Author Archives: Ricardo Denis

Movie Review: PASSENGER doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel to be entertaining

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Reviews have gone down a strange road as of late. Something is either a seismic genre-shifting piece of art or a complete waste of time that should be shunned for making us interact with it.

In the past few years alone, horror has been reinvented or redefined a few dozen times. Shelby Oaks became the scariest movie of the 21st century (it’s not, but it can be scary), Talk to Me changed the way we make movies about haunted objects (it didn’t), and Longlegs became an instant crime horror classic (okay, this one’s deserved).

Somehow, we’ve lost the middle. Sometimes, all we need is a well-made vampire movie or haunted house story that plays the greatest hits just right.

PASSENGER

This is the spot where André Øvredal’s Passenger comfortably sits in. It’s a movie that manages to do something that’s already hard to pull off: entertain. A scary demon, reliable pacing, and a strong finale is all it needed to achieve that.

Passenger follows Maddie (Lou Llobell) and Tyler (Jacob Scipio), a couple that decide to give up life in Brooklyn for a life on the road. They get an RV, turn it into their new home, and drive. Along the way, they come across a gruesome car crash. Maddie sees three strange long scratches on the car they came upon.

Shortly after, Maddie starts suspecting that something decided to hitch a ride with them when they stopped at the scene. Things quickly escalate from there as the demonic entity ramps up the violence the longer the ride gets, as if it were enjoying it.

The movie has a great demon in the form of the Passenger (played by Joseph Lopez). It’s an unholy thing that is not afraid to lean into blasphemy. Its design is simple and more terrifying because of it. He’s basically a corpse dressed as a priest with longish grey hair and a gruesome face. A broken smile hangs over his face most of the time, revealing the absolute pleasure he gets from haunting his victims.

PASSENGER

If fans obsess over the Passenger aggressively enough, it has the potential to be the kind of monster franchises are built on. It possesses a strong silhouette and a classically-inclined sense of terror, the kind that made B-list monsters such as the Street Schizo from Prince of Darkness (played by Alice Cooper) and the Scarecrow from the 1981 TV movie Dark Night of the Scarecrow so beloved by fans.

Every time the Passenger is around, torturing Maddie and Tyler, the movie’s great. Øvredal proves to be highly skilled at producing a terrifying image, and he’s not afraid to get creative with jump scares. There’s a scene involving a movie projector that leads to one of the creepiest horror images I’ve seen in a while.

Those who’ve seen Øvredal’s previous films, namely The Autopsy of Jane Doe and The Last Voyage of The Demeter, already know he’s one of the most visually fascinating directors working in the genre today. Passenger further cements that, driving up anticipation for whichever project he decides to settle on next.

Unfortunately, the movie does stumble in the script department. Screenwriters Zachary Donohue and T.W. Burgess forgot to make Maddie and Tyler interesting enough to really care for them that much up to the point where the bad stuff starts happening. Commitment issues are shoehorned in along with religious themes that never fully blossom.

PASSENGER

The biggest letdown is the wasted potential of the RV culture/life on the road component of the story. Maddie and Tyler jump from RV campsite to RV campsite on their journey, giving viewers a look at what that type of lifestyle entails. This is where Maddie meets a woman that sheds some light on the thing that hitched a ride with them. She’s played well enough by Melissa Leo, but she’s mostly a vehicle for exposition.

There are also some key bits of hobo history attached to the mystery behind the Passenger that could’ve really shined had they been given the time to influence the couple’s attempts at getting rid of their demonic backseat rider.

In a sense, the bones of a truly great horror movie were there. Sadly, they got lost in the movie’s insistence on sticking too close to traditional conventions. Maybe it’s time we put other types of characters in leading spots. Passenger would’ve been better served by more inquisitive characters that were eager to dive deeper into the demon’s legends of the road.

Complaints aside, Passenger still manages to ramp up the horror at the right moments to guarantee entertainment. The demon is a true highlight that could end up in a sequel or as a collectible action figure in shops everywhere in the near future. The movie might not mark a watershed moment in horror, but it doesn’t have to. Scaring people into keeping a closer eye on the road at night for fear of picking up an unwanted guest is more than enough.

Movie Review: Play Along with The Lost Man in EXIT 8

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Video game adaptations, by definition, wrest control away from players. To an extent, they ask them to watch the same story they already played through but with less direct input. Gone is the anxiety of making a big jump to finish a level. Gone is the tension of inadvertently walking into a boss fight with limited ammunition. Simply put, video game adaptations turn players into spectators.

Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8, an adaptation of the walking simulator/puzzle horror game hit of the same name (developed and published by Kotake Create), finds success by leaning into the spectator aspect of the experience to foster interaction. Rather than turning the story into a 90-minute long cutscene, it opts for a quiet and spaciously-framed affair that audiences can still participate in by spotting important details along with the characters.

