Category Archives: Series

Face Down In The Mainstream: Batwoman

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Batwoman Reborn: Batwoman in Detective Comics; 854 August 2009 (Part One of Three)

Greg Rucka ,writer

J H Williams III, art

This….This is art.

Beautiful, interesting, compelling art.

I picked this comic up because I heard it featured Batwoman, lesbian socialite by day and crime fighter at night, and I figured that I couldn’t go too far wrong there.

The story isn’t that exciting, so far, but I don’t really care. The art is absolutely exquisite. *flails hands around*

The plot is pretty much this: Batwoman is trying to find the person who is leading this religion of crime in Gotham. They’re organized by covens, and sometime in the past they caught her and tried to kill her. The leader is coming into town, and Batwoman plans to be there. Dun dun dun. Or whatever. I don’t even care.

The episode starts with a lovely little fight slash victim interrogation. Just look at this page:

The top panel is especially nice. The body torsion is correct and the leg is right, unlike my last foray into current comics, and the pose works well with the page as a whole. There’s kind of a weird, bat shaped panel thing going on, which is clever, but which I liked rather than hated. The comic takes some odd approaches to panels in general, but I very much like the way the artist moves into and out of the frames, zooming and then pulling back, choosing key bits—like her hand—to focus on.

What I like about this page is the movement. It goes from frenetic, chaotic, to quiet, wham, focus on her hand and his face, and the whole mood changes.

The comic deals with both sides of Batwoman’s identity. Her crime fighter night life, as above, and her daytime self. This is a page where she’s talking to Pop (her father I assume, but haven’t really read far enough to know for certain).

There are several fascinating things about it. One, she’s wearing crummy sweats that make her butt look big. This is not an attractive outfit; it’s the kind of thing a real woman would wear to workout in, though, if she was at home. It’s intimate and real; showing a different and fallible, human, breakable side of her.

The colors are all of a piece in the home scenes: her bright red hair fits in with the rest of the landscape of skin, wood floors and warm walls, sunlight. Very alive.

It’s quite a contrast to the fight scenes where she looks like a fetish dom.

There’s a heavy sexual element to this comic, and so far I’m finding it both sexy and well done, rather than skanky (unlike, say, Amazing Spiderman, which I picked up and would have stomped on except then I would have had to buy it). The villain—but maybe I should talk about the villain next week. No, I’m sorry, I cannot resist talking about her now:

Look at this villain! What a fantastic and fun artistic contrast. The previous pages (which I have resisted scanning, but only barely) often focus on Batwoman’s dark red lips. The villain also has painted lips. And a fetish outfit. White and innocent, very frilly and girly compared to Batwoman’s butch femme dom outfit. The boots, too, are a contrast. These boots are white and tightly laced; Batwoman’s boots are red red red with a bat in the sole.

The villain is a beautiful foil for Batwoman. When they fight—Ah, but that is a tale for next week.

In short, I thoroughly enjoyed this comic and I do not care that it was 3.99 and I do not mind the ads or the weird and badly drawn extra or the fact that I had to drive someplace special to get it. I only hope I can talk lots and lots of you into reading it and discussing it with me. My only real complaint was some truly random bolding in the dialog. Nobody would have emphasized those words in speech, but that’s kind of a quibble.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #17

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Marston and Peter’s Wonder Woman 16 may have been the best of the run so far, both in terms of the unusually ominous story and the adventurous art. #17 starts out well, with a marvelous cover.

Peter uses almost all of his favorite tricks here: the bison is out of scale, so WW looks almost like a doll, and even the horse seems bizarrely tiny. The motion lines are incredibly dynamic…in part because the circle is split up, I think. He also uses some of his scribbly linework for the bison’s breath…and that little cue cartoony squirrel is hard to resist. Plus, it looks like we’re going to get WW in the wild west, which sounds like it has potential. The last time travel episode, with evolving gorillas and dinosaurs and Steve turning into a cave man, was pretty great, so I was optimistic that a second might work as well.

