Monstrous comics

Other than continuing with scary novel series, trying to read as many ghost story picture books as possible, and looking up some remembered middle reader ghost stories, I also read some comics.

They followed a different theme. They were pretty disappointing.

We were going to attend a Universal Studios Halloween Horror Night in late September. It makes sense that I pursued the knowledge, but I don't remember exactly how I found out that there was a comic series based on the classic Universal Monsters.

It was a little surprising to see the history honored in that way, because you certainly don't see any traces of them at the Studios; that is all much more recent movies plus a lot of clowns with chainsaws.

https://sporktogo.blogspot.com/2025/10/universal-halloween-horror-nights.html 

It looked like each comic was initially released as four single issues, then collected into a trade. I read the trades.

The order I read them in, with publication dates:

Universal Monsters: Frankenstein by Michael Walsh, April 2025

Universal Monsters: Dracula by James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds, May 2024

Universal Monsters: Creature From the Black Lagoon Lives! by Dan Watters, Ram V, and Matthew Roberts, November 2024

I really hate how much I did not like them.

The problem was that the people were all so terrible. I don't mind monsters not actually being monsters. From that aspect, Frankenstein was probably the best of them; the problems with Dr. Frankenstein have always been pretty clear.

There really should have been more Creature in Creature; it was mainly terrible humans, then rejected by the Creature who was inclined to like the woman.

That follows a lot of current trends. You might think I would learn something from that, but notice that schedule? There's a mummy one out now. Yes, I requested it from the library. 

If I hate it but there is a Wolfman one in six months, I will probably check that out too. 

While pursuing this series, there were some other things that came up in my catalog searches. I am always up for some mission creep.

B.P.R.D. Plague of Frogs, Volume 3 by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi

This was back from 2012. Parts of it were quite grim (not unusual in the Mignola-verse) but there was an interesting new character and a cat, and some shocking changes. I may pick this back up. 

If someone will tell me that giant armadillo from The Visitor shows up again, I am there!

Lon Chaney Speaks by Pat Dorian

This was a pretty interesting look at early film history. While "Senior" did not play any of the Universal monsters (Junior did), the father had such an influence on make-up and prosthetics that his influence is there.  

Universal Monsters Little Golden Book by M.D. Brundlefly and Meg Dunn, September 2021. 

These are not just Universal monsters, but Funko Pop figures of the Universal monsters.

Guess where else we went the day of the Halloween Horror Night?

https://sporktogo.blogspot.com/2026/01/hollywood-funko-pop-store.html 

I thought with that level of commercial influence, this would be terrible, but it was surprisingly charming with a perfect ending. 

Ideas are important, but it all depends on the execution. 

Actually, the Boo! Book that came with the Wendy's Halloween Frosty meal was better than you would expect too.

At least sometimes they try. 

More about my father

I want to write about the songs for the 10th and the 13th, but it may be hard to get right.

January 10th last year was the day he died. "The Living Years" by Mike + The Mechanics kept coming to my mind, but it didn't feel like it was about me and and my father (or about my mother and my father). 

It felt more like it would be between my father and his own father. 

He was estranged from his parents when they died. It had mainly been a fight with his father, but he wasn't talking to his mother either. She was really upset about that and had talked to my mother.

They might have made up eventually, but then my grandparents were dead in a crash, with no real warning.

Based on the number of times that my father disowned children who displeased him, I can only assume he refused to learn anything from that. I still know it affected him, including him suddenly wanting to have another child: me. (A string of cousins born pretty close together tells me that his reaction was not unique.)

I didn't think "The Living Years" reflected us because I had communicated with him about what our relationship needed many times. It never got anywhere, but I had tried, and I believed I had tried enough. 

I revisited the idea periodically, and I was afraid I was going to have to reach out and it would be hard, and then he was gone. It was sad, but mostly a relief. When he stopped speaking to me for two and a half years when I was seventeen, I told myself that it was easier not dealing with him, but I was not really okay with it. Many years later, I had a better grasp of what I could control and what I couldn't and there really was peace, even though it was still sad.

