Here’s what’s gone up on my Patreon in the first month of 2023:
for all patrons: a review of Glass Onion
for patrons who pledge at least $2/month: 22 cat (and bird) pictures
for patrons who pledge at least $5/month: a review of Red Dwarf
for patrons who pledge at least $7/month: excerpts from Feat of Clay (my upcoming urban fantasy novel), “The Legend of Long-Ears” (my upcoming Weird Western story), “You Can’t Buy Fate” (my upcoming Star Trek story), and “The Thick Blue Line” (my upcoming Sherlock Holmes novella)
for patrons who pledge at least $10/month: a Shirley Holmes & Jack Watson vignette
for patrons who pledge $20/month: first looks at my short stories “You Can’t Buy Fate” and “The Legend of Long-Ears” and my essay “A Critical Hit with a Yo-Yo and Other Stories”
Here’s what’s been on my Patreon from the 25th of October to the end of 2022:
$1/month and up: reviews of Black Adam, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, The Gray Man, Innocent, My Cousin Vinny, and Violent Night
$2/month and up: 58 cat (and dog) pictures
$5/month and up: reviews of Star Wars: Andor and Blake’s 7
$7/month and up: excerpts from “This Little Light of Mine,” Star Hoppers Book 7, my essay on the Joker, and Feat of Clay
$10/month and up: vignettes featuring the Super City Cops and Dragon Precinct
$20/month: first looks at Star Hoppers Book 7 Chapters 1-7, my essays on “The Curse of the Fatal Death” and the Joker, and Feat of Clay Chapters 11-15 and the Epilogue
For the new year, the first movie review is likely to be Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and on the TV side, I’ve finished watching Rings of Power season one as well as all of Red Dwarf, and I’m working on The Orville, among others. January will see me writing several short stories and a novella, so the $20/month crowd can expect a lot of first looks, and the $7/month (and up) folks will get a variety of excerpts.
Super City Cops: “The Battling Bensons,” “Family Matters,” “Unhappy Hallowe’en,” and “The Menace of Maleagris”
Nonfiction
“Watching the Detectives: ‘Minerva, Millionaires, and Mayhem’,” in OOOFF! BOFF! SPLATT!: The Subterranean Blue Grotto Essays on Batman ’66–Season Three, ed. by Jim Beard, with Rich Handley (Crazy 8)
“Star Trek: Prodigy Arrives at Mid-Season with Hope and Fear” (Tor.com)
“Lonely at the Top: The Underused Leaders of Stargate Atlantis,” in Unauthorized Offworld Activation: Exploring the Stargate Franchise, ed. by Rich Handley & Joseph Dilworth Jr. (Sequart)
“‘A Little Strategic Violence’ — The Umbrella Academy Season Three Continues to Bring the Bugnuts” (Tor.com)
“The Chase is On as Star Trek: Prodigy Returns” (Tor.com)
Star Trek: Enterprise Rewatch — from season 1 episode 7 to season 2 episode 25 (Tor.com)
“4-Color to 35-Millimeter: The Great Superhero Movie Rewatch” — Barbarella, The Batman, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Eternals, It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman!, The King’s Man, Mandrake, Morbius, Sparks, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Thor: Love and Thunder, Timecop, Timecop: The Berlin Decision, Vampirella, Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Tor.com)
Reviews of Star Trek: Discovery season 4 episodes 8-13 (Tor.com)
Reviews of Star Trek: Picard season 2 (Tor.com)
Reviews of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 1 (Tor.com)
Reviews of Star Trek: Lower Decks season 3 (Tor.com)
Patreon movie reviews: The Batman, Black Adam, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Clueless, Drive Me Crazy,Ferry, Free Guy, A Goofy Movie, The Gray Man, Innocent, The King’s Man, My Cousin Vinny, 9 to 5, Onward, Presumed Innocent, 10 Things I Hate About You, Thor: Love and Thunder, Turning Red, Violent Night
Patreon TV reviews: Animal Kingdom, Blake’s 7, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Falcon & The Winter Soldier, Grace & Frankie, Giri/Haji, Hawkeye, The Kominsky Method, Loki, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, My Life is Murder, Our Flag Means Death, Sandman, She-Hulk: Attorney-at-Law, The Shield, Signora Volpe, Slings and Arrows, Star Trek: Prodigy, Star Wars: Andor, Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ted Lasso, Under the Vines, Undercover, WandaVision, What If…?
