"Becoming a Moral Relativist is a Good Way to Become Only Relatively Moral"

Walt Disney Comics Digest #7

 

Walt Disney Comics Digest #7 (January 1969) is an interesting exception to the rules here. We never had it as kids, and I never bought it when I was trying to collect them all later. BUT! Inspired by these posts I looked it up on Amazon and found a copy for $10 (Lord knows what condition at that price, really) and ordered it. The only thing I can really say about it is that it is apparently the first appearance anywhere of “Buck Duck, Last of the Good Guys”, an unusual and rare branch or spin-off of the Duck family. I always thought he looked kind of like Richard Boone as an Anseriforme.

Walt Disney Comics Digest #6

 

And here we come to the next issue I remember us having, #6 from December 1968. Mom would definitely be back doing the shopping at Baenziger’s. Mike would be in the middle of First Grade, maybe even on Christmas vacation. A splendid opportunity to reward and distract the herd with a little taste of presents to come.

Although this issue’s main features concluded the story of Bambi from (the unpurchased) #5 and began the story of Pinocchio, the big story for me was Scrooge, Donald, and the Nephews voyaging into space so Scrooge could stake a claim to a newly discovered 24-carat gold moon, orbiting on the dark side of the regular moon. After beating their competitors to the finish line, they find a strange little being already in possession, who is ready to make a deal. “Skunk cabbage! I live again!”

                    Other stories have Baloo obtaining an especially delicious looking honeycomb, Madam Mim being crowned as Queen of the Witches during an appearance of Comet Croakus, Mickey having to deal with Pluto’s cowardice, Super Goof being unable to punch his way out of an enormous paper bag, and Ludwig Von Drake and Moby Duck having to deal with the machinations of Emil the Eagle.

Looking back, I would have to say there were two features that may have particularly influenced Mike. One was a “Walt Disney Animal Autobiography”, with a realistically drawn exploration of whales and their lives. Another was “Lotor Takes a Trip” (not a comic strip but a simple short story with a few illustrations), about a raccoon that escapes from the zoo and with the help of a young boy is returned to the wild, where he learns to live in freedom.  

The Next Three Undigested Digests

 

Walt Disney Comics Digest #3 … August 1968

Walt Disney Comics Digest #4 … October 1968

Walt Disney Comics Digest #5 … November 1968

Three more issues we never had.

"It Looks More Like Number Two To Me"

 

We did not get another issue of Walt Disney Comics Digest until #6 in December of 1968 (half a year is an outrageously long time when you’ve only had five of them). When I started collecting them again at the turn of the century of course I had to try to get them all, particularly the ones we had but perhaps most intriguingly the ones we had missed. So here is #2, from July of 1968, which I never saw at all as a kid. It is odd, but the first time I read it I thought it a little sparse and that maybe the art wasn’t as good. But opening #1 and comparing them I saw that they were on par with each other. It was just that I didn’t have as much memory invested in #2 as I did in #1, I think. Anyway, I finally read the end of “Mickey and the Beanstalk” and saw the conclusion of "Babes in Toyland"., only about 47 years later. I’m pretty sure Mom and Pop weren’t very concerned (perhaps not even aware) of the “To Be Continued” elements of our lives, and at that age, except for a vague hoping, neither were we. We pretty much learned to make do with what we got, and to squeeze every drop of content and imagination out of it that we could.

With All Your Disney Favorites

Sometime in 1968 (in June, or the months thereafter) our parents bought us a copy of Walt Disney Comics Digest (#1), put out by Gold Key Comics, featuring reprints from regular comic books in a more compact digest form, this issue containing 192 pages. Mike would have been about 6, me 5, and John 3, and Kenny, if he had even been born yet, just a baby. It might even have been bought to keep us distracted during Mom’s time in the hospital.

          Anyway, our engagement with it was intense, even if we could barely read it. Mostly, I think, it had been read to us once or twice and then we had to rely on our memories and vivid imaginations to fill out the stories. Donald, Scrooge, and the nephews visit Atlantis; Brer Rabbit gets Brer Bear to dig him a well; Daisy goes to work in Ragbagia where patches replace money; Super Goof foils an invasion from space of Goofy look-alikes stealing Earth’s rocket ships; the first half of an adaptation of “Mickey and the Beanstalk” sees Donald driven mad by the prospect of more beans for supper; these were the stories and images that sank deepest into my memories.