Unfortunately, after that cover, the issue itself is pretty much…eh. Part of the problem is that the entire plot is built around a scientist Lana, her love for the no-good Carl, and WW and the Holiday girls’ efforts to cure her of same. Lana’s confusion is such that it causes her to whip up time winds which cause all and sundry to fall back into the past and relive former lives in roman and colonial times…but even such full-bore nuttiness can’t disguise the fact that this is a pretty staid man-done-her-wrong plot. Marston’s fetishes are kept mostly under wraps (as it were); Lana triumphs simply by getting rid of the bad guy in her life, not by teaching him the joys of bondage and loving submission. The feminism is less conflicted, but also a good bit duller. Or maybe the problem is just that pure, naive Lana is not a particularly sparkling protagonist; whether as modern scientist, Roman maiden, or pioneer daughter, her trust in her blandly evil boyfriend and love for her blandly gruff father are equally uninvolving. You can see why Marston didn’t care enough about her to even bother tying her up.

As is often the case in this series, as Marston goes, so goes Peter; the artist doesn’t seem nearly as inspired as in his last couple of outings. Still, there are a couple of moments. The duo does some more experimenting with wordless action sequences, and again the effect is lovely:

This is an interesting moment too.

Wonder Woman is using a pole to pick up a fan so the blades can cut the ropes tying Etta. I’m not sure the sequence entirely works; it’s hard to figure out whether WW is supposed to be moving up or down in that first panel, and the way the image is cropped, cutting off the end of the pole and the bottom two-thirds of Etta, seems awkward. But, again, I like the experiment with wordlessness, and the use of mutliple, Flash-like images of WW to convey motion is intriguing. Again, I wonder if this is something we’ll see more of in future issues. (I know we’ll see more of bound WW manipulating objects with her teeth — Marston lives for that.)

Going into the past also allows Etta to fully embrace her butchness:

Yep; in a past life, Etta was a gun-toting madam…er, that is, cantina owner. I like this intimation of jealousy as well:

Peter also makes Etta rather handsome there. The borderline men’s attire suits her. (More evidence that Marston doesn’t necessarily see women in drag as evil.

And…yeah, I think that’s really about all I’ve got to say here. You can tell the issue wasn’t firing on all cylinders because I’m not having to stifle the impulse to reproduce every single page. Peter’s art is still worth looking at, but there’s little evidence here of the breath-taking double page layouts that made last issue so stunning. But that’s the way it goes sometimes. We’ll see hope for better on the next one….

Utilitarian Review 9/18/09

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Goodbye

As folks have seen, the biggest and saddest news on the Hooded Utilitarian this week is the departure of Tom Crippen. Tom came onto the blog almost exactly a year ago, though it feels like he’s been here forever. He’s been a tireless blogger, about everything from comics to politics to Star Trek. While he’s been here, his lovely, thoughtful, and often mean-spirited (and I mean that in the best way) prose has really defined the Hooded Utilitarian.

If you haven’t read much of Tom’s work, I’d urge you to look back through the archives; there’s just tons of wonderful material. Some of my favorites:

-his description of an imaginary Sandman collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Jack Kirby.

-his paean to his days as a Marvel Comics collector

— his contributions to the Helter Skelter roundtable, both in his own posts and in comments.

—his attempts to understand Oliphant

-and maybe the gem of gems, his description of Michael Corleone as a Mary Sue. It’s one of the pieces of writing that made me feel like starting the blog was worth it.

Almost all of Tom’s posts, with the exception of a few at the beginning, can be found here. You can also read him semi-regularly in the Comics Journal, where he writes a stellar column called “The Post-Post-Human Review about super-hero comics. I believe he’s got a long essay on Alan Moore and Watchmen coming up there, which I’m eager to see.

I hope we’ll see Tom occasionally in comments still, and I really hope he finds more outlets for his writing, either online or in print. In any case, I feel very lucky to have had him here for as long as we did, both as a co-blogger and a friend.

On the Hooded Utilitarian

This week was devoted to our roundtable on Sandman. Some of us were disappointed, others still loved it, and lots of folks weighed in in comments.