"I Can't Make You Love Me" by Bonnie Raitt was definitely for Mom and Dad. 

She tried really hard. I saw her do so many things for him, coming up with little surprises and honoring even his most unfair whims.

That's not to say that she was always perfect. She would get frustrated and freeze him out sometimes, but I think she learned everything she knew about the silent treatment from him. Also, there was far less in the way of attempts to make her happy on his side, and lots of criticism of what she did try. That criticism also changed, where things that had worked before became unacceptable. 

Look, there are reasons none of their daughters got married. 

One thing that helped me understand him was a passage from Jane Eyre. Mr. Rochester is explaining his guardianship of Adele through his relationship with her mother, his mistress, as well as briefly mentioning two others. He explains that a mistress is always inferior socially and often by character, and it is degrading to live familiarly with inferiors.

It is possible to find in that an indictment of the English class system and various patriarchal systems (speaking of patriarchy, it is sad how similar so many other fathers of that generation were). What I saw as an adolescent girl was that Dad thought he was better than Mom, and he treated her as inferior. That was not great for her, but it also damaged his love for her, which continually got worse.

She had to be bad so it was his fault that he cheated or was a jerk in other ways. Then she deserved it, and he kept viewing her as lower and lower, so kept treating her worse.

He also did that with his children. 

To be fair, he needed to be better than everyone, not just Mom. For people who didn't deal with him a lot, it may not have been noticeable. For people who lived with him, it was hard, perhaps more so because it was never stated outright how you were supposed to be to make him happy. You could try picking it up from context clues, but in fact, you could not make him happy and he would never see that as a him problem.

Its origin was his problem, but living with it was ours.

I found myself in the song too. It's not that he didn't love me, but there was a problem with his love, or with how love didn't change things... I could not fix that. That's why I stopped trying. 

So there I was in the other song as well.

Because I had tried, I didn't think I had regrets, but I can believe now that he would. 

I don't know what the time frame is, but I really do believe that eventually the self-deception fails in death. Maybe you cling to the denial really hard, but eventually it gives out against the stark reality of death.

I can believe he has things that he would have liked to say to us in the living years.  

That window has closed, but other ones will eventually open. 

I hope he has been able to make peace with his father. 

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2022/10/on-paternal-side.html  

Hooked on culture

Looking over the timeline of the songs for January, there are two important ruptures. I wanted something to represent the time in between them.

"America" kind of did that, but also represented Mom moving countries. I wanted something for what life was like before things started splitting off.

Something else that played a lot was Hooked on Classics.

I had never thought about the structure of that album. There literally is a track called "Hooked on Classics Part 1 & 2". I ended up choosing "Rondo Alla Turca" -- that's what I was feeling the most, even though technically I was hearing it as part of track 7, "Hooked on Mozart."

I may be thinking of this more because of an earlier conversation. 

My younger sisters were saying they credited me with some of our tendency to go to cultural events and travel and things like that.

I understood why they thought that, because often when we went together to the opera or ballet or Australia, I did a lot of the planning and paying, back in the day. That is not where it got started.

I pointed out that with our mother being Italian we were always more likely to be interested in going to Italy, at least, and I think that opened things up, as well as opening us up to opera.

I am not saying that it's in the blood. Our mother loved opera, and played it frequently. 

She got that from her father, who also loved it. I think culturally that was pretty common in his time; I'm honestly not sure about now. That's probably something else to ask my cousins.

The culture did not just come from her. Our father was the one who played other classical music and filled the bookcase with books. Those included classic novels and plays, but also Tolkien and some Edgar Rice Burroughs and lots of Time-Life book series. We had a full set of junior and regular encyclopedias.

(Randomly, there were also a few copies of PS Magazine, an army maintenance magazine that started with illustrations by Will Eisner, award-inspiring comic inspiration.) 

As important as school and public libraries have been for me, the library at home was a big influence.

