The grisly truth about 'teacher voice'

Not even wildlife is a match for “teacher voice.”

A bear in North Carolina was recently caught on video retreating from a second-story porch as a retired English teacher deployed the well-known tactic.

Speaking from the safety of the opposite side of a patio door, the teacher told the bear: “Get down from there right now! Go! Go! Go! Go! You get down from my porch right now! What do you think you’re doing on my porch?”

And the bear, following in the footsteps, er, pawprints, of generations of misbehaving students, shinnied down the side of the condo and slinked off, accompanied by a chorus of “I see you!” from above.

In a later interview, the teacher, Debbie Tomlinson, extolled the power of her teacher voice with the ursine intruder. But, she said, it's a tone she seldom needed in the classroom. “I had wonderful students,” she told "Inside Edition."

Since I grew up hearing my share of teacher voice, my sympathies are with the bear. I wasn’t the worst student, but I wasn’t the best, either. My usual role, the kid who never threw spitballs but instead lobbed an ongoing commentary about the lesson, sometimes led to negative teacher attention.

An elementary school teacher heard my little friend and me coming back from recess, reciting some of George Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on TV.

I wriggled out of punishment because I wasn’t saying any of the Great Unmentionables at the moment her bionic ears singled out the expletives from the rest of the bleating herd. Had she tuned in two seconds earlier, it would have been a different story.

As it was, she ushered my unfortunate classmate to the principal’s office, accompanied by a teacher-voice greatest hits collection of “What did you say? I can’t believe my ears! Did you say what I thought you said?”

He looked as abashed as that poor bear.

On another occasion, a priest offered a variation of teacher voice during confession.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I began, and proceeded to unload sins I had squirreled away for the past six months. One was using creative swear words (you can see a theme here).

The priest asked for examples, which I thought was odd. But so is kneeling in a dark closet, so what the heck, I shared a few of my verbal concoctions.

“You remind me of myself when I was younger,” he said, laughing. “Once, I put an extension cord inside a copy of the Electric Bible and asked my mom where I could plug it in. You sound like a good kid. What are you, 16 or 17?”

“No, Father. I’m 10.”

“You’re what?”

Apparently, there are age categories for certain sins, and what can be written off as “boys being boys” when you’re driving and shaving is serious stuff when you’re still playing with G.I. Joes and chewing Bazooka bubblegum.

At any rate, the good-natured comments stopped. Instead, out came the priest’s teacher voice, unmistakable in tone while still maintaining a volume suitable for church. No easy trick, that. After a strident lecture that would have shamed a grizzly, he rained down an exceptionally heavy penance of Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

Well, the great wheel of karma has turned, as it does for saints and sinners alike, and I am now a teacher myself. Like Ms. Tomlinson, I have wonderful students and almost never use my teacher voice.

But on the few occasions when I have, it has been met with mixed results.

Once, I attempted to scold a room of talking students, probably for the first time the entire year. The sound of Angry Teacher, as opposed to Goofy Teacher, Boring Teacher or Lecturing Teacher, was so novel that all heads turned in my direction.

“What are you doing, Mr. Schillig?” one of them asked me, incredulously.

I stopped, looked at their confused faces and admitted, “I don’t know.”

Then we all started laughing.

It was no animal-slinking-off-the-porch moment, but I survived the lesson and the day, in much the same way I’ve survived post-recess swear-a-thons, awkward church moments and my entire professional career.

Barely.

At least nobody filmed it.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Star Trek: Debt of Honor Turns Thirty

 Originally released in 1992, Star Trek: Debt of Honor (DC Comics) is a stellar example of how to adapt licensed material. 

Chris Claremont does the Frank Miller/Elektra trick of incorporating new elements into the Trek franchise's backstory. The writer makes it feel natural and inevitable that James T. Kirk's career has been shadowed by both a half-Romulan, half-Vulcan beauty and an alien race of serpentine baddies. I was reminded of how seamlessly Miller did this with Elektra in the Daredevil series, making it seem as though she had been part of the hero's story all along, despite showing up well into his second decade in print. 

The femme fatale here is T'Cel, whose life intersects with Kirk's at various key points. Claremont has done his homework and manages to include flashbacks to the original Trek timeline throughout. Readers get a story of Kirk before he became a captain, one during the original five-year mission, and others situated at various points within the first four films. 

