Origami Unicorn

Before Pogo...

  Walt Kelly was a comics artist, and one of the series he drew was based on the popular movie shorts called Our Gang, which are better known as "The Little Rascals."  Kelly created exuberant and original stories, marred, for contemporary readers, only by the racist overtones of Buckwheat's portrayal, which is faithful to the mores of the period.  Available now from Fantagraphics Books.

2: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

The mother and her daughter have come to a rich town, a town where there is no charity, except in the public poor houses, and that the woman is unwilling to accept. One by the people she appeals to turn away or close their windows, until they come to one that does not close. It's not that the man within is kind—although he will prove to be kinder than many—but that he needs the air and the light. They have come to the studio and home of the Master of Dorndrecht and he is alone, living in bachelor squallor while his apprentice is away.

Iris stares within, all eyes for the studio, which is filled with the makings for paint in jars and pots; the cloudy white of panels not yet worked on; the vivid colors of half-finished painting; and the painting the Master is working on. Margaret, sensing his interest, says "She will be of marriageable age within the month—" and is told to be silent. Iris has already asked the question that has captured the painter's attention: "What are you doing?"

(to be continued)

The illustration is a detail of "View of Dorndrecht" by Aelbert Cuyp.

George Kashdan

George Kashdan, editor of DC Comics, who introduced such characters as Aquaman, and also wrote scripts for other comics companies and for animated films—including Flash Gordon, Star Trek, and The Twilight Zone for Gold Key Comics—has died at the age of seventy-eight.

Gyorgy Ligeti

Gyorgy Ligeti, whose piece "Lux Aeterna" is part of the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, died June 12, 2006. Ligetti often used the organ in unconventional ways, including having the organist span the keyboard with his arms before the airflow was tuned on, so that when it was, a vast sound thrumed around around the hall.

Tim Hildebrandt

Tim Hildebrant, probably most famous for his work done with his twin brother, Greg, dead at the age of sixty-seven of complications from diabetes. The Hildebrandt Brothers did an especially well-known series of illustrations of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which appeared in many forms, including calendars. Some of their other fairly famous work appears to the left...

Lady in the Water

It's both a film and a children's book, but the promo now running on Amazon is sufficiently interesting to be worth a look all on its own: M. Night Shymalan tells a bit about a story that began as one he told his own two girls. There is, you see, a lady of sorts who lives in a room under the pool in the backyard, and comes out at night to swim and to change the destiny of—someone.

29: In a Hole in the Ground...

It's probably impossible to over-estimate the influence of William Morris on J. R. R. Tolkien. He's represented in Tales Before Tolkien by a rather short story, "The Folk of the Mountain Door," but Morris was not only familiar with the northern myths that would become part of Tolkien's life work, but also created legends of his own. Some of these foreshadow—perhaps even surpass in some respects—the later author's work. For an example, go to The Roots of the Mountains.

Morris was a writer, poet, artist, and designer, and a central figure in the Arts and Crafts movement. He was also an excellent businessman, whose designs figured throughout British, and, to a lesser extent, American homes. His company produced tiles, fabric, rugs, and stained-glass windows. It was a central tenent of the movement that objects of everyday life should be well-designed and beautiful, an ideal which may reflect the growing influence of Japanese design in Europe, but which in the hands of Morris and his fellows harkened back to an idealized version of the Medieval period and even earlier, heroic but pagan, times.

As teenager, Tolkien read Morris' translation of the sagas, and when Tolkien went to Oxford, he entered the same college, Exeter, where Morris had studied many years before. It is easy to imagine that the young man, already busy inventing languages and myths for a universe of his own, dreamed of being like Morris, at least in some aspects. Years afterward, the professor was to draw illustrations for his own stories, and to be most finicky in the choice of ink colors and manner of reproduction.

But let us begin the story. "Of old time, in the days of the kings, there was a king of folk, a mighty man in battle, a man deemed lucky by the wise, who ruled over a folk that begrudged not his kingship, whereas they knew of his valour and wisdom and saw how by his means they prevailed over other folks, so that their land was wealthy and at peace save about it uttermost borders." We who have read Lord of the Rings know of another place and time where there once was, and would be again, such a king.

(to be continued)

Futures and Fantasies Past

The University of Nebraska Press—This web address doesn't always seem to work, but you can request a catalog toll-free at 800.755.1105—has reprinted a number of classic SF and F novels, covering a span from Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Eternal Savage, Nu of the Neocene, through H. G. Wells' The Croquet Player, and on to John Jacob Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds, A Romance of the Future, plus less exotic fare like Ralph 124C 41+ and The Circus of Dr. Lao. Read the past greats of the genre and what some of its more recent great names say about them. John Clute on The Purple Cloud is the perfect meeting of subject and critic.

1: The Translator

The Translator came as a welcome relief to many of John Crowley's genre fans—his is the distinction of having begun as a genre writer and to have done it so well his work is much-praised as literature: See this adulatory review in Salon for an example—in that he has at last and once more written a whole book without a main character named "Pierce." His huge work in progress, Aegypt, may turn out very well but the pieces of Pierce's lives tend to impress more by their repetition than by their fine prose.

So we were ready for something new from the author of Little, Big, who is probably tired of being identified as such, major award-winner although that book was. The Translator was that new and hoped for thing. It inhabites the profitable disputed territory between straight fiction and fantasy where one reader will find one thing and another something quite different.

Set in the early sixties, at the time when Crowley himself was growing up, it is, in an inverted way, probably the most frankly externally autobiographical of his works. I say inverted, because the main character of the novel is a girl journeying into womanhood, so if the setting is one Crowley knows, the viewpoint is one he must stretch for.

The other major character is a poet, and Crowley agrees he is not one, and found it a challenge to produce poetry good enough to be accepted as translations of greater poems, lost poems, poems written in Russian, by a man fleeing one major Cold War power for another and neither leaving nor finding comfort.

(to be continued)

9: Experimental Online Comics

There are comics created entirely in the computer, and although you may miss the swash and buckle of pen and ink, there's a Toy Story charm to The Dreamland Chronicles. Except this tale of two brothers, fraternal twins born five minutes apart, and of the dreams one of them has and the other covets, has an edge to it. It seems when one brother is in Dreamland his brain is, clinically, dead. A sword pendant may link the real world and the world of dreams, but where did that come from, and why can Alex still travel to Dreamland when most adults cannot?