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I picked up a copy of this black and white small press anthology magazine in those long-ago days prior to my entry into the funnybook selling business. In fact, if I recall correctly, this magazine was in a stack of books being offered “FREE with $10 Purchase” (or something like that). Anyway, I grabbed it partially because of my interest in sampling a lot of the black and white indies at the time (and the ’80s were a real heyday for that sort of thing), but mostly because I saw
Cynicalman creator Matt Feazell‘s name on the cover.
As it turned out, this wasn’t Feazell’s usual stick-figure style…actually, it was a story that had been drawn back in ’81:
However, there was a stick-figure style story elsewhere in the anthology (The Stick Dick in “Vengeance Day” by Eric Mayer), as well as a Morty the Dog story by
Steve Willis and a Mightyguy lead story by
Tim Corrigan. The magazine contains mostly short humor strips like the above (though the Feazell strip is more “slice of life”), and there is one horror strip that seems somewhat out of place. But overall, this is an entertaining mix of cartooning styles, some more polished than others, but all demonstrating an honest, homemade expressiveness that your typical 30-part superhero crossover punch-em-up can’t match.
The black and white boom of the 1980s did result in a lot of junk, but it did occasionally come up with a bit of enjoyable oddball weirdness like Czar Chasm, and I kind of miss that.
Hey, Cully, look at this.
Things I can never get enough of: Batman just tooling around the skies of Gotham in his Bat-jetpack:
This is from the fourth season animated series episode “Critters,” in which an evil farmer sends mutated animals to do his evil bidding. Like, for example, this giant Jack Kirby-esque cow:
Even down to the Kirby-style squared-off udder teats:
I felt a little weird for noticing this, but later, when I listened to the commentary track, the guys who actually did the show made sure to point out the Kirby udder as well, so I guess I’m…well, still a bit weird for noticing this.
An interesting thing about the commentary track…they just state outright that the reason they’re doing a commentary for this episode is because it’s one of the most hated of the series. And not just by the fans….even some of these folks in the commentary said they thought the story “sucked” when they got their hands on it…but as the episode progressed, the guys very clearly enjoyed it and its goofy humor. The elderly farmer who holds his own in hand-to-hand combat against Batman, the giant insect invasion of Gotham, Robin’s exclamation of “Holy Cow!” (with Batgirl’s response “You had to say it!”), mutant chickens versus a blimp…there’s plenty to enjoy if you don’t take everything too seriously.
The story is by Steve Gerber, who gets name checked during the commentary for his Howard the Duck and Man-Thing comics work, and the script is by Joe Lansdale, so you’ve got a very strange mix of Gerber’s worldview and Lansdale’s quirky dialogue, which, the creators of the show admit, was probably too peculiar for some viewers. But I’m fans of both these guys, and I thought the episode was a hoot.
In related news, I was recently processing a bunch of Batman comics from the ’70s and ’80s at the shop, and looking at the covers, it struck me that seeing a comic where it’s just a plain ol’ “Batman vs. the Penguin” story is almost kind of quaint. No crossovers, no extended special event storylines, no re/de/construction of decades-old characters, no stunt-casting of celebrity creators (or at least a lot fewer of those elements)…just the Penguin committing bird-themed crimes and shooting his umbrella gun at Batman and Robin, and he goes to jail at the end. Stirred a strange bit of nostalgia in me…probably the same nostalgia nerve that Batman: The Animated Series so successfully hits. Or “punches,” more appropriately.
So anyway, that fourth-season episode of Batman: The Animated Series, “Old Wounds,” which explains the rift between Batman and Dick Grayson, the original Robin…the one that leads to Dick becoming Nightwing?
Barbara (Batgirl) Gordon doesn’t know the Dynamic Duo’s secret identities at this point, but asks Bruce what’s bothering Dick. Bruce decides to reveal his and Dick’s double-life to Barbara, and, only saying “follow me,” pushes open the grandfather clock to reveal the secret cave entrance and walk down the stairs, with Barbara quite a ways behind:
And this is an awfully long set-up just to note that as I was watching this scene, I briefly thought “Barbara probably thinks this path leads to Bruce and Dick’s sex dungeon” and that all kinds of
horrible possibilities of just
what caused the rift were crossing her mind.
That’s a horrible thing to think about a Batman cartoon, anyway. I’m not proud. But c’mon, if a rich gentleman and his college graduate ward have had a falling out, and you ask the rich gentleman what’s up, and his only response is to open a secret door to a staircase into a cave and tells you to follow him, what’re you gonna think? You’re going to think “this guy’s gonna end up wearing my skin,” that’s what.
