So the results of yesterday’s poll is decidedly in favor of Ultra the Multi-Alien! Hoorah! I have no idea what to do to commemorate this!
If memory serves, my initial exposure to Ultra the Multi-Alien was on the very early Nickelodeon Channel show Video Comics, which displayed old DC Comics stories panel-by-panel with narration and sound effects. I recall some of the featured stories included Silver Age Flash and Green Lantern stories, some Shelly Mayer stuff (Three Mouseketeers, Sugar & Spike), Adam Strange…and I’m about 79% positive that Ultra was in there, too.
But outside of that, and maybe reading a reprint of his origin in a DC digest, and any cameo appearances he’d made since (like in James Robinson’s Starman), I haven’t had a whole lot of exposure to Ultra. Maybe when that DC Archives: Ultra the Multi-Alien hardcover comes out, I can catch up. However, I am struck by how similar in appearance he is to Metamorpho (immortalized in that song I presented yesterday). Comics really had a thing for characters divided up in fourths like that, didn’t they? Like Super Skrull, or Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man.
And you can’t help but wonder just what’s going on, you know, with their, um, naughty bits. Half and half? Maybe split four ways, like it’s the point where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico meet? DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT, you know you wondered, too.
By the way, speaking of yesterday’s voting, the Ultra-Humanite would like to contest the results:
So reader Charles emailed to remind me that Netflix, the mail order DVD rental and online streaming service, has added America’s finest film Swamp Thing to its Watch Instantly streaming library. For those of you unfamiliar with Netflix’s rating function, you can rate movies you’ve seen with star ratings (1 to 5 scale), and based on your tastes, it will try to guess how much you would like other films you have yet to rate. In this case, I hadn’t got around to rating Swamp Thing, and Netflix’s suggestion-thingie said that I’d probably think it was a three-star film.
AU CONTRAIRE, NETFLIX. I have corrected your incorrect assumption by giving the film FIVE stars, baby.
However, I have not yet checked to see which version of the film it is…if it’s the one with an extra dollop of nuditivity, or the slightly less nekkid one (as discussed here). I’ll have to check and report back to you folks…as, you know, a public service.
Oh, wait, just looked at the user reviews…someone claims that it’s the censored version, but, being of a skeptical bent, I still prefer to investigate this myself. INTO THE BREACH, MY FRIENDS.
Another follow-up to yesterday’s post…pal Nat, one of the world’s foremost Peanuts authorities (and, by the way, has provided the text for the forthcoming Peanuts Collection hardcover), popped into the comments to suggest that I’ve “subscribed to the myth of the timeless Peanuts,” which is fair enough. Like Nat says, the reprint books we grew up with tended to leave out the strips with celebrity references, which is probably why those references seem so out of place now. (The sports references, like to Billie Jean King, were usually left in, which is of course why they feel like they fit more naturally into the strip’s world.)
By the way…there’s totally a Cheryl Tiegs reference near the end of that newest Complete Peanuts volume.
I think I’ve mentioned before that seeing real celebrity names in Peanuts always catches me off-guard. I realize that it’s not like this is something Schulz never did, but it’s just that…well, I’m not sure how to put it, exactly. Maybe it’s that Peanuts was just so much of its own little world that the occasional intrusion from outside really stands out. Like the celebrity name-dropping, or the Vietnam reference in the strip I pointed out yesterday, or…okay, I was going to point out the Disco Beagle strips (scroll down on that page to see the rest) as another kind of oddball thing to find in the Peanuts milieu, but let’s face it, those strips are fantastic.
Anyway, Peanuts…I have, won’t you?
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In other news:
I’d like to thank the folks who were nice enough to get me mentioned three times in Tom Spurgeon’s “Name Five Writers About Comics You Like” survey. That was a very welcome surprise, especially since I usually feel like I’m not so much writing about comics as flailing about wildly, slamming my forehead against the keyboard and hoping something halfway coherent results. Anyway, thanks to those good people, and to all of you, for continuing to come back and encourage this sort of behavior.
Now here’s someone who knows his stuff…and it’s a six year old little stuffed bull by the name of Bully, who’s taking you on a whirlwind tour of Marvel Comics’ many publishers. Pack a lunch, it’s a long trip!
Hey, you guys like awesome stuff that is free, right? And presumably you like reading about comic books, unless you’re coming here for my cooking tips and frank relationship advice, which, well, more pity you. Anyhoo, all four issues of the legendary comics ‘zine The Imp are available for download in PDF format at the publisher’s webpage, entirely gratis. Each issue devoted to a specific topic (Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Jack Chick, and naughty Mexican comics), and each issue is great reading.
