleased that he has arisen from his slumber to save the day, as would happen in later films. Here, he is a wild, unpredictable cataclysm that cannot be stopped, a symbol of the natural world’s dominance over us and its indifferent ability to survive us.

Kong, too, is no stranger to social and political interpretations. There is a long and distinguished critical tradition of reading King Kong as a problematic and racist engagement with themes related to slavery, imperialism, and moral panics about Black masculinity and sexuality. Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 original, which draws heavily on the representational traditions of lost world adventure fiction, is widely considered to be an allegory of slavery and imperial exploitation, a tragic parable of man’s ruthless, irreverent, and self-involved abuse of the world’s majestic wildness. John Guillermin’s 1976 US version would more explicitly locate the story in the context of petropolitics, as the colonizing expedition to Skull Island is motivated not by a desire to capture a mythic beast but, more prosaically perhaps, to drill for oil. When Peter Jackson remade the movie in 2005, he made it a satire of the entertainment industry, casting Carl Denham as a roguish, self-destructive genius, an Orson Welles figure whose visionary talent threatens to destroy all of those near to him, and whose pledges to complete his work in the honor of the people who died in its course recalls the increasingly desperate dedications of documentarian-cum-unintentional-murderer Remy in 1992’s Man Bites Dog. For Jackson, Denham is like Kong, an unstoppable and doomed force of nature who destroys by loving.

Every Hollywood version of the original story, though, however sophisticated, simultaneously exploits the persistent racist panic about Black male desire for white women that is embedded into the fabric of the story. King Kong is, at its heart, a story about the violent death that inevitably looms at the horizon of Kong’s love for human women, a fable that has always been read as a racist allegory of the tragedy and illegitimacy of Black men’s supposedly insatiable appetite for the love of white women.

King Kong Vs. Godzilla is no exception here, as Kong’s storyline fuses critique of corporate colonialism with a problematic representation of Black desire. The characters’ extractivist plunder of Kong’s home island—changed from the enigmatic and unlocatable Skull Island to Pharaoh Island, a fictionalized landmass among the Solomon Islands—is the incident that prompts the confrontation between the two legendary beasts, and the Pacific Pharmaceutical execs who exploit Pharaoh Island for its pleasantly intoxicating fruit are shown as single-minded, hubristic buffoons as they capture Kong with the insane intent of using him to advertise their company. The clash of titans still makes time for a comedic critique of the ruthlessness of the capitalist advertising industry; so too does it retain Kong’s fascination with human women, as he scales a government building while clinging to a beautiful young woman he has captured.

The natives of Skull Island, too, are always a problem for these films. From Cooper’s original painted tribe of Kong-worshippers, to Jackson’s violent brutes (who recall the Uruk-Hai orcs from his Lord of the Rings trilogy), to the noble savages of 2017’s Kong: Skull Island (who recall Kurtz’s sinister and silent tribe in 1979’s Apocalypse Now), the human inhabitants of Kong’s home are routinely represented in extraordinarily dehumanizing ways.  

Once again, King Kong Vs. Godzilla follows suit. The tribe of Faro Island is portrayed by actors in full-body blackface, and the Pacific Pharmaceutical employees bribe them with a transistor radio and tobacco. This patronizing bargain, in which they steal the island god in return for habit-forming poison and toys, is part of the film’s critique of exploitative capitalism; it is also, however, played for laughs. No matter how progressive the themes, a film that features dehumanizing ridicule like this is irredeemably racist. It is interesting, too, that the first major development in the Godzilla franchise’s relationship with its US audience foregrounds anti-Black racism, as though one of the safe territories on which the US and Japan could rebuild their relationship was the imperialist dehumanization of Black people.

For King Kong vs. Godzilla is historically and politically significant most of all because it was an international co-production between Japanese and American filmmakers. Where the original Godzilla is a fable of the nuclear suffering that the US inflicted upon Japan, made only two years after the conclusion of the post-war American occupation, King Kong vs. Godzilla is a symbol (and product) of the renewed Pacific alliance and the reestablishment of geopolitical cooperation between the US and Japan. Ishiro Honda returned to direct the original Japanese version for Toho, released in 1962, and John Beck helmed the adaptation of the US version for Universal Pictures, which was released the following year. This collaboration would fuel a monster movie franchise that endures today.