There was also a long post on the inkdestroyedmybrush site in response which is worth checking out.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Vom Marlowe reviews Killer Unicorns over on her LiveJournal page.

Kristy Valenti catches me in an embarrassing error over at comixology. It’s like the Dave Johnson thing all over again…except this time, I really do kind of care.

I have a short review of Jennifer’s Body at the Chicago Reader.

An essay at Splice Today in praise of lousy art.

On the contrary, if any contemporary figure attains to Bataille’s ideal of pure sacrifice it is one particular kind of artist—that is, the failed artist. Note that by “failed” here, I do not mean the artist who has missed commercial success, but has underground cred or aesthetic bonafides, or who is discovered and lionized after his death. On the contrary. When I say, “failed” I mean “failed.” I mean an artist who profligately, copiously, obsessively works on creating objects that are, literally—by everyone and forever—unwanted. Creators of tuneless songs who never achieve dissonance; of ugly canvases too self-conscious to be outsider art; of doggerel verse too banal for even the high school literary magazine-in them, the excess of the universe is annihilated. Genius, love, life—they are exchanged for neither lucre, nor cred, nor beauty, but are instead simply thrown away. Failed art is permanently wasted, and it is therefore sacred.

I have a review of Observatory’s Dark Folke. It got kind of chopped down for space, so I thought I’d reprint the full version here:

The Observatory
Dark Folke
Self-released

Though this Singapore band may have placed the word “folk” on their album, that doesn’t really capture their sound. Certainly, there are elements of freak folk here; “A Shuffler in the Mud” has sparse lovely harmonies and a gentle acoustic sway that wouldn’t be out of place on a Devandra Banhardt album. Other tracks, like “Lowdown,” though, trip merrily etherwards, heading for the brainy, drony psychedlia of Ghost. For that matter, “Decarn” is almost heavy enough at points to qualify as metal, locking into a head-thrashing trudge while keyboards burble overhead and somebody shrieks from the pits of Hades for a couple of bars before handing it over again to the gentle-voiced harmonizers.

The album feels like a delicate arrangement of shifting textures drawn upon and then erased from a black canvas. Omicron, for example, starts with an acoustic guitar strum that is allowed to fade almost completely; then there’s a second strum, also followed by silence, and then a percussive keyboard figure takes over, building with other instruments and vocals, until again it fades almost to silence…and we go back to acoustic guitar. The track is built around changes in direction, but it’s not the busy post-modern bricolage of the Boredoms. Rather, it’s modernist, fetishizing space and silence. If The Observatory doesn’t adore Webern, I will cease staring at the hardbound liner notes, graced by Jason Bartlett’s Pus-head meets Virginia Lee Burton line-drawings, and eat the whole package instead.

Other Links

Alan David Doane reviews the abstract comics anthology and searches for Sentinels in my contribution. His son finds them.

Comics creator Dewayne Slightweight performs an amazing rendition of Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.

Utilitarian Review 9/11/09

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A few people (well, okay, two) have mentioned that the blog is getting busy enough that it’s actually occasionally hard to follow everything. So I thought I would start trying to do a weekly roundup, both of business here and of my articles elsewhere. And, what the hey, I’ll throw in a couple additional links when I think of it. So here we go:

On the Hooded Utilitarian

I had two Wonder Woman related posts, one about WW creator Marston’s not very good novel, the Private Life of Julius Caesar and one about Bob Haney and Jim Aparo’s Batman/Wonder Woman team up

Tom proceeded with Wiki Trekand incidentally explained why on earth he’s doing this.

Kinukitty tried to figure out how squicked out she was or was not by the skeevy age differences in the yaoi manga Kiss All the Boys.

Vom Marlowe tried her best to like an X-Men comic with Rogue in it.

