Posts by David Jón Fuller

Slash and burn: former Gunner’s solo album scorches

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SLASH / Apocalyptic Love (Universal)

MUSIC fans may well wonder why a band like Guns N’ Roses gets inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, when the lineup that made them famous hasn’t played together in roughly 20 years.

Then you hear what just one of them can do on an album like Apocalyptic Love.

Founding GNR guitarist Slash’s riffs and solos are as nimble as ever, and crackle with the energy of a musician still out to top everything he’s done before.

Slash’s second solo album kicks into high gear with “Standing in the Sun,” a melodic thumper full of the electric boogie that made GNR classic “Paradise City” such a crowd-pleaser. “Halo” boils over with sharp hooks and blistering lead guitar, and “We Will Roam” chugs along with radio-friendly riffs and an anthemic chorus.

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Werewolf Wednesday: Catherine Lundoff’s Silver Moon

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If you think the modern werewolf tale is a thinly-veiled metaphor for raging hormones, Catherine Lundoff would say you’re right.  Just maybe not be the ones you’re thinking of.

Lycanthropy in pop culture has become so attached to the adolescent (I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Teen Wolf were early examples) that we ignore other times of change in the human body — such as the transition from middle age to one’s golden years.

But in Silver Moon, Lundoff eschews that obsession with youth by focusing on women “of a certain age.”

“I got the original idea for menopausal werewolves from watching the werewolf film Ginger Snaps, which features teenaged protagonists,” she says. “It’s also funny and political and very grim, and I wanted to do something a bit like that, except with a protagonist who was definitely not a teenager.”

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Welcome to the new site

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I promise, there will be more to come soon.  For those of you migrating over from the previous site for As You Were, you’ll find all the articles and comments originally posted there are now here.  If you’ve never been, welcome to the site — hope you enjoy what you see here, and more is on the way soon — blog tours, interviews, and book reviews. Thanks for stopping by!

Thunder God Thursday: Thor hits the funnybooks

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Artist Oliver Coipel revamped Thor’s look for Marvel Comic’s reboot of the series, written by J. Michael Straczynski, in 2007.

Author’s note: a few things have changed since this was written. First, there was the resurrection of Thor by Marvel Comics in the acclaimed run on the new title by J. Michael Straczynski, alluded to in the comments from Tom Brevoort below. Also, there were new incarnations of Norse myths in independent comics, such as Grant Gould’s The Wolves of Odin.

And one other thing, what was that?  Oh yeah, Marvel’s Thor is going to be a female character now, which has some people excited (nothing wrong with a more diverse Marvel lineup) and some people upset (because they forget Marvel’s Thor has also been a frog and a horse-faced alien, among other incarnations).

Add to that, two blockbuster movies starring Chris Hemsworth as the titular thunder god, who also featured in The Avengers movie and in its sequel, The Age of Ultron, due out in 2015.  If you want to see how the god of thunder went from medieval god to modern superman, read on…

The Modern Edda: Norse myths in comics

Though their names leap out at us from the days of the week, Norse gods were relatively obscure until recently. Opera figures of Siegfried and Brunnhild were one tentative step into this pagan world, but it took another form of entertainment to plunge a new generation into the old myths: comic books.

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Authors put the bite on vampires and their ways

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We’ve all heard enough about vampires recently.

Everyone knows they look like frumpy old ladies, overjoyed that an aging population means they fit in nowadays. Or that they keep humans penned up as food, and having sex with a human is tantamount to bestiality. Or that when a vampire slayer starts killing them off, they go right to the police.

Wait, this isn’t sounding too much like Twilight or True Blood — but they’re some of the ideas introduced in the new Canadian anthology Evolve, edited by Nancy Kilpatrick.

The Montreal-based Kilpatrick is no stranger to the genre, having written numerous dark fantasy and horror novels herself. She previously edited the erotic vampire collection Love Bites, and co-edited Edge’s horror anthology Tesseracts 13.

Tesseracts 13 was the first horror title published by Edge, a predominantly sci-fi and fantasy publisher in Calgary. The success of that book prompted this new all-vampire anthology.

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She did it — now she needs to hang on

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Well, many of us predicted it: Rachel Deering managed to get to $20,000 in pledges for her Kickstarter campaign to fund the remaining five issues of her “lesbian werewolf epic,” Anathema.  A huge and hearty congratulations to her.

Now comes the hard part.  I don’t mean the writing, lettering and publishing, which Rachel will undertake (though the publishing duties have now been picked up by Comix Tribe — a huge coup for Rachel).  No, the challenge now is to ensure the total stays above that mark until the campaign closes on April 30. If any pledges are reduced, bringing the total below $20,000, none of the money is collected.

That’s already happened once — for a very understandable reason. One prospective donor who had pledged $1,000 reduced it to $45 upon learning he would soon have a baby to support. Great news for the donor, on which Rachel and other pledgers offered congratulations; but a snag in the fundraising all the same.

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