“This is UN reporter Eric Carter with the news”

Prior to Emmerich’s 1998 adaptation, every time a Godzilla movie appeared in Western markets it would be bowdlerized in some way. The movies were often retitled, recut, or given comically bad English dubbing; some of them, such as the original Godzilla and Godzilla 1985, were reshot, with American stars retroactively given focalizing roles in order, it was thought, to make the films more appealing to American and European audiences. Many of the recuts were extraordinarily unforgiving—the NBC screening of Godzilla vs. Megalon, for example, savagely streamlined the movie down to just 48 minutes, cutting out almost half of the movie in order to accommodate commercials and a Godzilla-suited John Belushi’s accompanying skits.

King Kong vs. Godzilla is unique in the way it is recut. A great deal of Honda’s original is brusquely shaven off and replaced, not with dramatic scenes featuring American actors, but with newscast-style footage of a reporter, Eric Carter, explaining the events of the plot directly to the audience. There is an amusing irony here: in the Japanese version, Pacific Pharmaceutical needs to use Kong for advertising because their own TV show is “dull, boring, and without imagination.” Carter’s broadcasts are almost as dry as the output of Pacific Pharmaceutical’s fictional TV network, as clumsily direct and awkwardly literal an expository device as you are ever likely to see in any film. Carter, the voice of the movie, is the antithesis of “show, don’t tell,” sometimes dictating not only the events but the way we should feel about them, too.

This clunkily oratorical exposition may be dramatically flat, but it has the virtue at least of being swift. One of the enduring problems of the Shōwa Godzilla series is the grinding slowness of some of the utterly turgid exposition, so it is in a way gratifying for an audience to be simply given the facts rather than having to yawn through interminable dialogue. And Carter’s scenes are also, sometimes, wonderfully comic. The scene in which he invites a paleontological expert into the studio to explain Godzilla’s origins and anatomy, for instance, features this expert—purportedly from New York University—using a child’s illustrated guide to dinosaurs as a visual aid.

And this formal oddness did nothing to stop the film’s popularity, as it was a hit on both sides of the Pacific. Strangely, though, given the film’s walloping success, Godzilla and Kong would never meet again until this year’s Godzilla vs. Kong, produced as part of Legendary’s MonsterVerse, which will be released almost a full sixty years after the movie it pays homage to. This seems odd, given that Toho retained the rights to Kong long enough to make King Kong Escapes in 1967, and that Toho was keen to make Godzilla face off against certain foes repeatedly—notably Mothra (four times), King Ghidorah (six times), and Mechagodzilla (five times).

The original was also uniquely difficult to acquire on home video for years, which meant that King Kong Vs. Godzilla became something of a myth, a legendary “lost” movie, particularly in my wet corner of Tory England. It was rarely if ever screened on British TV (not even in the small hours of the morning), and when a series of affordable VHS releases of Shōwa classics was released to coincide with Emmerich’s Hollywood Godzilla, King Kong Vs. Godzilla was nowhere to be seen among them, much to my adolescent disappointment. The US version was unavailable on DVD before 2006, and until the release of the 2019 Criterion Shōwa Blu-Ray box set, one of the only ways to get hold of the Japanese cut of the film was through obscure mail-order catalogs or DVD-R bootlegs.

Its iconic success, its lack of repetition, and its unavailability led to the attachment of a quasi-mythological status to this singular and mysterious film—a film that for many years of my pre-internet youth I couldn’t even confirm existed. Tantalizing half-truths and outright falsehoods circulated among fans like whispered playground rumors, further distorted in the retelling. The most enduring of these claimed that the two versions ended differently, with Kong winning in the US version but with Japanese audiences seeing Godzilla emerge victorious.

Perhaps inevitably, when I saw the film for the first time it was extraordinarily disappointing. The US cut is far less coherent than the Japanese, with characterization, comedy, and subtext stripped out; the Godzilla suit looks tired; and the Kong suit is almost unbearably goofy (despite what I said about special effects not being important, it still smarts to see them be quite so poor). But such is the unpleasable nature of fans: nothing, no matter how spectacular, could have lived up to the King Kong Vs. Godzilla in my head, nurtured by years of feverish daydreaming and speculation.

