Is He A Man Or A Monster…or Both?

Yet another great character dreamed up by the Mighty Marvel Bullpen in the supernatual 70’s. Roy Thomas and Gil Kane were the men created Morbius, jettisoning all the usual gothic trappings that Hammer were exploiting at that time, they envisaged a bloodsucker with sharp threads who would mainly be pitted against Spiderman. No longer would Spidey be able to beat up on deranged old men like Doc Oc or The Vulture, now that there was this strapping individual flying around New York with a thirst for young women’s blood. Even through my pre-pubescent ignorance I could discern that this dude was a metaphor for repressed lust, and I always found myself rooting for him in a fight, largely because his back-story suggested that his vampiric state was brought about by accident. A tragic monster, y’see. Michael Morbius had been a biochemist who’d tried to cure his rare blood condition using electroshock treatments and, as you do, vampire bats. The result, well…

Of course, after the first few appearances, his place in the continuity became ever more complicated and ridiculous, but in the first few issues there was some attempts to pitch him as an anti-hero of sorts, as in this great issue with a cover that promises madness aplenty…

I don’t like what they’ve done with the character in recent years and will always cleave to the ‘vintage’ version, as I did when drawing this image …

Top Lust, Top Hate, Top Heavy

I’ve just finished reading Jimmy McDonough’s excellent biography of Russ Meyer - Big Bosoms & Square Jaws - which I thoroughly recommend to anyone who may have previously taken RM for granted. McDonough’s book is as effective a sales job on, as he puts it, “the man, the myth and the madness that is Russell Albion Meyer”, as Ivan Stang’s excellent RM primer in High Weirdness By Mail, where he declared that he had been “born again in Russ.” Madness is certainly the prevailing theme of the book, with Russ barely hanging onto his sanity pretty much from the get-go. With Meyer no longer around to object to what people say about him, McDonough has managed to dredge up every character who ever collided with the Meyer comet and extracts from them some unbelievable stories that provide at least one laugh-out-loud moment on each page. Yes, reading this in public will earn you some attention as yet another insane Meyer moment sends you off howling like a loon. Whatever you may think about the man and his work, Planet Earth was certainly a far more interesting place during the time he was on it.

Russ was the only child of William Meyer and Lydia Howe, left without a father-figure when dad split the scene shortly after his birth. Stories of mom’s China Syndrome emotional state, coupled with his sister’s breakneck post-adolescent descent into schizophrenia, only serve to warn of the lunacy that would follow. Irony indeed then that the one relatively stable period of RM’s life was when he was a U.S. Army combat cameraman for the 166th Signal Photo Company during the latter stages of WWII. Russ loved the war. He loved his experiences with the guy’s as the Allies advanced through Europe towards the Fuhrer’s bunker, and he never really wanted it to end. He made some of his true life-long friends over there, and, courtesy of Ernest Hemingway, lost his cherry in a French brothel to the most stacked girl in the joint. Back on civvy street he took work as an indistrial film-maker and still photographer, during which time his tendencies led him towards the burgeoning ‘glamour’ market. Russ was there shooting for Hef on the early issues of Playboy, which is how he met his second wife Eve who he’d shacked up with whilst still married to Betty Valdovinos. The first marriage was Russ’ brief stab at playing Joe Average, which lasted as long as a head-cold and was sunk by the double depth-charge of Eve’s “mystical love rockets”. Russ photographed Eve numerous times, predominantly in the niff and often in remote desert locations, maximising the discomfort and ratcheting up the emotional state of all involved to ensure that what was captured on film was more than just cheesecake. The added ingredient for Russ was mania, simmering just beneath the surface and ready to explode out of its 2-D confines into the faces of anyone drawn to his work.

