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Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

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Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

ATTN GLUTTONS: Please savor this mouth-watering review of The Solitary Gourmet, a comic about eating in the age of loneliness (1994-present) by Jirō Taniguchi & Masayuki Kusumi, up today at TCJ (The Chowbell Jouissance)

1990s interior page from The Solitary Gourmet

21st century interior page from The Solitary Gourmet

November 11, 2025 at 4:57 PM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

I was pleased to assist in proofreading the super-deluxe issue #2 of “dummy,” the editorial project of longtime comics-focused journalist and museum director John Kelly. It’s 92 pages dedicated to a century of artists parodying America’s best friend, Mickey Mouse. Recommended!

August 15, 2025 at 9:01 PM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

ATTN all shivering vampires, I wrote a little about Anthology Editions’ new, first-ever English publication of 1967’s Saga de Xam, a notable early adult-oriented French comic album from artist Nicolas Devil, working from scenarios by soon-to-be cult filmmaker Jean Rollin.

July 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

Hi, I have a long article up today about Kazuichi Hanawa, artist of grotesque, folkloric, metaphysical comics, sometimes all at once, who’s just had two books published in English: Red Night from Breakdown Press (which the article is mostly about) and Light of the Moon from The Mansion Press. ENJOY.

July 3, 2025 at 2:02 PM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

(15) Locked in a jail cell together, the Showgirl upbraids the Countess, who has tempted her to betray Dr. Mabuse, who will command she swallow poison in 45 minutes’ screen time. Er ist der größte Mann, der lebt! Nobody with any sense believes that history will continue after 1922. History is a solved game. Mastery over the game inspires absolute devotion to the precious singular effect of victory denied otherwise to all us wretched dogs. Men are at his beck and call and his women are ready to die. The Gambler is the most marvelous man alive.

April 6, 2025 at 4:10 AM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

(13) Psychology, neurology and hypnotism had been intertwined as means of treating hysteria for more than a hundred years; before that, Franz Mesmer adapted his study of animal magnetism, inducing the trance state from manipulations of invisible lebensmagnetismus, from hermetic ideas of planetary influence discussed by Paracelsus in the German Renaissance. And yet before: the Libro de los juegos, commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile, who had refused the German throne in 1257, which theorized gaming — chess, dice, tables — as a sort of magical synecdoche. Game pieces as astrological symbolism; the humours of the body. One can master these forces through play, contemplation. Risk. (14) By the time the Prosecutor who is Death finds him, he will not be not Dr. Mabuse anymore, because he will no longer be bound by rules that dictate one’s relevance to this, our sorry material world.

April 6, 2025 at 4:10 AM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

(11) There is an ambient hum of antisemitism; jewelers with scratchy hair and hook noses are twice associated with moral decay. Adolph Hitler would rise to power in 1933, and von Harbou would write and direct films under his regime. She was involved in a mixed-race relationship at the time, and would claim, perhaps sincerely, that her intent was to press the Nazis apparatus toward liberal aims. (12) Surrounded by police, Dr. Mabuse is urged not to resist state authorities. He replies that he feels like a state himself - can one not wage war on another? In an adjoining room his butler hits bumps of coke off his fingers while a gowned fräulein crouches with a rifle by the window, firing on the police. Smoke pours from a corridor across the street. She falls dead. Escaping through sewers, Dr. Mabuse emerges into a locked room of blind men who cannot receive his gaze and therefore are beyond his power. He begins to believe he can see through the veil of life itself, perceive the forms of the dead.

April 6, 2025 at 4:10 AM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

(10) During a poker night at home, the Countess walks arm in arm with Dr. Mabuse. She tells him that she has recently come to believe that love is greater than Sensation, which is cause for melancholy; she stares dully at the husband who bores her. Dr. Mabuse tells her that love merely sentimentalizes desire, realized through the Wille zer Macht. Fists clenched and eyes widened, he subtly shifts the hypnotic control he has been exerting over the Countess’ husband the entire evening so that the man reveals to outraged guests he has been cheating at poker. The man sits barely comprehending as everyone screams. The Countess faints into the arms of Dr. Mabuse, who princess-lifts her out the door of her home and up a long flight of stairs to the sumptuous tower bedroom. A few scenes prior he had stood in that room contemplating a Showgirl who loved him, whom he turned out for the purposes and seduction and who was then arrested. There are no intertitles to narrate his thoughts.

April 6, 2025 at 4:10 AM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

(8) A magnificent iris-in takes us from the round casino pit to a circle of hands laid on a séance table. The Countess is seated next to Dr. Mabuse. She spoils the séance because it is so fucking stupid, all of this is so fucking stupid. Dragging on his cigarette, Dr. Mabuse remarks that gambling remains of interest to him. A hypnotist, he can control the gamer through observation, directing them to win or lose, and in this way become a meta-gamer, gambling with people and fate. (9) Lang was involved in the production of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and may have known that the writer Carl Mayer based that film’s hypnotist villain on military psychiatrists he had encountered years earlier while faking madness to avoid the trenches. Psychology, hypnotism in this sense, is a means of enforcing social obedience.

April 6, 2025 at 4:10 AM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

(6) The proprietor of the Petit Casino, face to camera, acknowledges to the seated crowd that 1922 has brought us too far into wan modernity to bear. Quoting Goethe (“Erlaubt ist, was gefällt”), he assures us that this room, at least, will capture the spirit of a departed Golden Age: romance and poetry, when people were still capable of doing as they pleased. (7) The deprivations of the post-war period are shown through extreme distinctions between rich and poor, but the film can barely tolerate the dirty and stupid rabble. The screenwriter, Thea von Harbou, is adapting a book by Norbert Jacques, but that adaption is like her script to the later Metropolis in that the masses are easily misled; to accomplish justice, the Prosecutor who is Death can enter any location, supersede any rule, order any arrest.

April 6, 2025 at 4:10 AM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

(4) Splendidly portrayed by heavy-lidded Gertrude Welcker, the Countess loiters in an illegal Berlin gambling hall, smoking and observing what appears to be the film’s hero, handsome playboy naïf Paul Richter, who is shot and killed just before the halfway mark. Instead, the hero is a Prosecutor played with faintly sinister severity by Bernhard Goetzke, who portrayed the figure of Death in Fritz Lang’s prior film, Destiny. The Countess tells the Prosecutor who is Death that weary hearts chase Sensation to endure this human life, and that to watch people gaming is to confirm to one’s self that passions still exist. (5) Dr. Mabuse is a racketeer and a psychologist, but, most importantly, he is a pro gamer.

April 6, 2025 at 4:10 AM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

Herrschaft des Verbrechens (Dr. Mabuse’s Weimar Hot Nights)

(1) God died in World War I. (2) The film begins with Dr. Mabuse provoking and then defusing an international trade dispute so he can buy into a stock market dip. (3) I don’t know if “Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler” (1922) was the first movie to compare the stock market to gambling — that definitely feels like an observation Griffith would have made at some point in the prior decade — but it may be the first to identify both as a form of gaming, which is to say they are depicted as much as a means of coaxing psychological effects from a housebound set of rules as a strictly material system of risk and ruin.

April 6, 2025 at 4:10 AM

Condemned Wraith JOG

@snubpollard.bsky.social

Hi, today is the day Sanpei Shirato’s extremely famous 1964-71 panorama of the Tokugawa class system with sword violence, The Legend of Kamui, begins its official English publication, and I wrote a little about it here: www.tcj.com/reviews/the-...