I reviewed the Andrei Molotiu editedabstract comics anthology (in which some of my work appears), and also wrote about the Japanese print series by Yoshitoshi 100 Aspects of the Moon

Finally, I posted my review of Mandy Moore’s album Amanda Leigh, which ran on Madeloud with some of its snark excised. And finally, I posted this week’s music download mix, featuring Chopin, Beyonce, Ol Dirty Bastard, and Johnny Cash, among others.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Over at the Comics Reporter, Suat has a lengthy and really entertaining article about how mainstream writers are overhyped while mainstream artists are underappreciated. I think this is my favorite bit:

Pia Guerra’s response to Brian K. Vaughan’s sparse and determinedly straightforward scripts (as presented at the back of the Y: The Last Man collections) are illustrations conveying as little mood or sense of place as is present in Vaughan’s instructions. The comic is left to succeed purely on the basis of Vaughan’s ideas and lively dialogue. That these ideas are at various times boring, nonsensical or just plain irritating is beside the point — I’m focusing purely on Vaughan’s mastery of the formal tools at his disposal. Vaughan’s stories in the early issues of Y are nearly bereft of devices unique to comics filled as they are with unsophisticated story structures, flat panel to panel transitions and the rote use of splash pages at the end of each issue. If anything, Y reads like an easy to understand sales pitch for comics-illiterate movie executives. Little wonder then that the words HBO and Y are so often uttered in the same breath.

I had a bunch of writing on music run this week. Over at the Knoxville Metropulse I reviewed the stellar new Raekwon album and the mediocre new album by the Vivian Girls. My essay about the greatness of Kitty Wells and the shittiness of Alison Krauss which ran on Culture 11 a while back, was reprinted over at a nifty site called Splice Today.

Splice today also ran an essay by me about Ukrainian nationalist black metal band Drudkh in which I explain why I like them even though they probably approve of burning my relatives:

I’m not trying to make the case that Drudkh is evil and should be banned. Rather, my point is that they seem clearly to be drawing from a nationalist milieu, which is proto-fascist if not actually fascist. And, moreover, it’s that milieu which gives their music its inspiration and its power. Microcosmos starts out with a Ukrainian folk tune on traditional-sounding instruments, and the whole set has a definite folk tinge-the riffing sonic blast on “Distant Cry of Cranes,” for example, is shot through with syncopation and melodic tinges that evoke traditional Eastern European music. This is made even more explicit halfway through the song, where the maelstrom falls quiet, and we get an acoustic guitar break leading into an almost funky dance segment. Similarly, the weird minor harmonics on “Decadence” (a thoroughly fascist-friendly title) point to folk sources. Even the classic rock soloing on “Everything Said Before” is under-girded by an odd, off-kilter rhythm, as if a village-full of toothless peasants had set upon and cannibalized Jimmy Page.

Finally, my comixology column is out today, in which I claim that Beyonce is really the best-selling super-hero of our time.

Super-hero comics are overwhelmingly made by, for, and about white guys. This is so thoroughly the case that you can actually watch the desperate, embarrassed scramble for a more multifarious façade whenever a property gets transferred to a different medium. Nobody gives a damn about John Stewart in those little pamphlet thingies, but on the tubes? He is Green Lantern, fanboy, because, hard as it is to believe, in the real world out there beyond the direct market people come in different shades and shapes and sizes, and gratuitous, pig-headed segregation is actually kind of bad for business.

Other links

Tom beat me to this one, but I really enjoyed Shannon Garrity’s article on the history of the Comics Journal.

Tucker has a great article on Cry for Justice, wondering why exactly DC thinks it’s an especially good idea to gratuitously murder scads of gay characters all at once.

Dirk dances on Paul Levitz’s grave as the latter is pushed out of the top job at DC.

And I haven’t read this, but am looking forward to it; the incredibly knowledgeable Jacob Austen writes about finding the first ever Michael Jackson recording.

So let me know if this is a useful innovation or not, and if so I’ll try to make it a regular thing.

Now With Free Checking: X-Men Legacy

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X-Men Legacy issue 226
Carey, Weaver, Tadeo, Reber

You know those people who read just the words in comics and kind of ignore the art? Yeah, I’m the opposite. I like the pretty pictures and often ignore the words.

So I’d been wanting to read some American comics and I circled my options at the Borders. I wanted superheroes (including female superheroes), some action, not too much gore and no zombies. This episode looked promising: Rogue on the cover, decent art, explosions in the background. Neat!