          And there for a long time they had to stay. As youngsters, we took very little care of our books. We read them so hard that eventually the covers would go, then pages from the front and back, then at some point Mom would just throw them out. My impression is that by my year in 2^nd Grade (1971-72) the book was entirely gone. Although we got other issues of Walt Disney Comics Digest (and they too would suffer through the years to a greater or lesser degree) this one survived only in our thoughts.

Fast forward to the early years of the 21^st Century. Suddenly I had a computer and access to eBay, and many things seemed possible that had before been unthinkable. And like many folks of my generation, I wanted to buy back the relics of my childhood. I found an affordable copy of Walt Disney Comics Digest #1, not pristine to be sure, but in acceptable shape and in my price range. Soon I gazed once more on images unseen by me for decades, of one of the nephews pouring the contents of a pie down somebody’s pants, of Brer Bear standing in the cutaway of a well, of Scrooge diving through a puzzle of seaweed to a sunken treasure, of Donald screeching out his hatred of beans, and so much more.

That was the beginning of a quest, a quest to get new copies of Disney Digests from our past, including ones I had never seen, to get the entire run (which ended in 1976), if possible. That has not, for various reasons, been accomplished yet, though I have a majority of the issues. More on them later, perhaps.

Viriconium: Tales of the City

                                  Viriconium … M. John Harrison

Foreword by Neil Gaiman

A Del Rey Books Trade Paperback Original (2005)

 

Viriconium, by M. (for Mike) John Harrison is a 2005 omnibus of three novels and eight short stories, written between 1971 and 1984 and set in and around the fictional city of Viriconium.

          The stories of Viriconium are set so far ahead in time that the world is exhausted and moved past what we would call the future. Poisoned by the landscape-encompassing detritus of past technologies, humanity has descended into a nearly medieval-level of culture, but with access to “superscience energy weapons that the citizens of the city know how to use but have forgotten how to engineer” (Wikipedia). Throughout the stories the topography and history of Viriconium shift and mutate, as if the fabric of reality itself has grown thin and uncertain, or as if the author was unconcerned with consistency but focused on effect.

          And what poisonously beautiful effects there are. One follows the efforts of the ‘heroes’ trying to ensure the continued existence of their lives in the same way one would follow, distraught, the fight of a patient against a pernicious disease, feeling that ‘good health’ will never be an achievable goal but that survival will be some kind of win. The prose is intricate and suggestive, and more than once sent me to a dictionary for the definition of an outré word.  The overall milieu of Viriconium recalls elements of the works of Mervyn Peake, Jack Vance, and of course Michael Moorcock, under whom Harrison started his career as a protégé.

I was more or less sent to Viriconium on the suggestion of Steve Donoghue and his book vlog, and seeing Gaiman attached confirmed the recommendation. I can see how I have missed Harrison for all these years, as famous and as reprinted as they are; for although these stories of his read like fantasy, they are technically science fiction, and that is a neighborhood I have only seldom visited. But Harrison’s work, like his worlds, will not be confined to genre. Reading Viriconium has been an Experience unlike any other and being in its neighborhood opens up new areas on my map.

“You Have Appealed to Caesar; To Caesar You Shall Go”

I may not be a woman (or perhaps I am; after all, I am no biologist), but as a one-time fetus and a full-time human, I have some things to say about abortion. While I am a Christian, and in fact a Catholic, and my beliefs go even farther than the arguments below (say, for example, on contraception), those arguments presented here are founded on Natural Law. Natural Law holds that there are universal moral standards that are inherent in humankind throughout all time, and these standards should form the basis of a just society. Natural Law is a philosophical concept; ideas like Justice, Equality, and Mercy cannot be based on or derived from science.

Apart from religious arguments, abortion stands as an offense to human dignity. It reduces what is essentially a human being to the level of a material commodity, to be disposed of at the owner's convenience. This has happened in history before. It is called slavery. The current legality of abortion is not a good argument in itself; slavery, segregation, and internment camps were all once legal in the United States.

 A fetus has more than simply human DNA, as a tumor or any other growth or a cell on its own may have. The fetus is developing (if it is not damaged or interfered with) in the direction of life independent of the mother’s physicality. Euthanasia (if it has a justification - which is itself a debatable point) is used because the body is dying and has a tendency towards death. The normal fetus is growing and has a tendency towards birth. The comparison is inexact.

But, it has been argued, the fetus is not a fully developed person. But it is a human being, albeit a human being at a very early stage of development. To kill an innocent human being, no matter its stage of strength, dependence, or intelligence, is murder.

But, it has been argued, a fetus is simply part of a woman's body, and a woman has the right to do with her body as she chooses. If a fetus is simply another part of a woman's body, it is a part that somehow has half of another human's DNA. In other words, a different human body. How it gets there is the responsibility of both the male and female partners.

