Like a lot of people, I remember OUTLAW STAR from the late 90s/early 00s as a seminal sci-fi anime - one of the series everyone had to watch. Unlike many, however, I somehow never got around to watching it (I never finished COWBOY BEBOP, either, but that's another story). The DVD collection was in my Amazon wishlist for the last several years, and then, by luck, Toonami re-ran the series. Huzzah!

I'm glad I got a chance to watch this series finally. It won't make my all-time-favorites list, but I enjoyed it.

The series follows the crew of the Outlaw Star, a cutting-edge space-ship built by a mysterious criminal organization for unknown purposes, and then stolen by an outlaw (those who are neither outright criminals, but also don't adhere strictly to the law) named Hilda and later given over to Gene Starwind and his friends after her death. Nominally, the series is about trying to find the legendary Galactic Leyline, the nexus point of the galaxy (and possibly the universe), where literally anything is possible. Melfina, the beautiful amnesiac girl who is somehow part and parcel with the Outlaw Star's navigational system, is also somehow connected to the Galactic Leyline and, like the hero he aspires to be, Gene has promised to find this legendary place and solve the mystery of Melfina's past. That is almost immediately pushed aside, however, and doesn't really pick back up until the last few episodes of the series.

I enjoyed OUTLAW STAR quite a lot and it reminded me of simpler times. The characters are delightfully 90s-nostalgic anime stereotypes (the maverick who's often in over his head; the boy-genius; the beautiful-intruder who doesn't have any memories of her own past; the cool beauty who can kick your ass; even a cat-girl), and the individual story-lines range from epic space opera to goofy fan-service. One of the complaints people often have of the series is that there's little originality to it, and that's true - it really doesn't do anything a dozen (or more) other series haven't. But that doesn't mean it isn't a fun time, and really, that's all I was looking for from this series. I'd like to mention, too, that the stunning job (presumably) Funimation did in upscaling the 20-year-old animation to high-def. It just looks gorgeous, especially the space-scapes.

Recommended if it's a series you enjoyed the first time around or if you are simply a fan of 90s anime.

Just a short one today, as I don't think I've ever done a music post here, but there's a first time for everything.

Today, I ramble a little about Finnish hard rock/light metal/horror-show band LORDI.

I became aware of Lordi way back in 2006 when they won the Eurovision contest with their song "Hard Rock Hallelujah", the first metal band and only Finnish band to win, and listened to them sporadically online via streaming services for a while, then they fell off my radar. A few weeks ago, however, their song "Would You Love a Monster Man?" came up in an old playlist I created, and I realized what I'd been missing.

I found a copy of their album "The Arockalypse" for a decent price and away we go.

LORDI, while superficially resembling American band GWAR in both look and sound, have more in common with the hard rock/light metal bands of the 70s and early 80s, such as KISS (who they cite as influences), Alice Coooper and Twisted Sister (Dee Snider of TS actually does guest vocals on Arockalypse), often with horror-themed lyrics. Songs include lighthearted, but hard-driving, anthems such as "Bringing the Balls Back to Rock" to full-on horror-themed songs such as "The Kids Who Want to Play with the Dead" or "Chainsaw Buffet", and the style vacillates back and forth between hard rock and lighter metal. Other albums, though, such as "To Beast or Not to Beast" are full-on metal, while albums such as "Babez for Breakfast" is hard-rock right out of the mid-80s. At no point, however, does LORDI not rock, whether playing metal or anything else.

Definitely not a band for everyone, but I think with driving guitars, metallic harmonies and tongue-in-cheek, fun-loving lyrics, LORDI is a band that anyone who likes metal or rock can appreciate.

 Way back in 2012, a comic packager asked me to create a female-lead, supernatural comic series. The concept I came up with was "Night & Days", an adventure/humor series about an occult investigator named Dr. Antonia Harper, derisively called "Dr. Night" (as in "things that go bump in the"), by her more mainstream colleagues, and Nathan Days, the curator of the Arkham Museum of Art and Artifacts, home of occult items great and small. The concept was that the museum was a magnet for weirdness and, after Days brought Dr. Harper in to help with a particular issue initially, she would have ended up using it as her base of operations. It was high concept enough to allow for many possibilities and the folks who asked me to create it loved the concept so I worked up a script for a short graphic novel that would have served as the introductory storyline. A four-page sample story was also created as part of a proposal to send to larger publishers (or possibly use as part of a Kickstarter campaign).

Unfortunately, the project fell through for various reasons, but that four-page story, called "Real Deal", was completed and it seems a shame not to let anyone else ever see it, so here it is.

(Click the image below to read the comic)

If you follow me on twitter, or have been reading this blog for a while, you'll know I'm a fan of Erle Stanley Gardner's detective team of Cool and Lam. Gardner's more famous creation, though, Perry Mason, is another character I've read a fair bit about and am coming to enjoy more and more.

​Read on.

I am a fan of detective fiction, primarily private-eye and hardboiled stuff. Whodunnits and cozies are not usually my cup of tea. Gardner's Cool & Lam novels are sort of a half-way point between whodunnits and traditional P.I. stories and I enjoy them. Save for the very first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, I hadn't read any of the PM novels until fairly recently when someone gave me five of them they'd found at a garage sale and bought for me, remembering I liked Gardner's work. 

Well, they are definitely more in the vein of traditional mystery stories, but I have come to enjoy them quite a bit.

First, if you aren't familiar with the character, Perry Mason isn't a typical mystery novel protagonist. Like Gardner himself, Mason is actually an attorney, though one who professes to love mysteries and, in the words of Hamilton Burger, the Los Angeles County District Attorney Mason frequently comes into conflict with, Mason is a great attorney but an even better detective. Mason is rather mercurial and will turn down big-paying clients he knows are guilty or whose cases don't interest him in favor of working for, or with, people accused of crimes who can't pay, but whose circumstances interest him. Mason, in his own words, detests boredom and paperwork and craves puzzles, making him perfectly suited to the role of mystery novel protagonist.

Very little is shown about Mason himself in the novels and he's more or less used as a spotlight to shine on interesting puzzles Gardner has created. One of the things that new readers of PM novels must be aware of is that the plots of all the novels are, in a sense, all the same. Gardner found a formula that worked very well and stuck with it for more than eighty of these novels. Where the works shine, however, is in the sheer, vast variety of characters, circumstances and twists that Gardner invented and crammed each story chock full of.

These are true whodunnits, too, and clever readers paying attention can puzzle out the solution along with Mason. One of the hallmarks, in fact, of Gardner's PM novels is that there are usually at least two completely plausible solutions: one in which Mason's client is guilty (the theory espoused by the police or district attorney, generally) and one in which they are innocent. Mason, of course, fights for his client and only if he is convinced of their innocence, but there are a few times when I've found myself wondering if the other, equally possible, solution isn't the factual one. It's part of the fun.

As I said, I'm not normally into whodunnits, but I've come to develop an affection for these Perry Mason mysteries. Because the plots are always so similar in many ways, though, these are not novels I can binge on, rather they have become an occasional reading treat and I think that's how to best enjoy each mystery: one at a time, with ample breaks in between for the hard stuff.