I picked it up and read it over coffee at the Squid Cafe, and I was….disappointed. First of all, this sucker cost me four bucks. It’s full of ads for cheesecake statues and Spiderman toothbrush holders. There’s a large excerpt in the back for some other comic. All of which is fine, except–there’s only twenty two pages of comic. For four dollars! That’s seventeen cents per page.

Well, it seemed a bit steep to me, considering I can get nearly two hundred pages of manga for 8.95 (or 5.37 if I have my Borders coupon).

Regardless, I persevered and read the art. The story isn’t that complicated. There’s this sort of riot on Castro Street (no, I don’t know why it’s there–go with it), and Rogue and company are trying to stop it from being bad.

Some of the art is really fun. Check out this page below. The colors shift from earthy and dark to this sexy, girly pink. The woman’s pose is tough, hot, and feminine. Those earrings! That attitude! I wanted to know more about her right away.

Unfortunately, most of the pages are just not this good. And she’s not in the rest of this issue.

So we switch to another scene, where Rogue is supposed to battle the big female baddie. This should be a fun scene–the big payoff for the issue. Rogue gets to strut her stuff, the baddie gets to be tough, and….

It’s weird, is what. I wanted to mail the artists a copy of a simple anatomy book. Take a look at this page:

In the top right panel, the torsion is just wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. Yes, she’s moving through her body, but the arms and body don’t add up properly. Then there’s the competing speed lines in the next section. Speedlines go one direction from the punch–Rogue is thrown. And then we have speedlines from the opposite direction with a couple of sexy boots stepping into them like they’re supposed to indicate a slipstream. What?

The leg in the second to the bottom was it for me. The force lines go up (near the foot), the baddie is kicking up, not out. But Rogue is moving to the right. What?

Wrong. All wrong.

So they battle, Rogue gets in some hits, baddie gets in some hits, Rogue goes crashing through a window and then we get this:

Keeping it classy, I see. Thanks Marvel. Cause showing a woman’s bra when she’s been in a fight and lost is what cheesecake is all about! Frankly, I took one look at this and thought about mailing Rogue a nice brochure for Enell.

So at this point I’m kind of two minds: the Rogue bits were meh, but the Lady in Pink is hawt. The colors are gorgeous, but the drawing is irritating. (Also, whoever does the inks for the eyebrows keeps leaving out a chunk of Rogue’s left eyebrow. Weird.)

Then we come to this, the US Bank portion of the issue. We’re tooling along, having a massive street showdown with lots of yummy explosions and baddie fights on Castro street and we come to this page:

At first, I thought Well, the artist traced some photo of Castro and just included a building logo in the prime center top position for verisimilitude. And then, when the logo appears right next to the baddie’s head, I thought Huh, that’s odd. And then we get to the next page.

And my eyes rolled forever.

I slapped the poor issue shut and ordered myself a consolatory cappuccino. Fortunately, I wandered into a local small comic shop and they hooked me up with a much more promising title. Batwoman! Lesbian socialite by day and crime fighter at night. Sounds good to me.

Wiki Trek: “That Which Survives”

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I forgot entirely about this one. It’s a harmless episode: Lee Meriwether wants to touch Kirk’s shoulder and he hides behind Sulu and McCoy. Lee Meriwether advances, Sulu and McCoy step up to her, a united front, and Kirk stands behind them. The effect is a bit like the fairtytale-theater shows I saw now and then as a kid: adults gathered on stage to do something that resembled kids playing, and to do it without identifiable scenery. An intimate effect results; it’s pleasant. I like quiet, undemonstrative ways of passing the time

She’s an android representing the dead commander of a space ship/base left long ago by aliens. Three androids in all, all of the lady captain. The ship/base’s automatic system causes the androids to try to kill intruders (which they do just by touching). Or so I think, since the plot just doesn’t really come thru for me. The upshot: the lady captain is not to blame, and the men toast her memory as her prerecorded taped message (a matte blur against the wall) explains what has been going on and how no harm was meant.

