It doesn't seem like thirty years is very long, and in the greater scheme of time, it is barely a hashmark on the cosmic calendar. But a different sense of time seems to apply to pop culture, which by definition is one of humankind's more transitory constructions. Whether it's a book, a song, movie or television show, pop culture has a tendency to age quickly and, for those who follow such things, become the focus for sentimentality almost immediately. Into this strange void in time and space falls the relatively new phenomenon of "science fiction archeology."

Okay, that's a term I totally invented so don't go to your local community college looking to major in this field, you geeks. Let me explain... To me, "science fiction archaeology" is something beyond the fanboy obsession with acquiring irrelevant and moldy movie props often at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars — you know, like almost anything you might find on icollector.com. It now involves an element of tourism, and yes, finding artifacts left behind by production companies decades ago because the prop handlers had no conception that some discarded rubber would mean anything to anyone ever. I first became familiar with the idea of "science fiction archeology" about two decades ago when I read an article in a fan magazine about the props and movie locations left behind in the Tunisian desert after the filming of Star Wars Episode IV. It turned out that remnants from the Lars homestead, Ben Kenobi's home and even those curious dinosaur-like bones C-3PO wandered passed were all still lying there in the hot desert sun... and some adventuring uber-fan had the wherewithal to photograph, document and write about them. This fascination with aging artifacts from a galaxy far, far away eventually culminated into a thriving tourist industry for Tunisia, a country few Americans could even locate on a map.

Into this atmosphere comes what may be the end-all-be-all archaeological (or at least archival) look at the first of these films: The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film, The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. All three books were written by the late J.W. Rinzler, who was an executive at Lucasfilm Productions, a film historian and author who specialized in books about the behind the scenes of blockbuster movies . The latter title was just released this past October, and like its predecessor, has the fingerprints of George Lucas all over it. Lucas in a smart man in many, many respects. But when it comes to marketing, he may actually be some kind of crazy genius. He's certainly not oblivious to the fanaticism that surrounds his creation or how it can make true believers spend weeks traveling around the Tunisian wastelands just so they can take a photo of a hole in the ground where Mark Hamill once stood and stared into the sunset. He knew that thousands would pore over the pages of these books (as I did) in rapt awe of the anecdotes and never-before-seen photos of sets, costumes, effects and actors. And he knew that, while we did so, a strange aching dreaminess would sweep through us. In fact, I doubt if these books would have had quite the same appeal had they been released in 1980 when, by pop culture standards, Episode IV and V would have been young. Lucas understands that the passage of time, and with it the increase in sentimentality, gives even old Star Wars a new lease on life.

Considering the amount of detail in all the books, one might be tempted to refer to them as dissertations on the first three Star Wars films. But they are neither dry nor ponderous as you might expect from dissertations, nor are they solely about about how a costume was created or a makeup effect applied — the usual things that are written about science fiction. In fact, and much to my surprise, some of Rinzler's most intriguing parts are about doing business in 1970s Hollywood, where Lucas was often seen as an impetuous upstart by the establishment. Science fiction films that preceded Episode IV were typically slow-paced with heavy, cynical themes that often made them painful to watch. Lucas's concept, of creating a space opera that was heavily derivative of classical mythology, was expected to result in a "little summer movie." Pondering just how wrong the Hollywood execs were and how much they underestimated the human need for heroes and the vanquishing of evil is one of the most satisfying aspects of the books. And if you get tired of reading these 300+ page tomes, just wander through the voluminous photos, some so clear and sharp that you'd swear they had been taken yesterday. You will find your mind wandering, and maybe you will come away wondering what other bits of Star Wars legend are still lying undiscovered in some distant jungle, on an ice floe or in a dusty warehouse.

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With Sunrise on the Reaping, a prequel to The Hunger Games, currently in development as a major motion picture, I thought it might be a good time to revisit the original novel. To that end, I have posted by 2013 review of the book below, along with an analysis of how it fits into the larger genre of dystopian fiction. Please be aware that there are spoilers...

​I read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins after enjoying the 2012 science fiction movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson. It's easy to see why both the novel and film were so popular. The story strikes a primal chord since people have always been fascinated by those things which also appall us – and what's more fascinatingly appalling than a gladiatorial competition which pits teenagers against each other? Collins has taken some criticism for her depiction of kids killing kids, regardless of the fact that this happens in our world all the time. These recriminations would be fair if Collins did anything to glamorize the ritual, but as protagonist Katness Everdeen makes clear through her narrative, the Hunger Games are pure brutality, designed to keep the people of this futuristic America passive by constantly reminding them that their lives are not their own. 