My guess is that if I knew more Star Trek history, I'd catch many more little character bits and callbacks. As it is, I tip my hat to Claremont for giving every member of the original crew moments to shine in this graphic novel. He's also captured the voices of each character, along with providing a plausible reason for the Enterprise crew to get back together one last time. Again. 

The whole adventure is illustrated superbly by Adam Hughes and Karl Story, who make all the characters look like they've stepped off the small and large screen. A few two-page spreads, particularly of the Enterprise, are pure fan service in all the best ways. Just gorgeous. The Dave Dorman cover is lagniappe. 

If I have one complaint, it's this: The creative team does such an exemplary job of setting the stage for an awesome galactic adventure, but the adventure itself feels somewhat rushed and uneventful by comparison. The last third of the book, while still engaging, doesn't live up to earlier expectations. 

Nonetheless, this is spectacular stuff. Claremont's legacy is forever wedded to the X-Men, but here he proves he would have made a formidable writer for a Star Trek series, as well. He, Hughes, and Story have created a high-stakes installment in the franchise that feels just as essential as any of the movies. 

IDW has released a reprint in recent years, but I found an original hardcopy for less than the cost of a single issue of many modern comics. I started reading a digital version, but the panel layouts were so innovative that I had a tough time following it on a tablet. This is one book worth finding in print. 

Recommended for casual and hardcore Trekkers alike. 

Shredded cheddar

Getting rid of damaged money is a lot like trying to throw away a garbage can: You can’t get anybody to take it.

I learned this, much to my chagrin, after numerous attempts last week to unload a $1 and $5 bill that my dog shredded. Based on the forensic evidence, the mutt liberated the currency from an open pocket in my daughter’s duffel bag, where it was stored near a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, the canine’s true target.

The dog has had a hankering for gum since she was a pup, and even in her dotage, we sometimes find shredded wrappers littering the floor. This time, two dead presidents had the misfortune of getting in her way, and along with the optimistic yellow of the Wrigley’s wrapper, I discovered the grim greens of shredded dough.

The story could have (and maybe should have) ended there, with me throwing away the money. But just as “something there is that does not love a wall,” something there is in me hates to waste money, especially when the wasting is literal.

So with a little tape, a lot of patience, and the theme from “The Six-Million Dollar Man” ringing in my ears (“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him…better than he was before…better, stronger, faster”), I set about to reconstruct United States Currency.

What I ended up with was more Frankenstein monster than Bionic Man. George and Abe were patchwork quilts of their former selves, their eyes set crookedly, their jaws lacking the traditional square of presidential authority. The once Great Seal leaned precipitously, like a building in the final throes of an earthquake. The bald eagle was more crooked than proud.

Worst, I realized the dog was digesting a large piece of both bills – a missing pyramidal shape in the bottom left. Time might yield these up, but there is a limit to even my thriftiness.

I remembered a kindly parish priest in my childhood who used to give me 50 cents by tearing a dollar in half, and that I spent that money just as I would two quarters. So I had hope that somewhere out there, somebody would accept these stunted remnants of two of our greatest presidents.

I tried first at my daughter’s soccer game, but had the bad luck to try the transaction with a ticket taker who once worked at a bank. “The serial number is missing on both these,” she said. “They have to have at least that.”

It was the monetary equivalent of a yellow card before I was even in the door, but I didn’t necessarily believe the information.

I tried to pass the money at lunch the following day, but the result was the same. Later in the week, I started folding the money carefully to hide the missing chunk, but as soon as cashiers unfolded it, I was busted. I even magnanimously offered to let them keep the change, hoping they would tuck the money into the register before the gaping hole where the serial number should be became noticeable, but no luck.

I started to scheme about how I could unload the money. Vending machines were out; no way would the currency pass muster there. I could leave the bills as a tip in a restaurant, but that felt wrong, especially if the service was good. I could give it to some Little Leaguer collecting at the door of one of the four dozen pharmacies in Alliance, but those kids all look so doe-eyed and innocent I would feel like Jack the Ripper.

My wildest scheme was to place it carefully in a public restroom or trashcan so that the denominations would be easily seen by passersby, one of whom would surely take the bait and rid me forever of the curse of the maimed money. But messing around in public restrooms like that is imprudent and likely unsanitary, and my cries of “Free at last! Free at last!” as an unwitting sucker took the bait likely would give me away, anyway.

A quick check with the U.S. Treasury Department reveals that its Office of Currency Standards will accept damaged currency, and that it will “reimburse the full face value if clearly more than one-half of the original note remains.”