• • •
More redesign notes:
Got all my quotes from the old sidebar on the About Page, got all my links on the “Links” page, naturally enough, and my page of previous sidebar icon pics now looks like the rest of the site. Plus, I have my titlebar banner on that page in all its unobscured glory. Next step: pop-up and pop-under ads and loud autoplaying music. …It’s what the people want.
Speaking of the banner, I’ve had more than one person ask me who that was second from the left, there. Why, that’s Spunky the Monkey, of course! Here’s a story of his I posted a couple of years back. Please…enjoy some Spunky.
AAAAAAAAAAAAA!
AAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
from The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy (1988) – thanks to pal Andres
from World’s Finest #183 (March 1969) by Leo Dorfman, Ross Andru & Mike Esposito
Hey, I didn’t even realize when I pulled this comic aside that its cover date is the very month and year of my birth! (Its actual
release date was likely a month or two previous, I think.) Huh, neat. To think my birth coincided with the raising of the Superman and Batman flags at the United Nations…where they fly even today.
Anyway, you guys had some comments on the redesign from yesterday, so let me respond to a couple:
Just Some Guy sez:
“Oh god! Searing pain in my retinas! The glare… too bright!”
Yeah, it is very…white, isn’t it? I’d been dead set on duplicating the exact look of the old site, which is one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to upgrade…I kept fiddling around with WordPress templates and getting frustrated and giving up. But I think this layout is a lot more open, and a lot less, I don’t know, 2003. I think I can live with it.
Plus, I finally changed the banner. Having some old friends staring back at me from across the top of my site helps ease the transition.
Walaka wonders
“Um, isn’t the apostrophe in your title backwards/upside down? What’s up with that?”
What, indeed? That’s just how the apostrophe is in this particular font used by this theme (Hanami, if you were wondering and if you hadn’t yet peeked at the link at the very bottom of the page). To tell the truth, it kind of bothered me at first, but just a little, and I kind of like it now. Just a little bit of weirdness in an otherwise stately design.
Plus, when I looked at the site on my work computer, it just had the standard straight-line computer apostrophe, so I guess whatever font that is isn’t installed in the shop’s computer. I just used “computer” three times in that sentence.
Pal Andres asks, in regards to my old comments:
“If I read the Blogger update correctly your old site will still be accessible, right?”
Well, it could be, if I go through the trouble of setting it up, but then I’d have two copies of my site on the internet and that could be confusing and screw up Googlers and Bingers and such. I mean, I could adjust settings so that Google wouldn’t index the other site or whatever, but one of the reasons I made the transition over to WordPress in the first place is to kind of keep things simple and in one place. Google’s new set-up would have required fiddling with subdomains and redirects to where Google would be hosting my actual posts, while all the media would still be served up by my hoster, and feh on that.
Employee Aaron declares
“The whiteness of your site will burn my retinas every morning from now on! Soon we will have progressive ruin the social networking site so we can compare Swampthing embroidered doilies!”
You’re fired.
C. Elam gives me more gray hair by suggesting
“I am sure you will be working on fixing links on a prodigious number of your entries, because that is the sort of thing that bothers folks like us. Good luck getting things back to ‘normal.'”
I do plan on fixing some of the internal links to other posts, but it’ll be a slow process since I’m gettin’ near to 3000 entries on this site, and I’d like to be able to sleep sometime. I’ll probably focus on the most recent year’s worth of posts, and work backwards from there.
Former employee Ray (and, in fact, the guy I replaced here at the shop!) pleads
“But you have to get the 1969 thing going. I MUST KNOW what you have done since 1969.”
I think instead of the rotating banner I used to have, that would display a new “since 1969” phrase every time you reloaded the site, I may instead be changing the phrase manually in my banner up there. Not quite as dynamic, I realize, but not everything can make the transition, I’m afraid!
I don’t have the rotating “what people are saying about PROGRESSIVE RUIN” thingie anymore, either, but I do plan on throwing those quotes onto my mostly-empty “About” page. Yes, even the one Dirk wrote about me six years ago about being “one of the better new comic bloggers to emerge so far this year.” I’m hanging onto that quote for dear life.
Ed queries
“Any plans to expand the blogroll to something approaching its former glory?”
Oh, yes, absolutely. But it’ll be a separate page, accessible via a button next to “HOME” and “ABOUT” up there by the banner. Assuming I can do that, that is. In fact, I would have done that today, except I spent all my blogging time doing that swank new banner image. (Who’s not a Photoshop expert? THIS GUY.)
One of the things that bothered me most about the other site is the sheer number of links in the sidebar. It looks cluttered and cramped, but I didn’t want to drop a bunch of links, either. By putting the links on a separate page, that’ll likely encourage me to add lots more of them, so hopefully I can get started on that soon. The links I do have in the sidebar were just kind of put up there to have a blogroll, and are mostly my closest internet pals, the folks with whom I do Fake AP Stylebook, and the mighty Neilalien, the first and most powerful of all comic webloggers.
