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[profh0011]

I prefer Dino Battaglia left as he was.

Just a reminder, YOU were the one who sent me scans of those 8 stories!  LOOK WHAT YOU STARTED!



"USHER"  (ohhhhh, I love this one!!! -- it's all about the COLOR CHOICES)

https://professorhswaybackmachine.blogspot.com/2020/10/poe-1969-pt-5.html



"LIGEIA"  (this was also such a BLAST to do!)

http://professorhswaybackmachine.blogspot.com/2021/01/poe-1969-pt-13_8.html

[profh0011]

I'm only just now becoming familiar with Italian artists.
Thank you for introducing me to Dino Battaglia. This is a style I don't usually warm to, but wow - I am attracted to an artist who can put energy on the page - not many can - he has it in spades.
There is energy there and also individuality in the human characters. 
So thank you again.   

I got about halfway thru "KING PEST" when it suddenly hit me... not only was the story a COMEDY, but Battaglia was drawing the characters as if they'd stepped straight out of an old Warner Brothers cartoon!  It was NUTS!

I recall I also had to go back and look at the original Poe text as much as possible, because it was so INSANELY stylized, which is what made it so damned funny.  Try reading that dialogue outloud.  I couldn't possibly depend on Google Translate, that was only for reference, to let me know what Poe text I should actually be using instead.


The longer I've worked on this project, the more authentic "Poe" I've tried to include when I do translations.  This only works, generally, if the adaptation follows the story.  When it doesn't... all bets are off.  I'm doing a movie-length "Usher" from Mexico, which is like someone took the Corman-Matheson film and then EXPANDED it.  There's glimpses of the 1960 movie in there (which Dell never adapted), but they added ghosts and stuff.  For most of it, I've had to just try to "channel" the characters from the film IN MY HEAD, and re-write the translations so they sound more natural, as if I was hearing the actors speaking them.  (It would be a lot easier if I had the movie on DVD, but that won't be for quite a few months yet.)

[crashryan]

I don't know why it popped into my mind just now, but have you read Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto? Published only yesterday--1764, to be precise. Supposed to be the first gothic novel, and an influence on EAP and others. I found it a bit silly in places, but also enjoyed the crazier fantasy elements including a giant helmet that falls from the sky, setting the story in motion. I thought it'd make a nice graphic story, especially drawn by someone with a distinctly odd style...Tom Sutton, Pat Boyette, someone like that. Available on Gutenberg and Archive.org and unlike many gothic novels a quick read.

[profh0011]

Isn't it fun to figure out who or what influenced who and what?

I recall a couple years back reading how there were several writers, contemporaries of Poe, who claimed he was ripping off their ideas.  But nobody remembers those guys now.

I was also mildly floored the last time I watched a few adaptations of early SHERLOCK HOLMES stories, and suddenly noticing similarities in POE stories from 50 years earlier.  Clearly, Doyle was a fan of Poe.

The scene that stuck out on my mind was when, in "RUE MORGUE", Dupan puts the ad in the paper for the sailor to respond to.  He's all friendly when the guy arrives, then pulls out a gun and demands to know all the details of the murders.

Well, in Doyle's very 1st Holmes story, "A STUDY IN SCARLET", Holmes figures out a murder must have been committed by the driver of a cab.  He puts out a call to that specific cabbie to come pick up luggage from his apartment... and when the man arrives, he slaps on the handcuffs.  This scene, by the way, wound up in William Gillette's play and subsequent film adaptations of it, which I only realized the other day was also used in Arthur Wontner's 1st (of 5) Holmes films.

[The Australian Panther]

Isn't it fun to figure out who or what influenced who and what? 

?Also, don?t be that fool who runs around yelling: ?The sky is falling, the sky is falling! Once upon a time the world was good! The old days were so much better! The world is about to end!? This is nonsense. There is nothing new under the sun. The world is as it has ever been: full of hungry, selfish, ignorant people who can?t see what?s right in front of them. Wisdom, like a windfall, can be good if you find it. It can help you see things for what they are. It can help protect you from your own foolishness. But wisdom has its limits. Consider?
― Adam S. Miller, Nothing New Under the Sun: A Blunt Paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 

This is very true of creative people like writers and artists, there are just no really original ideas, just new and updated contexts for them. This is not always deliberate plagiarism - this is just how the human mind works. Shakespeare was influenced by anything and everything. But Shakespeare, like Poe and Doyle and others - transformed his influences into something more memorable.
[I wish there were more Shakespeare comics.]
I'm sure there are those who have researched Poe to find his influences. 

have you read Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto?   