D. C. Fontana wrote the outline. Maybe it made more sense early on. But J.M. Lucas wrote the final, and I liked his stuff okay. He produced “Piece” and wrote/directed “Elaan.”

Labored snippiness.  The ep is divided between the landing party’s doings and the vigil of the anxious team up on the Enterprise. The ship scenes become painful.  As with so much of old Trek, the intended humor of the dialogue comes across as simple meanness. Spock apparently is the kind of boss who will respond to a perfectly clear but figurative remark by laboriously informing the subordinate that his/her remark, taken literally, does not make sense, then adding that one must not waste time. This happens again and again; the script can’t think of anything else for the characters to do. And Spock is incapable of speaking quickly, so you have plenty of time to sit there and wait for his pointless, time-wasting rebuke to trundle past. It’s maddening.

Then there’s Kirk and his snippiness toward Sulu, though Shatner does it very well: the murmured “Mr. Sulu” when he hands off Sulu’s tricorder to him after a rebuke. (I think that during the shoot Koenig was off in the midwest doing a play, which is why Sulu goes down with the landing party, mentions a meteorite in Siberia, and gets put down all the time by Kirk.)

Don’t be an Asian guy.  More support for my theory that being an Asian man is the most thankless task on television: Sulu feminized, scrambling back from Lee Meriwether and squealing.

The ep features yet another nothing crisis, this time not an approaching meteorite or space plague but the impending explosion of the Enterprise. Still, there’s the reward of seeing the look on Doohan’s face when Scotty has to make that last decision and go ahead with fixing the Jefferies tube in whatever highly risky way Spock just recommended. I agree that all the second-rank regs could have done more than they were given (except Takei—acting just was not his thing), but Doohan could have done the most.

Production notes.  From Mem Alpha:

In addition to the standard planet set, Matt Jefferies designed a “rocker plate” set within the set that gave the illusion of a “real” quake. Evidence of this new “rocker stage” can by the movement of the individual “plates” on the stage, followed by sequence of the landing party stepping off it onto the main stage and resting on their hands and knees …


The bypass valve room that Watkins enters consists of re-used pieces of the Yonada control room from “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky“. The control panel was re-used from the Vians torture chamber in “The Empath“.


A new access tube was created to show where the matter-antimatter reaction chamber was. Designed by Matt Jefferies, it had sliding doors accessing the crawlway. …


Spock’s calculation device was a reused of the remote control prop created for “Spock’s Brain“.”

The central chamber which housed the outpost‘s central brain was created especially for this episode. Designed by Jefferies, … the central chamber contained a “frosted 2D cube – rotating lights inside.””

Sulu mentions the Hortas of Janus VI from “The Devil in the Dark“. “


That last one went right by me. I think it’s a real stride for continuity because it’s gratuitous. Writers have to remember that phasers can fire on stun and that Vulcans don’t show emotion. But whoever threw in the horta did so for the hell of it, just because continuity is fun. That’s when the habit really starts to entrench itself.

 

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(The makeup around the eyes could be a wall painting; the lashes are like a sculpture … sorry, that sounds a bit like a Troy McClure. Anyway, I think Trek did this to its heroines’ eye makeup a lot more in the third season; at least I’ve started it noticing just recently.) 

Lee Meriwether, b. 1935 in LA. I thought she was fine. She’s given absolute dumbass s.f. exposition dialogue and has to deliver it w/ an android affect, a deadly combination. But she gets thru okay. Says she was a reg on Time Tunnel, so maybe that had toughened her up.

Won Miss America in 1955, married 1958, divorced 1974; two girls b. 1960, 1963.  IMDB lists 43 screen appearances as “Self,” starting w/ Miss America, 84 as an actor, starting in 1954 with The Philco Television Playhouse, 3 eps., but picking up in 1958, an appearance on The Millionaire, then Bilko, etc. Around her Trek ep, the Time Tunnels, two Batmans (not counting her movie appearance), Land of the Giants, Mannix, The Name of the Game, six eps of Mission: Impossible because Barbara Bain had left. Since the 1990s her main work has been 38 eps of a soap, All My Children, plus some movie roles here and there.