The idea of young tributes being herded off to die in bizarre competitions hails all the way back to Bronze Age Greece with the story of Theseus (see Greek Myths Retold for more). As you may recall, Theseus and other Athenian youths were trotted off to fight for their lives in a subterranean lair guarded by bull-headed monster called the Minotaur. Even more obvious are Collins's references to the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome and some of our more loathsome reality television shows. Maybe the author even picked up a copy of the The Most Dangerous Game (1924), about a castaway trying to survive a murderous aristocrat who's stalking him for sport, a book considered by many to be the definitive man-hunting-man story? 

The ever-widening gap between rich and poor in America is also reflected in the pages of The Hunger Games. Katness lives in District 12, located in modern-day Appalachia, where people eke out a rough living by mining coal. There's never enough food... or anything else for that matter. Most of what the district creates is shipped off to the country's capital which is lush, beautiful and deeply corrupt. The capital residents all speak with bizarre affectations and, reminiscent of the French Royal Court of old, try to outdo each other with flamboyant hairstyles and ostentatious fashion. The Hunger Games play a dual role in this society. For the idle rich, it's a guilty pleasure using people they consider inferior anyways. For the districts, it's a constant reminder of who's in charge.

Katness becomes the female tribute for District 12 when she volunteers to take the place of her younger sister. She's unexpectedly qualified for the games, having spent years sneaking into the forest to hunt for wild game and collect medicinal plants for her family. Most of the book deals with the young woman's quest to stay alive as she navigates a treacherous outdoor arena and forms uneasy alliances with some of the other tributes, including a boy from her home town named Peeta Melark. Unlike most of the other combatants, Katness's experience as a hunter-gatherer have taught her to think of three-dimensionally. She sleeps tied to tree branches, knows how to find water, can hunt wild game and avoid poisonous plants. She has no desire to murder others and at first is content to avoid her competitors and allow them to pick each other off. It's not until she begins to care for Peeta that survival becomes much more complicated. Yes, in the Hunger Games, even affection can be used as a weapon.

Reading The Hunger Games was a joy. It's simple narrative style were a welcome relief from some of the other young adult authors I've read who seem to think pretentious prose amounts to high art. Katness is an intelligent and logical protagonist in a genre which often portrays young women as trifling. I won't go so far as to say The Hunger Games should be on a high school reading list about the nature of tyranny alongside the works of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley or Gabriel Garcia Marquez; but there's much more to the book than just teens killing teens. Anyone who says otherwise either hasn't read it or doesn't understand its literary lineage.

The animated shows of the 1980s were memorable... but not always for the best reasons. Whether they were part of early morning Saturday television — a veritable "prime time" for viewing for millions of American children — or syndicated shows that aired after school, animated television was a pop culture staple throughout the decade.  

The animation was hand-produced, making it appear primitive by today’s standards, but also giving it a charmingly crude aesthetic. Often shows served as marketing tie-ins to toy lines, with Transformers and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe being prime examples. As such, storylines were as much about selling action figures as they were about entertaining young audiences and unfolded with simple, formulaic plots that were both familiar and comforting. And perhaps their simplicity was part of their appeal? After all, it didn't take much effort to follow your favorite shows each week — and there was never any ambiguity as to who was going to come out on top. No matter what dastardly scheme Mumm-ra came up with, we always knew Lion-O and the other ThunderCats were going to save the day. 

Invariably, the heroes of 80s animation were children, teenagers or very young adults and were usually pitted against adult villains. With a heavy emphasis on action, adventure, and fantasy, these shows left an indelible mark on an entire generation, shaping childhoods with their imaginative worlds and ultimately influencing movies, television, comics and books up to the present day. 

In fact, of all the ridiculousness that came out of the 80s, these franchises had remarkable staying power. (Consider the live-action Masters of the Universe movie currently under production and starring Nicholas Galitzine!) This is even more remarkable if you consider that most of these shows were only on the air for a few years! Yet today, I can't walk into a bookstore or comic book store without easily finding some rehash of a show I first watched 40+ years ago. As such, I thought it would be fun to collect some of the more current book and graphic novel titles together. 

RELATED FEATURES: Pop Culture Contributions of the 1990s  |  The Golden Age of Movie Novelizations  |  Writing the 1980s Arcade Experience  |  The Timelessness of Serial Storytelling | Gatchaman Returns... Again

Ten years ago, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was still new. Interesting. Exciting. Tenuous.

By March 2015, the MCU holy trinity had been established consisting of Iron Man, Thor and Captain America. But within the mix of their stories , which spanned generations and galaxies, there were numerous supporting characters who were just as fascinating. One of the best was Peggy Carter, played by Hayley Atwell. 

Introduced in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Peggy was an agent for the top-secret Allied intelligence agency, the Strategic Scientific Reserve (SSR). She was central to Project Rebirth, an experiment to create American super soldiers which ultimately transformed Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) into Captain America. Not only did Peggy champion Steve for the experiment, she ultimately became his friend, his love interest and — through the intricacies of time travel and storytelling I won't recount here — his wife and mother of his children.  