I once owned a copy, but couldn't get past a few pages.The older a narrative is, the harder it is to read for a modern person, who thinks visually about narrative, [ Comics, TV, Movies, even the news. we don't have the patience for long verbal narratives that are not primarily descriptions of action.
E.G.:-Politicians attempting to be re-elected now use sound-bites - as brief as possible. In the US in the 19th century Presidential candidates would cross the country in trains, hire halls and speak all day. No one today would have the patience to listen.         

[The Australian Panther]

! can't resist this!
Quote, ' ...the Great Bullet-head sat up until daybreak, consuming the midnight oil, and absorbed in the composition of the really unparalleled paragraph which follows: 'so, ho, John, how now? Told you so, you know. Don't crow another time before you are out of the woods! Does your mother know you're out? Oh, no! no! so go home at once, now, John, to your odious old woods of Concord! Go home to your woods, old owl, go! You won't? Oh, poh, poh, John don't do so! You've got to go, you know! So go at once and don't go slow; for nobody owns you here you know. Oh,John, John, if you don't go you're no homo -no! You're only a fowl, an owl; a cow,a sow;a doll, a poll, a poor old good-for-nothing-to-nobody,log, dog, hog or frog,come out of a concord bog. Cool, now - cool! Do be cool, you fool! None of your crowing, old cock! Don't frown so - don't. Don't hollo, nor howl, nor growl, nor bow-wow-wow! Good Lord, John, how you do look! Told you so, you know - but stop rolling your goose of an old poll about so, and go and drown your sorrows in a  bowl!"   

No - Not James Joyce. No - not Thomas Pychon.
Our very own E.A.Poe, from a short story called X-ing a Paragrab.
I think this story is Poe venting his frustrations at working with dull people in the publishing industry.   

Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism.   

I would like to read some of that.

Cheers!
                   

[Andrew999]

I confess I haven't read much from the 18th century but I did read Matthew Lewis' The Monk. I remember I enjoyed it - it's really a collection of short stories linked together with an outrageous and surprisingly bold plot - the moral downfall of Ambrosio, the novice monk.

Incredibly, Lewis wrote most of it whilst still a teen. He later became an MP

You can read it for free here:

https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostandRegained

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lewis_(writer)

[profh0011]

I often say, it's a fine line between creativity and plagiarism, but it does exist.

To me, real creativity is taking existing elements, then putting your own spin on them.  Make something different enough, in new combinations, and it becomes "new".

With that in mind, I take delight recognizing influences.


There was an instance last year where I somehow, inexplicably, wound up watching several murder mysteries in the same week, ALL of which contained the SAME method of murder!  It wasn't just that the method had been reused-- it was the "Twilight Zone moment" of unintentionally watching several of them a few days apart.  HOW does a thing like that happen?  And yet, those "coincidences" happen to me A LOT.  I tend to put it down to "being in tune with the universe" (heehee).  "But that's another story..."

SHERLOCK HOLMES -- The Problem Of Thor Bridge
CAMPION -- Police At The Funeral
PHILO VANCE -- The Greene Murder Case

The 2nd & 3rd of these, the novels were written only a couple years apart. Hard to know if one borrowed from the other, or if both borrowed from Doyle.  There was also, amusingly, an original 1950s CHARLIE CHAN tv episode that used the same gimmick. Probably borrowing from Doyle, as the other 2 were less well-known.

And, I should point out, the CONTEXT of how the murder method was used, was very different in each of these stories.  However, I did note that the PHILO VANCE and CAMPION stories BOTH involved old families gathered in a big house where people began getting bumped off one after another.

The HOLMES and CAMPION film adaptations were done only a couple years apart from each other, as well.


1 - The Problem Of Thor Bridge -- involves the solution of a SINGLE murder, done specifically to frame an innocent person

2 - The Green Murder Case -- the method was an minor incident used as a distraction for the police, to make the actual murderer look innocent

3 - Police At The Funeral -- the method is not discovered unti the very end of the story, and its discovery explains a whole series of other deaths

This is taking a single idea and using it in VERY different ways!   

[Captain Audio]

I confess I haven't read much from the 18th century but I did read Matthew Lewis' The Monk. I remember I enjoyed it - it's really a collection of short stories linked together with an outrageous and surprisingly bold plot - the moral downfall of Ambrosio, the novice monk.

Incredibly, Lewis wrote most of it whilst still a teen. He later became an MP

You can read it for free here:

https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostandRegained

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lewis_(writer)

I read the last chapter or so of this horrid novel as an excerpt in a horror anthology.

[The Australian Panther]

I often say, it's a fine line between creativity and plagiarism, but it does exist.

To me, real creativity is taking existing elements, then putting your own spin on them.  Make something different enough, in new combinations, and it becomes "new".

With that in mind, I take delight recognizing influences.

Yes! Exactly!