EXIT 8

Like the game, Exit 8 takes place in a looping passageway in the Japanese metro system. While the game doesn’t define or describe a specific character per se, the movie follows a man (played by Kazunari Ninomiya) who learns his ex-girlfriend is pregnant just as he’s getting off the train. While attempting to exit the subway station, he suddenly finds himself in a loop of corridors. There, he sees a sign with a set of rules printed on it that must be followed to escape this punishing liminal space.

To reach the real exit, the man must search for anomalies in the repeating passageways eight times in a row before he’s allowed to leave. Failure to identify these anomalies, or lack thereof, results in a reset that sends the man back to level 0 (the first run-through). If a poster or a door is in the wrong position, walk back to the rules poster to progress. If nothing’s changed, complete the loop.

The man meets a walking man and a kid that might or might not be lost in the loop as well. Whether they’re anomalies or not depends on the cues and hints the movie dishes out at key moments.

This is where director Kawamura finds an opening to make sure some of Exit 8’s gameplay elements make it into the movie. A lot of this relies on the observational aspects of the source material. Posters, signs, doors, and other important details are few but crucial to progression, so it’s easy to start looking for anomalies as an audience member while the man attempts to make it through all the stages. If the character misses out on anything you caught, an incredible sense of anxiety creeps in. You want to scream at the screen to point out the differences before it’s too late.

EXIT 8

Kawamura is smart to go for wide-shots here. We’re given a great big look at everything that could be hiding or pointing to a clue, and the movie does well to stick to the open and strikingly bright dimensions of the corridors that make up the loop. Nothing’s ever really obscured, which means the horror resides in what’s seen rather than what’s unseen. As a video game movie, it does what no other film of its kind ever truly manages to pull off: it lets people play the game from their vantage point, if only to an extent.

The only thing that undercuts the terror of the liminal subway loop is the movie’s insistence on hammering a message on indecisiveness, which hinges on the news of the pregnancy that hovers over the main character. It tries too hard to turn the loop into a metaphor for anxiety regarding big life decisions, detracting from the mystery.

What made the situation so unsettling was its random nature. That it simply forced someone to play a game about noticing strange alterations in a self-repeating space should’ve been enough. The message is just too blunt, and it compromises the creepiness factor. In fact, it takes away the bit of control it had afforded audiences so well beforehand up to that point.

EXIT 8

Exit 8 should be commended for adapting a video game while still giving audiences the chance to feel like active players in it. Its ending betrays some of the good work done up till then, but it doesn’t diminish its accomplishments entirely. If anything, it’ll make you want to pick up a controller and look for anomalies yourself in the original game. Hell, it might even make you look for anomalies in actual subway stations as well.

Book Review: A SHORT STAY IN HELL guarantees existential horror

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a short stay in hell

Our versions of the afterlife are predicated on our personal hopes and fears. This is why we tend to populate Hell with sadistic demons and brutal monsters surrounded by fire and brimstone, and Heaven with angels handing out mojitos in a permanent paradisiacal retreat. Religion informs a lot of this spiritual visualization, providing guidelines to secure a spot in the more pleasant of the two options.

In A Short Stay in Hell (2009), author Steven L. Peck, explores this idea by pouring a bucket of cold water on our ideations of what comes after death. It hits hard, going lengths to prove that being left alone with yourself is perhaps the worst form of torture imaginable. It’s so terrible a fate that you’ll wish for a demon with a pitchfork if only to keep you company.

The book follows a Mormon man called Soran. He’s died and made it to an impossibly large library that contains every book that can ever be written in its stacks. He first meets a devil that tells him that he followed the wrong religion while on Earth, thus earning him a stay in Hell. He’s informed that the one true religion is Zoroastrianism, which focuses on ethical dualism in the struggle between Good and Evil.

This Hell is not eternal, though. The devil tells Soran that if he finds the book that tells the story of his life, he can escape. It’s just a matter of hunting it down in the terrifyingly massive library, where years of searching might only cover a tiny section of a floor, with thousands upon thousands of other levels to go. To make matters worse, most of the books are made up of gibberish. Finding a coherent sentence in one of them becomes an event.

A Short Stay in Hell was inspired by Jorge Luis Bórges’s story “The Library of Babel,” which centers on a library that contains every book that could possibly be written with an ordering of 25 basic characters. Peck runs with this concept and turns into a short but intense bout of existential horror in which salvation is cruelly teased but never sold as a certainty.

Soren is not the only person roaming the library. Peck is quick to establish that there are other people there also spending cosmic amounts of time in search of their books. It stands to reason, then, that Soren will meet some of them along the way. Lovers come, build relationships that last multiple decades, and then leave never to be seen again; frustrated souls unleash unspeakable violence on the people they come across; and strange cults rise and fall with no lasting effects. The only constant is the library, and it remains indifferent to the things that happen in it.