In the final analysis, what is perhaps most striking about this movie is that its legacy—the structuring principle of the Kaiju battle film—saturates every Godzilla film to come. The natives of Infant Island, home of Mothra, bear a striking resemblance to the natives of Faro Island, and the franchise as a whole is more than a little indebted to the problematic Kong mythos, not least in its representations of monster-infested lost world islands that seem to have avoided the great extinctions. This movie, and the trans-Pacific alliance of which it is so powerful a product, is in some ways the distilled essence of all the Shōwa Godzilla films: goofy, imperfect, but magically suggestive.

Alex Adams is a cultural critic and writer based in North East England. His most recent book, How to Justify Torture, was published by Repeater Books in 2019. He loves dogs.

Mike Apichella / March 24, 2021

From Creepy Things #1, July 1975. Art and script by Tom Sutton

Today’s sophisticated communications infrastructure did not emerge fully formed as totalitarian surveillance. Its annihilation of privacy was merely the price we had to pay for an unprecedented level of reliability within an endless array of applications. The drive to eliminate the slightest material discomfort and provide instant gratification is nothing new—air conditioning and central heating technology first became widely available in the early 1900s, home refrigerators in the 1940s, TV and transistor radios in the 1950s. By the end of the 20th century, millions of people were immersed (billions still could not afford to be) in a world where technology could manage or minimize any kind of deprivation, danger, or imperfection.

Nature’s unpredictability was marginalized, and this new marginalization bore new phobias. Horror comics like Swamp Thing, Heap, and Man-Thing, films like The Legend Of Boggy Creek (1972), Frogs (1972), Jaws (1975), and Prophecy (1979), and novels by Guy N. Smith, John Halkin, and James Herbert presented situations that spilled out beyond the control of modern society. These narratives were set in places where technology was hard to come by, rural areas steeped in folklore, far from the reach of telephone service, big electrical grids, broadcast signals, and synthetic environmental conditioning. Charlton Publications’ acidic title Creepy Things embodied this new fear of technological deprivation.  

By 1975 Charlton had reached the peak of its creative powers. The company boasted a large, diverse roster of anthology titles that usually contained non-serialized content, and they offered artists and writers more creative freedom than any other mainstream American comic publisher. Some of their biggest sellers were horror comics; no less than eleven different mid-’70s horror titles carried the bold Charlton bull’s eye logo. Many of the Charlton’s comics adhered to an eccentric house style that favored post-impressionistic art paired with stories that were sometimes so limited in narrative content and character development that they bordered on absurdity.

Themes explored were standard genre fare: zombies, vampires, ghosts, and other undead monsters; werewolves and other lycanthropes; wizards, witches, and various ominous mystics; aliens, robots, and other sci-fi terrors; a menagerie of giant wild animals, swamp monsters, killer insects, slime creatures, and deadly plants. These latter beasts were often the subject for stories by Tom Sutton, one of the ’70s most prolific and innovative creators. Sutton’s Charlton material pushed representational art to abstract extremes. Conversely, his scripts were more nuanced than those of most other Charlton writers. In many ways, Sutton’s work epitomized the distinct tone of Creepy Things, which debuted in July 1975. In place of a fan mail page the first issue ran a bizarre manifesto that summarized the new series:

What do you think of when you read the title CREEPY THINGS? Snakes? Spiders? There are ants, rats, wriggly things in the mud when you go swimming, things you find under rocks… We neglected to mention the creepiest creep of all. Lest we forget, the deadliest species on planet Earth is Man! And, when Man gets a little twisted, spaced out, or peculiar, he can do some mighty funny things. You find sadists, psychos, killers, and all kinds of weirdos all over the place.  

This cynical outlook proved to be one of Creepy Things’ biggest narrative tropes. A powerful element of that anti-human fervor was the title’s host, Mr. Dee Munn. All Charlton horror titles featured wisecracking Crypt-Keeper-type narrators decked out in scary costumes that recalled the classic style of Universal monster films and Hammer’s sexy goth chillers. While he did have pointy elven ears and plentiful one-liners, Dee Munn didn’t look much like the other ghost hosts. He gave off the aura of a mafioso with his fine tailored pinstripe suit, neatly trimmed devil beard, and tinted cop shades. He chomped on cigars and kept a pet raven by his side at all times. Paunchy and balding with slicked back hair, he certainly looked creepy, but not in a Bela Lugosi way; more like some sketch bag who’d be lurking around at your seedier local gambling den or red light district.    

