Jim Lemoine
Mar 10, 2005, 12:18 pm
<img src="http://x-mencomics.com/xfan/images/columns/chicomix_logo.jpg" align=left border=0 alt="Chimerical Comix">By Douglass Barre, blackflak@aol.com
Intro by Jim Lemoine, jimlemoine@comixfan.cjb.net
Of the many columns that have graced the pages of ComiX-Fan over the years, Chimerical Comix was always one of my very favorites. Where else could you find write-ups on the epic Secret Wars Zero limited series, the short-lived Power Pack: One Pack, A Day mature readers title, the classic Beware... the Phantom of the Opera! horror mag, or the long sixties and seventies run of Superman's Boss, Perry White? Nowhere, that's where. You could only find them in the Chimerical Comix column, because the aforementioned books (and many others) only existed in the incredibly fertile imagination of the column's author, Douglass Barre - the writer of Image's Defiance and Mythstalkers series.
I do admit to some bias - I know Doug personally, and he's a heck of a great guy. Creative, witty, kind to small animals (usually)... and the list goes on. He introduced me to Amber, Amethyst, and Allred's Atomics - and we haven't even gotten to the second letter of the alphabet. He wrote a lot of the best dialog in X-Assault (about which the less said, the better), and was personally responsible for some of the game's coolest moments. His Mysthstalkers series from Image Comics was a personal favorite for showing a slightly different take on the kind of mystical, irreverent Victorian graphic adventure that was so trendy a year or two ago. A comic store clerk, a comic book writer, and a loving father, I've rarely met people with a greater imagination (or, for that matter, greater love of the comic book medium).
These days... well, Doug's been better. Not long after the birth of his second child and the hiatus of Mythstalkers, Doug's been in the hospital for several weeks with severe pancreatitis. He's been in and out of ICU, in and out of consciousness. Some days he's doing great - some days it looks like he may not make it. While I personally choose to believe that he will pull through this, it's hard not to contemplate how much the world would miss if he wasn't around. The love his wife would miss, the father his parents would miss, and the simply outstanding writer that comic fans would miss.
As I was digging through my old ComiX-Fan Archives, I found a lost gem written by Doug - the never-before-published Chimerical Comix #16: Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld. Below, ComiX-Fan is proud to present this column, the work of a somewhat twisted but undeniably genius comic lover.
If you're the praying type, Doug's family would definitely appreciate the support. If you're not the praying type, then please take a moment to think of a fantastic writer and great guy who's in pretty bad shape right now. But regardless, enjoy the below nugget of DC-inspired wizardry, and let's all hope that we see more work from Doug's pen soon!
AMETHYST, PRINCESS OF GEMWORLD #1-4 (1996, Vertigo)
In 1996, DC was sitting pretty. The travails of Marvel's bankruptcy had left that company creatively strained. Over at DC, however, in the dark fantasy ghetto known as Vertigo, series like Sandman (soon to end) and Preacher (just getting its legs) were impressing the industry and garnering both critical attention and trade paperback sales. One of the modest successes over at Vertigo was the Neil Gaiman-created (but other-writer-sustained) young boy fantasy adventure, The Books of Magic. This series followed the adventures of Tim Hunter, boy wizard, as he faced magical (and often, admittedly, surreal and/or nonlinear) adventures.
Somewhere along the line, however, new Vertigo editor Genevieve Corbois decided that if Boy Adventure was so well represented in their line, that Girl Adventure was simply a necessity. To that end, she recruited novelist Traci Dorman to attempt to revive the old DC property Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld. Unfortunately, since the original series, the Amethyst character had become somewhat... disembodied and impersonal, having turned into a statue/goddess. Dorman, known mostly for her young adult series "Yesterworld," submitted the following fix (reprinted from the original proposal, available at her website www.tracidorman.com):
"The realms of the Gemworld are not what they once were. The ruling houses have degenerated into fiefdoms, ruled by petty princes and Machiavellian cabals. Sure, the land is safe from magical intrusion or Lords of Chaos, but without a true leader, the people have languished and the land has fallen into disorder. The Gemworld doesn't need a impersonal mystical force... it needs a princess.
"Amethyst, once mortal, feels the pain of her world, but is forbidden from interfering. She's a goddess now, and these matters are below her purview. Besides, there's no going back to the way things were...
"Or is there?"
From that point, however, the series loses its purported thematic overtones and delievers a fairly standard, if well-characterized, fantasy story.
On earth, a mysterious amethyst pendant is delivered to the college dormitory room of Amy Schott and her roommate Hana. Amy dreams of being taken away from the dull mundane world. She lives her life as a cynical rebellion against anything expected of her, much to the exasperation of her far-better-adjusted roommate. When the spirit of Amethyst calls through the pendant for someone to travel to Gemworld and take up the mantle as Princess of the Amethyst realm... well, she goes with Hana, actually.