As such, Peck uses this version of Hell to flip the script on time. Whereas time is often thought of as a preciously limited resource in life, in death it becomes a burden. Too much of it slowly chips away at meaning. It erodes spontaneity and excitement, dulling the edges of purpose and giving way to a superior form of punishment: boredom.

The language on display here points to Peck’s background in poetry and evolutionary biology in magnificent ways. There’s an observational quality to the language that allows for complex worldbuilding. And yet, the book is accessible despite challenging the reader with profound questions about faith, love, damnation, and memory.

Peck wants his readers to get lost in each page, demanding a lot of imagination from them. But he doesn’t merely want them to paint a series of visuals that account for the characters and their surroundings. Instead, he develops a world filled with mathematical and philosophical improbabilities for readers to try and make sense of. It works to produce one of the most intellectually rewarding experiences in modern literature.

A Short Stay in Hell, like its interpretation of the titular realm, is a unique read with considerable staying power. It plants ideas, breaks them apart, and then asks the reader to put them together. In a way, it’s an interrogation of the things we categorize as essential to our sense of self. You’ll simply wish you could spend more time on this journey into the philosophy of Hell.

Movie Review: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy copies and pastes a familiar curse

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Whenever the name of a director is made part of a movie’s official title, it’s only fair to expect the presentation of a unique vision. The name signals the creation of something only they can make, something that sets them apart from the rest. Lee Cronin has earned that distinction rather quickly, with only three feature films in the bag (plus a handful of short films and some TV work thrown in for good measure). Evil Dead Rise (2023) was the movie that turned him into a name, and it’s now attached to the title of the latest attempt at reviving a classic Universal monster: The Mummy.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a strange film, more in terms of concept than in actual content. It seeks to reinterpret the Egyptian creature in radical fashion, and it does. It changes everything, from the way the bandages work to the purpose of mummification. Unfortunately, it borrows too heavily from other horror classics to come off as original. Ultimately, the movie suffers too much for it, making for something way less original than the title suggests.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

The story follows TV reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) and his family while he’s on assignment in Egypt. One day, a strange woman lures his daughter Katie (Natalie Grace) away from their home. Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) is brought in to investigate Katie’s disappearance, a woman that hopes to specialize in missing persons cases.

Katie is found eight years later, inside an ancient sarcophagus. She should be dead, but she isn’t. She’s malnourished, disfigured, and near catatonic. Charlie takes her home to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he hopes the warmth afforded by family can help her heal and recover. But something’s inside Katie, and it’s eager to spread its evil as cruelly as possible.

Cronin should be applauded for approaching The Mummy with a mind to push certain established ideas to their limit. There are no corpses wrapped up in white wraps shambling around in this one, no killer scarabs or locust swarms. The story swaps labyrinthian pyramids and quicksand for a two-story house in a New Mexican desert. Things are more intimate as a result, more focused on family rather than on the spread of an ancient evil possessed by an insatiable hunger.

The problem lies in Cronin’s decision to use the building blocks of long-established, highly recognizable films in the process of crafting his own. It’s done to the point of compromising his own attempts at innovation. To watch Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is to watch a combination of The Exorcist, Se7en, and Cronin’s own Evil Dead Rise. Of the three, though, Evil Dead is the most obvious, most notably in terms of Katie’s look and behavior.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

In Evil Dead Rise, Cronin presents the Deadites (the possessed humans affected by the Necronomicon’s incantations) as decaying bags of flesh with a penchant for self-mutilation. They’re gleefully evil, happy to be spreading death and mayhem. They’re disturbingly raunchy, too, as they taunt and mock the living with grotesqueries that are meant to drive them mad.

The possessed Katie in The Mummy is essentially a Deadite. She moves, talks, and taunts her family in almost the same way as the possessed in Evil Dead. A few pages are taken from The Exorcist’s own possessed girl, Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), especially during scenes when Katie is on her bed, staring blankly at the people around her before snapping with a bite to the forearm or a headbutt. The gist of it is, a combination of very obvious influences doesn’t always lead to something original.

Se7en comes in during a particular scene in Egypt involving a violent run-in with a key suspect and a box. This one’s not as blatant as it is in Katie’s case, but the nudge is more like a push here too. Detective Zaki gets a chance to shine in this sequence, but then she’s just asked to homage a scene from another movie more with little space afforded for originality.

It also bears mentioning that there was a more interesting movie in Zaki’s story. Turning The Mummy into a dark and gritty detective story could’ve led to some interesting places, complete with an opportunity to perhaps explore other aspects of Egypt that get sidelined way too often in these kinds of films.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

While Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has some intense horror sequences and some interesting characters at its core, it’s more of a Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie. It’s multiple parts, all done better elsewhere, grafted together under the guise of a new interpretation. That said, if you watch the movie as strictly a new Evil Dead entry, you should be fine.

