Review: 'One Tough Dame: The Life and Career of Diana Rigg'

Diana Rigg seemed to take the most gratification from her stage work, but her screen genre work was what made her an icon. Say the name and one is most likely to picture her as Bond's one and only bride in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Vincent Price's costume-changing coconspirator in Theatre of Blood, the ceaselessly scheming Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones, or most probably, the karate-chop dishing Emma Peel of The Avengers.

Review: 'American TV Comic Books: 1940s-1980s'

We all know that Wonder Woman, Plastic Man, and The Crypt Keeper are classic comics characters. But what about Emma Peel, Davy Jones, and Ed Sullivan? Indeed, comic artists have transformed a whole bunch of TV personalities and characters into caricatures on funny-book pages. Most TV-based comics didn't last long, most were published by Dell, and most were written and illustrated with all the care and artistry one puts into something intended as a quick cash-in.

Peter Bosch collates these sundry cash-ins in his new book American TV Comic Books: 1940s-1980s. The book consists of very tidy entries on everything from a 1949 comic based on Suspense to well past his titles' timeline for an entry on Stranger Things comics. Each entry includes a short paragraph about the history of the given TV show and an even shorter paragraph on the comic adaptation, which mostly consists of a list of the involved artists and a critique rarely more extensive than "good" or "bad." 

Considering how goofy fun Bosch's topic is, it's a shame that his writing is so dry (paging Dr. Mark Voger... ). But the copious illustrations spread throughout the book, which include full comics pages and covers and such delightful oddities as a handy page translating Edd "Kookie" Byrnes's 77 Sunset Strip lingo for anyone unhip enough to not know what "fill me in" means, are a gas.

Farewell, Diana Rigg

We Americans had Batman and Batgirl. The British had John Steed and Mrs. Emma Peel. I won't argue over who was cooler, but both dynamic duos brought groovy-mod style, flash action, and buckets of irony to mid-sixties TV. Mrs. Peel was not Steed's first partner, but she's the one Avengers fans tend to remember most fondly, largely because of Diana Rigg's unforgettably bemused performance.

A discussion of Diana Rigg's career will likely begin with the pop-art ka-pow that first made her household name, but her career hardly hinged on The Avengers. She was Vincent Price's mustachioed co-conspirator in Theatre of Blood. She was the only woman to marry James Bond (if ever so briefly) in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. She was memorably miscast as plain-Jane Helena in the boffo 1968 adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She starred Paddy Chayefsky's bizarro medical-drama/monster movie The Hospital, cameoed in The Great Muppet Caper, hosted PBS's Mystery!, and proved she was still unimaginably cool when she played Lady Olenna Tyrell on Game of Thrones.

No matter the role, Diana Rigg always imbued it with her innate charm and the gravitas of a first-rate actor. Sadly, she died today of cancer at the age of 82. 

Review: 'Fashion in the 1960s'

The 1960s were not always rich in substance (welcome to Gilligan’s Island!), but the decade’s style was often unimpeachable. Before frumpy hippie non-fashions took over toward the end of the sixties, sharp lines, vivid colors, eccentric materials, and wild op-art patterns defined the decade. The sixties were also very notable for making a place for men on the runway. It seems like we’ve been shut out of genuinely exciting fashions ever since.

Review: 'Horror by Heck'

Don Heck is best known as a member of the four-man team who created Iron Man and for penciling The Avengers during its Silver Age run, but he also paid the bills by penciling and inking horror stories for Weird Terror and Horrific (renamed Terrific after the comics code crack down). Horror by Heck is a new anthology of these grisly tales edited by Craig Yoe as part of IDW’s “Chilling Archives of Horror Comics” series, and while the utterly bizarre nature of these stories is what stands out the most, Heck’s work is still distinguished by his pan-faced characters and his restraint in illustrating some truly grisly material. I can imagine that his reserve in portraying the rather shocking violence and sex in “Concrete Coffin” is the only thing that made it publishable in Weird Terror back in 1953.

While I wouldn’t dare call Heck a hack, as one wrong-side-of-history critic did in an article that really raised the ire of Kelley Jones in his introduction to this volume, I will say that Heck’s work in the stories, themselves, is not overwhelmingly striking. His covers are another matter, as they fully showcased his trademark big faces. Horror by Heck makes a lot of room for these fabulously confrontational covers, as well as a neat selection of the illustrations he provided for those text stories most horror-hungry kids probably skipped. With a lengthy and informative biography by Yoe, and a cheeky cover that allows you to stick your finger into the bullet wound on the forehead of a typically large-faced Heck victim, Horror by Heck is another sweet package from the Chilling Archives… even if anonymous yet nutso stories about Hitler’s ghost, accident-causing gnomes, and a barber who becomes a vampire after wearing a dead guy’s scalp sometimes upstage this show’s star.