Dorman's chosen heroine Hana Araneo is a true millennial girl. She's neither disenfranchised nor disillusioned, and wants to make something of her life. She's a DJ at the college radio station and president of the Students for Environmental Action. She doesn't want to leave everything behind for swords and sorcery... but neither can she turn from an honest request for her help.
Hana travels to the Gemworld, where her guide, Gareth of the house of Opal, is a dedicated-if-a-bit-puppydoggish servant of the old ways. Together they journey through the amethyst lands to find the garden where the old Amethyst, still a statue, waits. On the way, they are hounded by brigands and thugs working for Brademagus Amethyst, the current ruler of the House of Amethyst.
Meanwhile, assassins from the Gemworld have followed Opal's trail to earth... where they burst through to our world and attack Amy, thinking her to be the one chosen to bring back Amethyst. (Of course, Amy is happy to point out that, damn it, she really should be!) She is rescued by a roguish figure from the Gemworld, the "world's greatest thief," who calls himself The Carnelian. (If he is connected to the Carnelian of the original series, he doesn't say, and the question is never resolved.) He tries to hide Amy and protect her from the people sent after her. They most definitely do not fall in love. In the end, of course, The Carnelian loses Amy to Brademagus' men through no fault of his own... and significant fault of hers.
Hana finally comes to the garden of Amethyst, and there, she and the goddess are finally able to speak. The mortal rulers of the Gemworld have turned from serving their people to seeking their own gratification. A movement known as "The Clarity" has taken root amongst the rich and powerful, espousing selfish gain over service, control over compassion. The land needs a voice to speak against this... not a goddess to pay lip service to and ignore. Amethyst asks Hana to be this, to join with her and become the Gemworld's princess again.
And Hana, grounded woman of principle that she is, cannot turn from an honest request for help.
Once more the beautiful and magical princess, Amethyst/Hana heads to Castle Amethyst to reclaim it from Brademagus. Unfortunately, Brademagus has foreseen this, and finally captured Hana's roommate Amy. It's a classic confrontation: "You can't stop me... I have your friend captive!" Except that Amy's more than happy to be captured and Hana isn't interested in defeating Brademagus... she wants to reclaim the people's soul from him. Her words are backed up both by magic and principles, and in the face of it, even Brademagus recants his path. (It's enough saccharine to make Amy vomit, as she repeatedly and loudly points out. Always the cynic, that Amy.)
Opal and The Carnelian help with the transfer of power, and both offer to assist Amethyst in her goal to lead the Gemworld away from the Clarity. Hana promises to return when she can, and the two girls return to earth, to school, and to reality.
The best bit of dialogue in the book comes with the last panel.
Hana: "What do you have against happy endings?"
Amy: "They make the next ending that much more likely to suck."
The original Amethyst is, at its core concept, a story of an earth girl who becomes a princess. To a thirteen year old, that's a great fairy tale. To Vertigo's more postmodern audience, that's a cliché. While Dorman worked to play with that expectation and give the readers an Amethyst they didn't expect, her background in young adult fiction made itself shown. Rather than being snappy and self-referential like the college-aged Vertigo fans might have responded to, the story only punctured classic fantasy adventure so far as a teenager's capacity for satire.
The best aspect of the series was Dorman's use of Hana's radio program as a way of narrating the series. Her college radio show, "The Prismatic Eclectica," was a recurring sidebar where she reflected on her adventures through song and metaphor... which Dorman used to both emphasize "chapters" and lay down a soundtrack to give the book a musical beat, much like Chynna Clugston-Major would later do in her Blue Monday series for Oni Press.
Admittedly, this miniseries was really a platform for a future Amethyst series, being of the set-things-up, not the knock-things-down kind of story. Unfortunately, with the critical disregard for the series (not so much hostile as uninterested) and the licensing debacle that ended with editor Corbois' departure from DC Comics, Amethyst failed to live long enough to make it to today's TokyoPop-driven young female market that it was unintentionally aimed at.
<center><hr width=75%></center>
Read the column Kurt Busiek called "imaginative and clever," and "It's not just how funny the Chimerical Comix listings are than makes them work so well ... it's how close they come to being utterly believable." Click here (http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=339) to read more Chimerical Comix!
Before you waste a lot of time driving store to store to track down this week's featured title, please read the introduction to this piece to make sure you've gotten the joke. We also sincerely warn you not to buy any Chimerical Marvel titles online, no matter how nice the seller seems.
Marvel Comics and their characters, stories and situations are (c) and (tm) Marvel Comics. Existent Marvel Comics creators and editorial staff are real people, and therefore (c) and (tm) themselves and are used here as a fictional depiction or personality parody. Non-existent Marvel Comics creators and editorial staff are entirely fictional characters and any similarities to persons living or dead are accidental and coincidental. CHIMERICAL MARVEL is a satire and/or parody (depending on the week) and not intended maliciously, but out of love. I love you, Harry S. Truman.