Even in stories that were literally flooded with slimy amorphic monsters, nothing was scarier than the series’ main human antagonists. These were nasty degenerates who brought cruelty and neglect to children, the disenfranchised, romantic rivals, pets, and livestock. Their tendency to prey upon the vulnerable and their lust for control stood as symbols of the cold-blooded authoritarianism that’s infected world progress since civilization’s earliest days. For the swamp mutants and supernatural globs of Creepy Things, brutal violence often functioned as a kind of vigilante justice doled out in order to keep “the creepiest creep of all” in line.    

“The Grass Is Always Greener” was the cover story of Creepy Things no. 3, one of a small but powerful selection of Charlton horror tales written by Mike Pellowski. Here we are introduced to Rud Pangley, an obnoxious alcoholic living in a swamp in America’s Deep South. After a “hard” day avoiding work and soakin’ up corn liquor, Pangley stumbles upon a cherubic community of “green folk” frolicking in a cool glade. Clad in bikinis and loin cloths made from tropical blossoms, the hairless, lime-skinned beings enjoy a utopian existence—until one of them strays unwittingly into Rud’s grimy clutches. Overcome by greed and distorted ambition, the sloppy drunk quickly puts together a crude side show that exploits his green captive, whose curious presence, up until this point, was considered to be nothing more than local myth.

It turns out the green folk can only survive on a plant-based diet and not the meat and potatoes that Rud tries to force feed his prisoner. The little green meal ticket promptly dies—starving behind bars in a makeshift cage before a noisy audience of angry hecklers. It’s a moment that emboldens a view of humanity as a nexus for all things selfish and callous. Abandoning the dead creature’s carcass, Pangley scampers back through the brush, hot on the trail of another hapless victim. Things don’t go quite according to plan, and artist Mike Vosburg renders this fateful twist with tenderness. The painful sequence makes Rud seem almost as victimized as the green folk.

Two other Creepy Things standouts come from the title’s second issue, an oozing tour de force by Nick Cuti and Tom Sutton called “Slimes, Slogs, and Glumps,” and the anti-classist Joe Gill/Rich Larson yarn “A Spell Of Misery.” The former tale centers around yet another community of surly swamp folk. The main character is a young boy fond of bringing home all kinds of swamp critters and keeping them as pets in his family’s shack. The kid’s father is a loudmouth control freak who wants none of it. With flagrant disrespect for the sanctity of life, the dad’s short fuse incurs the worst consequences for all involved.

Some of Creepy Things’ horrific locales possessed a remoteness caused by human negligence. The NYC ghetto setting of “A Spell Of Misery” is a prime example. In conditions nearly as miasmic as the swamp from the previous tale, we find the impoverished residents of a shambolic low-income housing complex struggling to survive, until slumlord Edmond Ruggles falls victim to the magic of benevolent local voodoo priestess Mama Carafino. Ruggles’ wretched indifference is matched by the horror of voodoo born monsters, gigantic versions of the dangers that plague the tenants daily (i.e., rats, roaches, fire, etc.). The landlord’s wife Ethel comes off as a shallow materialist unphased by her husband’s gross mismanagement. The elderly couple are depicted as snarling malcontents dissatisfied with themselves and each other despite their comfortable, antiseptic, and well-fortified suburban mansion far from the unfortunates whose rent checks bank roll their luxury.    

The 1970s witnessed the rise of what is known today as folk horror, and Creepy Things was one of the first comic book series to represent the genre, which works by contrasting the modern world’s scientific arrogance to the timeless forces of magic and mysticism. “The Star Of Siva,” an action packed Joe Gill/Rich Larson work from Creepy Things no. 6, presents a deadly clash where earthly strategies are no match for divine neutral chaos. Three greedy criminals (a French drug pusher, an AWOL American soldier, and a Viet Cong deserter) invade a Southeast Asian religious site with intent to steal a priceless treasure trove of artifacts. The deeper they go, the closer they get to their own destruction. Their hateful blasphemy is only surpassed by their disrespect for each other, culminating in the story’s grisly conclusion. With fierce energy, Larson’s depiction of the mercenaries’ meeting in a sleazy, smoke-infested metropolis stands in stark contrast to the jungle tranquility of the sacred enclave’s surroundings. The site’s rugged charm is preserved within a bubble of obscurity, much like the agrarian paradise Summerisle, fictional setting of 1973 folk horror touchstone The Wicker Man.      