I Saw The TV Glow turns adolescence into a horror TV show

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I Saw The TV Glow

It’s safe to assume a lot of us grew up watching a tv show that not only helped inform our identities but also our fears. For me it was Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark, a show that made me appreciate horror storytelling and how scary monsters could be when they had great backstories pushing them forward. For others it was Goosebumps or Eerie, Indiana or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Older generations had their own shows, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits among them. Regardless, these shows possessed the power to confront viewers with metaphors and creepy situations that could force them to reckon with their own sense of self at a young age. In the process, it was hard not to put ourselves in the shoes of the kids that faced the supernatural. We wanted to be as brave as they were.

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow taps into this world of identities and the tv shows that would shape them for a story that looks at adolescence as if it were a tv show of its own, one that could get rewritten for the worse at any moment.

I Saw The TV Glow follows Owen (played by Justice Smith when the character’s older and by Ian Foreman when he’s younger) and Maddy (played by Brigette Lundy-Paine both as the young and older version of the character), two friends who bond over a show called The Pink Opaque, a mix of Goosebumps and Charmed (with some Supernatural) that also follows two friends who face off against the demonic forces of main villain Mr. Melancholy.

As Maddy and Owen’s friendship grows, finding itself reflected somewhat by that of the kids in The Pink Opaque, their personal development turns episodic. Its progression isn’t all encompassing, though. It’s more akin to how we remember our younger years in terms of special or traumatic moments that mark us. It’s a path paved with its fair share of tragedies.

This idea is furthered by Schoenbrun’s decision to have Owen break the fourth wall for quick bits of narration to offer insight into both his feelings and the things that happen to Maddy. They act as points of no return, of memories that will haunt the character. In fact, the screen glows with neon-infused words marking the beginning of new chapters in the story, further cementing that sense of life masquerading as a tv show.

You’d think this focus on tv and how influential it is as a source of identity would keep I Saw the TV Glow in nostalgia territory to the point of it being only decipherable to Nineties kids, but it’s actually the opposite. Schoenbrun’s neon-tinged visuals (beautifully composed by cinematographer Eric Yue) allude to the ephemeral quality of memories, to how we construct and unconsciously manipulate them down to the way they’re lighted. It opens up the movie to anyone who’s ever obsessed over a tv show and survived middle school and high school in large part because of it.

I Saw The TV Glow

That’s not to say there aren’t any references and influences strewn throughout. There’s a scene in a dark bar with a whole musical number that echoes a similar scene found in the original Twin Peaks series, and there’s flashes of Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome that are potent enough to come across as intentional winks to them.

That Schoenbrun also shot the scenes from The Pink Opaque in the fuzzy analogue style that characterized Nineties TV strengthens the idea that nostalgia is how we reconnect with the bits and pieces we used to put our identities together.

And then comes the gut punch. I Saw the TV Glow slowly pulls back the veil on nostalgia to reveal its most frightening realization: growing up means deciding what things will and will not accompany you into adulthood, knowing the choice can backfire. It’s a tough consideration as Schoenbrun essentially argues that building one’s identity is as much about breathing life into the self as it is about the willful death of certain parts of the self. What you kill to become your true self is crucial and it determines a lot, but not letting certain things die can prevent the full blossoming of identity. Nostalgia can either be a reminder of what we became or a reminder of what we didn’t become, and that’s hard to come to terms with.

I Saw The TV Glow

I Saw the TV Glow takes nostalgia and turns it into a source of terror that finds scary things in the memories of our youth. Like a tv show, there’s certain episodes that we love to watch and rewatch. But then there are also episodes we dread catching up to, that we wish weren’t a part of the whole. We can skip them, but they don’t stop belonging to the story. And they’ll haunt the characters involved in one way or another.

ZOM 100 is a zombie anime for the working-class

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Typically, the start of the zombie apocalypse is a harrowing affair. In Night of the Living Dead it leads to racism and stubbornness, in Train to Busan it props up a hellish commute, and in Return of the Living Dead it turns a party in a graveyard into a blood feast for the undead. Zombies are under no obligation to offer the living a good time. That is, unless you’re at work and being belittled by your superiors every day for not putting in overtime for the good of a company that underpays but expects absolute dedication to their visions. For those people, the zombie apocalypse is cause for celebration. A chance to go out and enjoy life. This is the zombie apocalypse of ZOM 100: Bucket List of the Dead.