And who could resist it? Russ was at the vanguard of the golden age of tits. Decades before hardcore ruined the scene, the screen was awash with plenty of the sizzle, but none of the beefsteak that turns plenty of stomachs. Call me old fashioned but I side with Russ in his preference for the softer fare, which allows for stimulation of the imagination, as opposed to the “floodlit autopsy” (thank you, Alan Moore) of modern ‘adult’ cinema. Of course, no-one took their obsession as far as Russ, and by the end it had completely overwhelmed his senses to the point where all his heifers had to be sporting some degree of “augmentation.” But during the 60’s and early 70’s, RM had it just about under control and brought to the screen such delights for the senses as Lorna Maitland, Uschi Digard, Dolly Read, Edy Williams and Raven De La Croix. All had one common factor - “voluptuousness” to you or I, “cantilevered” to Russ - but in the context of his films they were encouraged to unleash a side of themselves that demanded the male of the species be beaten, broken and crushed beneath their heels. And no Meyer Mama’s were ever more capable of rising to the challenge than the incredible Tura Satana and Erica Gavin.

Without Tura, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! could have been a forgettable piece of B-movie trash. The film is all about Tura, and only really comes alive whenever she has screen time. Dressed to kill in every sense of the word, her performance was nothing less than a blastwave of venegeance against a world that had cruelly wronged her. Gang-raped when she was 9 years old, Tura had gone on to become one the most feared performers of the strip circuit, a Lady Macbeth with pasties who took zero shit from anyone, least of all drooling patrons of the tug buckets in which she shook tectonically every night. The living embodiment of ’sex & violence’, Tura was a bullet and men were the target, and we can only speculate what damage she might have done had Russ not given her the psychic release valva that was ‘Varla’.

Whereas Erica Gavin was an altogether stranger breed. “Is she a woman, or an animal?” asked the strapline for Vixen, and there’s times within that film when you expect Erica to mutate into a more primal state as she gnaws her way through the flesh and bone of anyone who gets in her way. What she lacked in terms of “frontage” (but only when compared to a typical Meyer mama) she more than made up for in terms of sheer attitude, which could only be tamed by the Russ himself, who ran his film sets like Patton. Russ approached film-making the same way a platoon of GI’s went at an enemy’s machine-gun nest. Death or glory. One former associate likened it to “…being in the first wave landing in Normandy during World War II, crossed with a weekend in a whorehouse.” He set a punishing pace from the outset and expected everyone else to keep up, or else. Erica was up to the task, having run away from home at the age of 17 to become a go-go dancer. She was a damaged case, having been molested consistently throughout her childhood, and now warped by the idea that her body was all she had to offer the world, numbing herself to the reality by being stoned all the time. During her burlesque years, she worked alongside Haji and Tura, which is how she came to the attention of RM. Casting her as his feral lead - “a racist, a sex fiend, an incest partner, a lesbian” - Russ was smitten, and spent the evenings during filming peeping on her in her room. After filming the big finale lesbian sex scene between Erica and Vincence Wallace, Russ was given to shout: “Cut! I gotta change my shorts.”

Vixen, the first film ever to be rated X, was the most blatant expression of Russ’ conviction that men were useless unless they could stand up to these deadly goddesses within the sexual arena and defeat them through missionary position pummelling. For such a sexually-orientated artist, RM was incredibly prudish and considered anything other than vanilla sex to be a godless perversion. He had no time for homosexuals, and even considered the act of female>male fellatio to be an act best left to the “fags.” Those women who were fortunate enough to experience his bedroom technique all reported variations on the suspicion that Russ neither knew nor cared what it took to please a woman sexually and was only interested in draining his spuds as quickly as possible, before dashing off to bathroom to remove any lingering stench of female. Some have interpreted this as a repressed homosexual trauma, but Russ Meyer was too complex a script to be open to pop-psychologocal interpretations. He was the complete antithesis of the “just gay enough” Metrosuxual, possessed of the kind of warped vanity that in itself becomes a beacon for those creatures instinctively drawn to the flickering flame of obssession.