Intro by Jim Lemoine, jimlemoine@comixfan.cjb.net
Of the many columns that have graced the pages of ComiX-Fan over the years, Chimerical Comix was always one of my very favorites. Where else could you find write-ups on the epic Secret Wars Zero limited series, the short-lived Power Pack: One Pack, A Day mature readers title, the classic Beware... the Phantom of the Opera! horror mag, or the long sixties and seventies run of Superman's Boss, Perry White? Nowhere, that's where. You could only find them in the Chimerical Comix column, because the aforementioned books (and many others) only existed in the incredibly fertile imagination of the column's author, Douglass Barre - the writer of Image's Defiance and Mythstalkers series.
I do admit to some bias - I know Doug personally, and he's a heck of a great guy. Creative, witty, kind to small animals (usually)... and the list goes on. He introduced me to Amber, Amethyst, and Allred's Atomics - and we haven't even gotten to the second letter of the alphabet. He wrote a lot of the best dialog in X-Assault (about which the less said, the better), and was personally responsible for some of the game's coolest moments. His Mysthstalkers series from Image Comics was a personal favorite for showing a slightly different take on the kind of mystical, irreverent Victorian graphic adventure that was so trendy a year or two ago. A comic store clerk, a comic book writer, and a loving father, I've rarely met people with a greater imagination (or, for that matter, greater love of the comic book medium).
These days... well, Doug's been better. Not long after the birth of his second child and the hiatus of Mythstalkers, Doug's been in the hospital for several weeks with severe pancreatitis. He's been in and out of ICU, in and out of consciousness. Some days he's doing great - some days it looks like he may not make it. While I personally choose to believe that he will pull through this, it's hard not to contemplate how much the world would miss if he wasn't around. The love his wife would miss, the father his parents would miss, and the simply outstanding writer that comic fans would miss.
As I was digging through my old ComiX-Fan Archives, I found a lost gem written by Doug - the never-before-published Chimerical Comix #16: Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld. Below, ComiX-Fan is proud to present this column, the work of a somewhat twisted but undeniably genius comic lover.
If you're the praying type, Doug's family would definitely appreciate the support. If you're not the praying type, then please take a moment to think of a fantastic writer and great guy who's in pretty bad shape right now. But regardless, enjoy the below nugget of DC-inspired wizardry, and let's all hope that we see more work from Doug's pen soon!
AMETHYST, PRINCESS OF GEMWORLD #1-4 (1996, Vertigo)
In 1996, DC was sitting pretty. The travails of Marvel's bankruptcy had left that company creatively strained. Over at DC, however, in the dark fantasy ghetto known as Vertigo, series like Sandman (soon to end) and Preacher (just getting its legs) were impressing the industry and garnering both critical attention and trade paperback sales. One of the modest successes over at Vertigo was the Neil Gaiman-created (but other-writer-sustained) young boy fantasy adventure, The Books of Magic. This series followed the adventures of Tim Hunter, boy wizard, as he faced magical (and often, admittedly, surreal and/or nonlinear) adventures.
Somewhere along the line, however, new Vertigo editor Genevieve Corbois decided that if Boy Adventure was so well represented in their line, that Girl Adventure was simply a necessity. To that end, she recruited novelist Traci Dorman to attempt to revive the old DC property Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld. Unfortunately, since the original series, the Amethyst character had become somewhat... disembodied and impersonal, having turned into a statue/goddess. Dorman, known mostly for her young adult series "Yesterworld," submitted the following fix (reprinted from the original proposal, available at her website www.tracidorman.com):
"The realms of the Gemworld are not what they once were. The ruling houses have degenerated into fiefdoms, ruled by petty princes and Machiavellian cabals. Sure, the land is safe from magical intrusion or Lords of Chaos, but without a true leader, the people have languished and the land has fallen into disorder. The Gemworld doesn't need a impersonal mystical force... it needs a princess.
"Amethyst, once mortal, feels the pain of her world, but is forbidden from interfering. She's a goddess now, and these matters are below her purview. Besides, there's no going back to the way things were...
"Or is there?"
From that point, however, the series loses its purported thematic overtones and delievers a fairly standard, if well-characterized, fantasy story.
On earth, a mysterious amethyst pendant is delivered to the college dormitory room of Amy Schott and her roommate Hana. Amy dreams of being taken away from the dull mundane world. She lives her life as a cynical rebellion against anything expected of her, much to the exasperation of her far-better-adjusted roommate. When the spirit of Amethyst calls through the pendant for someone to travel to Gemworld and take up the mantle as Princess of the Amethyst realm... well, she goes with Hana, actually.