$1/month and up: a review of Clueless, Drive Me Crazy, and 10 Things I Hate About You
$2/month and up: 32 cat pictures
$5/month and up: reviews of Animal Kingdom, Sandman, and She-Hulk, Attorney-at-Law
$7/month and up: excerpts from Phoenix Precinct and “This Little Light of Mine.”
$10/month and up: a vignette featuring Bram Gold (with another that will go live on Hallowe’en)
$20/month and up: first looks at the drafts of Phoenix Precinct Chapters 1-23 and “This Little Light of Mine.”
Since that’s almost two months’ worth of stuff, for just $40, you’d have gotten all of that! And there’s more coming, as I’ll have a movie review in the next week (possibly of The Gray Man, possibly of Black Adam, which I’m going to see tonight), there is another vignette coming on the 31st, as I said above, and there’s a new excerpt from a work in progress every single week (usually on Wednesdays). Plus, of course, ever more cat pictures…….
When I reached fifty patrons on my Patreon in August 2020, I wrote the following as a special bonus for all of my patrons. I’m reprinting it here two years later in honor of writer J.M. DeMatteis’s new Kickstarter.
When I first started seriously getting into superhero comics in the early-to-mid-1980s, I read almost entirely Marvel Comics stuff. It was a great time to get into Marvel, as some of the greatest runs on their heroes were at this time: Chris Claremont’s X-Men and New Mutants, Roger Stern’s Amazing Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Avengers, John Byrne’s Fantastic Four and Alpha Flight, Bill Mantlo’s Incredible Hulk, Micronauts, and Spectacular Spider-Man, Walt Simonson’s Thor, Denny O’Neil’s Iron Man, Jo Duffy’s Power Man & Iron Fist, Frank Miller’s Daredevil, and J.M. DeMatteis’s Captain America, Defenders, and Marvel Team-Up, among others…
DeMatteis was a writer I quickly took to. Several elements of his authorial voice appealed to me, from his naturalistic dialogue to his strong use of humor, from his fantastic ability to get at the human motivations behind both his heroes and his villains to his general belief in the goodness of human beings. (A lot of the work he did on Captain America proved to be the lasting basis of how the character was written both in comics and especially in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the lack of any kind of thank-you to him in any of the MCU films is a travesty.) There was also always a sense of hippie mysticism about his work that continues to appeal to this child of hippies.
From 1985 to 1987, DeMatteis wrote a miniseries for Epic Comics, Marvel’s line of creator-owned titles, called Moonshadow. The artwork was fully painted, mostly by Jon J Muth, with help from George Pratt and Kent Williams when Muth fell behind on his deadlines. It was one of the first fully-painted comics, and Muth et al’s washed-out watercolors gave the book a very distinctive, ethereal look that stood out in a medium that favored bright primary colors.
Moonshadow was reprinted by Vertigo in the mid-1990s, and then they published a coda one-shot called Farewell, Moonshadow, all of which was collected into The Compleat Moonshadow—which was recently reprinted, along with a ton of behind-the-scenes material, by Dark Horse as Moonshadow: The Definitive Edition.
Anybody who’s read DeMatteis’s work over the years will recognize many of the tropes in Moonshadow, from the general search for enlightenment that is the theme of the story to the romanticizing of mid-to-late-20th-century Brooklyn (where DeMatteis himself was born and raised) to the multiple literary references (including at least one reference to Fyodor Dostoyevski, a DeMatteis staple) to the charmingly goofy use of humor, including quite a number of Yiddishisms.
DeMatteis is Jewish, and Judaism plays a much bigger role in his work than it does in most mainstream comics work. (One of his other 1980s creator-owned Marvel projects was a graphic novel called Greenberg the Vampire.) Reading The Definitive Edition now, there are several Yiddishisms that my teenage self totally missed the first time ’round (as an example, two planets are named Goyim and Shpilkuss).
I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s a true delight, one part coming-of-age story, one part satire, one part fairy tale, and one part science fiction allegory. An older Moonshadow tells the story in flashback, with the main action taking place during Moonshadow’s teenage years. The title character is half human—his mother is a hippie burnout named Sheila Fay Birnbaum, who goes by the name Sunflower after she tuned in, turned on, and dropped out—and he has many adventures throughout the cosmos. The satire and social commentary is fast and furious in Moonshadow, with critiques of capitalism, war, organized religion, and more.