 


 

 

Hey, meat! Old Max Kirkland in the Police Academy movies, and a blueshirt who died like a redshirt.

Arthur Batanides, b. 1922 in Tacoma, Wash. IMDB lists 122 acting jobs. His first was for a tv show called Out There in 1951; his last was Police Academy 6 (1989). Wiki says he was the police sergeant in a 1959 crime show called Johnny Midnight. Around his Trek ep he was doing Death Valley Days, Run Buddy Run, The Man from UNCLE, Time Tunnel, The Green Hornet, Lost in Space, Cimarron Strip, I Spy (5 eps as “Rocco), Wild Wild West (4 eps), Gomer Pyle USMC (3 eps but not the same character), The Mod Squad, “Tony” in The Maltese Bippy, and so on.

… Accidental Family. What a great title for a mid-60s tv series. From The Brady Bunch on, you could imagine the premise. But pre-Brady — what the hell?

 



 

Sulu’s replacement.  She gets a lot of lines, actually. She’s Spock’s feed for much of the tense helming that must be done because of the forces unleashed by the Lee Meriwether androids. In “The Paradise Syndrome” she helps dress the Indian princess and tells her to buck up. Her character’s name in this one is Rahda. IMDB says she was in The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968) as “Indian Squaw” and the series Korg: 70,000 B.C. as Mara (1974). That’s it, that’s the list.

 




Harvard grad.  Dr. M’Benga played by Booker Bradshaw, b. 1940 (or ’41) in Virginia. Wiki says, “an American record producer, film and TV actor, and Motown executive.” In the 1970 his IMDB credits are mainly for writing tv scripts (did a Columbo, a McMillan and Wife, a Jeffersons, a Rockford, credits on 4 eps of Richard Pryor’s 1977 variety show, bunch of others). Cartoon voice work in the ’80s. Career started in 1960s with “Prince Nicholas” in a Girl from UNCLE (1966), 2 eps as “Dr. B’Dula” on Tarzan, then 2 eps as Dr. M’Benga on Trek, tailed out in early ’70s. Howard Brunswick in Coffy (1973), Lucas (militant, I guess) in The Strawberry Statement (1970).

 


 

Wordless, beautiful redshirt.  Brad Forrest, birth year unknown. He did “Which” in 1968 and an episode of Man in Space (“Dateline: Moon”) in 1960. That’s it.

 

 



Hogan’s Heroes reg.  “He is perhaps best known for playing Sgt. Richard Baker during the final season of the television series Hogan’s Heroes.” Kenneth Washington, b. 1946, IMDB lists 26 acting jobs, couple as a kidm, then picks up in 1966 with “Man” in a I Dream of Jeannie, “Corporal” in My Three Sons, a policeman in Dragnet 1967. Did his Trek episode in the same period he was doing about a half dozen eps of Adam-12 as “Officer Miller,” eventually his 24 eps on Hogan’s Heroes, the ’70/71 season, and after that things dwindle: “Guard” on 2 Rockford eps in 1977, etc.    

Wiki Trek: “Wink of an Eye”

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Another of the 4 eps that I’m missing. Involved a sort of Julius Schwartz s.f. idea, but one that Mem Alpha says had already shown up on a Wild Wild West ep back when Gene L. Coon produced that show; Coon also did the outline for “Wink,” part of his batch of contractually obliged script work done after he left Trek. The ep idea: people moving so very fast that they can’t be seen, and the movement isn’t running or push-ups, it’s vibrating. The ep uses the idea as justification to claim that an entire civilization could exist and be invisible to us, perceived only as an occasional buzzing sound like that of an unseen insect. I would guess that this notion takes the idea further than Wild Wild West did. In other words, “Wink” is another third-season ep with a premise that’s pretty advanced and complicated for tv s.f. of the time.

But I get all this from synposes. The ep itself is clean gone out of my mind. It appears to have been another arrogant-advanced-race set-up, with a queen interested in Kirk. 