But even so, it has been argued, a woman's uterus is her own, and she can decide what is in it. This is true. But in that case, she and her partner are responsible for preventing conception, either by refraining from sex or by birth control, and seeing that both comply. If we treat a pregnancy like a disease, we should go all the way: as we refrain from overeating to prevent diabetes or heart disease, so the circumstances for a pregnancy must be regulated by the persons involved. This is taking responsibility along with the right.

But, it has been argued, a woman may become pregnant through no agency of her own. Birth control might fail, or she might be raped. In that case, she is left with an unwanted pregnancy; may she then have an abortion? Is it justice for the innocent to die? It is a hard thing (no one said doing the right thing is always easy), but even in the case of rape the destruction of an innocent life is not justified.

But, it has been argued, the situation may arise when the pregnancy compromises the mother's health. What about abortion then? This is a highly debatable area, where hard decisions about life and death must be made with fear and trembling between a woman and her doctor. Harsh necessity drives it, not simple convenience. If the fetus itself is dying with no hope of survival, that could necessitate an abortion as well. It is not abortion on demand then; it is a situation where abortion may demand itself.

Abortion, and its twin at the other end of life, euthanasia, are the thin edge of the wedge chipping away at human rights. It is defining worth by capabilities, by material prospects to be gained. It is reducing a human being to a commodity or a convenience; an object; a non-person. It leads to the slave block, the gas oven, and the mass grave.

Many people want to be the voice of the voiceless and powerless. They try to speak for the trees, for the animals, for the planet. People who are anti-abortion speak for another vulnerable group, a group nearest to us by our human nature: the unborn children of our own species.

I don’t think my stand of being pro-life will surprise either of the two readers of my blog. But these are the reasons behind my position.

Confused? Perplexed? Lost in The Shadow Library?

Primetime Proverbs: The Book of TV Quotes

Jack Mingo and John Javna

The Busy, Busy Shadow Library

 

The Busy, Busy World of Richard Scarry ... Walter Retan, Ole Risom

Although I have absolutely no memories of this book, I found it in a list of volumes I was offering for sale on Facebook. If I had to conjecture (and I think with some accuracy) I'd say it was in some books that John was going to sell, that he offered me whatever I wanted from the pile, that I got it, took a look at it, and later sent it to Florida to Kenny with some other books I sent him.

Restricted Area

Dancing in Chains.  In the case of every Greek artist, poet, or writer we must ask: What is the new constraint which he imposes upon himself and makes attractive to his contemporaries, so as to find imitators?  For the thing called "invention" (in metre, for example) is always a self imposed fetter of this kind.  "Dancing in chains"— to make that hard for themselves and then to spread a false notion that it is easy — that is the trick that they wish to show us.  Even in Homer we may perceive a wealth of inherited formulae and laws of epic narration, within the circle of which he had to dance, and he himself created new conventions for them that came after.  This was the discipline of the Greek poets: first to impose upon themselves a manifold constraint by means of the earlier poets; then to invent in addition a new constraint, to impose it upon themselves and cheerfully to overcome it, so that constraint and victory are perceived and admired.  -Friedrich Nietzsche

“We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.” -G.K. Chesterton

Sherlock in The Shadow Library

 I was checking something in my older blog (PowerOfBabel) when I ran across the full list of the Sherlock Holmes-related books that Kenny had passed on to me from his deceased friend. There were (as I remembered) many more than I had already listed. While I cannot be sure at this distance in time if these were the exact covers, my old rubric of bold letters for hardbacks, italics for trade paperbacks, and normal script for ordinary paperbacks still applies.

The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes...Collected by Peter Haining

The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes...Ken Greenwood

The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes...Collected by Roger Lancelyn Green

The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes...Edited by Marvin Kaye

The Game Is Afoot...Edited by Marvin Kaye

The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes...Donald Thomas

My Sherlock Holmes...Edited by Michael Kurland

The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes...Edited by Martin Harry Greenburgh & Carol-Lynn Rossel Waugh

Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space...Edited by Isaac Asimov

Sherlock Holmes In Orbit...Edited by Mike Resnik & Martin H. Greenberg

An East Wind Coming...Arthur Byron Cover

Seance For a Vampire...Fred Saberhagen

The Revenge of the Hound, by Michael Hardwick

Prisoner of the Devil, by Michael Hardwick

The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, by Michael Dibdin

Sherlock Holmes and the Thistle of Scotland, by L. B. Greenwood

The Moor, by Laurie R. King

Sherlock Holmes and the Rune Stone Mystery, by Larry Millett

Enter the Lion, by Michael P. Hodel & Sean M. Wright

The Case of the Baker Street Irregular, by Robert Newman

The Whitechapel Horrors, by Edward B. Hanna

A Samba for Sherlock, by Jo Soares

Against the Brotherhood, by Quinn Fawcett

The Works of Benvenuto Cellini: The Shadow Library

 

Consisting mainly of his Autobiography. This edition by Black's Readers Service (Company).