ZOM 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Adapted by Bug Films from the manga of the same name by writer Haro Aso and illustrator Kotaro Takata, ZOM 100 follows Akira Tendo, an exhausted 24-year-old office worker who works for an exploitative marketing agency. The grind has left him an empty shell, a drone that merely exists on automatic. Routine has zapped any chance for excitement to make an appearance every now and then, and existence has been confined to small cubicles and even smaller apartments. He’s essentially become a zombie without having to go through the whole dying process. And then the end of the world starts, freeing Akira from his tortured existence.

In light of this newly acquired free time, Akira makes a bucket list. He intends to do all the things he said he wanted to do but couldn’t because of his job. And then it’s one mad dash to live life after the other.

The story thrives on relatability, and rooting for Akira is infectious. It’s very easy to see his side of things and to validate his decision to take the apocalypse as an opportunity to decompress. For example, one of the first things he tries to scratch off his list is giving himself a day to just lounge at his apartment, drinking beer and enjoying the silence. Of course, he’s running low on beer because he’s never home long enough to restock. Intent on enjoying his time how he wants to, he ventures outside and in the process meets Shizuka, another survivor who has a history with abuse.

The concept works because it captures the simplicity of our human needs so well. Working all day and getting back home just to wash up, sleep, work, and repeat the process means leading a very insular life. Veer from the script and you’ll open yourself up to meeting new people and enjoying life. For example, one of the benefits of freedom from work results in Akira reconnecting with his old college pal Kencho, a hilarious companion that always wanted to be a stand-up comedian and so decides to shed his clothes every chance he gets to further that dream. This reunion wouldn’t have happened had the zombies decided not to disrupt the status quo. Horror has a hell of a way of telling people how scary things can help us reevaluate life.

ZOM 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Of course, ZOM 100 is still a zombie anime, so you’ll get a lot of undead action each episode. Just don’t expect a gorefest the likes of a Lucio Fulci zombie flick or cannibal carnage done a la Tom Savini. That said, the series adds an interesting twist to the violence by drenching zombies in a mess of bright neon-like colors as a substitute for the usual red when showing blood. It helps keep the zombies kinetic, playful, and very stylish overall. They’re still a threat and there are some intense zombie chases that ramp up the intensity, but fun outweighs outright horror here.

It’s not often one can say this about a zombie apocalypse story, but ZOM 100 is a great comfort watch. It’s not out to wallow in trauma or to comment on the destructive nature of humanity. It’s about enjoying life. This sets it apart from tradition in ways very few other stories of its kind do (with the film One Cut of the Dead and the manga I Am Hero among top exceptions). It can get emotional, but there’s always a joke around the corner that can bring you back to relative peace. The message? Don’t be a work zombie. Make your own bucket list and see it through, even if it means dodging the undead to cross out each item.

Joseph Koch’s Comic Book Warehouse is invaluable and it’s a damn shame it’s closing

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It takes standing in a warehouse full of comics to gain somewhat of an understanding of how vast the entire history of the medium truly is. There’s just not that many chances to do this, to take in the enormity of it all in a place filled to the brim with boxes upon boxes of single issues and adjacent merch. Joseph Koch’s Comic Book Warehouse is one such place, and the cruel march of rising rent costs, inflation, and outright greed has forced the location to announce it is closing its doors.

Located in the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn, the warehouse is the stuff of legend. Mention of its name in conventions and other comic book shops built up a location that was, in essence, a memory palace.

It carried an irregular operation schedule, opening either on weekends or by appointment. Given its elusive state of being, it took me a while to finally make the trip over. In fact, it was news of its closing that finally got me to right that wrong. Turns out the threat of losing something important to history is a strong motivator, but one that has the potential to kick in too late.

Upon first entering the warehouse, you’re met with a sense of potential discovery. No specific issue or book or action figure will be readily available upon request. You have to work for your find. The reward, on the other hand, can come in multiple unexpected forms. Dedicated single issue hunters have a great chance at landing that hard-to-find item, but what they’d discover in the process would probably eclipse the actual reason they went to Koch’s in the first place.

I didn’t go with a specific comic in mind to find. No mission other than the experience. Not five minutes in, though, I stumbled upon stacks of Humanoid/DC books that only ever tend to crop up either in smaller conventions or older comic book stores that overstocked in them thinking they’d yield a small fortune. Jordorowsky and Bess’s Son of the Gun, Baranko’s The Horde, Carlos Portela and Das Pastoras’s Deicide, and Mark Malés’s Different Ugliness, Different Madness were all there and in plentiful amounts. It felt like getting a look into the comics market of the past to appreciate what was trying to hit it off with readers (and maybe didn’t, to the extent that was expected at least).

One find in particular was a stark reminder of how comics are always trying to make what’s old new again. In one of the shelves furthest from the entrance was a section that had more adult comics mixed in with oversized editions of masterworks and classics. Among them were the first ten to twelve issues of the 1994 Penthouse Comix magazine, which ran up to 1998. Of special note was issue #7, which featured an erotic take on (not) Batman by comics legend Moebius. In it, Batman goes to the shrink and is confronted by his dress-up fetishes.

