Contest: Crush crush sweet Charlotte.

The loser of ANTSS "Killer Kaiju" give away is Charlotte, NC. Why? Because it is the stomping grounds of choice for our winner: Aaron White! To claim your prize, shoot me an email at crwm44[the at symbol]yahoo[the dot]com.

A building-sized thanks to everybody who played along.

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Contest: Leave nothing but smoking rubble in your wake!

Last day to get in on the action! I'm giving away one brand new copy of Killer Kaiju Monsters, a richly illustrated homage to all things big, Asian, and stompy by Ivan Vartanian. To enter the contest, just click through to the original contest post and leave a comment telling me what city you would stomp if you were a giant monster and why. There's plenty of unstomped real estate left. A winner will be selected at random tomorrow.

Kaiju-Fink art by McNail.

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Contest: Because other blog fandoms are Tokyo and you, dear ANTSS readers, are Godzilla.

It's been too long since I've thrown a contest here, and it's about time I thank all y'all for following along with my ramblings. So here goes . . .

Hot off the presses, from the kind folks at Collins Design, comes Killer Kaiju Monsters: Strange Beasts of Japanese Film. Part light-hearted reference book, part art book, all city-stomping hotness, this handsome hardcover, curated by Ivan Vartanian, contains production stills, photos of kaiju collectables, poster repros, papercraft build-your-own kaiju, and original kaiju themed-art from artist (including the wonderful kaiju cross-section art Shoji Ohtomo). It's a pop kaiju smorgasbord!

And ANTSS is giving away one copy a deserving reader. Retail value: about 28 Washingtons. Number of dead presidents it's going to cost the winner: zero. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Free-city, daddy-o.

Could you be the lucky winner? Sure. Why the hell not? You're as awesome as anybody! It's your time, dammit! Hell yeah!

What do you have to do to win? Easy. Just leave a comment connected to this post saying what city you would stomp if you were a giant monster and why. Tired of Montreal's smug politeness? Think you might be doing Detroit a favor by utterly destroying it? Think an attack on Bakersfield is called for just because nobody would see it coming? You're the giant monster; you make the call. Just tell me what city and why, and you're in the running. One winner will be selected randomly on June 4th. Only one stomp per player.

Because I'm a cheap bastard, I've got to limit this to players in the United States. Not that I don't want to hear what towns my foreign readers would lay waste to, but shipping costs prohibit me from rewarding you for your destructive impulses. Imaginary chaos and devastation will simply have to be their own reward in this case.

Let the stomping begin!

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Contest: Booty call.

Thank you everybody who entered the ANTSS Every Damn Comic of Solomon Kane Ever Contest. The fickle finger of fate has pointed out our winner: Pauline the Pirate Queen!

Avast Pauline, email me a mailing address at [my blogging pen name]44[that "at" symbol]yahoo[the dot]com. I'll get the books packaged up and on their way.

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Contest: I Kane, I saw, I conquered.

Just a reminder: Throw your hat in the ring for not one, but two big prozes in ANTSS Kane Komics Giveaway! Winners will be selected at random tomorrow morning.

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Link Proliferation: In which you meet the Iranian Little Red Riding Hood.

You Gotta Be In It, to Win It

Why haven't you entered the Every Damn Comic of Solomon Kane Ever Contest (EDCSKEC)? Do so, right now. I randomly select a winner on Monday.

Ghostly History

A now and then tour of Manhattan sense through the lens of the Ghostbusters flick.

Fairy-Tale History

The Telegraph has an interesting story on the historical age of fairy tales.

The common take on fairy tales is that they were relatively recent when Romantic nationalists started recording them in 1600s. Using "Little Red Riding Hood" and taxonomy techniques borrowed from the biological sciences, one team of anthropologists has teased out a memetic history that traces back more than 2,600 years.

A study by anthropologists has explored the origins of folk tales and traced the relationship between varients of the stories recounted by cultures around the world.

The researchers adopted techniques used by biologists to create the taxonomic tree of life, which shows how every species comes from a common ancestor.

Dr Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world.