My money meets that criterion. However, the feds also write, “Unfortunately, it is impossible to predict how long this procedure will take, due to varying workloads. However, they make every effort to speed up shipments when possible.”

Which is the government’s way of saying you will likely never see your cash again. Besides, you’re not supposed to mail money anyway. Do I insure the six bucks, even when it’s not really six bucks anymore? And what about the cost of postage and the aggravation of waiting on line at the post office?

No, I’ll keep my tattered currency for a while longer, I think, and keep trying to pawn it off locally. Somewhere, somebody who has never heard of Treasury Department regulations is dropping a drawer into a cash register, and that person is my lawful prey.


This column predates 2009, but I don't know by how much. Maybe a lot. The dog that chewed the money has been gone for a long time, and my daughter hasn't played soccer since high school. But how to dispose of damaged money is still a concern, right? 

Merry Christmas from the stars

It was a Christmas gift the world had to wait seven months to open.

Launched on Dec. 25, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope started to deliver only last week when President Joe Biden shared the first image from the NASA project.

The picture was awesome, the photographic equivalent of time travel. It pulls back the cosmic curtain to show the universe far closer to its purported time of origin.

It’s almost too much to process. Light from 13.7 billion years in the past, entire galaxies, each one brimming with stars, around which could be countless planets, at least some likely containing life, all captured in one image.

But the James Webb wasn’t finished yet.

The next day, NASA revealed images the telescope had captured from Jupiter, including a shot of Europa, one of the gas giant’s many moons.

Jupiter is practically close enough in astronomical terms that we could drop by and borrow a cup of sugar, a piddling 365 million miles away at its closest point and 601 million miles away at its farthest.

When talking about space, numbers become mind-blowing really fast. The James Webb telescope is a million miles from Earth. That’s the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe – our globe, that is – 40 times. A vast distance, but still comprehensible.

What’s completely outside my ability to visualize is how far light has traveled in that first Webb image – 80 billion trillion miles. (Yes, billion trillion.) When I tried to determine how many times around the Earth that was, I’m pretty sure I broke Google’s calculator.

In a week of other news that was mostly terrible, the telescope’s success was the balm the world needed, a tall, cool glass of water on a scorching day.

To paraphrase “Casablanca,” the problems of three people – or, in this case, seven billion – don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy universe. There is so much more out there, infinitely more, which helps put our own challenges into perspective. If we can succeed with something as complex as the James Webb telescope, then surely we can yadda-yadda-yadda, insert transitory or intractable problems of the day/week/month that need solving.

That’s not meant to sound dismissive. But it is a gigantic reset switch of sorts, a reminder that our own obstacles pale in the face of a limitless universe and are solvable when people work cooperatively and not competitively.

An article on space.com details the years of engineering and testing that went into the telescope’s creation, along with the many challenges of deployment, including a mirror that “collapses like origami for the launch” and then later unfolds in space, and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. More than 300 “single-point-of-failure” glitches could have ended the mission.

Yet it’s up there, orbiting the sun, transmitting images of incredible clarity, helping scientists learn more about our own solar system and the universe itself.

At $10 billion, some may quibble with the price tag. However, by my math, it cost only 73 cents for each year we peeled back like an onion to peer into the past. That’s less than most readers paid for today’s newspaper.

It’s also a bargain for a Christmas gift that keeps on giving.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

OOBEs and Aliens

Alien abductions might not be that alien.

New research making the rounds on the Internet claims that people can be “trained” to meet extraterrestrials while in a lucid dreaming state. How much credence you give such information depends on how long you’re able to suppress a giggle when you learn this study comes from the OOBE Research Center in Los Angeles.

OOBE, which sounds like a term a kid might use for something he fished out his nose or the chorus of a really bad ’80s rap song (Oo, Bebe Bebe), really means “out-of body experience.” As in, “I drank a bottle of tequila and had an OOBE.”

You know your crackpot scientific theory has really arrived when it has its own research center in L.A. I can only hope it’s not federally funded, like all those studies where researchers spend years watching kids sit on couches and stuff their mouths with potato chips before announcing that, wonder of wonders, inactivity and junk food make children fat.

Out-of-body experiences, according to the OOBEs at the OOBE Research Center, are just one part of a larger phenomenon called “the phase,” which includes lucid dreaming and astral projection. The OOBE prefers “phase” because the term has not been corrupted by, in the words of its website, “strange people with strange views on life.”

This might also explain why trash collectors prefer to be known as “sanitation engineers.”