The most fascinating aspect of Moonshadow to me is the G’l Doses. They’re basically giant glowing smiley faces, created decades before emojis became a thing. They flit about the galaxy pinging, popping, and poofing their way through space, occasionally kidnapping people and putting them in their zoo for reasons that are never made clear. The G’l Doses appear to operate completely on whim, and all attempts to understand them are doomed to failure. (DeMatteis presents two philosophical texts that take opposite viewpoints on the G’l Doses: We’re All Ants in a Meaningless Cosmos by Ragstone Phillit, which obviously takes an existentialist, nihilistic view, and The Gospel of Shree Quack Quack H’onnka, which takes a much more optimistic one.) Sunflower is one of the people they kidnap, and — for reasons that are never elaborated upon, just like every other G’l Doses action — one chooses to marry Sunflower and impregnate her. Moonshadow is the result of that bizarre union.
One of the things I love about DeMatteis’s work in general and Moonshadow in particular is that he understands the importance and value of storytelling, and how the creation of art in general and of literature in particular is of such critical import to what makes life worth living. Each chapter of the story starts with a literary quote, and while they’re all excellent and apt quotes, by some of the greats, reading it in 2020, I have to wince at the fact that it’s made up entirely of white dudes from the late 18th to the early 20th century, and all but one from the U.S. or the UK (the exception being the aforementioned Dostoyevsky): William Blake, L. Frank Baum, William Butler Yeats, J.R.R. Tolkien, Percy Bysshe Shelley, J.M. Barrie, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dostoyevsky, John Keats, Henry Miller, and Samuel Beckett. While growing up in the G’l Doses zoo, Moonshadow had access to a huge library that supposedly had the entirety of human literature in it—but, again, all white dudes from a single hundred-and-fifty-year timeframe.
Still, the story is superlative. DeMatteis effortlessly slides across set pieces and genres, from the horrors of war to the hilarity of worlds like Gimmegimme and Pillbox to the delightful flashbacks to Sunflower’s childhood and young adulthood during the oppressive 1950s and the turbulent 1960s. Throughout it all, Moonshadow is a delightfully romantic, naïve, competent, pathetic, brilliant, idiotic, complex hero whose journey to enlightenment is well worth the journey.
The art is beauteous, the perfect accompaniment to DeMatteis’s tale, ranging from Seussian absurdity to ethereal beauty worthy of William Blake (whose introduction to the Songs of Innocence provide the de facto epigraph and theme). Kevin Nowlan’s handwriting-style lettering is also perfect for the feel, though occasionally it is difficult to read the thin-lined lettering over the colorful art, at least for your humble reviewer’s aging eyes…
I’m of two minds about the Farewell, Moonshadow epilogue, which also slides from genre to genre but it’s not as effortless as it is in the main story, feeling a bit more disjointed in tone and feel. The initial bits with Moonshadow as a tinkerer works well, but the middle part with him basically becoming Job, with everything going wrong with his life, feels like it wandered in from a different story. Sometimes it’s best to leave parts of the story untold, and I’m not sure the epilogue works as well as hoped.
Still, this is one of the greatest comics stories ever produced, flaws and all. It’s tremendous fun, full of happy chear, and will make you feel good when you read it. It’s a great story, and that’s what makes life worth living.
Here’s what’s been on my Patreon from the 1st to the 31st of August:
$1/month and up: a review of Onward.
$2/month and up: 17 cat (and dog) pictures.
$5/month and up: a round-up review of Our Flag Means Death, Ms. Marvel, and Ted Lasso.
$7/month and up: excerpts from “Ticonderoga Beck and the Stalwart Squad,” “Another Dead Body on the Corner,” and Phoenix Precinct.
$10/month and up: vignettes in the worlds of Bram Gold and Dragon Precinct.
$20/month and up: first look at the first drafts of “Ticonderoga Beck and the Stalwart Squad,” Star Hoppers Book 6 Chapters 7-17, “Another Dead Body on the Corner,” and Phoenix Precinct‘s Prologue.
For September, there’s going to be a lot of Phoenix Precinct at the $7 and $20 tiers, as that’s my main focus for the month. Several TV shows are vying for my reviewing attention, including The Sandman, Animal Kingdom‘s final season, the new seasons of What We Do in the Shadows and The Brokenwood Mysteries, and more. Ditto for movies, though I’m leaning toward The Gray Man.
So what are you waiting for? THERE’S ALL THIS COOL STUFF! You should totally support me! I mean, for a mere twenty bucks, you can get at least two reviews a month, one vignette a month, a weekly excerpt from a work in progress, first looks at my first drafts, and a ton of pictures of adorable furballs! Such a deal!
If you don’t support my Patreon (and why don’t you?????), here’s what you’ve missed over the last five weeks…..