It was hard not to think of the current Penthouse Comix reboot and reflect on whether it’ll meet the same fate as it did in the Nineties. Seeing a past attempt at something preserved in a warehouse would bring up questions on whether it would find a more willing audience today to become a more constant presence in the comics landscape. Hell, if it will even become a part of the conversation.

A few shelves over led to old Vertigo books that I had never even heard of before, found next to a box filled with House of Hammer horror magazines that featured comics adaptations of some of the studio’s most popular movies. In a sense, the warehouse also speaks to the cruelty of time and how it elevates as much stuff as it forgets.

These are the types of things that a single visit can bring to the fore. You can’t help but think how much or how little comics have changed throughout the years. By merely existing, Koch’s Comic Book Warehouse became a statement on the nature of comics as an industry. It only has a bit more time left in that role.

Comics history isn’t the only thing getting lost when it closes its doors for the last time. Koch’s also housed old newspapers, a hefty collection of Playboys and other adult periodicals, comics-adjacent toys and merch, sci-fi books, VHS cassettes, posters, trading cards, and random objects that look like they were acquired in a yard sale or from the Warrens’ occult artefact room from The Conjuring films.

All of it would fit in well in a museum, and it would be quite sad if it ends up boxed and taken to the dump. Some local comic stores have been taking stock off them, but not all of it will make it to someone else’s hands. The volume of what can potentially be lost equates to losing the finer details of a complicated narrative that thrives in minutiae.

If you have the opportunity and haven’t done so yet, give Koch’s Comic Book Warehouse a visit. If you’ve been before, go again. Surround yourself in the history of a medium, of an industry, and acknowledge the expansiveness of human creativity that lives in the things that still inhabit that space for a little while longer. You won’t get many more opportunities to do so.

Interview: Zack Quaintance finds the life of comics in DEATH OF COMICS BOOKCASE

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comics bookcase

Including the word ‘death’ in the title of a comic book could suggest that a funereal tone will be taking charge of the proceedings. But that’s not the case with Zack Quaintance’s Death of Comics Bookcase, Vol. 1, an anthology comic that takes a magnifying glass to the medium and finds it can celebrate, mourn, and offer necessary warnings on the future of comics by way of werewolf priests, living comics bookcases, and morally haphazard wizards.

The project, which hopes to get funded via Kickstarter, tackles a different genre in each of its stories, from fantasy and horror to superheroes, but they’re all woven into a wrap-around story that centers on the titular Comics Bookcase. The variety on display makes the book feel like a roadmap for all the things comics can do, highlighting the richness of the medium. It’s a book that accounts for a life in comics, which Quaintance has certainly led and is still living (he is currently the Reviews Editor for Comics Beat).

There is one thing that brings all these stories together: Quaintance’s sharp approach to satire. No instance of humor is there for the sake of a punchline. There’s thought put into each joke, of the kind that will inspire staring into distance to reflect upon the meaning behind some of them (like when you’re watching a movie and you realize the sword is actually a phallic symbol, or that the main villain is a stand-in for the author’s mother).

One story stands out for how personal it feels while still managing to be a solid horror story. The Werewolf Priest, illustrated by Anna Readman with colors by Brad Simpson, follows a journalist on the heels of a story about a priest that’s rumored to be a werewolf. It has the satire locked down, but it also succeeds in becoming a gleefully gruesome monster-of-the-week yarn that looks at immigration and the loneliness that comes with being a journalist in the process (pulling from Quaintance’s previous experience in the field). It’s strong enough to be its own comics series and it is a definite highlight.

Quaintance scripts all the stories but is accompanied by a different artist in each one. PJ Holden, Nick Cagnetti, Luke Horsman, Ryan Lee, and Pat Skott all lend their talents here.

I corresponded with Quaintance to get at just how Death of Comics Bookcase came to be, what goes into Kickstarting a book, and why that Werewolf story is so damn good.

RICARDO SERRANO: Anthology comics can be strange creatures as they let you flex different storytelling styles while still feeling part of a unifying vision. You go for a different genre per story here. What did you hope would come through in each segment to keep it all together?

ZACK QUAINTANCE: I didn’t initially plan to connect them at all, outside of the Death of Comics Bookcase framing device story that runs in between each. But in the process of working on them, a shared sensibility started to emerge. I really like comics that take absurd concepts seriously, and that’s absolutely what ended up unifying the book. The high concepts are very pulpy — whether it’s a werewolf priest or a war between sharks and apes — but there’s depth beneath that pulp, too.

SERRANO: One thing that’s present in each story is humor. Each one has its own tone though. What do you find in humor that helps you tell these kinds of stories?