Anyway, the OOBEs put volunteers into “lucid dream” training to show them how they can control the contents of their dreams. After only three days, volunteers were able to insert themselves into vivid situations where they met and traveled with aliens.

The bottom line, then, is that those stories of humans cruising along the Milky Way (not to mention the Snickers) with aliens in their late-model flying saucers are products of human imagination. I, for one, am glad they cleared that up.

Just for kicks, I decided to try a lucid dreaming/out-of-body/phase experiment for myself. So before bed one night, I drank some warm milk, watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” listened to Holst’s “The Planets,” and re-read my well-thumbed copy of “Alien Visitors and the Humans Who Love Them” until my eyes grew heavy.

Before I knew it, I was looking down at my slumbering body, passed out there on the couch. (Memo to self: Cut toenails.) I floated through the wall and checked out the kitchen, where I harassed the cats for a few minutes — they can’t see astral projections, but they can smell them (evidence suggests APs smell like a mix of dead rats and KFC original recipe) — and then drifted into the back yard. I thought it was safest there, as I was shielded from the prying eyes of any psychic neighbors who might wonder why my astral projection was naked. (Second memo to self: Be sure to wear clothes when travelling between states of consciousness.)

Despite the fact that it was nighttime, no aliens made themselves known, even when I drifted over to the new Chipotle, where half the city’s been hanging out. Depressed, I returned home to my body.

The next morning, I noticed a handful of political ads stuck to the front door that hadn’t been there the day before. Apparently, my subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference between “politician” and “alien.”

Or maybe they’re more alike than we think. Nobody believes what most people say about aliens, and nobody believes what most politicians say. One is a wild figment of the imagination, and the other says things that are. Furthermore, they both tend to disappear at approximately the same time: aliens right after Halloween, and politicians one week later.

Maybe they travel in the same mother ship, after all.


Originally published in 2011. 

Where are all the kids?

Originally published in 2014.

Dusk on a residential street. Lightning bugs pulse first here, then there. A lawn mower whirrs far in the distance as somebody races darkness, hoping to find not too many missed lines the next morning. Otherwise, quiet. Too quiet.

Where are all the kids?

It’s something I ask my wife more and more frequently on our evening walks. There are no kids. No kids catching lightning bugs. No kids playing hopscotch. No kids riding bicycles up and down driveways or wrestling in yards or turning cartwheels or.

Or anything.

I feel more and more like a character in a Ray Bradbury story, strolling down some woebegone street in a slice of small-town America that has been scooped up in its entirety and re-planted on Mars. Everything perfectly replicated — houses, garages, shrubs, roads and stop lights.

Everything but kids.

I know this city has children. I see buses filled with them on weekday afternoons during the school year. I see their photos in the paper and on friends’ Facebook pages. I see them in malls and restaurants.

I just don’t see them outside. Not at dusk, not anytime.

When I mention this to other people, I always get the same answer. “Oh, when I was a kid, Mom pushed me out the door in the morning and only let me back in for lunch and dinner and when the streetlights came on. We didn’t sit in front of the TV all day or play video games or text on phones like kids these days.”

This is the answer no matter the age of the respondent, including people who were just kids themselves a few years ago, when older people said the same thing about their generation.

In my own youth, my sister and I played outside a lot, but I’m not fooling myself — I was never an outdoorsy-type. The big difference between summer and winter was that I could read a book on the porch in the summer instead of on the couch in the winter.

Still, we went outside. We set up Slip N’ Slides and got sunburned and played basketball and blew bubbles and built makeshift ramps for our bikes and just ran around.

Maybe parents don’t think it’s safe for kids to do that nowadays. Too many stories about too many creeps. Maybe in a lot of single-parent or two-income homes, kids have to come in early, even in the summer, and go to bed to get up before dawn the next day to be carted off to childcare. Maybe spontaneous play really has been replaced by more scripted scenarios — organized sports, playdates at the movies or crawling through plastic, yellow tubes that spill out into boxes of rubber balls at fast-food franchises.*

Or maybe kids really are content to stay indoors, even on beautiful early summer evenings, when dusk hangs in the air like a gauze curtain, and watch TV and play video games.

One house on our walking route, however, is like an oasis to my soul. There, kids are doing all the things that I expect to see kids do on a beautiful summer night. They’re skipping, yelling, playing catch, and doodling with chalk. They look dirty — the glorious kind of dirty that comes from lots of exercise and from finding worms in the drive after a hard rain, the wonderful kind of dirty that parents have to scrub off in the bathtub once the sun goes down.

