Graphic Film, Graphic Novel

eXistenZ
David Cronenberg; illustrated by Sean Scoffield
Toronto: Key Porter, 1999

For nearly two decades, The Dead Zone stood as my favourite Cronenburg film – then along came Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and A Dangerous Method. The Toronto filmmaker has been going from strength to strength this millennium, encouraging me to catch up on everything I'd missed.

Last week it was eXistenZ, Cronenberg's fin de siècle nightmare about gamers, the gaming industry and Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish. One of the director's body horror films, the title refers to a new game system contained in a disease-prone pod that is in fact "an animal grown from fertilized amphibian eggs stuffed with synthetic DNA." You play by inserting a 12-foot UmbyCord of "twisted, translucent, blue and red veiny vessels" into your spine through a permanent Metaflesh bioport.

Steve Jobs would've called this a "shit design".

Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as Allegra Geller, the designer behind eXistenZ. A "game-pod goddess", she's just begun leading her fawning followers through a test when things appear to go very, very wrong. First, an assassin tries to kill her with a gun made of flesh and bone (she takes a tooth in the shoulder), then she's saddled with timid Ted Pikul (Jude Law), who is not only an ineffective bodyguard but an UmbyCord virgin.

I knew something of what to expect from eXistenZ through this odd book, which is as far as I'm aware the only graphic novel made from a Canadian film. Purchased back in April 1999, it did a disservice in  discouraging me from taking a trip to the cinema. Where on screen eXistenZ is disorienting in its depth, on thin paper it's just confusing.

Illustrator Scott Scoffield takes the film's murky look and renders it black, at times obscuring vital detail. His panels look like stills that have been manipulated with a paint-simulation filter. Who knows, maybe they were. The dialogue is all here, but the acting is absent. Faces float, washed-out and emotionless in the darkness.

There is no drama.

Don't get me wrong – as a film, eXistenZ is not a triumph – but it is worth seeing.

Warning: Not for the squeamish.

Better yet, see Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which – interestingly – was adapted from John Wagner and Vince Locke's graphic novel of the same name.

Warning: There will be violence.

Did that need saying?

Object: A slim paperback – 111 pp – containing the graphic novel, an uncredited interview with Cronenberg, an uncredited essay on his films and a Glossary (uncredited).

Access: My copy, signed by Messrs Cronenburg and Scoffield, was purchased new for $24.95 back in the spring of 1999 at Toronto's TheatreBooks. "Very scarce thus", claims an online bookseller (who offers two copies). I'm not so sure. I remember plucking mine from a teetering stack of signed copies. In fact, half of the fourteen currently listed online are signed by both men; prices range from US$40 to US$98 (condition is not a factor). Unsigned, "as new" copies begin at US$4.09.

Talking Montreal Noir with Nigel Beale

Audio of my recent interview with Nigel Beale can be found here. Lots of talk about Brian Moore, Ted Allan, News Stand Library, Véhicule's Ricochet Books series and more!

Northrup Northrop Frye Celebration Hangover

The National Post, 10 July 2012

From the same webpage:

Celebrating the Northrop Frye Centenary

Herman Northrop Frye

(14 July 1912 - 23 January 1991)

The great man in conversation with historian Ramsay Cook, broadcast 3 September 1973.

Teasing the Private Dick

A pithy, yet passionate passage from David Montrose's The Body on Mount Royal (Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1953):

I noticed she was wearing a zippered dress. I turned those thoughts over in my mind for a little while and decided it might be a good idea for me to go get into a cold shower right away.

   Lila said, with a teasing grin, “There was another reason why I came around. I was afraid the demonstration the other night maybe wasn’t convincing.”

   I swallowed hard. “Demonstration?”

   “About the foam rubber,” she said. “Remember?” Her hand travelled slowly up to the neck of her dress. She unzipped.

   It was away too late for the shower.

   “See?” she said proudly, and she could be proud.

   This time there was no possibility of doubt. Because there was no brassiere.

   A few minutes later she said, “Well, my golly! You might take off that old gun belt!”

Now that's romance... Harlequin romance.

Related post:

The Unpleasant End of Russell Teed

The Unpleasant End of Russell Teed

The Body on Mount Royal
David Montrose [pseud. Charles Ross Graham]
Winnipeg: Harlequin, 1953

First the good news: our private dick is back to drinking beer. The bad news is that he's hitting the hard stuff more than ever.

What happened? When we first met Russell Teed, back in The Crime on Cote des Neiges (1951), he specialized in investigating corporate embezzlement and fraud. A son of privilege, known for his discretion, Teed's introduction to Montreal's seamy and seedy came when he was hired to look into the husband of a childhood friend. A year later in Murder Over Dorval, the private detective who had once taken such pains to present his services as "private investigatory", returned as a self-described "skip-chaser... an eye, a Humphrey Bogart role." The corporate jobs were pretty much gone, and while Teed told us then that he was "sober, sensible, and not given to impulse", we could see that wasn't at all true. Things are much worse in The Body on Mount Royal; Teed can't even go a few blocks to meet a friend for drinks without having to stop in at a tavern en route.

"Don't walk alone at night on Mount Royal," narrator Teed advises the reader, "a big, brave friend of mine looked awful funny without his wallet, wristwatch, glasses, pants, and false teeth." The ramblings of a barfly? Can't say I've ever had a problem myself. Never mind. A body is found on Mount Royal, but as Teed discovers, the murder is not a mugging gone wrong. The Body on Mount Royal is set in the united underworld of blackmail and illegal gambling. The mysterious Montrose seems to have been quite familiar with the latter – it fuels Gambling with Fire, his fourth and final novel – yet I found myself less interested in barbotte and craps than with the women in Teed's life.