My father's family had some hard times. There were a lot of moves and restarts and some migrant farm work. A cousin has informed me that they had good times too -- it wasn't always a struggle -- but the struggle seems to have imprinted itself more deeply.

The frequent moves affected education. 

I don't know how much of my father's ego was real versus an attempt to cover up deep-rooted insecurities. He seemed to really think he was better than everyone else, but maybe it was a convincing cover bolstered with denial.

Regardless, looking back I see a lot of striving in the collection of books and the pursuit of culture and knowledge. 

I hope he got some enjoyment out of it too. 

We did. 

The flight of the Butterfly

My father was not a good husband to my mother.

His skills as a father could be questioned too, and that is not a completely new idea, but there are two points I want to make regarding her marriage:

• She never had any interest in dating or marrying again; once was quite enough.
• She still never regretted marrying him, because of the good things that came from that. 

Two of the songs are because of that, and kind of a third as well.

"America" by Neil Diamond, from the soundtrack of The Jazz Singer:

In my growing up years, some musicians got played a lot that were not really my choice. That might involve Black Sabbath from my brother, Steve Miller and the Beatles from my older sister, and definitely Anne Murray, the Ray Conniff Singers, ABBA, and Neil Diamond from my parents. I don't hate any of them, but I think I have heard enough of them to last a long time.

It still felt like I should include something from there. "America" was the best fit. It played frequently in our house, it represented Mom coming to a new country after marrying my father, and it is also the track for an amazing sequence in a different movie, Born in East LA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AecJ4Vi_zqk 

"The Holy City":

I used a version by the Tabernacle Choir for the song of the day on the 11th, but a version from the London Philharmonic on the playlist I have been listening to while I sort out my feelings. 

In fact, Mom's favorite version was sung by Jeannie Rickards at church and she apparently did an amazing job that Mom never forgot. It was before my time, but I did go to girls' camp with one of Jeannie's daughters so that's my connection.

I chose that song to represent her faith. My father may have led in the decision to meet with missionaries and get baptized, but he stopped going later and she never did. Her faith sustained her and was never something she could regret.

"You're A Friend of Mine" by Clarence Clemons and Jackson Browne

She made a lot of friends through church, and she made a lot of friends through her work (which does have a song, but that's a different post), and through greyhounds. He was the one who first brought a stray greyhound home on his way out of town, leaving her to care for it. 

She was not thrilled with that (it was pretty inconsiderate) but she quickly grow to love that dog, who absolutely loved her. It also led to her contacting the adoption group, volunteering with them, and making many more friends.

Her ability to make friends wherever she went did not come from him, but a lot of the "wherever" was him.

Her family did not really have pets, but they became a constant part of her life here. She loved her cats and dogs (which tended to be collies before we discovered greyhounds). Sure, I thought about "Who Let the Dogs Out" and "What's New Pussycat", but no.

I also don't know a good song to express Mom's love her for children, but she wanted us and could never regret us.

She was resilient and found many good things in her life. Most of them got their start in my father, but that was not their end. 

A ghostly movie

I try watching a different Halloween movie every year.

They are mostly movies that are new to me, but an old one that I haven't seen for a long time will do as well.

I hadn't had anything specific in mind this year, and was thinking Weird Science might work, even if not strictly on theme. Instead, I finally found an option for watching Child of Glass.

Many of my spooky Halloween memories are associated with Disney, from us watching the weekly shows and from the early years of the channel.

The other movie I associate most closely with that is The Watcher in the Woods, but I have been able to see that much more often.

It had felt like Watcher was much more recent, but really they were only two (kind of three) years apart.  

The Watcher in the Woods had its first theatrical release in 1980, but was then re-shot and re-released a year later. Regardless, it did have a theatrical release, so that kind of a publicity campaign and then a lot of television play.