But in the surrounding yards, nothing. Silence. The flickering of TV screens through picture windows, and uncaptured lightning bugs holding sway over all.

Where are all the kids?

*In 2022, I would add extreme heat to the list of reasons why children might not be outside as much. 

Zen and the Art of Car Maintenance

Originally published in October 2010: 

A flick of the wrist, three pumps, and it’s done.

Resetting the “check oil” light on my wife’s car is as simple as turning on the ignition (without starting the car) and depressing the accelerator three times. I do it after every oil change because either the technicians don’t know how, forget, or – in the words of that immortal scoundrel, Rhett Butler – don’t give a damn.

It doesn’t bother me, because resetting the oil light is one of just seven maintenance tasks I can perform on a car, and this is only if one stretches the definition of maintenance to include things like screwing on the gas cap after fueling.

I remember reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” many years ago and getting pretty into it, right up to the point where the author chides readers who operate motor vehicles without knowing how they work. My newly found inner calm went right out the window at that, along with my copy of the book.

America’s fascination with the automobile completely baffles me, as does its obsession with organized team sports. I see a car only in its most practical terms, as a means of conveyance and a place to store all the stuff that my wife would accidentally on purpose throw out if I brought into the house. This is why the backseat of my car has become a mini filing cabinet, home to mountains of paper that fade and yellow from the sun before being transferred to a more permanent home – the trunk.

Because I’ve been denied the gene that extends an aura of mystique to a hunk of steel, chrome and rubber, I’m a difficult customer in a dealership. The salesperson can yammer all day about a sleek chassis and clean lines, but all I’m likely to care about is the mileage and the radio. I have developed a little dog-and-pony show that involves kicking the tires, feigning interest in what lies under the hood, and asking about the flux capacitator, because the ability to travel through time is one of the few add-ons I would pay extra to receive.

Otherwise, cars don’t interest me much. I once went almost four years without changing the oil in a Chevy Nova. Every few months, I would just feed it a new can. That car cost me less money than any car since, and on all the others I’ve made a point to follow a more-or-less routine maintenance schedule. Coincidence or something more? You decide.

Among my other maintenance knowledge is the ability to change windshield wipers and add new washer fluid – in most cases. I say “most” because sometimes the maze of tubes, hoses, wires and such beneath the hood is nearly hypnotic, and I can lose my concentration staring into it, like little Rikki Tikki Tavi being mesmerized by the undulating cobra in that “Jungle Book” story by Kipling.

(Kipling always reminds me of an old cartoon showing a nerdy guy holding a book of the author’s work sitting next to a beautiful woman who looks at him archly and says something like, “You naughty boy, I never kipple on the first date.”)

If I keep my wits about me, I can usually figure out where to put the wiper fluid, just as I can usually decipher the arcane arrows on the arm of the windshield wiper that release the old blade and show how the new one snaps into place.

In this endeavor, I have a perfect track record of always changing blades in the middle of a torrential downpour or a snowstorm, an extra challenge that ups the ante on my stress level considerably.

This is where I could really use that copy of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Maybe I should buy a new one and keep it in the trunk.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

Memories of a 'muscle-seller'

I was talking over the weekend with a former co-worker who made an intriguing observation: Short-order cooking was one of the hardest jobs he’s ever had.

I thought about that for awhile. He and I worked together at Ponderosa Steakhouse decades ago, when Alliance had fewer restaurants, especially of the chain variety. With limited choices for steak along State Street, customers often ended up in one of two places: Bonanza on the west side, Ponderosa on the east.

Consequently, both restaurants were busy. At Ponderosa, it wasn’t uncommon to have a line of customers stretching from the cash register to the sidewalk outside.

Cooking shifts were marked by intense heat and cramped space. Above our heads fluttered a line of handwritten slips for T-bones, porterhouses, ribeyes and a handful of other cuts, all ordered to various degrees of doneness. (Medium rare, by the way, is meat the way nature intended. Other donenesses are either too bloody or too scorched.)

Ours was sweaty work with a quick turnaround. Customers had to have their meals delivered 12 minutes after they ordered it. Otherwise, they would gobble up too many profits from the all-you-could-eat salad buffet, sending the bean counters’ heads spinning.

I don’t disagree that short-order cooking is hard, but it is also satisfying in a way that almost no other job I’ve had since has been. This is because no matter how hot and sticky the shift, when it was over, it was really over.