Whilst the European version tells the story of a little girl who is tricked by a wolf masquerading as her grandmother, in the Chinese version a tiger replaces the wolf.

In Iran, where it would be considered odd for a young girl to roam alone, the story features a little boy.

Contrary to the view that the tale originated in France shortly before Charles Perrault produced the first written version in the 17th century, Dr Tehrani found that the varients shared a common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.

He said: “Over time these folk tales have been subtly changed and have evolved just like an biological organism. Because many of them were not written down until much later, they have been misremembered or reinvented through hundreds of generations.

Personally, I find the concept of the meme dubious at best. The application of genetics to abstract concepts like a story's themes and tropes seems to confuse phenotypes with genotypes, leading to lots of false positive "links" between things that are not really related. Still, the variants they've discovered and the range they've recorded is interesting.

Tortured History

Over at Pop Matters's, Marco Lanzagorta turns in another LP-worthy post. This time he ponders the evolution of the "torture porn" flick and traces its roots from Ulmer's The Black Catthrough 70's 'sploiters and up to now.

He contributes some original stages to the common historical narrative, most notably the "Inquisition flicks" of the 1960s and 1970s.

The first clear trend of torture films that emerged during these years can be termed as the inquisition flick. As with The Black Cat, Poe’s work served as inspiration for a film about madness, corruption, and obsession. Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) takes place in 16th century Spain and the climax involves a young man trapped in the titular torture device. The torturer, played by the inimitable Vincent Price, is revealed to be the demented son of an inquisitor.

While the violence was kept to a reasonable level, the commercial and critical success of The Pit and the Pendulum is likely to have influenced a series of films that depicted a demented inquisitor torturing, mutilating, and humiliating innocent bystanders. Most of the time, their victim was a young virginal girl who refused the sexual advances of the inquisitor. Not surprisingly, the amount of violence and sexual situations increased with each new entry in this subgenre. The most notorious flicks in this trend include The Witchfinder General (1968), The Bloody Judge (1970), Mark of the Devil (1970), and Mark of the Devil 2 (1973). Evidence of the cruelty and brutality of these films is the fact that most of them have been banned or censored at some point in time.

However, like everybody who has tried to define torture porn as a subgenre, he gets tangled up in his own definition.

Therefore, because of our complex cultural intertextuality, it may be difficult to define the exact generic conventions of the torture porn subgenre. Nevertheless, it is possible to avoid sophisticated intertextual conundrums and identify a torture flick as one where acts of torture are the main visual and narrative drivers of the storyline.

That sounds good until you start looking at examples. For example, the violence in the French Chainsaw-manqué Frontier(s), which is the columnist says can be "considered the pinnacle of the torture porn subgenre," is extreme; but whether it is torture or not (beyond the most basic assertion that any violent captivity would be torture) is dubious and, even if we decided it were, you'd need to defend the claim that torture was the driving narrative force behind that film.

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Contest: House of Kane.

Perhaps I'm still loopy from how well the whole anniversary Silent Scream series went. Maybe it's because October is here and that means we're that much closer to the fright freak's high holy day. It could be the cold medicine.

Whatever the reason, I feel like giving away stuff.

Specifically, I'm giving away two - count 'em - two big ol' comic books featuring everybody's favorite dour monster hunting Puritan: Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane.

First, I'm giving away one copy of The Saga of Solomon Kane, an omnibus style doorstop that collects hundreds of black and white pages of Kane action from his adventures in Marvel's Conan comics to his more recent shenanigans at Dark Horse.

What it doesn't include, however, is Dark Horse's recent Castle of the Devil series. So I'm going to throw that in too!

That's right!

Win this mammerjammer and you're basically awash in pulpy he-hero action!

So what do you have to do? Just leave me message below. The winner will be randomly chosen Monday morning.

Employees of Dark Horse are eligible to enter, but seriously, dude, just take it from the office. It's no biggy. Contestants should know that both books are "lightly used," though I can't discern any defects or abuse. I'm also going to have to limit this contest to folks from the US - blame shipping costs or my own rampaging jingoism, either way that's how we're doing this one.

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