You can’t talk about Charlton Publications without mentioning the company’s biggest superstar freelancer, Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko. One of Ditko’s greatest Charlton works was “Where Do They Flee?,” which ran in Creepy Things’ third issue. Yet another Joe Gill-penned folk horror parable, this one was partially inspired by real accounts of the strange beings who haunt abandoned British mines. It also boasts a complex sub-plot involving labor politics—Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. hit theaters shortly after the issue’s publication. The film follows the Brookside Strike, a violent labor uprising that occurred in a remote Appalachian town in southeast Kentucky. Tragedies connected to the strike and its impoverished proponents had been making headlines since the early ‘70s, so it’s easy to understand how these incidents could’ve impacted Gill’s script.

“Where Do They Flee?” melds archaic folklore with a politicized empathy for the desperation of miners and others suffering through the decline of the labor industry (a cultural development ingrained in many ‘70s and ‘80s historical narratives). Resembling a cross between zombies, ghosts, and mole people, the hollow-eyed, supernatural main characters secretly reside in squalid conditions hundreds of feet beneath the rubble of a decrepit Welsh mining tunnel (this locale could be a nod to another iconic artifact of the labor struggle, Idris Davies’ tragic poem “Gwalia Desert XV” aka “The Bells Of Rhymney“). The inhuman presence is just the right jolt needed in a confrontation between a close knit group of rural miners and their greedy boss, whose crimes against humanity bear close resemblance to those of the Brookside protesters’ arch enemy the Duke Power Company.  

Perhaps the most striking visual element of Creepy Things were the lavish cover paintings. Most of these were done by Sutton, with two exceptions: issue five’s cover featured a Rich Larson/Tim Boxell piece exploding within a dense zip-a-tone fade; the sixth issue brandished a moody, teal-soaked nightmare by Mike Zeck, who later became a mainstay at Marvel and popularized vigilante character The Punisher. The third issue’s Sutton cover is the major visual expression of Creepy Things’ philosophy. A distillation of “The Grass Is Always Greener,” it shows Rud Pangley overpowered by Lilliputian green folk. As they descend upon the grizzled opportunist all they can see is a threat that must be eliminated; the sanctity of human life isn’t even an afterthought. Surrounded by wilderness, impotence and terror etched upon his face, he’s paralyzed by the horror of an uncontrollable environment, pushed beyond the limits of science, immersed in a world where civilization is meaningless.

Mike Apichella has been working in the arts since 1991. He is a writer, multimedia artist, musician, and a founder of Human Host and the archival project Towson-Glen Arm Freakouts. Under his real name and various pseudonyms, his work has been published by Splice Today, Profligate, Human Conduct Press, and several DIY zines. Mike currently lives in the northeast US where he aspires to someday become the “crazy cat man” of his neighborhood.

Artwork found at the imKinsky auction house.

Artwork found at the imKinsky auction house.

Artwork found at the imKinsky auction house.

Phoenix 

Burning Narrative 

Phoenix 

The Fall 

Choice 

Heaven 

Hell 

Faust 

The Four Horseman of Destiny 

Redemptive Ideas 

 

You'll find the Iranian born artist's instagram here.

Artworks found at Dastan Gallery

Artwork found at the imKinsky auction house.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Demons," 1980 

The Omen, 1977 

Arnold Schoenberg's opera "Moses and Aaron," 1980

Satire on the Human Vices  The Marriage of the Devil in the Kingdom of Hades, around 1600  Devils torturing sinners in Hell
Swanenburgh's original works can be found in previous posts from 2017 and 2015.

"A stalwart monster, huge in size, Did streight frae out the river rise, His legs were horn, wi joints o' steel, This body like a crocodile..."  "Grim furies spread their forkit fangs, An drove at John wi furious bangs..."  "The Kelpy tried we John to grapple, But Arn caught him by the thrapple, And gar'd his carcase sweep the stanners, Whilk made a noise like corn fanners..."  "Her coatties pat the knees were kiltit, In eldrich notes she croone'd an' liltit..."  "Sae fently did she wing her flight, In a twinklin' she was out o' sight... "
 You can read the book in its entirety at Google Books.  The higher resolution images found thanks to Spl Hand Colored Rare Book Collection.