I never went home agonizing that I’d ruined somebody’s meal. If I did, it was fixed on the spot with a new steak or a refund.

I never went home concerned about the next day. Somebody else was responsible for ordering food and supplies and creating the schedule. Those were their worries, not mine.

I never went home feeling like I needed to practice. Short-order cooking can be overwhelming, with hundreds of dollars of meat sizzling away at one time, but the mechanics are simple — flip, turn, flip, remove — with just enough nuance to keep it interesting.

As one moves further along in a career, regardless of the field, a consequence is a dwindling sense of freedom at the end of the day. When I was in sales, I was constantly agonizing over the next presentation, an occupational hazard of the profession. As a teacher, I’m always pondering lessons to improve and papers to grade. Even in the summer, when teachers allegedly work less – although I’ve seldom met such creatures, as most of us are still schlepping away at one job or another in the warm-weather months – I can’t turn it completely off.

From such standpoints, then, short-order cooking was one of the easiest jobs I’ve ever had. Not that I could still do it physically today, in my mid-50s, with the same reckless abandon.

Barbara Ehrenreich demonstrated this in “Nickel and Dimed,” the chronicle of her attempt to wind back the clock in middle age and work for both the same wages and at the same level of physicality as many in the hospitality industry.

She describes her brief waitressing experience as “the perfect storm” of filled tables and demanding customers, the particulars of the shift “lost in the fog of war.” She eventually walks out of a job in the middle of a shift, feeling “an overwhelming dank sense of failure.”

Another American writer, Jack London, reached a similar conclusion earlier in the 20thcentury when he wrote about “the colossal edifice of society,” with laborers at the bottom, offering “muscle, and muscle alone, to sell,” and “brain sellers” at the top. In the middle was a vast population of merchants, politicians and representatives of the people, selling footwear, manhood and trust, respectively.

“Shoes and trust and honor had a way of renewing themselves. They were imperishable stocks,” wrote London. “Muscle, on the other hand, did not renew.” He was disillusioned early in life by his attempts to scale the tower of capitalism through physical work alone (a common lament even today) and eventually turned to study. And then to socialism. Coincidentally, Ehrenreich, too, is a socialist.

I’m still mired in capitalism, myself, having experienced no London-like epiphany from my few years as a muscle seller.

All I can say is that I respect the hell out of all people who make their living through physical labor. If one small fringe benefit is to turn off thoughts of the workday from one shift to the next, then nobody should begrudge them.

My guess, however, is most workers don’t have that luxury, that plenty of other concerns rise to the forefront. My recollections of a carefree life as a so-called muscle seller likely stem from my age at the time. The biggest concern I had in my late teens was filling the gas tank and having money left over for concert tickets.

That cloud over the grill is more than just smoke and heat. Some of it is the haze of nostalgia.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Tarzan: The New Adventures

 This beauty showed up on my doorstep earlier this week, and what a fun volume it is. 

Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan: The New Adventures Volume 1 (Dark Horse) delivers exactly what the title promises — new stories of ERB's most famous creation, but definitely in the style of what has come before. 

The book offers the first two stories from the strip's continuity, previously available only to subscribers of ERB's website. Both are written by Roy Thomas, legendary scribe and editor for Marvel and DC Comics. The first story is illustrated by Thomas Grindberg, and the second by Benito Gallego. 

Since both are meant to replicate the charm of the full-color Sunday comics pages of yore, the pacing may surprise readers who expected a more traditional comic book. Most pages feature a succinct recap of what happened in the previous installment, a couple panels that advance the story incrementally, and a final panel with a cliffhanger or foreshadowing of the next chapter. 

Thomas does a good job of keeping the story rolling within these constraints, but I do wonder how readers found the pacing when seeing only one installment every week or even less frequently (Thomas notes in the intro that he and Grindberg struggled to keep to a schedule). 

The first story is a pretty typical lost-civilization plot that Tarzan has been involved in plenty of times in either the original novels or the many comics, movies, and TV shows that followed. Thomas gives Tarzan's mate, Jane, more to do than just getting kidnapped (a standard part of many Tarzan tales), although an abduction is central to this story, as well. 

Much of the first storyline appears to be checking off familiar beats of a Tarzan tale. Tantor the elephant? Check. Nkima the monkey? Check. Crocodiles, savage brutes, beautiful women pining away for the ape man from their thrones? Check, check, and check. 