Dorman's chosen heroine Hana Araneo is a true millennial girl. She's neither disenfranchised nor disillusioned, and wants to make something of her life. She's a DJ at the college radio station and president of the Students for Environmental Action. She doesn't want to leave everything behind for swords and sorcery... but neither can she turn from an honest request for her help.
Hana travels to the Gemworld, where her guide, Gareth of the house of Opal, is a dedicated-if-a-bit-puppydoggish servant of the old ways. Together they journey through the amethyst lands to find the garden where the old Amethyst, still a statue, waits. On the way, they are hounded by brigands and thugs working for Brademagus Amethyst, the current ruler of the House of Amethyst.
Meanwhile, assassins from the Gemworld have followed Opal's trail to earth... where they burst through to our world and attack Amy, thinking her to be the one chosen to bring back Amethyst. (Of course, Amy is happy to point out that, damn it, she really should be!) She is rescued by a roguish figure from the Gemworld, the "world's greatest thief," who calls himself The Carnelian. (If he is connected to the Carnelian of the original series, he doesn't say, and the question is never resolved.) He tries to hide Amy and protect her from the people sent after her. They most definitely do not fall in love. In the end, of course, The Carnelian loses Amy to Brademagus' men through no fault of his own... and significant fault of hers.
Hana finally comes to the garden of Amethyst, and there, she and the goddess are finally able to speak. The mortal rulers of the Gemworld have turned from serving their people to seeking their own gratification. A movement known as "The Clarity" has taken root amongst the rich and powerful, espousing selfish gain over service, control over compassion. The land needs a voice to speak against this... not a goddess to pay lip service to and ignore. Amethyst asks Hana to be this, to join with her and become the Gemworld's princess again.
And Hana, grounded woman of principle that she is, cannot turn from an honest request for help.
Once more the beautiful and magical princess, Amethyst/Hana heads to Castle Amethyst to reclaim it from Brademagus. Unfortunately, Brademagus has foreseen this, and finally captured Hana's roommate Amy. It's a classic confrontation: "You can't stop me... I have your friend captive!" Except that Amy's more than happy to be captured and Hana isn't interested in defeating Brademagus... she wants to reclaim the people's soul from him. Her words are backed up both by magic and principles, and in the face of it, even Brademagus recants his path. (It's enough saccharine to make Amy vomit, as she repeatedly and loudly points out. Always the cynic, that Amy.)
Opal and The Carnelian help with the transfer of power, and both offer to assist Amethyst in her goal to lead the Gemworld away from the Clarity. Hana promises to return when she can, and the two girls return to earth, to school, and to reality.
The best bit of dialogue in the book comes with the last panel.
Hana: "What do you have against happy endings?"
Amy: "They make the next ending that much more likely to suck."
The original Amethyst is, at its core concept, a story of an earth girl who becomes a princess. To a thirteen year old, that's a great fairy tale. To Vertigo's more postmodern audience, that's a cliché. While Dorman worked to play with that expectation and give the readers an Amethyst they didn't expect, her background in young adult fiction made itself shown. Rather than being snappy and self-referential like the college-aged Vertigo fans might have responded to, the story only punctured classic fantasy adventure so far as a teenager's capacity for satire.
The best aspect of the series was Dorman's use of Hana's radio program as a way of narrating the series. Her college radio show, "The Prismatic Eclectica," was a recurring sidebar where she reflected on her adventures through song and metaphor... which Dorman used to both emphasize "chapters" and lay down a soundtrack to give the book a musical beat, much like Chynna Clugston-Major would later do in her Blue Monday series for Oni Press.
Admittedly, this miniseries was really a platform for a future Amethyst series, being of the set-things-up, not the knock-things-down kind of story. Unfortunately, with the critical disregard for the series (not so much hostile as uninterested) and the licensing debacle that ended with editor Corbois' departure from DC Comics, Amethyst failed to live long enough to make it to today's TokyoPop-driven young female market that it was unintentionally aimed at.
<center><hr width=75%></center>
Read the column Kurt Busiek called "imaginative and clever," and "It's not just how funny the Chimerical Comix listings are than makes them work so well ... it's how close they come to being utterly believable." Click here (http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=339) to read more Chimerical Comix!
Before you waste a lot of time driving store to store to track down this week's featured title, please read the introduction to this piece to make sure you've gotten the joke. We also sincerely warn you not to buy any Chimerical Marvel titles online, no matter how nice the seller seems.
Marvel Comics and their characters, stories and situations are (c) and (tm) Marvel Comics. Existent Marvel Comics creators and editorial staff are real people, and therefore (c) and (tm) themselves and are used here as a fictional depiction or personality parody. Non-existent Marvel Comics creators and editorial staff are entirely fictional characters and any similarities to persons living or dead are accidental and coincidental. CHIMERICAL MARVEL is a satire and/or parody (depending on the week) and not intended maliciously, but out of love. I love you, Harry S. Truman.