Such coolness, and the writer (yourself?) has a delicious command of something dear to my heart that used to be known as the English language... "icy carapace" has a marvelous ring to it.  FAAAAABulous!

Penny Dreadful in the comics is quite the Goddess, but she just doesn't have quite the distinctive charm that you yourself radiate in the flesh.

Hoping the comic is a huge success!  I need to order it!

hugs, Gothick

Love the set design for Julia's lab.  It's so lusciously theatrical as are so many of the key sets in this opus.

Funny that Angelique doesn't appear at all in this one.  Haven't a clue why not since she is so important to what we've been told about this story.

Thanks so much for the captures, MB.  The images whizz by far too quickly otherwise. 

BarnaDepp looks as if he is wondering "what sort of claret cup is that?" as he watches the people (in the Blue Whale?) eating ice cream sundaes.

G.

sigh.

G.

Great essay, Zahir!  I'm far, far from being an authority, or even a fan, of the 1991 DS, but as I understand it wasn't just the heavy hand of Dan Curtis that sabotaged the show; there were other factors at play:

(1) The Gulf War, and the cupidity of NBC programmers, meant that the series episodes were shunted all over the place in the schedule, to the point where you'd have needed David's crystal ball to know when the next installment was going to air.  As well, the initial Friday night slot was a notorious "death slot" in the NBC schedule so the series was already being given short shrift by programmers.

(2)  NBC suits (Brandon Tartikoff, perhaps?) apparently insisted that the 1790 flashback and scenes set in the present interweave in the latter weeks of the series, resulting in a hodgepodge effect in some of the episodes and an unnecessarily speeded-up retelling of the original 1795 story.  (I still wince whenever I think of that last episode.)

I personally found the art direction to be very erratic--sometimes great, othertimes unwatchable--and the same for the writing--Curtis needed to hire someone of the calibre of Sam Hall to be a script editor.  My impression is that DC himself was the script editor.  This in general never proved to be a scenario resulting in greatness (yeah, I know the Curtis worshippers out there will disagree--just giving *my* opinion here).

I'm sure I've already written more than anyone cares to read, but the final thing I have to say about this show is even though everyone always talks about the lavish production values, something about it just looks somehow tawdry to me.  I don't know whether it is that clashy color palette they kept reverting to (see note above about art direction) and the network trying to cut corners on post production (I have no idea about the technical side of things, but the series always looks so grainy and poorly-developed in the film stock sense of the word). 

I still think that if the network had supported it more, it would have lasted at least one more season.  I have the impression that there was backstory and personality conflicts behind the abrupt pulling of the plug.

cheers, G.

Interesting comparison, michael.  I think you may have a point.

I am lol at your use of the Salem Branch.  hee hee!

G.

If Moltke had come back to play a new character, especially an evil one, during the Tarrytown hiatus period, I think it would have made PT 1970 an even more nuanced and intriguing story.

We got Lara Parker as the ingenue in PT 1841.  I'm just as glad that she got to play a thoroughly psychotic version of Angelique in this storyline.

And this reminds me:  having finished the new comic book and seen the 2012 trailers, what is it with the evolution of the Angelique character into a psychotic slag with super-powers?  On the series, she was also a character with a lot of shadings and nuances and layers.  Yeah, Barnabas always ranted about how eee-vil she was, but we (the audience) got to see some of her doubts, her questionings, and even her desire for love as opposed to her obsessive need to have Barnabas come crawling to her on his hands and knees.

There is no answer to this... maybe the trend for apocalyptic villains with superpowers in the mass media is part of the reason for why the character seems to be written as she is in spin-offs and tie-ins.

G.

Wow, I finally sat down to look at issue four and it's ... wall-to-wall schlock is the best phrase I can come up with for it.

If the original issues 4 through 6 were combined into this one final issue that explains at least some of the ways in which the story fails.  I don't know why they hired such a poor artist, and the colorist didn't even bother to check hair colors from earlier issues.

I wonder how long this mag will last.  Fans of the new movie will be puzzled when they check it out and don't find any jokes...

G.