And who can blame Thomas? Those are the aspects of ERB's storytelling that made Tarzan immensely popular in the pulps and continued to hold the character in good stead for most of the twentieth century. 

Grindberg lushly illustrates the proceedings in a style reminiscent of the great Tarzan artists of the past. The back cover of the book mentions Hal Foster, J. Allen St. John, Frank Frazetta, and John Buscema. Grindberg pays homage to all of them with expansive panels of jungle vegetation, the ruins of lost cities, and action action action. It's all intoxicating to experience. 

If the story gets a little cumbersome near the end with two lost civilizations, La of Opar, half-human brutes, and a Jane/Helen of Troy lookalike twist, it hardly matters because it's all so beautifully rendered and told with such sincerity.  

It's the second story where Thomas stretches creatively, giving readers a mash-up of Tarzan and the Leopard Men and Monster Men, the latter being a lesser-known ERB novel that does not feature Tarzan. Body horror and Tarzan don't generally mix, which is what makes this story fresher and more interesting than the first. 

Benito Gallego's artwork, while less flashy than Grindberg's, is nonetheless easier to follow in this format. His Tarzan owes a lot to the Buscema version from Marvel's 1970s series, but since that's one of the best of the comic-book Tarzans, it's fine. He does a good job of bringing to life the gorilleopard, the obligatory weird science experiment, which terrorizes the nearby village. 

Bonus points, too, for an unconventional ending that offers redemption and not just punishment. It was a surprise to read. 

A second volume of these website comics is scheduled for later this year. Based on how much I enjoyed this one, I look forward to more new tales starring everybody's favorite jungle lord. 

Bigfoot is the monster for our time

Bigfoot is having a moment in northeast Ohio.

Last month, the Small Town Monsters production company announced Monster Fest in downtown Canton for June 2023. While Bigfoot may share the billing with UFOs and ghosts, everybody knows the big, hairy guy is the real star.

Small Town Monsters has been making bank with Bigfoot since 2015 when company owner Seth Breedlove released “Minerva Monster.” The film explored a branch of the creature’s family tree that sprouted in Paris Township.

Since then, Breedlove has continued to document Bigfoot and other cryptids with several more films. Another will debut next June 3 during Monster Fest, according to a Canton Repository story.

Look, I love me a good Bigfoot yarn, something regular readers of this column know. If you grew up semi-rural in the 1970s, like I did, with a few trees somewhere on your property that an overactive imagination could stretch into a bonafide forest, then Bigfoot was as much a part of your formative years as corduroy pants and transistor radios.

Back then, I lapped up pseudo-scientific junk about giant man-apes like it was manna from hirsute heaven. I still have my dog-eared copy of “The Mysterious Monsters,” a tie-in to a corny movie that made the drive-in circuit in the mid-1970s.

Written by Robert and Frances Guenette, the book covers the holy trinity – Yeti, Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot him/itself. The first two intrigued me, but let’s be honest, I wasn’t going to the Himalayas or Scotland anytime soon (still haven’t). However, I did romp around in the woods, and it was just possible that a rogue Bigfoot was cagey enough to elude the razor-sharp senses and infallible tracking skills of my eight-year-old self.

As a kid, I played on a swing set that abutted a track of trees no self-respecting monster would have bothered to haunt, but I was certain a Bigfoot lived there, or at least visited on weekends. So powerful was this daydream that I used to practice drills, leaping off the swing and running for the house to see if I was fast enough to elude any Bigfoot that might lumber my way, looking for a scrawny kid to use as a combination Slim Jim and toothpick.

(I don’t know how fast was “fast enough,” but I must have convinced myself that I had a decent chance of survival because I kept going back to the swings.)

My Bigfoot obsession reached its apex with a two-part episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man,” where bionic Steve Austin (Lee Majors) met the creature, played by Andre the Giant. Another encounter later in the series crossed over with “The Bionic Woman” so that Lindsay Wagner could get in on the fun. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has nothing on this epic story of a robotic Bigfoot protecting an underground colony of space aliens while an earthquake looms. (Can you hear my eyes rolling?)

Anyway, over the years I left my obsession with Bigfoot behind, even when others didn’t. An area operation in the ’90s put a new wrinkle on the Bigfoot legend by trying to convince people that many Bigfoot encounters were traumatizing enough to spark amnesia, meaning it was possible to see Bigfoot but suppress the memory. So maybe we’ve all encountered one!