QUAINTANCE: The humor just kind of showed up. At no point did I think to myself, ‘Okay, time to make this funny.’ I spent quite a bit of time thinking about each story before and during scripting. I had the concepts for each early, but it took a long time to figure out how to first introduce readers to each world and then later how to wrap things up in ways that felt satisfying. At a certain point, I think I started trying to entertain myself. The longer I tinkered, the more jokes started to creep in.

SERRANO: One of my favorite stories from the book is the Werewolf story, which actually says a lot about journalism in the process. It feels personal. How did you come about this story?

QUAINTANCE: That story is based on my life. Well, sort of. I’ve never seen a werewolf, but after college, I did get a job at The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico Border. My first beat was night cops. It was a really rough time. I was 23 and didn’t know a single person for hundreds of miles. I’d drive around at night from car crashes to murder scenes to incidents with Border Patrol. I had really idealistic notions about reporting, but the paper there was on hard times. Nobody was reading it, nor did anyone respect it as a community institution. It was an intense mix of loneliness, violence, and professional futility. So, the comic has monsters, but for me the real horror is the young journalist reconciling his expectations with the reality of his job. 

SERRANO: This isn’t your first time around Kickstarting a book. How have these experiences differed and what’s surprised you the most on this one?

QUAINTANCE: The last time I did a Kickstarter campaign, it was August 2020. Comics Twitter was alive and well, which made promo easier, or at least more centralized. Now when I have something new to unveil, I have five platforms to put it out on, and each one of those platforms works a little differently in how you have to court engagement. It’s more time consuming. The way I think about it is promo has gone from taking a highway, to taking a muddy road. You can still get where you’re going, but it’s going to take more pushing and patience.

SERRANO: Already thinking of book 2? More Death of Comics Bookcase on the horizon? 

QUAINTANCE: Absolutely! The plan as of now is to do at least three volumes. I’ve already got an idea of what will be in the second book, some of which will look familiar to readers of this volume. In fact, the only way there won’t be more Death of Comics Bookcase is if we don’t fund this one. I should also point out that two of these stories — The Werewolf Priest and Goldmask! — were designed as backdoor pitches. And while it wasn’t initially going to be, Nick Cagnetti and I changed the ending of Responsibili-Teen ever so slightly to make it so that character could also return. That’s a long way of saying, yes, absolutely. And the second volume would obviously be Reign of the Comics Bookcases.

You can find the Kickstarter page for Death of Comics Bookcase, Vol. 1 here.

Quiet on the Set puts Nickelodeon in very dark waters

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nickelodeon

There’s a scene in the movie Steve Jobs (2015) between the titular Apple giant and his friend Steve Wozniak in which they fight over giving certain development teams their due for helping build some of the most successful products in the company’s history. Jobs hunkers down on his position to not recognize those people. Wozniak offers stern rebuttals. When Wozniak realizes Jobs won’t budge, he offers this as a parting shot before walking out on his friend: “It’s not binary. You can be gifted and decent at the same time.”

The sentiment behind this scene echoes throughout ID’s new 4-part docuseries Quiet on the Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, on Nickelodeon’s toxic work environment during the Nineties and the early 2000s in shows led by Dan Schneider. It’s essentially an exploration of what happens when a company’s biggest moneymaker is an abusive, sexist, and unethical presence that can make or break careers and leave deep scars on those caught in his path.

In addition, the show dives into the discovery of at least three sexual predators that worked on different sets and prayed on talent from programs such All That and iCarly. From this comes the bombshell revelation that one of Nickelodeon’s biggest stars, Drake Bell, was a victim of one such predator. He tells his story publicly for the first time in this series and it is both heartbreaking and deeply harrowing.

There are a lot of things Quiet on the Set does right, but a few specific ones are truly striking. First up is the quality of the interviews and the time afforded to them so that the voices of the affected lead the narrative. Featuring some of the now-adult stars of Schneider’s shows and other staff—All That cast members Bryan Hearne and Katrina Johnson, director Virgil Fabian, and The Amanda Show writers Jenny Kilgen and Christy Stratton among them—series directors Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz give each interviewee a chance to get as much of their story out to the public as possible.

One thing that elevates these interviews is the set design for their scenes. Each person is seated either behind a table with office supplies on it or on an actor’s chair that highlights what their roles were and how important they’re work was to the success of each show. It gives them a sense of respectability that recognizes their experience without forcing upon them the victim label as if that’s all they came to be after they left or were removed from their positions.

The setup makes it seem like we’re stepping into a professional’s office, a place that belongs to someone who has achieved much despite the dark times they had to endure.

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Another thing the docuseries does really well is highlight the investigative nature of the story, letting facts and carefully shot testimony make the case rather than impassioned bits of narration that guides the audience towards indignation. Directors Robertson and Schwartz trust in the audience to make their own judgments with the information provided.