$1/month and up: a review of Thor: Love and Thunder
$2/month and up: 31 cat (and dog!) pictures
$5/month and up: a review of Obi-Wan Kenobi
$7/month and up: excerpts from Star Hoppers Book 6 and “Ticonderoga Beck and the Stalwart Squad”
$10/month and up: a vignette featuring Bram Gold
$20/month and up: first looks at Star Hoppers Book 6, Chapters 1-10 and “Ticonderoga Beck and the Stalwart Squad”
This is a really good deal. For twenty bucks a month, you get weekly excerpts from my works in progress, a monthly movie review, a monthly TV review, tons of pictures of cute fuzzy things, a monthly vignette featuring one of my original milieus, and every time I finish a chapter or a short story, you get to see the first draft.
Here’s what’s gone up on my Patreon since the 20th of May:
$1/month and up: reviews of 9 to 5 and Presumed Innocent
$2/month and up: 37 cat (and dog) pictures
$5/month and up: a review of Signora Volpe
$7/month and up: excerpts from Pigman and Star Hoppers Book 5
$10/month and up: a Super City Cops vignette
$20/month and up: first looks at every chapter of Star Hoppers Book 5
Coming in July will be a movie review, TV reviews of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ms. Marvel, tons more cat and dog pics (I visited ToniAnn and Kyle in Raleigh last week and took a lot of pics of their zoo), the usual work-in-progress Wednesdays, July’s vignette, and first looks at Star Hoppers Book 6 and the short story “Ticonderoga Beck and the Stalwart Squad,” which is due on 30 July.
If you haven’t joined my Patreon, here’s what you’ve missed since the 6th of March:
$1/month and up patrons: reviews of the movies Turning Red, Free Guy, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, A Goofy Movie, and The Batman.
$2/month and up patrons: 52 cat pictures.
$5/month and up patrons: reviews of the TV shows WandaVision, The Falcon & The Winter Soldier, Loki,What If…?, Hawkeye,Grace and Frankie, Giri/Haji, Moon Knight, Slings & Arrows, and Under the Vines.
$7/month and up patrons: excerpts from Feat of Clay, “A Lovely View,” “The Rat’s Tail,” Star Hoppers, and Pigman.
$10/month and up patrons: vignettes featuring the Super City Cops, Cassie Zukav, and Dragon Precinct.
$20/month patrons: first looks at “A Lovely View,” “The Rat’s Tail,” and Star Hoppers Book 4 Chapters 1-19.
There’s a new Batman movie in theatres, and in honor of that, here’s my review of the DC animated movie that was released in January 2021, and which I simply adored. It’s a total 70s movie, and I’m here for it. This review appeared on my Patreon in January 2021, and for just $1/month, you can get monthly movie reviews — for the last few months, I’ve reviewed Moonstruck, In the Heights, Black Widow, The Suicide Squad, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Luca, Eternals, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Encanto, Ferry, Turning Red, Free Guy, A Goofy Movie, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And for more, you also get cat pictures, TV reviews, excerpts from my works in progress, vignettes featuring my original characters, and first looks at my first drafts!Check it out and please consider being my patron!
Denny O’Neil died last year. One of the best comics writers and one of the best comics editors in the business, one of Denny’s favorite tropes to play with as a writer was characters who trained in the martial arts. He created the character of Richard Dragon, first in the 1974 novel Dragon’s Fists, then adapted him to comics for DC. In the pages of Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter—published starting in 1975, which was the height of the kung fu craze following the rise of Bruce Lee’s popularity—O’Neil also created the characters of O-Sensei (the title character’s mentor), Lady Shiva, and Ben Turner (a.k.a. the Bronze Tiger).
O’Neil would later use both Dragon and Shiva extensively in his brilliant run on The Question. Shiva became a major player in the Batman titles after that, and the Bronze Tiger was a founding member of the modern incarnation of the Suicide Squad.
As a tribute to O’Neil, Warner Bros. Animation has done a Batman animated movie that explicitly takes place at the same time that Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Fighter was published, and which features Batman teaming up with Dragon, Turner, Shiva, and O-Sensei. Jeremy Adams’s script shows an impressive facility for the time period, nailing the plot, the script, and the slang with impressive verve.
The movie is a pastiche of 70s horror comics, 70s kung fu movies, and 70s spy thrillers. The opening is straight-up James Bond, with Dragon on a covert mission to get some files from the safe of a mansion in the middle of a big party. It comes complete with spy tricks (getting someone’s fingerprints for a print-scanning lock), disguises, gambling, hand-to-hand combat, and a big explosion at the end.