It’s this kind of wonkiness that has Bigfoot perfectly positioned for a contemporary comeback. Today, folks believe all sorts of bogus conspiracy theories without a shred of evidence. Large hominids living undetected in North America and elsewhere – despite infrared technology, an absence of bodies and scat, and every camper and hunter carrying a cellphone with a camera – seem quaint compared to PizzaGate, replacement theory and Italian satellites that change votes for Joe Biden. (Where’s Steve Austin when we need him?)

Some people just want to believe in something – anything! – so badly that they’ll do it despite (or maybe because of) a lack of evidence. Not for nothing is “confirmation bias” the psychological phenomenon of the 21st century.

None of which should keep anybody from enjoying next year’s Monster Fest. Maybe Bigfoot himself will even make a guest appearance. And if you spot a zipper running up his back — well, just chalk it up to evolution. It’s as plausible an explanation as anything else.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig

Revisiting the ‘Man Without a Country’

This column was first published in July 2021. 

Edward Everett Hale almost did it.

The eighteenth-century minister and writer almost achieved literary immortality with his short story, “The Man Without a Country.”

There was a time, according to a piece by Alexander Zaitchik in the Los Angeles Review of Books, when Hale’s was ubiquitous in American public education — a patriotic flag-waver perfect for the Fourth of July.

Army Lt. Philip Nolan, the story’s titular character, swears allegiance to Aaron Burr — of the famous Hamilton/Burr pistol duel — and is tried for treason. At the trial, Nolan renounces his country: “D--n the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” (“Damn” being such strong language in 1863, especially when used against one’s nation, that it was partially obscured.)

Like a character in an O. Henry short story or a Twilight Zone episode, the judge grants Nolan’s request. He is sentenced to live out his life on a series of ships at sea, where officers, sailors and guests are never to mention the United States or tell him news of his former country. He is forbidden to see maps or receive updates on its citizens, including his family.

He becomes … dum dum dum … the Man Without a Country.

(Spoiler alert: The next two paragraphs reveal the ending of a 158-year-old story.)

Predictably, at least by jaded twenty-first-century standards, Nolan has a complete change of heart. Fifty-six years on a boat will do that to a guy. On his deathbed and still at sea, he displays a self-made map of the U.S., complete with educated guesses about which territories have become states. The captain reneges on the judge’s long-ago order and tells Nolan news of the nation, including as much as he can recall about the Civil War, which Nolan missed completely.

An hour later, Nolan is dead, but not before tucking into a nearby Bible his request for an epitaph: “He loved his country as no other man has loved her; but no man deserved less at her hands.”

For obvious reasons, the story is a good choice to teach a particular type of patriotism that advocates never questioning one’s superiors or criticizing authority. The Man Without a Country learns to value his nation above all.

One can see how the story would have appealed to certain audiences during two world wars and their aftermaths, when belief in American exceptionalism was at its zenith, and also how the story would have fallen out of favor in the decades since, when the nation has had to interrogate its shortcomings.

But the story’s obscurity is a shame, because beneath its jingoism and obvious moralizing are complexities that deserve exploration.

The story’s narrator, a younger man, attempts to have Nolan pardoned, yet can find nobody in the government who even remembers the man’s name, let alone his crime. “They pretended there was no such man, and never was such a man. They will say so at the Department now!” the narrator writes. “Perhaps they do not know. It will not be the first thing in the service of which the Department appears to know nothing!”

The story further hints that Nolan’s trial was performative in nature — “to while away the monotony of the summer” — and that other conspirators, perhaps those of higher rank or from better families, escaped punishment. Or, as the narrator puts it, “The big flies escaped — rightly for all I know.”

The appropriateness of Hale’s sentence, both its excessive length and his country-club prison aboard a boat, is worthy of discussion, as is the reality of scapegoating and the advantages of wealth, power and rank.

These topics need not be debated to the exclusion of a larger moral — the importance of loyalty to one’s country — but alongside it. The story makes a point to call out the likes of “every Bragg and Beauregard who broke a soldier’s oath two years ago, and of every Maury and Barron who broke a sailor’s,” references to U.S. Army and Navy leaders in the South who renounced their country and joined the Confederacy.

In a modern era that has forgotten the honorable, vital role that protest played in forming our nation, and where too many of our friends and neighbors are willing to turn a blind eye to the flying of the Confederate flag or the insurrectionists that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, maybe “The Man Without a Country” is more worthy of a literary reevaluation this Independence Day than ever before.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter