Gideon Defoe: THE PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH COMMUNISTS!

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm a sucker for pirates--but it's not because of Johnny Depp. I'm a sucker for pirates because I like William Hope Hodgeson's maritime horror stories, and because you can't beat Raphael Sabatini's Captain Blood for seafaring action. Johnny Depp's on the list, somewhere, because the first Pirates of the Caribbean truly was a good time, but he's on there with Errol Flynn and plenty of others. I'm not enamored with Captain Jack Sparrow. Not at all. I'm not a newcomer to the pirate bandwagon either, and I've got countless childhood Halloween snapshots to prove it (I looked great with a penciled in beard, long before I had it in me to grow a real one [in fact, I'm still tempted to pencil in the scraggly growth I've got now]). Where am I going with this? I'm headed towards Gideon Defoe's The Pirates! and their many adventures, but in particular The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists! Now, this should theoretically appeal to me: I'm a socialist, and I like pirates. But really, I mean, Defoe's whole schtick is getting old. He's exploiting the Pirate Captain and the various pirate jokes, but he isn't doing anything with them. The fact that this book featured communists didn't make it significantly different from the others in this series (yes, I've read them all, and I'm kind of ashamed to admit it). Defoe's humor should change to take advantage of each different subject the series visits--but it doesn't. The same cheap pirates jokes, all the time, just aren't going to cut it. I'm sorry, Gideon, but this may be it. I mean, I bought the other books, but this one? Library check out. And a D.

Richard Corben / William Hope Hodgeson: THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND

I've never understood the appeal of William Hope Hodgeson's House on the Borderland. Well, that's not entirely the case. I understand its appeal, but not relative to the obscurity in which most of Hodgeson's other, far stronger works seem to languish. I mean, the man could write a sea story. And a horror story. And a horrific sea story, horrific meaning horror-filled, not bad, because the last thing Hodgeson's writing ever is, is bad. Well...except for House on the Borderland. Which, again, isn't bad, but is thoroughly mediocre. And I mean thoroughly. There's not a single point in the (very short) book that jerked me upright and shouted, "Hey, this is some vintage Hodgeson right here!" No, not one. But whatever: apparently H.P. Lovecraft loved it, and who are we to shout down good old H.P. (never mind that he was a racist bastard in addition to be being a great writer, and thus cannot perhaps always be looked to when defining what is and isn't good taste). Which leads us to the graphic novelization of House on the Borderland, by Richard Corben. Corben makes some changes, modernizing the story a bit and speeding it up significantly, but doesn't change the fact that, relative to Hodgeson's other work, I find the whole thing to be nothing but, well, mediocre (sound familiar? That's because I'm repeating myself all too much). It doesn't help, I suppose, that I'm not a fan of Corben's art, which might otherwise have livened things up. Oh well; I give this a C+ only out of respect for the rest of the William Hope Hodgeson corpus.