But at first, it looked like Peggy's character was one and done. After all,  Steve is presumed lost and killed at the end of The First Avenger and Marvel fans presumed that was the last they'd see of Peggy, too. But fate intervened in 2013 with a short film called Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter. The film was a glimpse into Peggy's life after the war as she wrestled with her grief and being a woman in the male dominated espionage game. The One-Shot became so popular that it was turned into a weekly television series called Agent Carter in 2015. 

Although the show was praised for its snappy dialogue and astute character development, it only lasted two seasons due to low ratings. One particularly baffling review called the show "fascinating but boring."  But really, I think Agent Carter was probably ahead of its time. Having a female-led period piece  that dealt with issues such as feminism, race, grief and sexism within the framework of Cold War espionage tinged with science fiction was probably pretty challenging for American audiences ten years ago. This is especially true when you consider that Peggy had no super powers whatsoever. Her strength came from intelligence, ingenuity and creativity. Hell, in one episode she took out a goon twice her size by weaponizing a stapler!

Sigh.

Regardless, Peggy Carter remains a fan favorite in the MCU and has even found new life as "Captain Carter" in some of the franchise's alternate universes. So, in honor of Peggy, Marvel's greatest non-super superhero, I'm presenting a collection of books, videos and collectables about her — or characters and stories similar to hers.

Stay calm and carry on!

Join THE MIDNIGHT, one of the world’s top synthwave bands, comprised of Tyler Lyle and Tim McEwan, on an electrifying and original sci-fi adventure inspired by the poetic storytelling and the neon-soaked aesthetics of their music.

​Jason has spent his life running from his problems, but now he and his childhood sweetheart are on the precipice of parenthood, and he’s struggling with the loss of his adolescence. Then he re-discovers his favorite old video game, THE MIDNIGHT, a nostalgic 1980s fantasy adventure about a helmeted hero who travels to a cyberpunk world to save the people from eternal darkness. Seeking to repair his broken game, Jason ends up at a mysterious arcade in an abandoned 1980s mall, where he plays the old arcade game of The Midnight and suddenly he’s transported to… 

…a post-apocalyptic Neverland in the year 2085. A world of perpetual night where time stands still. A final bastion of humanity in a glistening futuristic city. And a shocking reveal – they know him as the hero who once vanquished the shadow monsters, and they believe he’s returned to his true reality to do it again. More surprising, his wife is here, but only with a memory of Jason as this world’s hero. As this lost boy tries to embrace his new hero powers, with the help of his true love and her cyberpunk warriors, he must face the responsibility of protecting an entire world from danger and discover which world he truly belongs to.

For The Midnight fans and newcomers, created by rising comics writer, Zack Kaplan (Break Out, Mindset), artist Stephen Thompson (Star Trek: Year Five-Book 1, Star Trek: Year Five-Book 2), artist Jahnoy Lindsay (Superboy: Man of Tomorrow) and The Midnight, follow your dreams to a visually stunning cyberpunk metropolis, find love in the darkness, defeat shadow monsters and explore what happens when we hide in our fantasies. Are we escaping life’s monsters or simply escaping ourselves? The answers lie in the Midnight Graphic Novel.

ORDER NOW FOR AN OCTOBER 1, 2024, SHIP DATE >>
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The movie was a dud... but that doesn't mean they isn't some life still left in the Borderlands... at least in graphic novel form.

If you've played Borderlands 2, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, or Borderlands 3, you're probably familiar with Tiny Tina, the emotionally unstable and morally ambiguous fourteen-year-old who loves to make things go BOOM! When not blowing shit up, Tina also enjoys a lively game of Bunkers and Badasses, Pandora's equivalent to Dungeons & Dragons.

I got my first taste of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman in the late 1970s when Sandy Frank Entertainment imported the Japanese anime to the U.S. in a version known as Battle of the Planets (BOTP). The show, along with Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, was a staple of my childhood science fiction diet.

While Sandy Frank sapped the original 1972 anime of its edge, BOTP worked well for American audiences and was a huge overnight success. As an eleven-year old, I was fascinated by the show even though the storylines seemed choppy, confusing or contradictory. What I didn't know at the time was that the eighty-five BOTP episodes were cobbled together from 105 Gatchaman episodes... and nothing ran in the order in which it was created.

Since Gatchaman was a serial, with interlocking storylines and recurring characters, there were tremendous gaps in continuity when it became BOTP. To gloss over these plot holes, Sandy Frank inserted some crudely animated segments with a robotic character called 7-Zark-7, who looked a little like R2-D2's inbred cousin. 7-Zark-7 provided both connecting exposition and comedic relief as the original anime was very serious and sometimes downright grim. To be fair, I don't know that the original show would've have been shown in the U.S. in the late 70s without these alterations.