The Bible Repairman and Other Stories

 

The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2011) is a book I bought more or less on a misapprehension. I heard that it contained a story about Edward Trelawny, a linking character between Powers’ The Stress of Her Regard (1989) and Hide Me Among the Graves (2012). It was only when I started reading it that I realized that I was already familiar with the tale from Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers (2017). It had not sunk deep enough into my long-term memory yet. Every other short story in Repairman was there as well.   

          Still, I cannot bring myself to regret the purchase entirely. It is a smaller, handier volume (sturdy, too) for rereading the tales therein, and is pre-eminently a good loaner copy. It was only $1.38, with five bucks shipping, so I am not much out of pocket.

          Apparently, it is an ex-Denver Public Library book, carrying the usual stickers. Curiously, it does not have the common cancellation marks (a DISCARD stamp and the bar codes struck through with black marker). Odd, that.

Some April When He Passes: Pan's Labyrinth

 

The title of this book, Pan’s Labyrinth:The Labyrinth of the Faun, is related to the history of the film, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), whose original title in Spanish was El laberinto del fauno (tr. ‘The Labyrinth of the Faun’) which was changed because it was felt that English, German, and French speakers would be more familiar with Pan than with the half-goat fauns of Roman mythology (perhaps even confusing the title with the idea of fawns; i.e. baby deer). Guillermo del Toro, the writer and director of the film, has explicitly stated that the faun in the movie is not Pan. This novelization of the movie by both del Toro and Cornelia Funke, appeared in 2019, thirteen years after the movie premiered. One wonders why such a gap in time.

          The double title is strangely in keeping with the nature of the book. Not only does the story deal with interactions between the worlds of myth and the everyday, but the task of telling is shared between del Torro, who wrote the film, and Funke, who worked on the novelization. Although all the pages carry the same framing decoration, the pages are differently colored, with those recounting what is seen in the movie in off-white, and those revealing background information in the form of magical short stories told in light gray. How much of this interstitial material originated with del Torro and how much is Funke (author of the Inkheart series, among many other books; she has been called ‘Germany’s best-selling author for children’) is a curious question.

The illustrations are by Allen Williams, and they conjure the look and feel of the movie’s imagery while being their own creative interpretation. Williams is “an illustrator, concept designer for film and television, and fine artist.”

As a film, Pan’s Labyrinth has always evoked the beauty and sadness of the pagan world, the dreamy horror and the struggle of the most authentic of the old fairy tales. If the ‘real world’ is terrifying and brutal, so is the magical side of reality. As a novel, Pan’s Labyrinth is somehow even darker and grittier, with the ambiguous ending of Ofelia rejoining her family after overcoming her trials being heavily hinted as being a dying hallucination; in the movie that is left more or less to the interpretation of the viewer.  So … one for the kiddies?

And Where To Find Them: In The Shadow Library

Treasury of Fantastic and Mythological Creatures ... Richard Huber ... Dover

It Ends Well: The Shadow Library

 

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri ... Translated by Lawrence Grant White

Engravings by Gustave Dore

"Paradise Lost" Lost: The Shadow Library

Paradise Lost and other poems ... John Milton ... Mentor

Ed. by Edward Le Comte

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger

Yesterday my brother John came over to visit and take a look at Mickey Sees the USA in person. He brought along a DVD copy of Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) to give me, as we had been talking about Harryhausen before and I mentioned that this was the only one of the director’s “Sinbad Trilogy” I did not have. Having got an upgraded copy fairly recently and having this as a spare, he was glad to supply my deficiency. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was a movie we saw in the theater back in the day. This copy looks mostly like the one pictured, except it has a band on the top declaring “DTS: Digital Surround Sound”.