One of my readers, the presumably-pseudonymous Glitch Girl, sent me an email yesterday morning altering me to the Music of DC Comics: 75th Anniversary Edition CD, featuring DC-related theme songs and other music from the past few decades. Of particular note is the track Glitch Girl was emailing me about:
“22. Swamp Thing – Christopher Stone (1991)
- Previously unavailable. Digitally remastered. From the live-action TV show ‘Swamp Thing: The Series.’”
So regular commenter on the site, Roel Torres, and his drawin’ pal Scott Arnold have just unleashed their first comic book onto the world, Lightning Girl Loves Rocket Boy, an essentially done-in-one graphic novel featuring the romantic travails between two young college students who are also, it just happens, superheroes.
Roel was nice enough to pass along a copy to me, and I quite enjoyed it. I liked how the superheroics were pretty much just in the story for the purposes of how it affected the romance, and not the be-all, end-all of the story with a romantic subplot squeezed in. The dialogue is light and humorous when it needs to be, and services the romantic melodrama without being overly melodramatic and goofy.
Though it took me a page or three to get used to it, Arnold does a good job on the art, handling both the character interaction and the superheroics with his particularly stylized cartooning. All the characters are distinct and consistently portrayed and instantly recognizable, which is a plus considering the emphasis is on what happens to the leads when they’re NOT out in their superhero work uniforms.
The story itself is 50 pages long, but there’s a lot packed into it. There’s no wasted space on the pages, and no wasted time moving the plot along. No decompressed storytelling here. Yes, it’s a “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, does boy get girl back, I ain’t tellin’” plot, only with superheroes, and even with that twist, I’m sure we’re all familiar with the tropes of the genre. Even so, it still moves along at a quick and entertaining clip, and the basic story thread is given enough unique embellishment to go down easy.
If I were to bust the guys’ chops about a thing or two on the comic…having “The Beginning” at the end of the story? Oh, Roel ‘n’ Scott, say it ain’t so. You know the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys would totally rake you over the coals for that. Also, the computer lettering used in the book was…well, not terrible, but just slightly distracting, but I got used to it. And there’s a panel or two in the comic where the characters felt like they weren’t really integrated into their backgrounds, such as when they’re standing on a rooftop but it looks more like they’re hovering over it or pasted into the panel. But that’s just getting nitpicky, and any rough edges the comic may have is the sort of thing experience takes care of. (Plus, I like comics with a rough edge or two…I’d rather read a comic produced by amateur creators just starting out in the field, like this one, than a fifteenth Avengers ongoing.)
But, overall, a good first effort, and I’d like to see more from these fellas. Maybe not more of this specific story, as, even though there’s a “#1″ on the cover (and, ahem, “The Beginning”), it feels like we reached a definitive ending with this story and it’d be a shame to undo that. It stands on its own as an enjoyable addition to the relatively-sparse “Superhero Romance” genre.
If you go to the official blog, you can read an extensive preview of the comic, and you can order your very own copy right here.
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In other news:
I received my package of Neil the Horse comics yesterday, and they’re all in good shape, with only the first issue having a crease or two on the covers. Can’t really complain for a 99-cent bid, though I have to admit I’m not thrilled about paying a certain amount for shipping, and then seeing that the actual shipping cost was only about a third of that. But…full run of Neil the Horse, under nine bucks total, stop complaining, Mike.
Hey, Superman: Secret Origin #6 is coming out today. Finally. Took ‘em so long, it’s almost time to revise Superman’s origin again.
Bully, America’s Greatest Little Stuffed Bull, presents to you Archie Comics Versus Kids’ Fads. It’s a battle Archie only rarely won, if ever. (Ignore the first reader comment, where someone proclaims Archie late to the party for featuring a Wii-type game on a cover. Um, the Wii is still selling, last I heard. DO NOT TEMPT THE BULL’S WRATH, COMMENTER.)
So Marvel and DC (well, mostly Marvel) regularly sends out packs of advertising postcards for shops to give away, usually listing all the tie-ins for a crossover series, or pushing some new title or storyline or what have you. They make for nice promotional items, and I’ve seen more than a few customers marking off titles they’ve picked up on the card’s checklists. And I’m sure a lot of them end up on display back at home somewhere…like, I’m not coming right out and saying that I have the “Planet Hulk” postcard on my fridge door, but I might.
That one I scanned above has received more reaction from our customers than any other card released so far. Okay, mostly it’s “they’re getting rid of a member of the Fantastic Four? Again?” but nearly everyone who’s seen the stack of these cards on the counter has commented on it. And really, this is about as perfectly pure and simple a targeted advertisement as I’ve ever seen. Okay, your average non-fan off the street may not get it, but every comic fan 1) recognizes this as the FF logo, and 2) knows that, hey, that should be a “4″ in there, not a “3,” therefore something’s happening to one of the characters. The information on the back of the card is almost redundant…everything you need to know is pretty much right there on the front. (But if you need to know…it’s a storyline starting in next month’s FF. And you should be reading FF right now anyway, because writer Jonathan Hickman has been doing a good job on it.)
Anyhoo, just wanted to give some appreciation to this promo item. Well done, Marvel’s marketing department…well done.
This is The Flintstones Double Vision (September 1994), a comic book adaptation of the live action feature film starring John Goodman as Fred:
The “Double Vision” in the title refers, not to the Foreigner song, but to this comic’s particular format…while at first glance, it appears to be a 3D comic:
…in fact, it’s two different adaptations of the same story! Looking only through the blue lens, you’d see the story as drawn with the characters resembling their live action counterparts (scans grayscaled for clarity):
Looking through the red lens, you’d see the story with the characters in their traditional animated form:
And if you were to look through both lenses:
OH GOODNESS DON’T DO THAT
Anyway, you don’t see anything in 3D, despite having to use 3D glasses for this particular gimmick. You do get to read a comic with one eye squeezed shut, and boy doesn’t that sound like fun.
An interesting thing on the cover:
They use “you know who” to make it rhyme, sure, but John Goodman’s name appears nowhere in or on the book, which I thought was odd since so much attention was paid to delineating the man’s features on the cover. But then, it’s not like actors get ballyhooed on comic book adaptations all the time as it is…you’re not getting the actor, anyway. You’re getting drawings of the actor. And there’s probably some additional licensing hoohar involved if you actually use the actor’s name, maybe…I really don’t know.
On the other hand, comic book adaptations of movies are kind of a moot point when you can own the actual movie about four or five months after seeing it in theatres, like I’ve written about before.
So, The Flintstones Double Vision…bit of an oddity, and a latter day example of a comic book genre that’s very nearly gone* nowadays. Also, it doesn’t appear to be in the Overstreet Price Guide, so I’m totally pricing this at $3000, and none of you can stop me.
* Yes, I know there’s a currently running adaptation of the Star Trek movie. That’s why I said “nearly gone.”
The All-Seeing Eye of Sanctum Sanctorum Comix spotted this brief appearance of Man-Thing in the promo for the animated Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes series. Perhaps a hint of an extended Man-Thing adventure at some point in the series’ future?
Not sure who did it…my name is spelled correctly, so that rules Employee Aaron out.
Also, minor correction to my headline here…this is actually the space to the left of my normal parking space, and you can see part of my truck on the right hand side of the picture, there.
…Yes, this is really what I’m posting today. Sorry, been a bit occupied with some some other things I need to deal with. Normal service should resume tomorrow, with any luck.
Neil the Horse is one of those series I’d been meaning to acquire for a while now, having somehow missed it during its original 1980s run. However, we never had more than a few issues at the shop, and didn’t feel like trying to track down the missing ones because I’m old and tired and back issue hunting is a young man’s game. But when a full run of Neil popped up on the eBay (and pictured above with the image from the actual auction) for an opening bid of ninety-nine cents…well, that was hard to resist. And I ended up winning the lot with that opening bid.
True, the shipping cost is seven and a half bucks, apparently for parcel post, which is…well, I’ll let this old post of mine explain, but even so that’s still a full run of Neil the Horse for under ten bucks, and therefore I won’t gripe too much.
There are other indie series from the early-to-mid ’80s that I missed that the store doesn’t have and I’m seriously thinking about picking up for cheap via the eBay, because clearly I don’t have enough comics already. And I’m still looking for the elusive Yummy Fur #9, which (if I recall correctly) was one of the issues of the series not carried by Diamond, making it a bit of a rare item. Well, sure, I at least have the lead story reprinted in one of the Ed the Happy Clown trade paperbacks, but the knowledge that I have issues #1 through #8 and #10 through #32 weighs upon me in a way that only fellow obsessive-compulsive funnybook readers can understand.
And by the way, I didn’t say anything about it at the time…but as only vaguely implied in that how to ship comics post, I’d bought a run of Minx on eBay, which is an eight issue series, and the seller wanted to charge me twelve bucks to ship ‘em. Twelve. Dollars. That’s crazy talk, and I told him so. He eventually saw reason, but I guess that was my fault for not nailing down shipping ahead of my bidding.
OR 
