Dragons on the Wind of Morning, RIP Ursula Le Guin

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
-- Ursula K. Le Guin

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.
-- Le Guin

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
-- from The Dispossessed

And now I need to read The Dispossessed.

I read her Wizard of Earthsea back in 8th grade.

I read Lathe of Heaven back in high school, maybe 11th grade.

I read Left Hand of Darkness in college, can't recall the year though.

I should have read more of her works.

Granted, I was content with reading Douglas Adams, and Frank Herbert, distracted by some groundbreaking writing in comic books during the 1990s and all.

But Le Guin was groundbreaking in her own way. Feminist but not overtly militant, philosophical - a Taoist - but not preachy, insightful in every way.

She passed away just now. A bright light in fantasy and science fiction lost to us. There are other lights, other voices, but hers was brighter than most and our world now diminished.

“I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.”
-- The Farthest Shore

RIP Berni Wrightson

I'd say DAMN YOU 2016 but that was so last year.

But today I find out that one of my favorite graphic illustrators died. Berni Wrightson, co-creator on DC Comic's Swamp Thing and arguably the most influential Gothic Horror visionaries of our era, passed away...

One of the first posters I ever owned... from Batman: The Cult

He was also one of the more recognizable Batman illustrators out there. He infamously drew Batman's cape to be longer than his own height.

In Berni's mind, Batman's superpower was being able to stop himself from tripping on his own cape.

Wrightson also worked on a project - on his own time and dime - illustrating Shelley's Frankenstein back in the 1980s, his most famous work and considered one of the best adaptations of that classic work ever.

But I will always remember Wrightson as the one who teamed with Len Wein to create Swamp Thing, one of the best-loved comic books from the early 1970s

I was seven, maybe eight years old, when my family was part of a comic book trade-off at the Dunedin Public Library. We ended up with a copy of the Special Issue re-release of issues 1 and 2 of the original Swamp Thing. It was an eye-opening work, far darker and mature than most of the children's literature I had been reading at the time:

In hindsight, the story itself was pretty simple origin story stuff: good scientist gets killed by mobsters trying to steal his plant formula, the plant formula turns scientist into a monstrous plant-human, the Swamp Thing gets his revenge but not before his wife is also killed, and a vengeful government agent swears to hunt the Swamp Thing down for all the wrong reasons.

But the artwork was incredible, with the beautiful use of shadow, and stylistic camera angles:

I will remember this sequence to the day I die.

This was one of two comic book in the house (the other was a beat-up copy of a Star Wars #14 I think with Han and team battling space pirates) until the 1980s when I snagged Issue 3 of Dark Knight Returns and got hooked for good.

When I was that age, I dabbled a bit into drawing, to see if I could develop a talent for it. Never really could. I got into writing instead, and I hopefully have some talent to that.

One of the things I want to do as a writer is become a comic book writer, to work in that genre of storytelling. I had hopes of someday getting into the industry, and getting to team up with the aritsts I liked.

Berni Wrightson topped my list.

At least I met him back in 2014 at the Tampa Bay Comic Con:

Buying a Wrightson-drawn print of two of my favorite characters: Batman and Swamp Thing.

Rest in peace, Mr. Wrightson.

"He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance."
- Final line of Frankenstein

Dear Heaven: That Red Hair Of Hers Is No Lie. You've Been Warned.

Ever look up "Fiery Redhead" in a dictionary and you will get Maureen O'Hara.

Without argument, the most beautiful redhead ever to grace the screen out of Hollywood.

She stars in one of my most favorite movies ever, The Quiet Man.

Just found out right now that Maureen O'Hara passed away after 95 years.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

A Master Writer Passes: Richard Matheson

News is out that Richard Matheson died today.

Basically, he's THE horror writer of the Sixties and early Seventies.  Before Stephen King, it was Matheson. His literary work covered novels, shorts, television screenplays, movie adaptations.

Matheson's greatest contribution was the updating of the horror setting from the 19th Century (or earlier) to the 20th.  A lot of horror and fantasy by the 1960s had been stuck in the era of Edgar Allan Poe and Hawthorne, in some gothic nighttime landscape of ruined castles and decaying nations.  Matheson brought the horror into the suburbs and cities: his I Am Legend not only redesigned the vampire genre, it basically launched the concept of a Zombie apocalypse (and redefined the concept of just who the monsters really are), and doing it in a world most readers would see as their own (amplifying the horror).  His heroes no longer soldiers or priests or barons in pursuit of the supernatural: they were common blue-collar workers or office drones, suddenly confronted with a real-time terror that wouldn't go away with prayers to a distant God.

This YouTube clip is from Duel, a made-for-TV movie directed by a relative unknown by the name of Steven Spielberg.  Matheson's screenplay played on the fears of driving alone, of being stalked by an unknown force (we never see the driver in full), of a civilized man (an office worker taking a work trip) being stripped of manhood in a stark and dangerous desert land, of the mundane horror that some other human - some bland nobody - can be a monster.

RIP, Mr. Matheson.  ...Just don't mind if we, uh, shove a metal stake into your heart to make sure...  WATCH OUT HE'S GETTING UP HE'S

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