The Man Who Asked If God was an Astronaut
By Dan Brown Earlier this month, Erich von Daniken died. Even though you may not know the author’s name, you are living in the world he helped to create. Simply put, this paperback writer did more than any other single person to popularize the notion that alien beings visited Earth in this planet’s distant past. He did more than Stanley Kubrick, more than Jack Kirby, more than any other artist or scientist to make that belief into a mainstream one. What was once a controversial theory is now part of the daily TV schedule, as evidenced by shows like History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series. In 1968, von Daniken published the pulpy Chariots of the Gods?. It argued that there’s evidence in ancient art and architecture of advanced beings coming to this planet to help our ancestors perform feats of engineering they couldn’t have possibly accomplished themselves, such as building the pyramids. As least one mid-1970s paperback edition of the book came with the tagline, Was God an astronaut? It was followed by many sequels, including Gods From Outer Space and The Gold of the Gods. The initial volume caused a sensation. You have to keep in mind that in the 1970s, a lot of disillusioned people were searching for meaning, and rejected the answers provided by the institutions of the day, such as the Christian church. Some folks joined cults. Some signed up for EST courses. Yet others started to believe ancient carvings and structures were proof that little green men had landed on Earth thousands of years ago, gifting us technology beyond our primitive understanding that eventually allowed humanity to flourish. Naturally, von Daniken’s claims were discounted as pseudoscientific nonsense. Figures like astronomer and TV host Carl Sagan led the charge to debunk Chariots of the Gods?, but it was too late – the idea got traction, and is still an attractive one to many. Whether you think von Daniken is full of bunk or not, you can’t deny his influence: Ancient Aliens, to name just one offshoot of his books, has been running on the History Channel since 2009 and shows no signs of being cancelled anytime soon. There aren’t many series on the small screen that boast the same kind of staying power. Nineteen sixty-eight was the same year Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted. Not only did the film depict the alien monolith appearing in prehistoric Africa, it also shows the extraterrestrial black slab providing the evolutionary spark that allowed hominids to make the transition from frightened ape to spacefaring species. When comic creator Jack Kirby returned to Marvel Comics in the 1970s, one of the titles he drew and wrote was The Eternals, which went one step further than von Daniken, portraying those ancient aliens as still living here. Chariots of the Gods? was also the inspiration for the Leonard Nimoy-hosted In Search of . . ., which set forth metaphysical, supernatural, and extraterrestrial explanations for mysteries from human history. The 1970s original then spawned a modern version in 2019. If the 1970s were about anything, they were about ancient aliens, Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle. People were looking for answers. Just like they are today. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
The Woodchipper is Evidence of Joe Ollmann’s Greatness
By Dan Brown At some point in the last few years, Joe Ollmann went from being a very good graphic novelist to a truly great one. His new book, The Woodchipper, is proof he has made that transition. Out now, the collection contains five graphic short stories – or whatever you want to call them. “Short-story collections can be a hard sell,” the Hamilton comic creator’s cartoon self explains in the book’s introduction. Maybe so, but Ollmann is making a strong case for the possibilities of the genre. Just as the late Alice Munro was a legendary writer of prose short stories, Ollmann has mastered the graphic equivalent. His stories are thought-provoking, funny, and sad. The common thread running through the five pieces here is how Ollmann concludes each with one of his patented “anti-twist endings,” in which almost nothing happens, yet the main character’s world is forever changed. My favourite of the lot is called Meat, and tells the story of Kara, a security guard at an animal-packing plant who befriends one of the protesters outside the company fence. “I’m Paul Blart with a moral conscience,” Kara says in her inner monologue, before being presented with an ethical dilemma. I won’t give away the rest of the story, but let’s just say Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth is no longer the only tale from a Southwestern Ontario creator that features a half-human, half-pig hybrid. And that’s the thing about the stories in this collection: None of them suffers for being short. They all feel as complex as a “full” graphic novel. Ollman packs each one with so much character detail and meaning. Also not to be missed is Nestled All Snug, in which bookstore employee Sasha gets locked in a bathroom in the back of the shop over the Christmas holidays. The slowly building drama here isn’t so much dependent on whether she can escape or not, but on what she will do to survive. Can Sasha, her mouth dry from hours of captivity, break down and drink the toilet water in order to endure? You’ll have to read the story to find out what she decides. As for the title story, it’s a perfect example of Ollmann’s theory about creating reverse-surprise endings. I’ll spoil it by revealing no human appendage actually gets torn to pieces in the titular chipper, but nothing is the same at the end of the story as it was in the beginning. Maybe you’re not familiar with Ollmann’s work. Maybe you’re looking for a point of entry into his oeuvre, which also includes full-length graphic novels such as Fictional Father and The Abominable Mr. Seabrook and yet more short-story collections. The Woodchipper, full of compelling character moments that centre on “non-incidents,” is the perfect place to start. I doubt Ollmann needs ideas, but I hope he considers a straight-on autobiography next time out. The snippets of his life we get from the introductions to his books just aren’t enough anymore. How about it, Joe? Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
The Many Stages of Building LEGO as a Grown-up
By Dan Brown Last weekend I put together a LEGO set. It was a time. Here, for the benefit of readers, are the 12 steps one goes through as an adult while making a LEGO Mars Rover. Just in case you’re thinking of doing the same thing. For the record, I built the smallest, cheapest Rover that goes for less than $20, not the other massive Mars vehicles the Danish toy company sells for hundreds of dollars. I thought the small one would be easy. STEP ONE: Carried along by memories of boyhood fun with friends and your brother, you eagerly rip open the plastic package, being careful not to lose any of the pieces that spill onto the coffee table in your living room. “Really?” you think, “That dinky little toy has so many components? There’s gotta be a thousand of them.” Regardless, you still look forward to what you anticipate will be, at most, 20 minutes of mindless fun. STEP TWO: With your spirit bolstered by pure enthusiasm, you pull out the construction instructions to unfold them. It dimly registers that there are 18 stages, printed on both sides of a wide glossy sheet, plus a large number of those stages have sub-stages. That’s a lot of work for a vehicle that’s not much bigger than a baseball! But you are not daunted. STEP THREE: Mashing a few small pieces together, you begin to suspect LEGO instructions are kind of like IKEA furniture-building directions. Since LEGO is a global brand, despite its origins in Denmark, the instructions are necessarily vague pictograms you are finding less and less helpful as the afternoon stretches on. In particular, you curse the colouring as you try to make the small pieces fit together, noting you can’t tell the difference between black and grey components on the instruction sheet. There are a lot of each colour. STEP FOUR: You stare at the instructions, your eyes growing blurry. Damn, this is more difficult than you thought it would be! STEP FIVE: You feel your thumbs growing raw from handling the tiny, unforgiving, sharp-at-the-corners plastic pieces. Your mind wanders. You find yourself pondering the length of time it takes for calluses to form on your fingers. STEP SIX: You run your rough hands over the pieces on the coffee table, once more trying to sort them by shape and colour. Not for the first time, you swear the makers of this particular package of LEGO must have left out that one crucial component you’re searching for. Desperate, you ask your wife, seated beside you on the couch reading a paperback romantasy, if she can see it anywhere on the table. STEP SEVEN: Just as you run out of hope, your feeble eyes spot it. Like every other time you swore a piece was missing, it was not. You decide it’s time to take a break. Your shoulders have begun to ache and you feel as though you’ve been hunched over for a couple hours – because you have been. You know you will benefit from