For example, the second episode of Gatchaman, entitled "Demonic Aircraft Carrier," was retooled into a BOTP episode called "Rescue the Astronauts." The story starts with an Apollo-era space module splashing down in the ocean. It is quickly captured by Galactor (in BOTP, these are the evil minions of the truly evil Zoltar from the planet Spectra) and taken to an underwater base. The Galactor commander is after the "Earth Compact System," which contains the locations of valuable natural resources including uranium. 

Uranium and nuclear power are a recurring theme in Gatchaman as they are in lots of Japanese science fiction. No one suffered more than the Japanese at the dawn of the nuclear age, and the atom is dually-represented as a source of unlimited energy and horrible destruction. This also underscores Gatchaman's emphasis on serious world issues such as dwindling natural resources, protecting the environment, loss, war, violence, and tyranny. In BOTP, almost all of these themes are either gone or heavily diluted.

For this particular episode, Sandy Frank's people altered the plot into a simple rescue mission where the astronauts have been abducted because they have telemetry about Zoltar's hidden bases. But there's a problem with the Gatchaman source material... The astronauts don't survive. In fact, their bodies are displayed before Ken (renamed Mark in BOTP), who thinks they are still alive and surrenders in order to secure their release. Once Ken is in custody, the Galactor thugs let the bodies fall to the floor.

"Even corpses are useful sometimes," the Galactor Commander chuckles.

Ken recoils and mutters, "How awful..."

You said it, Ken. But then again, later in this same episode, you savagely beat the Commander until his tells you the location of Earth Compact System... So, you know, don't be a total hypocrite. 

Can you imagine any of that running on a children's show in America in 1978?

Because BOTP had to be kid-friendly, the astronauts also had to survive. The dialogue is reworked. We never see any dead bodies. We never see an actual rescue but Mark later informs the team that the astronauts are recovering in sick bay.

Now the Science Ninja Team is back in comic book form from Mad Cave Studios. Gatchaman was reintroduced to American audiences during Free Comic Book Day this past May with an ongoing core series, a series of one-shots focusing on solo missions, and a miniseries focusing on villains.

Learn more about this series here.

OTHER GATCHAMAN GOODS:
Funko Pops: Ken Washio  |  Joe Asakura  |  Jun

Frank Herbert's Dune was originally published six decades ago, but this timeless science fiction series continues to enthrall and amaze new fans.  This epic science-fiction masterpiece is set in the far future amidst a sprawling feudal interstellar society. It tells the story of Paul Atreides as he and his family accept control of the desert planet Arrakis only to be brutally betrayed and drawn into an interstellar war.

Now the story is being transformed into a graphic novel series, with the third book, The Prophet, released in July 2024. 

Dune: Graphic Novel: Book 1 
Dune: Graphic Novel: Book 2, Muad'dib
Dune: Graphic Novel: Book 3, The Prophet

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The story of a nameless father and son trying to survive with their humanity intact in a postapocalyptic wasteland where Earth's natural resources have been diminished, and some survivors are left to raise others for meat, The Road is one of Cormac McCarthy's bleakest and most prescient novels. See below for info on the novel. 

This first official graphic novel adaptation of McCarthy's work is illustrated by acclaimed French cartoonist Manu Larcenet, who ably transforms the world depicted by McCarthy's spare and brutal prose into stark ink drawings that add an additional layer to this haunting tale of family love and human perseverance. 

Cormac McCarthy personally approved the making of this book before his death, and the adaptation bears the approval of the McCarthy estate.

PREORDER THE GRAPHIC NOVEL FOR A SEPTEMBER 17, 2024, RELEASE >>

I just got through watching the entire Mad Max movie series for about the fifth time... so I guess I'm in the mood for crazy vehicles packed with weapons and driven by lunatics hauling ass across a desert landscape! Fortunately, Convoy by Kevan Stevens and Jef is a very satisfying way to scratch that post-apocalyptic itch.

It’s 2074, and the Earth is an abused ruin, a landscape of desolation thanks to mankind’s inability to live in moderation. Pockets of makeshift civilization are spread out like islands in a sea of wasted misery, a distance that only the craziest and most desperate madmen dare to traverse. Alex and Fonzie are two such individuals, and they are about to take the contract of their lives leading a convoy of misfits and mercenaries on a mission to deliver a cargo of precious medicine across the desolate plain. They’ll face lawless hordes and competing agents, and their fleet will winnow before they reach their destination, but none of those opponents will be prepared for Alex and her wily ways…

Buckle up for an explosive tale of hard-boiled anti-heroes riding the razor’s edge between Death and Destiny… A pulse-pounding one-two punch full of criminal behavior and karmic justice from two of the most genre-pushing comic creators: Kevan Stevens and Jef!

PURCHASE

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