Meyer’s funky rocket ship was in the ascendent, catching the eye of 20th Century Fox who were still reeling from the surprise success of Easy Rider and looking to ride the wave recruited him to make the sequal to Jacqueline Susann’s Valley Of The Dolls. There have been few more demented business decisions. The resulting picture is a triumph of madness over logic, with crazy women running amok and classic lines oozing out of every frame, such as the unforgettable “taste the black sperm of my venegeance.” What exactly were 20th Century Fox expecting from the man who had made Motorpsycho and Mondo Topless (described by Jimmy McDonough as “Metal Machine Music with hooters”)? He’d set out his stall already when he said, “I don’t pretend to be some kind of sensitive artist. Give me a movie where some car crashes into a building, and the drover gets stabbed by a bosomy blonde, who gets carried away by a dwarf musician. Films should run like express trains!” Well this one could have been derailed critically had it not made boffo box-office. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was condemned by Variety as being “as funny as a burning orphanage and a treat for the emotionally retarded.” That all seems a little harsh, and we have to remember the times in which it was made, which included Manson, Altamont, Kent State, and the implosion of the hippie dream. Dolls is Meyer’s reflection on all of this, a summary on a brief and weird chapter in American history within which his own unintentionally psychedelic interpretation of reality became an integral part of the zeitgeist. ‘Bad taste’ it may have been for some, but as Alan Brien said of Meyer’s work: “Tastelessness on this scale eventually amounts to a kind of style.”

Not so much an ego-maniac as Ego + Maniac, Russ was not a man built to comfortably ride out the Seventies. Only the truly deranged Supervixens suggested a return to form, but the tide was turning against RM, particularly after the advent of hard-core, which he was repulsed by purely for aesthetic reasons. Gynaecology isn’t art, but the common’s man’s sexual psyche had been hijacked by lesser talents with a more brutal and unsympathetic vision and Russ’ wild but oddly tender view of life was no longer relevant. After 1979 Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, Russ’ film career was effectively over. He retreated to his LA mansion, with Harry the half-breed wolf as his only companion. He had retained the rights to most of his films and spent the majority of the 1980’s and 1990’s, selling his films direct to the VHS and DVD market. When not processing telephone orders himself, he hammered away at the manuscript that would eventually be published in 2000. A Clean Breast is RM’s three-volume autobiography that covers almost every minute of his life up to his last film, and then stops. Which is effectively what happened to his life - the day he stopped making films, he stopped functioning in the present tense. His body was merely a receptacle for an imploding mind that existed in some amalgamation of the past where Meyer was king of all he surveyed. Those around him could see that he was becoming increasingly unhinged and by 2000 he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and put in the care of his secretary.

Russ died 18th September 2004, at the age of 82. He’d seen a lot, done more, lived the life he had chosen right to the hilt and for all his faults and flaws he stands to me as a great example of how unwillingness to compromise eventually reaps rewards. Like it says on his tombstone: “I Was Glad To Do It.” I bet he was. As D.K. Holm’s said: “Meyer unearthed what Disney attempted to bury, the roiling sexual subtext and supertext to everything in the culture.” The fact that his best work is still held in such high regard is testament to the fact that Russ had tapped into something innate within all of us, something almost childlike in its innocence, and yet mature enough to recognise the inherent danger of these lusts we succumb to. Russ’ work is a more profound overview of the 20th century than anything offered by any high-art auteur you could care to name, and one that generations of the far future should turn to when trying to grasp what humanity was going through during the decline of the Age of Reason. At the very least, they’ll enjoy the tits.

Make Mine Marvel!

So let’s just get this straight…

…you’ve got a dude dressed as a bat, flying on the back of a bat, over New York city, with Daredevil in its claws. Yep, it was the mid-70’s but certain sections of the Mighty Marvel Bullpen were still hitting the Blue Sunshine. What I love about this cover, and virtually all of Marvel’s output from this era, is that they all absolutely meant it. No trace of irony whatsoever. Some modern comics’ creators should take note.

Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron

I never try anything. I just do it. And I don’t beat clocks, just people! Wanna try me? - Varla

This is just another in a long line of ‘tributes’ to Russ Meyer’s legendary film, and whilst this girl lacks the grit and barely-contained malevolence of Tura Satana, there’s something about those curves in the hip that put me in mind to go hotroddin’. There’s been plenty of films where the heroine packs a weapon and tries to strut her stuff, but they lack panache. How hard can it be? Go to the desert, unleash some girls who are built for speed, throw in some mexican wrestlers and a couple of Dodge Challengers and film it all in black & white with a soundtrack by The Cramps. Call it Goo Goo Muck and make a million. Any takers?

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Everything about this cover is perfect, so much so that for them to have gone on and played a note could have ruined its power. Fortunately, they gave the world the brilliant ’96 Tears’ and you can check out the rest of their output here.

Hill Ain’t A Bad Place To Be

“I’m not against half naked girls - not as often as I’d like to be.” - Benny Hill

Benny Hill probably did more to shape my early notions of sex than anyone else. Even more than Paul Raymond, whose titles Men Only and Mayfair were effectively used to raise my bed a further three feet off the ground, Benny introduced me to a world of lust, guilt and denial, all wrapped up in the plethora of pinkness that was Hill’s Angels.

As with Russ Meyer, here was a man supposedly warped for life by the over-bearing influence of his mother. Born Alfred Hawthorne Hill in 1924, he lived with mum in their house in Southampton for the majority of his adult life. She died in 1976, prompting a move to Teddington in London where he lived until his own death. He never married, and never held a long-term relationship with any woman, despite the popular perception of him being constantly surrounded by “clump.” He was a clown, but as the songs says, there was untapped well of sadness behind the make-up, which helped give his work an honesty missing from the efforts of his staunchest critics.

We can now look back on the so-called ‘alternative’ comedy “revolution” of the early 1980’s as a true Dark Age in British culture. Jumped-up twats like Ben Elton were denouncing the likes of The Two Ronnies and the seasoned veterans of shows like The Comedians as being no longer relevant and, the ultimate crime of the day, “politically incorrect.” They saved most of their ammo though for Benny Hill, who Elton described as a “dirty old man,” and hoisted him up as a Guy Fawkes for all that was wrong with rotten old Britain. Consider the career ‘arc’ of Ben Elton since then and realise what a total cunt he is, especially when it was the very venom he was spewing into the media that contributed to Benny’s ignoble downfall in the late-80’s.

The truth is that Benny Hill was funny. I still laugh my cock off whenever I see him doing his best work, whereas the likes of The Comic Strip or the hateful Elton’s anti-Tory rants on Saturday Night Live trigger nothing more than a desire to kick the TV screen in. Partly it’s nostalgia for the seaside kiss-me-quick culture Benny Hill embodied, but more than that it’s the basic understanding he had of what the common man - and woman - finds funny. Benny had come through the hard way, working for decades in radio before making the transition to television and cinema, with small but interesting roles in The Italian Job and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. From 1969 onwards he was a permanent fixture on ITV, attracting audiences of millions to his shows that all featured songs and sketches populated by a familiar cast of faces, including Henry McGee, Jack Wright, Bob Todd, and the lovely Sue Upton and Louise English. Certain sketches like the one where he gets his ‘F’s’ and his ‘P’s’ mixed up I can still recall to this day, though undoubtedly the enduring memory for me would be the Hill’s Angels, who exuded such joy and vitality throughout some very dark times (Three-day week, Miner’s strike, power cuts, IRA bombs, the Yorkshire Ripper) that they provided a promise that things might just work our alright.

By the late 80’s, with the Elton junta holding sway, Benny Hill was out of favour and his future as a performer unsure. His regular show had been cancelled and he started to suffer from a dicky ticker. By early 1992, just before the advent of a Loaded culture within which Benny would be championed, his doctor’s were recommending surgery or else, but he declined and sometime during the Easter weekend he died alone in his flat. He was found slumped in the chair in front of the TV. Irony of ironies, a new contract from Central Independent Television had arrived that same weekend.