The docuseries is very careful not to lay the blame entirely on Dan Schneider. It’s made clear that the hiring of those who would go on to engage in illegal sexual behavior were not hired by Schneider, nor were they protected by him. The revelations blindsided him just as much as they did a lot of the cast members. Many different things can go wrong in one place, but they can’t all be attributed to just one person. It takes a village to sustain a toxic work environment.

Nickelodeon executives and company men are also to blame for trying to sweep everything under the proverbial rug, and the show does an excellent job of showing just enough to get the point across without naming names that couldn’t be verified.

That said, Schneider is meticulously portrayed as a problematic genius that was allowed to get away with a lot just because he was producing hit after hit. The cost of building an empire on the back of an abusive person, though, is that whenever the bad stuff comes out the work becomes tainted. Glory is not without reckoning when it entertains so much ugliness in the process. Quiet on the Set is firm on this point. It’s a lesson places such as Nickelodeon should take to heart to secure a healthier and safer working environment.

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Depending on your attachment to the shows explored in this docuseries, it’s safe to say a lot of your childhood memories will be affected. It’s not easy to enjoy something that you now know was built on abuse, gender discrimination, and trauma. There’s a lot of tragedy here, some of which couldn’t be explored more deeply for lack of testimony (Amanda Bynes, for instance, did not participate). But there’s more than enough here to further conversations on power, child safety, workplace toxicity, and the scary things that hide behind success.

Why you should be reading The Space Between

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The Space Between

Good science fiction makes readers want to visit the worlds they contain, to explore them first-hand as a kind of traveler. The best science fiction, though, makes readers want to be the protagonists in them. The Expanse comes to mind as a recent example, a story that considers class and intergalactic warfare from various points of view, each an entry point into a larger conflict that’s hard not to put ourselves into. Star Wars does it by leaning into the promise of adventure inherent in the Hero’s Journey, of becoming a Jedi. Corinna Bechko and Danny Luckert’s The Space Between inspires this by making its sci-fi feel urgently timely and consequential, presenting conflicts that can be overcome despite the odds. You should be reading this comic.

The Space Between sees what’s left of humanity living aboard a massive starbound ark called the Dodona, a place that’s deeply segregated between upper tier citizens and pilots and lower tier workers who are prohibited from traveling from their living spaces below up to the top floors of the vessel. In the series’ first issue, a pilot called Revla finds herself on the lower decks by accident following a controversial flight that’s put her career on the line. While in the lower levels she meets Les, a worker from lower caste who helps her navigate the area. Through him, Revla experiences just what the class divide truly means and what kind of injustices it actually furthers and so decides to rebel and fight the system that sustains this division. In an interesting twist, that fight is also the result of a blossoming romance between the two characters, representing a union that transcends class and expectations.

This alone is plot enough for a whole sci-fi series, but that’s only issue #1. Subsequent entries (the series is three issues in as of the time of this writing) sees a new generation of protagonists continue the plight through different mutations of the same problems. Some of these characters are related to those found in previous issues, but new characters are also introduced. In the process, The Space Between transforms into a political space epic with a unique take on romance and social responsibility that never neglects the elements that make for great science fiction.

The Space Between

Bechko and Luckert succeed, in an impressive manner, in never making new issues feel like retreads of previous ones. It isn’t a kind of sci-fi Groundhog Day with a new pair of characters each time taking on the exact same problems. It’s a natural continuation of struggles that keep the class perspective firmly in place to track the evolution of the situation aboard the Dodona. Progress is certainly logged, but so are the changes in strategy from those who seek to cosign on reverting back to the days of segregation.

Luckert adds subtle but important touches per issue to communicate the jump in time and the changes in living conditions brought upon the results of key struggles. It makes Bechko’s characters more believable in the process as part of a social and political ecosystem that’s consistently being put in contentious spots that threaten to undo progress.

The romance aspect of the story is especially refreshing. It’s obvious from the covers to the story’s focus on a pair of protagonists primed for love per issue that an emotional connection can be as strong a unifying force as a political philosophy. Love isn’t on display merely as an excuse to get two characters to meet within a story. Instead, the intention is to show how it can generate a level of empathy that espouses understanding. Bechko and Luckert leave nothing to chance. It’s all carefully orchestrated with a sense of purpose that imbues the story with consequence. It makes everything feel genuinely honest.

The Space Between

The Space Between is the type of science fiction that comes along to remind readers of the power and influence of the genre, of its potential to look beyond trends to find something that sparks different kinds of conversations. It certainly earns a spot among some of the best comics of 2023, if you ask me, and it is a must-read. It possesses an energy that can turn casual readers into lifelong fans of science fiction. It’s that good.

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