Author: Rob

Writer. Film-maker. Cartoonist. Cook. Lover.

The Green Stuff

Many people extol the virtues of red sauce. Others prefer their sauces brown. I’ve always been partial to a spot of green.

This is the stuff that you can’t get in bottles. The best name for it is the Spanish shorthand – salsa verde. Unlike your red or brown condiments, this sauce doesn’t have a secret recipe handed down from father to son, locked in a safe somewhere. It’s an open source, open to interpretation kind of a deal. It also doesn’t last that long – certainly never long enough to form a crust round the top of the bottle. But as it takes so little time to whip up, that’s not such a big deal.

In basic terms, salsa verde is a herb and oil suspension, livened up with lemon juice and salt. You need a blender or mixer with a bit of grunt to it, unless you’re feeling prehistoric and prefer pounding your food into submission in a mortar and pestle. Which’ll work fine, but you know, 21st century and all that, the machines are our friends.

Green, leafy herbs are the order of the day. My preference is for lots of parsley, mint, basil and fennel or dill. My salsas are heavy on the fennel nowadays as I have a monster of a plant in the herb patch and I have to tame the bugger somehow.

Get yourself a decent handful of fennel and flat-leaf parsley, and about half as much basil and mint. Blitz, along with a few cloves of garlic, then pour in olive oil until you have something with a decently sloppy but spoonable consistency. Add the juice of a lemon, and some salt. You’ll probably need more than you think of each. I’ve taken to throwing in a couple of preserved lemons instead, which do the job in one hit. Taste, and taste again. You want something loud, tart and green, sharp and bright and grassy as the first sip of a gin and tonic on a hot summer day.

Fish and chicken are perfect for this stuff, although I’ve dolloped it on a burger with good effect. In fact, most barbecued meats will snuggle up happily to the salsa. It’ll keep in the fridge for a few days, although it will thicken up. Once it’s at that stage, stir it into mayo, yoghurt or sour cream to keep the salsa useful as a chippy dip, or a creamy side for lamb chops. In short, this is my go-to accompaniment for the warm months, and one of my principal reasons for growing herbs. A spoonful of summer.

A Fiendishly Good War Comic

Wartime horror is one of those subgenres that’s never really taken off. War itself is horrific enough. You don’t need to overegg the pudding with something supernatural.
SF can get away with the setting, as it’s an excuse for cool dieselpunk gadgets and Nazi robots and that.
There’s been a bit of an upsurge in films about Nazi zombies lately, but really they’re just the walking dead in an emotive costume.

I’m kind of disappointed that there’s been so little material on Nazi vampires. I can’t think of anything in the realms of film apart from Michael Mann’s discodelic The Keep (oh, those lasers…). Angel and True Blood have both had WW2 vignettes.*

But it’s comics that have brought us the best examples of an admittedly niche trope. Some fine recent examples include the current run of American Vampire, and a lovely, creepy Captain America strip by Ed Brubaker and the sorely missed Gene Colan, that you can read in full here.
But for the definitive WW2 vampire story, look no further than my beloved 2000AD, and Fiends Of The Eastern Front. Drawn by one of the most celebrated artists on the British scene, Carlos Ezquerra, and written by one of it’s most under-rated scribes, Gerry Finley-Day, FOTEF is a stark, uncompromising and gloriously pulpy bit of horror.
The comic is set during the Russian campaign of 1942, and takes the form of a diary written by a German trooper, Hans Schmitt. His regiment becomes host to a group of Romanian partisans led by the charismatic Captain Constanta. They seem unstoppable in battle, and fight by night, spending the day asleep.
You’ve guessed it. They’re Transylvanian, and Schmitt discovers their bloody secret. Of course, none of his comrades believe him, and Constanta gives him a not-so-friendly warning. When the tide of the war turns, and Romania changes sides, Schmitt and his regiment face a new and remorseless enemy who are quite literally after their blood.
2000AD is unfairly tagged as the Judge Dredd comic, when it has published a wide range of solid genre work over the years. Their horror is particularly good (and probably worth a post all to itself), and I would hold up FOTEF as one of the AD’s finest hours.

Ezquerra’s stark black and white art is dripping with atmosphere and a sweaty, febrile dread. Findley-Day’s script is stripped to the bone, as tight and inevitable as a hangman’s noose. Bookended with a scene set in a Berlin bunker twenty years later that provides a neat final twist, FOTEF is a deeply satisfying read that motors along breathlessly. As a treatise on the way allegiances can all too quickly shift, and how trust be be so easily compromised, it has few equals in the comics field.
Finley-Day is best known as Tharg’s future war specialist, creating both Rogue Trooper and The VC’s. But FOTEF’s roots can be traced to his work with Battle and Action in the mid-70s. He was already known for creating sympathetic German heroes, and his work had a sharply political and cinematic edge. Rat Pack, an earlier collaboration with Ezquerra, is a neat take on The Dirty Dozen, and I can’t help but be reminded of Peckinpah’s Cross Of Iron when reading Hermann Of Hammer Force. Not least because Ezquerra’s heroes look a bit like James Coburn…
Fiends Of The Eastern Front was revamped (sorry) for modern audiences in the early norties by David Bishop, and those stories, dropping Constanta and his bloodsucking crew into real life battles, are a lot of fun. But the original is the best, and Gerry Finley-Day deserves recognition for a solidly original work of horror fiction. War, with Constanta at your heels, can indeed be hell.

Revolution Books have a nice new edition of Fiends Of The Eastern Front for your viewing pleasure, which include the original tale and David Bishop and Colin MacNeil’s reboot. Highly recommended.