Child of Glass aired as an episode of The Magical World of Disney in 1978 (and in May, not October). Repeats just never seemed to happen. As far as I know, I only saw it once, but I always remembered the glowing girl and the dog, and that she was able to materialize for a dance (which seemed really fake and unfair to Blossom).

I had looked it up many times but with no luck. Finally I found a copy on Youtube. If the quality was not the best, it was still something. Finally!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzg4uQWAAuY 

(One thing that will come out more in a later post: I was also able to locate the book that acted as the source material, and the book is better.) 

For a made for television movie from the late 70s, it is not bad. I don't need to see it again, but I am glad that I was able to see it one more time.

As it was, I ended up more distracted by the familiar faces than caught up in the plot.

Alexander's mother was played by Barbara Barrie, Barney Miller's wife and Nana on Suddenly Susan. His sister was Violet Beauregard, though without her wearing blue or chewing gum there is no way I would have recognized her there. 

In my previous attempts to find the movie, I had gotten that Inez was Sylvia from Little House on the Prairie, but that didn't tell me that Aunt Lavinia was Moses' adopted mother from The Ten Commandments! I mean, these are people whom I had actually seen in other things, even at that young age.

Also, while I probably had not seen him prior to that, I would later become quite fond of Anthony Zerbe as Teaspoon in The Young Riders. I caught him very close to my re-watch in an episode of Columbo and I have to say he is pretty versatile.

It's not a big deal, but it was something I had wanted for a long time and I got it.

I would say that next year I will try Weird Science, but a friend reminded me of Something Wicked This Way Comes. 

I don't remember very much about that one either. I think I need to check it out.  

Butterfly

After two choruses from Verdi operas, I put in two of my mother's favorite songs from when she was a teenager in Italy, then one my father used to play as he stood by the jukebox.

This marks a transition from her family of origin to marrying an American GI and the father of her children.

I'm not saying she wouldn't have liked Puccini or Madame Butterfly anyway, but I know she felt like Butterfly in a way that she never felt like Aida or Fenena.

I am not sure when that started. I was only nine the first time he cheated, plus there was a time before I was born when he he had feelings for someone else... it put a great strain on the marriage.

Did she feel like Butterfly as soon as she married an American soldier and enthusiastically embraced all things American? (Watching a performance as an adult, that perspective broke my heart.) Or did that feeling happen later, after the soldier proved faithless?

I don't know.

What I do know, though, is that she did not become Butterfly, at least not the opera version.

In the opera, Pinkerton's new wife comes for his son with Butterfly, because Pinkerton is too cowardly to face Butterfly himself. Taking the blade with which her father killed himself -- on which it is written "Those who cannot live with honor can die with honor -- she takes her own life, having already surrendered it to her husband.

That was not my mother. 

She was hurt, a lot. If her children had been taken, I don't know what would have happened, but she had her children and she loved and worked and thrived for them.

That thriving becomes a larger pattern of her life, and there will be another post for that.

I am getting more to the point where I will be able to write an obituary. 

For now, I should say that there was another version for Butterfly as well.

The opera was based on a short story by John Luther Long.

It is mostly the same, but after agreeing to give up the child and starting to kill herself, Butterfly is interrupted by her maid, Suzuki, who pinches the child to make him cry.

Butterfly stops, and her child crawls into her lap. Suzuki dresses the wound, and when Kate Pinkerton arrives the next day, the house is empty.

Okay, the odds of a classical opera ending that way were always pretty low. You either tend to have a majorly happy, triumphal ending, or a tragedy with at least the soprano dead, the tenor and the baritone as well. 

Fortunately, life is seldom operatic in its scope; small victories and joys can get us through.

If those small joys happen because someone is looking out for you, good! We should be looking out for each other.  

Related posts: 

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2024/08/my-mother-my-talk.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/08/1960-1958-july-daily-songs.html 

Fly, my thoughts (Va pensiero)

January 3rd through 8th songs were a mix of classical opera and contemporary hits from around the time my parents met.

For as long as I can remember, my mother's favorite operas were Aida, Madame Butterfly, and Nabucco.