So passed a great British performer of the old school, who makes today’s comedy “geniuses” look like the undertakers for a suffocated culture that they are. Here’s some Yakety Sax to take you back to those good old days.

Hey Butthead, Are We Gonna Die?

This film has absolutely no right to be as good as it is, and I had initially dismissed it as being MTV flogging a horse that was already slumped dead in the knacker’s yard. But name one other film that can boast Isaac Hayes, Ozzy Osbourne, White Zombie, AC/DC, Butthole Surfers and, unbelievably, Englebert Humperdink singing ‘Lesbian Seagull’ on its soundtrack. There isn’t one…and when I saw a couple of clips from the film I was convinced that it must be a work of gonzoid genius.

And after laying down 79p for a VHS copy in a charity shop, my suspicions were confirmed. It’s a triumph of stupidity over intelligence, or so it would seem at first glance, but closer inspection suggests a crude and malignant intelligence at work: Mike Judge. He’s since made ‘cult’ favourites Office Space and Idiocracy, both of which were box-office failures whilst this thing made over $60 million! The Americans, it’s been argued, were not ready to have the faults in their system pointed out, whereas this film seems to celebrate all appealingly moronic aspects of the American Daydream.

I said ’seems’. The Simpsons had opened the sluice-gates for animated satire, but Beavis & Butthead seemed the most unlikely of point men to take the potential any further, and yet it’s their utter baseness that allows for Judge to rip the piss out of every convention and every cliche that strays onto his radar screen. It all starts when B&B find their TV’s been stolen. “This sucks more than anything that’s ever sucked before,” says Butthead. From there on in it’s a relentless assault of knowing idiocy, designed to reduce the entire audience (including females) to the mental state of 11-year-old boys. And yet, somewhere along the way, you begin to suspect that if Samuel Beckett had been a teenager in Des Moines during the 1980’s then this is what he would have given the world in place of Malone Dies.

Featuring the voices of Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, Richard Linklater and even David Letterman, playing everything from muderous husbands to roadies for Motley Crue, the film is a machine-gun feedback loop of dick jokes, toilet humour and stoner quotables that reaches it’s apotheosis for me when Butthead finally cracks under the strain:

Beavis: Dammit! This always happens! I think I’m gonna score, and then I never score! It’s not fair! We traveled um, a mil-… a hundred miles, just because we thought we were gonna score! But now it’s not gonna happen! Dammit!

Bus Driver: Hey, buddy! Sit down!

Beavis: Shut up, ass-wipe! I’m sick and tired of this! We’re never gonna score! We’re probably gonna get old like these people, but they’ve probably scored!

Bus Driver: Hey! I’m warning you! Sit down!

Beavis: It’s like this chick’s a slut… and look at this guy! He’s old, but he’s probably scored a million times…!

Old Guy: [nodding] Oh, yeah.

Beavis: But not us! We’re never gonna score! WE’RE NEVER GONNA SCORE! WE’RE NEVER GONNA SCORE! AAAARRGH!

Who amongst you couldn’t empathise with this tortured soul’s anguish?

Beavis & Butthead Do America says more about the human condition than anything vomited out of Hollywood in the past decade. Consider Beavis’ enthusiastic recommendation for The Bible: “Hey, Butt-Head, this book kicks ass! There’s this talking snake and a naked chick and then this dude puts a leaf on his schlong! Heh heh heh,” which reduces all the complications of Genesis to terms we can all understand. Or what about Butthead’s bold response to the challenges of ecological disaster?: “This desert is stupid. They need to put a drinking fountain out here.” Perhaps our heroes greatest talent is the ability to reverse the dangerous influence that the Orwellian double-speak of modern-day politicians has on our senses:

President: “Beavis and Butt-Head. On behalf of all your fellow Americans, I extend my deepest thanks. You exemplify a fine new crop of young Americans who will grow into the leaders of this great country.”

 BUTT-HEAD: “Huh huh huh. He said crap. Huh huh.”

Here’s the soundtrack.

