Monsters are an odd phenomenon in the human psyche.  When we’re little, the thing under the bed or hiding in the closet seems entirely too real.  But once those fears have been conquered, kids with vivid imaginations often embrace the creatures of their nightmares, and suddenly the razor-sharp fangs and slimy exteriors become endearing, instead of frightening.  For those kids, Titan Books has just released Monster Massacre, a compendium of comics, short stories, and artwork of those things that go bump in the night.  The book features a wide variety of creepy crawlies, from Lovecraftian cephalopods to mutant insects to demi-gods to good old fashioned dinosaurs.  Essentially, if you like monsters, there’s something here for everyone.  Unfortunately, the quality of the work presented is as varied as the creatures lurking within.

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Although the comic strip Flash Gordon might not have invented the space opera genre, it certainly helped define it.  And for nearly a decade, the creator and visual maestro behind Flash, Alex Raymond, drew a weekly strip that continues to inspire young artists today.  Since 2012, Titan Books has been issuing reprints of these classic comic strips as part of The Complete Flash Gordon Library.  Their latest offering, Volume 3: The Fall of Ming, covers the years 1941 – 1944, a time of great transition for not only the world, but also Raymond and his beloved creation.

It might surprise you to hear that it’s not absolutely necessary you read the previous installments of Flash Gordon in order to jump into the weekly comic strip.  While there are occasional references to earlier characters and events, for the most part the plot is simple enough to understand even without a complete backstory.  So chances are you’ll be caught up and know everything you need to know within a couple of strips.  However, I have read some of the early adventures of Flash, and knowing how the strip started back in 1937, helped put a better context on what it had become by the beginning of this volume in 1941.

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When I was a kid, we had a Betamax copy of a making-of documentary that played on PBS just before Return of the Jedi debuted in theaters.  I couldn’t tell you how many times I watched that tape, but I do know that when it was included on the DVD extras a few years back, the memories came flooding back.  I can recall the early concept sculptures for Jabba the Hutt, where the could-have-been crimelord had four arms.  There were drawings of long-legged, almost bird-like ewoks.  And the early designs for the AT-ST (AKA “The Chicken Walker”) were just as cool as the final vehicle turned out to be.  The show had a lasting impression on me because it showed me that there was a process to creating the iconic images I would grow to know and love.  Since then, I have been obsessed with concept art for movies.

If you’ve read my review of Hotel Transylvania, I think it’s unlikely that the film will ever be considered as iconic as any of the Star Wars films (including the prequels), but that doesn’t mean that it was thrown together without any thought whatsoever.  And thanks to The Art and Making of Hotel Transylvania from Titan Books, the most impressive part of this otherwise underwhelming film will not go unnoticed.
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Joan Medford is desperate.  At only 21-years old, and a newly-widowed woman with a young son to raise in 1960s America, she doesn’t have a lot of options.  So Joan leaves the toddler to stay with her wealthy, scheming, barren sister-in-law, while she gets back on her feet.  This means taking a job as a cocktail waitress in a restaurant down the street.  She accepts the job’s shortcomings – the skimpy attire, the seedy customers, and the ugly underbelly of what some girls do to make a living – because she needs the money.  Luckily, she has the assets – a quick tongue, a nice figure, and enough moral flexibility – to bring home the bacon.  Before long she’s back on her feet and doing better than ever; definitely better than when her deadbeat, drunken husband was still alive.  Now if only she could get these pesky detectives off her case, who refuse to let the odd circumstances of the accidental death of Mr. Medford go with him to the grave.

At the bar, Joan attracts the attention of two men: the older, richer, sickly Earl White III, and the younger, poorer, slicker Tom Barclay.  While White gives her everything a woman needs, Barclay gives her everything a woman wants.  Torn between the two men and the two sides of herself, Joan must decide which is more important.  Unless she can find a way to have her cake and eat it too, of course.

The Cocktail Waitress is the last book of James M. Cain, author of classic noir novels such as Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and The Postman Always Rings Twice, among many others.  Although he was at his peak in the 1930s and 40s, Cain continued to have new books published up until and even after his death in 1977.  However, The Cocktail Waitress is a special case, in that it was an unfinished manuscript that lay around in various stages of completion, until editor Charles Ardai, a mystery writer with an impressive bibliography of his own, brought the pieces together and tried to mold them into a cohesive story.  And I’d say he succeeds.
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I was born in a time that has since become known as the “Dinosaur Renaissance”, a period that arguably began in 1975 when paleontologist Robert Bakker, the bearded, hippy-looking guy with the long hair and cowboy hat that we all know from PBS and the Discovery Channel, published an article in Scientific American that gave the era its name.   It was here that many people first heard about dinosaurs being far different from the way they had previously been portrayed – as large, sluggish, rather boring lizards.  Bakker and others like him posited that dinosaurs were in fact warm-blooded, social, vibrant, and voracious creatures that shared more characteristics with modern day birds than they did crocodiles and turtles.

Once dinosaurs became more than just over-sized iguanas, educational book publishers sat up and took notice.  Here was a way to make science cool again; probably for the first time since the space race.  So they started cranking out books for kids with garish, almost comic book-like covers of dinosaurs that were based on these newly-presented ideas.  It worked.  And as a kid born the same year “Dinosaur Renaissance” was published, my early childhood was inundated with books, toys, cartoons, games, and everything else imaginable that starred these “terrible lizards”.
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