Two of those are much more famous than the other. I was able to take her to see both Aida and Madame Butterfly; I found a DVD recording of Nabucco for her. It was performed at L'Arena in Verona, where we had been together, so that was pretty cool, but it just doesn't get performed much now.

Madame Butterfly is by Giacomo Puccini and I think there are some things that are different about her love for that, so that will be a separate post.

Aida and Nabucco are both by Giuseppe Verdi. I think a lot of my mother's love for opera came from her father, and that is especially true for Nabucco, with its chorus, "Va Pensiero."

She always told me it was important to him because it was an anthem for Italians when they were under Austrian rule. As I was thinking about songs that were important to her, I started to wonder more about that. 

I was pretty sure it wasn't all of Italy, but maybe just the North. A little research indicated that it had to have been the kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, which existed from 1815 to 1866, when they were finally able to join with the rest of Italy, after first being ceded to France. (Italian unification was a lengthy and somewhat complicated process). 

We are from the Veneto, so this is the area. 

My grandparents were old, but not old enough to have been under Austrian rule.

Grandfather's father, Pietro, would have been 14 when they regained their independence. However, his father Domenico was five when the kingdom was created. Domenico died when Pietro was only 10. I don't know if he died in the fighting, but I can believe that there were some strong emotions tied into that song from an opera introduced in 1842 (just over one hundred years before my mother was born).

Shortly before its composition, Verdi had lost his wife and children to illnesses. He swore he would never compose again. The director of La Scala made him take the libretto, written by Temistocle Solera. Originally resisting looking, Verdi opened it to "Va Pensiero" based on the 137th Psalm.

The music came back to him, and he wrote again. 

Perhaps Solera should get more credit. In opera the libretto is often considered unimportant. As it was, Solera had already written one opera with Verdi before Nabucco and wrote three more in the next few years after. Still, the song is mostly associated with Verdi; onlookers in Milan began singing it spontaneously at his funeral procession and Toscanini conducted a version at Verdi's re-internment.

There was a powerful love for that song, and it is a powerful story of recovery from loss. I still don't know that I would have blogged about it if not for two other things that came up in my research. 

One is that various scholars dispute that Verdi meant for the song to be about independence. 

By all accounts, he was a very private man; there is not a proclamation of his determination. He was nonetheless associated with the move for independence and unification (The Risorgimento). The next opera that Verdi and Solera did together is also considered to have patriotic themes. 

Probably a coincidence. 

In addition, reading about Lombardy-Venetia, I found this:

"Austrian General Karl von Schonhals wrote in his memoires that the Austrian administration enjoyed the support of the rural population and the middle class educated at the universities of Pavia and Padua, who were able to pursue careers in the administration."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Lombardy%E2%80%93Venetia 

His explanation is that the nobles mistrusted the Austrians because they got positions through their nobility rather than their education, so it was the nobles who were into independence, not the common people.

Okay, as far as I can tell, Garibaldi was not aristocratic, but born to a merchant family and had some education. That should make him exactly the pro-Austrian type, yet somehow he became the key leader in the Risorgimento. He did at times work with monarchists, and certainly a movement can become more popular after it succeeds... but I think von Schonhals is projecting there.

As the granddaughter of a railroad man who was the son of a farmer, we say that song was about independence and yearning for freedom. 

That may not even matter that much, except that people lying about the motivations and the beliefs of those who oppose them, always having a way to justify themselves, feels relevant right now.

"If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it." -- Zora Neale Hurston

I would be reluctant to use a quote that serious if not for the murder of Renee Good.

Of course, this administration lies more about how you deserved the killing than that you enjoyed it, but they lie a lot.

They also say history is written by the victors, so maybe it doesn't matter what an Austrian general thought after they lost the territory. Maybe the reason the Italians remember it differently is because they finally did become free.

It feels important to express ourselves now. Speak, write, yes, complain, but do not leave the lies unanswered. 

That can have an effect generations later.