Yarva Demonicus Etrigan

I consider the Marvel supernatural anti-heroes of the early 70’s amongst the greatest creations in comics history. They were the vital yang to the yin of Superman and all the rest, always retaining a potential for chaos and looking damn good while they were doing it. It wasn’t until secondary school when reading G.B. Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple for O-Level’s that I finally understood where the appeal of these characters lay. Despite the fact that they were often essentially conquering “evil,” they were entirely non-conformist and kicked off against any figures of authority. Yep, I could relate to that alright.

DC Comics could never quite compete, but they got lucky in the early 70’s when big Jack Kirby defected and brought with him a brainfull of barmy ideas, including The New Gods, Omac, Kamandi and, my fave, The Demon. With origins in Arthurian legend, the character had a human persona in the form of Jason Blood, lurking in the shadow’s of Gotham City and ever-ready to mutate and kick ass for the forces of good as Etrigan. Blood is basically Bruce Wayne as conceived by Dennis Wheatley, whereas Etrigan is Marvel’s The Abomination emerging from the sulphurous pages of The Devil Rides Out. Speaking in medieval rhyme, Etrigan made for one powerful anti-hero, particularly in the hands of big Jack who by that stage had developed his bold drawing style to the point where each panel was a pop art canvas in miniature. No-one else would have been able to get away with drawing like that, but Jack had decades of experience, not to mention the burning conviction that he was right.

As for the stories…absolutely bonkers. The initial 16 issue run of The Demon (1972-74) was a triumph of madness over common sense, sold to the kids as harmless entertainment. Witchboy in particular was a freaky character - imagine Harry Potter if raised by the Manson Family - confirming all my suspicions about all those sullen little Damien types at school, who seemed ready to unleash some diabolical revenge upon their tormentors. Etrigan never had an easy ride against these “villains”, as if to remind us that being a demon he was himself “bad” and deserved to suffer. Not that I cared a toss about any of that - Etrigan just looked ace and brought the havoc every time.

Needless to say, he’s been poorly served as a character over the years, but his appearances in the Alan Moore run on Swamp Thing were memorable, as here was a writer who could fully explore the swirling grey areas this character inhabits, not to mention have a whale of a time with the rhyming couplets. I’ve since read about Guillermo Del Toro’s assertion that the world is now ready for a Demon movie - which you could argue is unecessary seeing as we already have Hellboy, a clear Demon homage if you ask me - and that Neil Gaiman would like to write the screenplay! This is a man who I have described before as having writerly abilities that “are most politely described as ‘nebulous’”. No, they should leave well alone and let the fans enjoy the imminent collected edition of Jack’s original series, which I thoroughly recommend to all fans of monster mayhem.

Here’s my own homage to the character:

Arania Negra

Here’s some covers of the Argentinian title Arania Negra (Black Spider), a truly wild photo comic in the vein of their other titles Peligro Supreme (Danger Supreme) and Kiling, which featured what must be the most referenced trash culture character outside of Tura Satana’s Varla - Sadistik.

These looks like a high point in human culture to me, successfully fusing the endearing crapness of the Batman TV series with the sinister promise of Russ Meyer’s ‘gothic’ late 60’s period.

If the contents could every hope to match the sleazy sizzle of the covers, then I can only dream about the brain damage this would have caused me had I found them when I was a young lad.

Zombies & Dinosaurs

These are teaser images for Rob Zombie’s next proposed flick.

Conflicting rumours abound - that the film is all about a wrestler rumbling under the name Tyrannosaurus Rex on the run from a demon biker gang, and that there are no dinosaurs in it at all, despite all the tease of these two images.

Hmmm…I think if you put dinosaurs in all the promo pictures, it’s going to prime people to expect them in the film. And if they’re not there, folks are going to be pissed off. Having never seen a Rob Zombie film I’m in no position to join the ‘He Rules/He Sucks Shit’ debate, but I can’t help feeling that this is one of those occassions where the actual idea is better than anything they could be realised with either the most generous or meagre of budgets.