From Mem Alpha:

At the beginning of the episode, Scotty is shown on the bridge recording a log while other dialogue is played over this scene. The footage is reused from “The Empath“. This is evident because Scotty wears a very different hairstyle, and another woman takes the place of Uhura

… only one set, a fountain, which was designed by Matt Jefferies.

The environmental engineering room, also designed by Jefferies, was a redress of the briefing room set.

The Scalosian weapon, also designed by Jefferies, was made from lathe-turned aluminum, and measured approximately 6 ¾” in length. … The weapon made a sound identical to Klingon disruptors and the Ardana torture device in “The Cloud Minders“.

This was Andrea Weaver‘s last episode as women’s costumer. She went on to join another Desilu production, Mission: Impossible.

 

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The queen, b. 1930, in San Luis Obispo, Calif.  Married Darren McGavin year after “Wink,” stayed married. IMDB lists 85 acting jobs; start: ep of The Gray Ghost (1957), end: 2 eps of Love Boat (1980). Around the time of “Wink,” parts in Laredo, Mr. Terrific, Felony Squad, The Wild Wild West, Hondo (5 eps, recurring role), The Big Valley, The Name of the Game (which had an ep titled “Shine On, Shine On, Jesse Gil”), Get Smart, The Outsider, Love American Style.


 



Epicene alien, b. 1922 in NYC; orig name: Herb Evers. Dropped out of high school, went into army, then became actor. Took a long time to get anywhere, never did anything too big, but he worked steadily for years. Quite a looker. IMDB lists 109 acting jobs, starting with extra work in Guadalcanal Diary (1943), ending with “Lou the Editor” in Basket Case 2 (1990). Was getting tv work thru most of the ’80s, primetime mystery/crime dramas for old folks. Around time of “Wink” he was quite busy, doing guest shots on Bonanza, The Invaders, Three for Danger, Tarzan, Run for Your Life, Judd for the Defense, Capt. Coleman in The Green Berets, The Wild Wild West, It Takes a Thief, The Mod Squad, a recurring part on The Guns of Will Sonnett (as Walter Brennan’s son).


 

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Look at this guy! B. 1922 in Sandness, Norway. He was in Stargate (Prof. Longford) and Titanic (Olaf Dahl), the fire commissioner in Ghostbusters II, did a St. Elsewhere ep (Dr. Sven Hosltrum), “Hotel Travel Clerk” in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966). Imdb lists 80 acting jobs, starting with 2 a two-parter for GE True (1962, so he was 39 or 40), ending with a part (Sven Halleus) in some kind of wacky comedy called Formosa (2005). Around “Wink,”  he was doing The Invaders, The Outcasts, Bonanza, Guns of Will Sonnett, “Digger” in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, 3 eps of Mission: Impossible in minor roles.

 




Dead redshirt, no birth year. “He was so young!” Kirk says, because the guy’s character has to age really fast and die. IMDB lists a dozen acting jobs. “Wink” was his first, followed by Medical Center a couple of years later, then a dribble of parts: Room 222, Mod Squad, Adam-12, nothing big. In 1974 he played J. Edgar Hoover’s special friend, Melvin Purvis, for a TV movie about Pretty Boy Floyd. “Second Warrior” in an ep of Battlestar Galactica (1978). Last role: Mike O’Malley in a movie called Raw Force (1982).


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Stunt redshirt, no birth year. Eddie Hice, Mel Apha says he’s “a stuntman, stunt coordinator and second unit director whose work includes films such as all of the four Planet of the Apes films,” plus lots else. IMDB lists acting jobs that start in 1959 (two eps of The Texan) and end in Hard to Hold (1984, he was “Waiter”). Stunts start with a Get Smart in 1965 and end in 2007 with the film Georgia Rule. Around “Wink” his stunts were mainly for films, including Countdown, Bonnie and Cyde and MASH. Acting he had 3 eps of Get Smart (“Blindfolded Accountant”). In 1970 a part in a movie called The Girl in the Leather Suit, part was “Red Beard”—bet he was some menacing young hipster hanging out in vicinity of the girl in the suit.


Unknown aliens. She’s a looker, though maybe her face is too long for tv. The poor guy is being humiliated by costume and wig.