*As expected, I has UPDATES from X&HTeam-mates. Ben Woodiwiss issues a Uwe Boll warning, and reminds me of Bloodrayne 3, which features more vampNazis than you can shake a stake at! Trailer here. Caution: not safe for anyone.

Meanwhile, Leading Man Clive has pointed me at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEI9BLZ6460

Looks like you have to go to the Germans for your Nazi Vampires…

Unclehood

I love being an uncle. I can highly recommend it. It’s all the fun of parenting with little of the tedious admin.

An example. TLC and I spent a chunk of the weekend at Pier 32, the codename I have decided to give to her brother’s gaff (a little more on Pier 32 later). We are guideparents to the son of the family, a bright bit of ball lightning called AJ. Guideparents? AJ’s mum and dad don’t stand for any of that religious nonsense, and he was named with all due ceremony in their local pub by a humanist minister. Does this mean I take my guidepaternal responsibilities any less seriously than if AJ had been christened?

Of course not. A vow is a vow no matter what kind of house you take it in. Our visits together may be infrequent, but we make sure AJ gets quality time when we’re around. As I am an unreconstructed big kid, this means lots of time with Lego, and time on the computer helping him out with homework projects. As AJ’s mum and dad have recently invested in a 27 inch iMac, this is not the grind it could be. Yesterday I helped him make a 12-page newspaper. I only grabbed the mouse off him once or thrice.

I’m not great with kids – they have a tendency to un-nerve me with awkward questions and unwarranted meltdowns. However, all the kids that I am uncle and god/guidefather to are exceptions to the rule, and I delight in spending time with all of them. Being able to sneak away and leave them to their parents after getting them sugared up and over-excited is, of course, just the cherry on the cake.

 

Falling Skies: none more SF

You can have fun with FX’s new big-budget SF show Falling Skies by playing spot the reference. It’s so stuffed with nods to other shows that it becomes a commentary on the state and visual style of filmed SF in the early part of this most scientifictional century.

(Spoilers ahead. Break left. Engage thrusters.)

Continue reading Falling Skies: none more SF

Dork’s Progress

After a couple of days working on The SEKRIT Thing That Won’t Be SEKRIT much longer, I’m back at work after two and a bit weeks off. And hoo boy, am I not ready.

I was clearly in denial about the whole prospect. I didn’t do a bag pack or a sort out of what I needed. Hence clattering round the house at half six this morning, waking up TLC by rummaging in cupboards and pockets for passes and tickets. Back into the house for my wallet after I’d locked up.

A hectic cycle ride to the station (road sense gone, nearly plowed into a pedestrian in headphones stepping off the pavement without looking) was capped off by the realisation that the key for the bike lock was back at home.
A return trip into a head wind, swearing all the way.

A stand-up train trip on tiptoes (yes, that busy) only made me more determined that an early train is the way forward. And do you people not SHOWER in the morning? (sidebar: after three bike runs, I probably wasn’t too fresh myself).

And yet I was still in work more or less on time. Shame there was no-one there to witness it, and the telecine’s not working. And I feel like a bag of swamp water and noodles now. Knackered before nine. Great start.

Dirty Bristow

I’m pleased, proud and excited to announce my involvement in one of the more interesting magazine projects around at the moment.

Dirty Bristow is, as the clever buggers who thought it up say, a project dedicated to resurrecting the magazine as a fetish object. That is, as something to both covet and collect. An object of desire. Beautifully printed on premium stock, DB is designed to be proudly displayed on your bookshelf.

Each issue takes a loose theme as the subject, which the contributors explore as they see fit. Issue 1 fittingly takes on the subject of birth, with articles on (to thinly scrape the surface) overpopulation, free-running, the creative process, architecture and stand-up comedy. Impeccably designed, deliciously illustrated, the thing is a joy to own.

Yes, of course I’m overegging it. Vested interest, donchaknow.

Aart from the cover price, the mag is funded through merchandising and live events, to make sure that you get a product free from ads. There’s no compromise, no sellout. Everyone who contributes to Dirty Bristow is free to say what they want, how they want. It’s an open forum, mixing the freedom of the small press with the production values of the glossies. The closest thing to it on the  news-stands is probably Little White Lies, which has the same themed approach, attention to detail and love smeared thickly over every page.

Finally, finally, issue two is on sale. The theme is BEAST. Eighty pages of articles, thinkpieces, illos and fiction. And somewhere in there: me, with an article on the smallest and most important beast of them all. I’m chuffed to bits to be asked to contribute, and can’t wait to see how it looks.

Here’s the important bit. You can order Beast here. While you’re at it, Birth and badge and sticker sets are available too. And the call is now out for contributions to issue 3: BREAK. I plan to submit to that, too.

Further, the launch party for Beast is on July 23rd, at the Edge in Digbeth, Birmingham. Six quid gets you entry, a copy of Beast and all kinds of music and general frivolity. If you’re in the area, you should give it a go.

Dirty Bristow. The fetish object that you can show to your mum.

 

 

Sundown

The Weather Gods finally grace you with a clear evening, so you hurry down to the beach, camera in hand.

The sun has touched the horizon line as you get there, and you begin to snap away. And then, you stop. This is something new, and not an event to be witnessed through a viewfinder.

The sun is sinking as you watch. Over thirty seconds it shrinks to a half-coin, a sliver, a dot, before the sea swallows it and it winks away. There is no record that you can show people of this. It doesn’t matter. You have it, warming a corner of your memory in coral pink and Florida orange. This one’s a keeper. This one is safe.

You walk back to your cottage in the dimming light, hand in hand with your wife.

And your heart is full.

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