The plot is pretty much an excuse to go from fight scene to fight scene, but there’s some characterization. In this tale, Batman is still a relatively new hero, with Bruce Wayne having trained under O-Sensei in Nanda Parbat. (That locale has been a remote site that has been a place to find enlightenment, gain badass martial arts skills, or both in various DC comics, TV shows, and movies over the decades.) Wayne trained alongside Dragon, Turner, Shiva, and two others, Jade Nguyen and Rip Jagger, who are versions of Cheshire and Judomaster from the comics. O-Sensei is training them to protect the Earth from Naga, a demon kept in check by a mystic gate that O-Sensei guards. But Jagger is secretly part of a cult that wishes to free Naga, and he kills Nguyen to open the gate, forcing O-Sensei to enter the gate and sacrifice himself to close it again.
Years later, Dragon finds out that the Kobra cult (to which Jagger belonged) has the gate now. He recruits Wayne, discovering that he’s Batman, and they then go to Shiva—now a crime boss, and possessor of the soul sword that is needed to open the gate. The bad guys take it, and then they recruit Turner, who it turns out knows that Kobra has a chosen one who was being raised from childhood to become the one who frees Naga. But Turner couldn’t kill an innocent kid. However, that innocent kid has grown up to be a psychopath (at one point, he kills a hooker with poisonous snakes after he pays her).
I honestly feel like Warner Bros. decided to make this movie with me in mind, because holy crap is this Keith catnip. I grew up in the 1970s, and still have massive amounts of affection for the popular culture of the era. I’m also a martial artist, a third-degree black belt in karate [note in 2022 when reposting: now a fourth-degree black belt….. —KRAD], and have always had an affinity for martial arts stories. And I’m also a massive fan of O’Neil’s work, and Adams channels O’Neil’s voice here beautifully, particularly with the title character.
One of the hallmarks of O’Neil’s writings of Batman over the years has been that he’s always been aware of Batman’s vulnerabilities. Most of the interpretations of Batman have him as a brilliant polymath who is always in control, or at the very least is always one step ahead of everyone, whether it’s to humorous effect (the 1950s comics, the 1960s TV show) or to be more serious (pretty much every iteration of the character after Frank Miller’s Dark Knight and “Year One” stories in the 1980s). But O’Neil always remembered that Batman was created in an alley where a little kid saw his parents gunned down. O’Neil also created Talia al-Ghul, the daughter of Ra’s al-Ghul, whose tragic love for Batman constantly proved a vulnerability to the dark knight detective.
Adams gives us a very young Batman. This isn’t the confident veteran hero that we’ve seen voiced by Kevin Conroy and Jason O’Mara and Jeremy Sisto and the like. David Giuntoli plays him as a younger man who’s still trying to get his anger and obsession under control.
He’s also a supporting player in his own movie, which I’m actually okay with, as Dragon, Shiva, and Turner are all more interesting characters. In fact, all three of them could have used a bit more fleshing out—how did Shiva become a crime boss? why don’t we see more of Turner’s life? why was Dragon in particular with O-Sensei so long? But Mark Dacascos as Dragon, Michael Jai White as Turner (he played the same role in live action on Arrow), and Kelly Hu as Shiva (she previously voiced the character in the Batman: Arkham Origins videogame) all do superb voice work, giving the characters more depth than the script really has time to grant them. O-Sensei, however, is given plenty of depth by the great James Hong, whom Adams writes with a mischievous wit that is a clichéd but still welcome variation on the sub-fortune-cookie nonsense we usually get from such characters (including the comics iteration all too often).
The story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it doesn’t really need to, and that’s honestly not the problem anyhow. The problem is the ending. The stupid fucking movie ends on a cliffhanger! Our heroes enter the gate, the door closes behind them, and I figure we’re about to get the climactic battle between the four protagonists and Naga. Instead, they pose as if ready to fight, and then the credits roll.
Now maybe they’re setting up for a sequel, but I have the feeling they just wanted to end it all open like that, and feh! I wanted the big-ass fight at the end!
However, up until the ending, this is a great movie. The music, the script, the design, all of it just nails the era being portrayed. If you’re looking for a story with Batman as the main character, you may be disappointed—Batman’s role is supporting, truly; the movie is written as if Dragon is the protagonist. But if you’re looking for a throwback to a time of fight scenes, satanic cults, and espionage, along with fashions that will make you say, “dig them crazy threads, baby,” this is definitely the movie for you.
Batman: Soul of the Dragon is available for sale on Prime and DVD and Blu-Ray. [note in 2022 when reposting: it’s also available for streaming on HBO Max —KRAD]
KRAD's Inaccurate Guide to Life 