I am absolutely adoring these recent Retro Bandito pieces, my DeVoTees.
They do not merely stir up fond little flashbacks of old film and television… they hit with that filthy punk/rock flyer flavor as well.
Like a local band cobbled the art together and then ran off a crooked stack of copies at Kinko’s with a copier key that just happened to be left behind by fate, fortune, or felony.
I must confess something scandalous, my DeVoTees.
For all my love of midnight theater and beautifully overcommitted weirdness, I have fallen asleep during Rocky Horror many times.
Not once. Not twice. Many.
Now do not mistake me. It is a fine film. A feral little fever dream of fishnets, flirtation, lipstick, lust, and gloriously ungovernable nonsense. I respect it immensely. It has style. It has swagger.
And yet…
Something about that music, my fiends, simply knocks me right out.
Perhaps it is the rhythm of it. Perhaps it lulls the ancient villain brain into some velvet-lined trance. Perhaps the whole thing feels so much like a decadent late-night ritual that my body, in its infinite indignity, assumes we are settling in for a haunted nap rather than a cult classic.
If you put it on too late, in dim enough light, with me settled too comfortably beneath a blanket?
My darling fiends…
I am liable to drift off before the absolute pleasure fully arrives.
For many of you, I am quite certain, your first taste of horror did not come from slashers, specters, or forbidden books.
It came from the Muppets.
That creepy little caravan of felt-faced lunatics, shrieking chickens, wild-eyed weirdos, swamp things, snouts, beaks, fangs, fur, and whatever in Grand Ol’ Ma’ma’s name Gonzo was supposed to be.
A pig in pearls with a temper like a tyrant queen. A bear who looked permanently one bad day from collapse. A frog trying desperately to hold together a cast of creatures that clearly belonged in an asylum. Even the house band looked like they had clawed their way out of some grotty little underworld nightclub.
That is where the seed was planted.
Not a fear of monsters, but a fascination with them.
They were likely your first introduction to the old truth that the strange ones are always the most interesting.
The rest of your horror education was merely refinement.
I have always had expensive taste.
Rare relics. Forbidden tomes. Beautiful monsters. And yes, those old illustrated pamphlets the grown-ups once dismissed as funny books.
Back around 1988 or so, I wandered into a local comic shop to see what all the fuss was about. I was after a mutant with claws. That was the original errand. But a mortal with a gun is what seized my attention and never quite gave it back.
What I found was not a superhero in the usual bright and bouncing sense. I found a grim, illustrated version of Mack Bolan, sharpened and slightly modernized. A man with no powers except focus, fury, and the willingness to push every bad day in his life through the barrel of a gun.
Perhaps it was the way Frank Castle cut against the gaudier grain of the medium. Or perhaps it was Jim Lee’s art on the War Journal series that sucked me in. Whatever the doorway was, I walked through it willingly. And was hooked.
And when I say hooked, I do not mean casually interested. I mean boxes, bags, back issues, and the slow, satisfying build of a near-complete run from those early days. One or two gaps from one or two titles, perhaps. A civilized obsession, in other words.
This was long before the skull was borrowed by bores and brandished by people who did not understand the tragedy stitched beneath it. This vigilante was never a mascot. He was a warning. A wound given shape. A man made in the furnace after his family was slaughtered... then turned loose upon crime with all the emotional stability of a lit stick of dynamite.
Mad? Certainly.
But given the circumstances of his creation, who in this weary world would expect him to come out cheerful?
I have always had an enduring affection for Gambit and Rogue.
Perhaps it is because Remy LeBeau hails from New Orleans, and I have long believed the finest scoundrels emerge from cities where the air itself smells faintly of impending corruption. A Cajun thief with a gambler’s grin and a pocket full of kinetically charged playing cards is the sort of fella I am inclined to salute.
And poor darling Rogue.
A Southern girl whose gift turned every touch into a potential crime scene.
Naturally, these two found each other.
Two Southern souls.
Two lovely little catastrophes.
A Story for the Constant Readers and my Loyal DeVoTees…
Sometime in the long shadow before the final book in The Dark Tower series was published (in 2004 I believe), I made a proper little vow to myself. I would go back to the beginning and read every Stephen King book in publication order, Short stories, Bachman books, and all, then let that long road end at the Tower itself.
I had read them all before, of course. I am old, immortal, and catastrophically well read. But this was the first time I had taken the trip in order, the first time I let King’s mind unfold the way the years unfolded, one book after another. And my fiends, it was far more fulfilling than I had expected. To move from those early raw jolts into the stranger architecture of the later work, and to watch the style sharpen was like walking along the beams themselves.
What pleased me most was not the evolution of the prose, though that was splendid. It was the early glimmers leading to the Tower. Reading them in publication order let me see the whole kingdom assembling itself. Themes repeated. Roads bent toward one another. The Tower was there before it was there, which is exactly the sort of magic I respect.
And somewhere in that trip I remember becoming convinced that even the world of The Shining was muttering its own little numbers and signals at me. Perhaps I counted nineteen steps where only obsession would count them. Perhaps that was merely the Tower making mischief in my head.
I have been thinking, lately, that it may be time to take that trip again. And this time I am tempted to widen the highway a little. I am tempted to throw Gwendy’s Button Box and any other dark little descendants into the journey as well.
I may even toss Joe Hill into the saddlebag too. Because I suspect, as I suspect many things, that all of it belongs to adjoining levels of the same great dark structure. Some roads run directly to the Tower. Some just pass close enough to fall in its shadow. Either way, I should like to walk those roads again.
If you have ever considered taking that journey yourself, take it from an old scoundrel who has already made the trip once.
It is worth every step.
If your soul is tangled, your spine is stiff, or your patience has gone wandering into the weeds, perhaps it is time to take instruction from the true masters of serenity.
Chaos is part of the practice.
The Necronomini… Hide your rings, your relics, your rolled-up rituals, your tiny notes of ill intent, or whatever other suspicious little treasures you prefer to keep from prying mortal eyes.