While certainly not the greatest Harryhausen film (a giant stop-motion walrus is perhaps his most forgettable creature) there is still plenty to make it a worthwhile view. Particularly interesting to me (an old wizard buff) is Patrick Troughton as the natural philosopher Melanthius, who helps Sinbad try to restore Prince Kassim, turned into a baboon by the wicked sorceress Zenobia, by traveling to the lost land of Hyperborea. Troughton had not only appeared in Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts as the blind King Phineus, tormented by harpies, but was also the second Dr. Who and portrayed the immortal alchemist Cole Hawlings in the BBC TV series The Box of Delights. Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) moved the bronze Minoton for several non-stop motion scenes.

I think this might have been the first time I saw the so-called Treasury at Petra used in a film, here as Melanthius’s home.

I had recieved a set of Harryhausen creature toys from John for my birthday about twenty years ago. One was on display, the dragon from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. John regretfully said he should have bought his own set at the same time. I decided on the spot that since the other figures had simply languished in a bin for years that he should have them. After a scramble and a struggle that went on a lot longer than I had imagined (the trouble it took to unearth them further proving that they were better off with John – my key to the contents of my bins was useless! Useless!) we finally got them out, found Minoton’s spear in the Accessories’ Drawer, and they were off to their new home.

                                              You can just barely see Talos off to Minoton's side.

Tolkien in the New Century: Hardly a Review, Mostly a Rant

 

Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey (2014), edited by John Wm. Houghton, Janet Brennan Croft, Nancy Martsch, John D. Rateliff, and Robin Anne Reid

 

“Widely considered one of the leading experts on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Thomas Alan Shippey has informed and enlightened a generation of Tolkien scholars and fans. In this collection, friends and colleagues honor Shippey with 15 essays that reflect their mentor's research interests, methods of literary criticism and attention to Tolkien's shorter works. In a wide-ranging consideration of Tolkien's oeuvre, the contributors explore the influence of 19th and 20th century book illustrations on Tolkien's work; utopia and fantasy in Tolkien's Middle-earth; the Silmarils, the Arkenstone, and the One Ring as thematic vehicles; the pattern of decline in Middle-earth as reflected in the diminishing power of language; Tolkien's interest in medieval genres; the heroism of secondary characters; and numerous other topics. Also included are brief memoirs by Shippey's colleagues and friends in academia and fandom and a bibliography of Shippey's work.” – Amazon.

I got this book in the mail early yesterday morning but decided to hold off a bit before really starting it. After all, I was still partway into Chesterton’s life of Chaucer and was expecting The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volume II before 3 PM. When the Discworld book arrived a little after 12 PM, I tore into that and despite a list of intervening chores, easily finished it by 8 PM. Then, being able to resist no more, I began Tolkien in the New Century before hitting the hay. The book itself seemed to have got a little bent in shipping, but a decade or two pressed on the shelves should fix that.

It is now 8:30 AM the next day and I am halfway through. Still, I think I can already say certain things about it.

These essays by the Scippigraed (formed from Old English = ‘those counseled by Shippey’) are the descendants of his seminal work The Road to Middle-earth and go far to remind us how much of the inspiration for The Lord of the Rings had deep roots in philosophy and philology. As in many collections of essays from different authors, one’s interest may be hit or miss; personally, I love the works describing the history of various words and how Tolkien uses them.

Reading this book is entangled now with a rather vexed question for me: the Amazon production of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. That they fired Shippey as a consultant in 2020 was a bad omen, and the revelation of their nomenclature of original characters does not inspire confidence. As the website TV Tropes puts it, “The names for several new characters [has] met with a tepid response, with many feeling they're either just uninspired or poor remixes of actual Tolkien names that are in some cases outright inconsistent, which is a particular sore spot considering how the study of names and languages was literally Tolkien's professional career and a primary part and major motivator of his world-building.” They go on to list these lingual monstrosities: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/TheLordOfTheRingsTheRingsOfPower

          In short, where Tolkien’s inspiration was philological, philosophical, and mythical, this Amazon ‘adaptation’ sounds increasingly political, both in the inspiration for their story (adapted from scanty references in the Appendices, lore save us) and in the behind the scenes decisions for the production. While The Lord of the Rings has a universal appeal and tells timeless truths, executive producer Lindsay Weber said, “It felt only natural to us that an adaptation of Tolkien’s work would reflect what the world actually looks like,” that is, the primary world and not the fantasy world Tolkien described. I increasingly fear that this adaptation will be, in more ways than one, only skin deep.

The series will premiere on September 2 of this year, the anniversary of the death of Tolkien. Make of THAT what you will. [Death of the Author is a concept from mid-20th Century literary criticism; it holds that an author's intentions and biographical facts (the author's politics, religion, etc) should hold no special weight in determining an interpretation of their writing. -TV Tropes]