In previous outings the dick was crazed in his infatuations; here he's unhinged. The first woman to attract Teed's attention is Elena Giotto, "a tall girl, with a surface coolness that made you feel you should approach her with a gift, begging acceptance." Hours after their first fleeting encounter, he meets Lila, Elena's doppelgänger. She'll do in bed, but it's Elena he really wants.

And it's Elena he gets.

And following the sad model set by men everywhere, once he's won Elena Teed decides that it's Lila he really wants.

I've spoiled things a bit, though I rush to add that the above reveals nothing of the mystery in The Body on Mount Royal. That said, those intending to read the book are warned that the following will spoil:

In the final two pages, Elena takes a bullet by throwing herself between Teed and an assailant. She dies. The assailant's head is split open by an axe-weilding Lila. He dies. Teed then empties a clip into the assailant's face as payback for those he'd killed: a blackmailer, a blackmailee, some innocent girl who got caught up in it all... but not Elena, the woman who loved him, the woman who saved his life, the woman who lies dead at his feet.

As I say, unhinged.

Lila then takes Teed's arm and suggests they take a trip to Bermuda.

Yes, unhinged.

The Body on Mount Royal is the final Russell Teed mystery. It's a wonder that he made it that far.

I'm betting he died of drink.

Trivia: The Body on Mount Royal is the only Montreal noir novel to mention the Aldred Building, the most noirish-looking structure in the city.

Full disclosure: I'm Consulting Editor for Véhicule Press' Ricochet Books series, of which this title is soon to be a part.

Object: A cheaply produced, poorly constructed mass market, it is blessed with my very favourite Harlequin cover. Yes, I like it even more than To Please the Doctor and Doctor in Bondage.

Though the clothes are all wrong, that would be Lila on the cover. The bottle – also wrong – should look something like the one pictured above. By the way, the man clutching his head counts as the only image of Teed.

Access: The Body on Mount Royal enjoyed just a single printing. One lonely copy is on offer online, and it sure ain't pretty: "Moderate spine slant, moderate edgewear, an unfortunate full-length vertical crease to front cover, a couple of other creases to front cover, the usual Harlequin tanning. Quite scarce. Good to Very Good." I'll agree that it's quite scarce, but can a copy so described be "Good to Very Good"? Price: US$75 (plus US$12 shipping).

Library patrons will find copies at Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library, the University of Calgary and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book LIbrary at the University of Toronto.

Related posts:
Teasing the Private Dick

A Private Dick's Disturbing Descent into Darkness

An Atlantic Canada Steampunk Fantasy

The Chignecto Ship Railway
H.G.C. Ketchum
Boston: Damrell & Upham, [1893]

The current Canadian edition of Reader's Digest features a piece I wrote about some of this country's great unrealized projects. Toronto's Vimy Circle, the Chateau Prince Rupert and Jean Drapeau's 325-metre-tall concrete celery stalk figure, as do Thomas Mawson's plans to recast cow town Calgary in the City Beautiful style, but the Chignecto Ship Railway ranks as my favourite.

The dream of New Brunswick engineer H.G.C. Ketchum, the whole venture seems like the work of a madman today, yet it received government backing, millions of dollars in investment from British businessmen and was once held up as a model that would be emulated the world over.

In Ketchum's dream, ocean-going ships would be raised from the Bay of Fundy, transported along a 27-kilometre double-tracked railway, then gently lowered into the Northumberland Strait.

And vice versa.

The pitch for what was to have been the world's first ship railway is all here in this booklet Ketchum wrote for the 1893 World's Columbian Water Commerce Congress. A desperate document, it was produced at a time when the project was in great jeopardy. You see, the most incredible aspect of this impossible dream is that the money ran out within weeks of completion.

It wouldn't be right to retell the whole sad, tragic story here – buy the magazine – but I spoil nothing in saying that the effort failed. The Chignecto Ship Railway died – and with it the whole idea of ship railways. Ketchum knew one could not live without the other, writing:

The safe transit of a ship in cargo across the Isthmus of Chignecto will be the signal for many other ship railway schemes to begin construction. The Tehuantepec, the Panama, the Cape Cod, the Ontario and Michigan isthmuses will be vanquished by this means; and various obstructions can be overcome and short cuts made in different parts of the world.

That passage is one of the most interesting in The Chignecto Ship Railway. The booklet is the work of an engineer doing his darndest to attract investors: bland prose is peppered with facts, figures and dollar signs. Visual aids would've helped.

Ketchum might have done well in turning to fellow New Brunswicker Charles G.D. Roberts. who had written about the project with great enthusiasm in the August 1890 edition of Cosmopolitan. The next year, Roberts painted a lovely scene in his Canadian Guide-Book:

When it is completed a line of steamers will run between St John and Charlottetown and the traveler will have the novel experience of watching from his vessel's decks a lovely landscape of meadows and orchards unroll below him as he moves slowly across the isthmus. The sensation will be unique, as this is the world's only ship railway.

I'd have paid good money to take that cruise.

Object and Access: A nondescript booklet, The Chignecto Ship Railway should not be confused with Ketchum's The Chignecto Ship Railway: Will It Pay? (1887), The Chignecto Ship Railway: The Substitute for the Baie Verte Canal (1892), Ship Transportation and the Chignecto Ship Railway (1892) and a handful of other similarly titled publications issued in support of the project. The others have been picked over by print on demand vultures, but only our old friends at Bibliolife have spotted this one. "We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide", they tell us. Bibliolife will happily sell you a copy of this 12-page public domain booklet for $15.50 (postage & handling not included).

Or you could just read it gratis here.

Bonus:

A scale model of Jean Drapeau's 325-metre concrete celery stalk
(otherwise known as the Monument Paris-Montréal).