getting some mental space. You go into the bedroom to play with your two cats, dozing without a care on the bed. STEP EIGHT: Back from the bedroom, you lock a few more pieces into place. You fear making this tiny toy is slowly, inevitably becoming a career for you. STEP NINE: Time for a booze break! You ask your wife if she will join you for a shot of something strong. She chooses a whiskey from the nearby liquor cabinet that is infused with the essence of black walnuts. You scarf the shot down, hoping it will fortify you with courage until the LEGO building is done for the day. Back at it. STEP TEN: You’ve pretty much given up consulting the instructions. Instead, you rely on the photo plastered on the ripped-open package for guidance. Your wife notes one of the key pieces you added 20 minutes ago is in the wrong place. You take this in stride, knowing your marriage is built on a solid foundation of love, respect, trust, and walnut whiskey. STEP ELEVEN: You throw in the towel for good, letting your wife know she is welcome to complete the final stages of this particular LEGO build. Sweetheart that she is, she seems to have little trouble doing so, finishing up in short order STEP TWELVE: Staring at the six-wheeled model in your hand, you realize you also bought two other LEGO sets, which are waiting patiently in their packages to be assembled. Does it ever end? Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Superman Takes on Spider-Man
By Dan Brown Who would win in a fight between Superman and Spider-Man? That question for the ages, surely argued over by many a comic fan, was settled in 1976. That’s when DC and Marvel joined forces to publish the first of what would grow into a long line of industry crossovers that continues to this day. Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man was a landmark comic. And now the fans of 50 years later – many of whom weren’t around in the 1970s – can re-live that moment in comics history by purchasing a reprint of the special issue, which came in giant treasury size and has the two heroes squaring off above the Manhattan skyline on the cover. Even though I’ve got a worn copy of the 1976 original, I picked up the reprint last weekend at L.A. Mood. The version I got features a painted variant of the famed Ross Andru cover. Andru also did the interior art, which looks crisp in the newly published version. The two companies did a really good job of making the story look fresh again. Stalwart Gerry Conway was assigned writing duties. The opening splash – which stretches over two huge pages and depicts a giant robot plowing through buildings in downtown Metropolis – pulses with energy. Printing has come a long way in the last five decades, the paper here is white, not the dingy brown of yesteryear’s newsprint. The continuity it takes place within echoed the timeline of each company at that moment in world history. So in this story Clark Kent is not a Daily Planet reporter anymore, but a TV anchor about to cover the national political conventions of 1976. Peter Parker, meanwhile, is about to graduate from college while freelancing for J. Jonah Jameson. After they meet in prison, Lex Luthor and Doctor Octopus embark on a partnership to ransom the Earth’s environment for $10 billion, which is of course peanuts these days. Cue your best impression of Mike Myers as Dr. Evil not grasping the implications of decades of inflation. By means of a frickin’ laser mounted on an ultra-secret satellite, Luthor is able to kick the planet’s ecology out of balance, finally creating a 200-mile-wide tsunami that threatens to destroy the East Coast. What I love about this retro comic is how it includes devices you don’t see in modern mainstream comics, such as thought bubbles and sound effects: RIPP! KRONG! THOOM! And now, a word about the superhero battle of the century. Any comic fan worth their salt knows the answer to who would win in a tussle between the title characters. There is an obvious power imbalance, and even with the proportionate powers or a spider, Spidey wouldn’t last a minute against Superman. It’s not even close. There is, of course, a ham-fisted way the creative team gets around this fact. Unknown to either party, Luthor infuses the wall-crawler with red-sun radiation, which in DC lore can rob the Man of Steel of his invulnerability, thus making it a fair fight. But if Superman’s nemesis can do such a thing, why doesn’t he ever do it over in the regular DC Universe? Such are the exigent plot devices of DC-Marvel crossovers! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Pop Culture: Will 2026 Be the Year It All Happens?
By Dan Brown Like a cornered she-wolf protecting her pups, the New Year is upon us. This week, I’m in the mood to look ahead and ask – what’s going to be the biggest thing in pop culture in 2026? What event, person, or product will define the next 12 months? Will movie theatres sell even fewer tickets? Will Taylor and Travis tie the knot? Will people continue to exit social media? What will the song of the summer be? What will the most-popular film, meme, TV series, book, and podcast be? Only someone who is deluded or dangerous would give answers to those questions with 100 per cent certainty. So while I don’t have an all-powerful crystal ball, I do have some thoughts. For starters, AI. If last year is any indication, the advocates who are pushing artificial intelligence on the rest of us will crack on. Their goal: Making the general public think AI is inevitable. But from what I’ve seen so far, I’m not impressed by tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. I’m a skeptic on this one, so the question for me is: What are the odds the AI bubble will burst before 2027 a la the dotcom downturn of the 1990s? Merriam-Webster Dictionary got it right when their editors chose “slop” as the one word that defines 2025. If present trends continue, perhaps the word of 2026 will be “crap” or “crud.” At the movie theatres, people are buying fewer tickets. The entertainment data firm EntTelligence, quoted in the Los Angeles Times this week, says there were 800 million theatre tickets sold in 2024, but 760 million sold in 2025. (Those figures are for the U.S., I’m assuming.) Even the higher figure doesn’t match pre-pandemic levels. There may be more people watching movies this year, they just aren’t watching them at the multiplex. One motion picture that I am looking forward to seeing on the big screen is Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, which is not a prequel to 2001. It arrives July 17. It could be interesting. As for the much-memed Avengers: Doomsday, I’m still on the fence. Other questions on my mind: Which entertainment figure will the Trump administration go after, as the U.S. President did with Jimmy Kimmel last year? What effect will Trump have on the proposed sale of the venerable Warner Bros. studio to Netflix? (He’s already said he will be involved in the federal government’s approval process.) You also can’t discount the stuff that happens in any given year that nobody saw coming. The obvious example from last year would be the December slaying of director Rob Reiner, whose filmography included one of the best motion-picture comedies of all time, This is Spinal Tap, as well as The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Stand By Me, and Misery. What will the big concert tour be? Which comedian will survive being cancelled? Will a seeming generation of stars – last year it was Robert Redford, Diane Keaton, Brigitte Bardot, and Ozzy Osbourne – pass into history before our eyes? Will something as simple as an album cover provoke controversy, as Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend did last August? Whatever happens, I will be here to document it all. And here’s hoping 2026 brings us more happy surprises than tragic ones! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
What I read on my Christmas break
By Dan Brown I’m one of the lucky ones who got some days off at Christmas. It won’t surprise you to learn I spent much of my time away from work reading graphic novels. Here’s the rundown on the books I finished while going through my TBR pile. Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson: You may know Thompson as the American comic creator behind the landmark book Blankets, in which he chronicled his turning away from religion as a teen. In this new volume, published last year, he again covers his youth, but this time he uses his childhood jobs on Wisconsin farms as the launching point for telling the story of ginseng. I will be honest with you, I wondered how the writer/artist would be able to fill 448 pages with details about a single plant. That didn’t sound like a workable premise to me. Surprisingly, he pulls it off wonderfully. I found the thick graphic novel engrossing. His lines are lush and this is the kind of book that reviewers call “expansive.” His scope is wide – really, it’s not about farming, it’s about life. Thompson is clearly at the peak of his storytelling powers. Drinking at the Movies by Julia Wertz: New York cartoonist Wertz relates how she came to live in the Big Apple after leaving her childhood home in San Francisco. Her autobiographical mini-stories revolve around Wertz’s struggle to understand her own motivations as she enters young adulthood. If Mimi Pond is among the comic creators you enjoy, you should check this one out. Based on this collection of Wertz’s strips, I plan to read more of her comics. Various by Jeff Lemire: I’ve been meaning to do a deep dive on the Southwestern Ontario creator, and finally got a chance over the holidays. I read stuff he wrote and drew himself (Fishflies, Minor Arcana Volume One) as well as titles on which he wrote and collaborated with another artist (Plutona, Primordial, Phantom Road Volume One). I would say the highlights for me were Plutona and Phantom Road. The former is about a group of school kids finding the body of a superhero (shades of the movie Stand By Me), the latter about a long-haul trucker who is transported to an alternate dimension where zombie-type monsters roam the landscape. As always, I don’t recommend Lemire for those who want pat explanations like you might get in a mainstream Marvel or DC comic. He likes to keep things mysterious for his readers. Ashes by Alvaro Ortiz: This thin volume is akin to a road movie in which a group of friends reunites after many years to carry out the wishes of a departed buddy who has been cremated. It has a fairy-tale quality to it, and I enjoyed the sweet ending. DC: The New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke: This Compact Edition, featuring almost all of DC’s roster , didn’t move the needle for me. I think that’s because I don’t know enough about the DC universe to understand the significance of how its heroes behave here. It seemed derivative of previous comics, such as Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, and borrowed elements from movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. What can I say? I grew up a Marvel fan. Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale: I understand this book is much loved by DC fans. The art is evocative, and it was a cool take on the origin of Two Face. Again, I read the Compact Edition. Did you get any time to read over the holidays? Did you get any graphic novels as gifts? I would love to hear about it in the comments! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
