Chris Baer – Page 59 – Movement Point

Cthulhu Primer: A Guide to Lovecraft

August 18, 2023November 17, 2009 by Chris Baer

When the stars are right, when mighty Cthulhu has risen (even in adorable plush form), and when the color beyond space is flashing in your eyes, you know you’re in H.P. Lovecraft country. It’s easy to get lost there.

Risen from R'lyeh again and sort of hungry.

Thankfully, science fiction superblog io9.com has provided those who seek to put their sanity to the test with a roadmap to the works and worlds of H.P. Lovecraft:

You’ve heard about Cthulhu, and you’ve probably heard about the man who created this tentacled horror, H.P. Lovecraft. Now you want to try delving into the world of Lovecraft, but where to start? Let us help you.

As with their earlier guides to Blake’s 7 and the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks, io9 does a nice job of providing an approach to entering the complicated and delightful Cthulhu Mythos through a variety of media, including the all-important Call of Cthulhu role playing game.

I would add Fantasy Flight Games’ Arkham Horror series of co-operative board games to the list of essential Mythos works. Any game where everyone can lose definitely captures the spirit of Lovecraft’s world.

Fan-a-Delphia: An Analysis of Philadelphia Sports Fans

August 18, 2023November 1, 2009 by Chris Baer

With all four of Philadelphia’s professional sports teams in action at present, Philadelphia sports fandom is in full swing, pass, dribble, and slap shot. And with most eyes on the Phillies and their quest for a repeat World Series championship against the Yankees, the New York Times has posted a nice piece on the essential character of the Philadelphia fan.

Mike Tanier’s “In Philadelphia, Heroes With a Lunch Pail” (Saturday, October 31, 2009) proposes the “Schmidt-Schultz Fan Appreciation Axis,” with the cooly reliable Mike Schmidt, a star by any measure, less appreciated than Dave “The Hammer” Schultz, who helped the Flyers win consecutive Stanley Cups with his grit (and his fists):

Most cities would treasure Mike Schmidt, a three-time most valuable player who led the Phillies to their first World Series title. Philly old-timers, however, swear that Schmidt stank in the clutch, his 548 home runs somehow producing only 274 runs batted in.

Philly fans preferred Greg Luzinski, a portly slugger who played left field like a brontosaurus flailing in a tar pit. Schmidt was aloof and sensitive, Luzinski flabby and fun.

While Mike Tanier interjects a few incendiary jabs typical of most writing about Philadelphia sports fans—”Philadelphia’s most beloved sports legends provided hooliganism and success”—the article nonetheless provides a fair look at the social and emotional context surrounding sports’ finest, most passionate fans.

(Image courtesy of Vincent J. Brown via a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.)

Penguin’s Fall Foliage

August 18, 2023October 16, 2009 by Chris Baer

Over at The Penguin Blog, the house blog for venerable publishing house Penguin Books, art director Jim Stoddart has unveiled some choice cover selections from this fall’s releases.

My favorite of the bunch has to be the cover to Richard Overy’s 1939: Countdown to War, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, combining the typically clean Penguin cover look with a sense of movement.

And I think I’m going to need to get the collection of 100 cover postcards being released in November. They’re just crying out for mounting in small frames.

(Cover image from The Penguin Blog)

Re-Branding a Time Lord

August 18, 2023October 9, 2009 by Chris Baer

Funny thing about Doctor Who is that the show’s visual identity has always centered on the current iteration of the Doctor and in the swirly title graphics; the title logo has never really been a focus for fan identity.

Current Dr. Who Logo

The lens-flare-esque logo for the Ninth and Tenth Doctors is a case in point. It’s just sort of there, really, not entirely memorable as it flips and flops in the time vortex as impatient viewers wait to for the show to start.

Prior logos were similarly utilitarian, as a nice BBC image gallery demonstrates.

io9 brings news that the BBC is updating the logo for the Eleventh Doctor, incorporating that most iconic of Doctor Who images, the TARDIS:

While I’m admittedly circumspect about Matt Smith’s casting as the Eleventh Doctor, fearing that the new show runners are playing to a younger demographic than, well, the demographic that I inhabit, I like this new logo. Bit of a visual pun, and it’s surprising that the TARDIS hasn’t been used in the logo before.

But that lens flare is killing me!

(Images from the BBC Doctor Who site.)

Doctor Who Project: The Sensorites

August 18, 2023September 19, 2009 by Chris Baer

I don’t know why we ever bother to leave the ship.

Why, indeed, is it that the Doctor and his companions leave the safe (usually) confines of the TARDIS every time they jaunt, unguided, through time and space, other than the fact that there wouldn’t be much of a show without this reckless behavior? Barbara asks this very question at the beginning of Peter R. Newman’s “The Sensorites” (Story Production Code G), spurring the companions to reel off all of their extra-TARDIAL adventures to date: pre-historic earth, the Daleks, Marco Polo, Marinus, and the Aztecs. And the Doctor replies, “It all started out as a mild curiosity in the junkyard and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure.”

“The Sensorites,” alas, is one adventure our fearless travellers would have been better off just staying in the TARDIS for. They certainly try, for as soon as they leave the TARDIS and see that they’ve materialized inside a spaceship crewed by two seemingly-dead humans, the Doctor himself is keen to get right out of there. The first ten minutes of the story seem like an apology for the plot to come, with each character in turn suggesting that they get right back in the TARDIS and leave, but as soon as you see Susan lock the TARDIS door, you just know they’re getting locked out.

By these guys, no less:

In fairness, Howe and Walker make a good point about the story’s attempt to portray an alien culture with, well, alienness and in a subtle and sympathetic vein. But the real interest for Doctor Who fans is in the continued development of the companions and the early stirrings of canonicity.

More Pop Peanuts

August 20, 2023September 9, 2009 by Chris Baer

The newest entry in Fantagraphics’ superb Complete Peanuts project, covering 1973 to 1974, arrived in the mail recently. The last volume, 1971 to 1972, saw an increase in specific cultural references that belie the strip’s reputation as being “outside of time”; it’s certainly timeless, but when you have characters mooning over government-sponsored environmental mascots, you’ve dated yourself.

This new volume sees Charles Schultz cranking up the popular culture references: Billie Jean King (who also wrote the introduction to this volume), Bobby Riggs, Olga Korbut, Comet Kohoutek…and, um, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Today, he'd be Judge K and have his own show on TV

The context of the strip makes clear that Landis was involved with baseball—Charlie Brown and Linus have been summoned to the Little League commissioner’s office—but Landis was the Major League Baseball commissioner some thirty years before the strip was published. Probably not a household name even in 1973 and certainly not now.

It’s possible that Landis’ role in Phillip Roth’s 1973 novel, The Great American Novel, helped bring Landis back to public awareness, but the strip in question ran on April 16th, 1973, and Schultz certainly knew of Landis without Roth’s assistance. So this seems more a case of Schultz playing with his knowledge of baseball and planting a name that has enough comic value to make children smile and with enough resonance to evoke knowing smiles from adult readers with a passing interest in baseball.

1974 saw a much more time-bound cultural reference.