Anyway, I hope that answered some of your questions about the site. It’s still a work in progress, and again, thank you for your patience and your readership. (And a reminder: you’ll probably need to resubscribe to the syndication feed for your RSS readers…just flip that little chromium switch there at the top of the page.)
In other news:
- Employee Aaron’s girlfriend Mel had a drawing of hers printed in Tank Girl: Skidmarks #3, out this week in a funnybook store near you. Well, okay, we sold out already, but it’s available for reorder and I’ve got more coming! Here’s a little snippet of it:
Pick up the issue and check out the whole pic! Oh, and read the rest of the comic, too. After you pay for it. With money.
You can also visit her Deviantart site and take a gander at her pictures…which, um, may include that same Tank Girl drawing, BUT GO TO SHOP AND PAY MONEY FOR COMIC. Thank you.
- This gentleman is putting together a list of the “100 Best Comic Book Covers” from 1980 to present, and I’m sure he’s going to get a lot of “um, you forgot” and “wow, really?” responses that these lists always get, but hey, a lot of those are nice images. So anyway, go check it out. Tell him he forgot this cover.
I’m all WordPressed up here now, as some of you may have noticed. Some problems immediately come to mind, such as all my old permalinks are now busted, so even my link back to a previous post in yesterday’s entry doesn’t work. Ah, well. And you may need to resubscribe to the RSS feed, which you can do by clicking that “syndicate” button up there in the upper right hand corner.
Still haven’t looked into reinstalling the old comments system, since I don’t want to lose all those, but maybe there just comes a point where you have to let things go, man, and start afresh. But I don’t want to lose some of the great comments from the last couple of days, for sure, so I’ll probably get around to reposting those on their related entries.
A major cosmetic change is that the banner submission thing I used to do here is now on hiatus. I do need to change that default image, but I don’t expect I’ll be rotating it on a weekly basis any more. I still have my sidebar icon pics, though! The archive is still using the old template, but eventually I’ll fix that. (And maybe someday I’ll finally get that archive of old banners up.)
Links: I still have the list o’links from the old site, but I’m not going to overload the main page with them. I put a few in the sidebar, just to see how it looks, but I think I’m going to create a separate page for the rest of the links.
So anyway, I’m not done fiddling with the page just yet, so please excuse our dust while we’re under construction.
I always wanted to use one of those graphics.
But seriously, thank you for your patience while I try to get settled, here. We’ll be back to talkin’ about comics and pictures of Sluggo in no time.
§ February 3rd, 2010 § Filed under blogging about blogging is a sin Comments Off on Blogging about WordPress is a sin.
Gang, I’m finally in the process of making that jump to WordPress from Blogger, due to Blogger’s impending removal of certain publishing tools that I use to produce this award-winning content day in and day out. (NOTE: No awards have actually been won by this site.)
As such, I spent most of my Tuesday evening transferring posts from one spot to another, messing around with templates, and not coming up with a post for today. So I apologize, and hopefully soon I can finish up and get at least a barebones WordPress version of my site going. Not sure if my rotating “since 1969″/”what people are saying about PR” thingies will make the transition, but we’ll see.
Another problem is the comments, which may not make the transfer and makes all that hoohar about the changing comments system sort of moot. I think there’s a WordPress install for the comments system I’m using, but I’ll look into it this evening. (I’m writing this at past midnight Wednesday morning, by the way…say, don’t I have to break down a new comics order in a few hours?)
One question I want to ask you folks…the WordPress theme I plan on using (essentially the same one pal Dorian is using, but with one sidebar) has the option of an 800 pixel-wide display, or a 1024 pixel-wide one. I’m leaning towards 1024, but I want to hear what you folks think, so please let me know.
Thanks in advance for your patience over the next couple of days as I try to make this transition.
A handful of links:
- It’s episode 7 of The Variants! It’s like your comic shop, but funnier!
- War Rocket Ajax interviews the boys from El Gorgo! Stick around through the end of the interview to hear an awful, awful question I submitted to be asked of these poor guys.
- Over at Comics Alliance, Chris Sims has a new installment of Chris Vs. Previews, which is kind of like my End of Civilization posts, except that son-of-a-bitch gets paid for it. Plus, he totally borrowed a joke from my Previews write-up for his article, which he asked if he could do, and I of course said yes, because why? Because Chris and I are BROTHERS IN COMICS, that’s why.
I remember an extensive preview in
Amazing Heroes catching my attention for this graphic novel (by Kevin Juaire, David Campti, Ron Lim, Michael Whitherby, and others) and subsequent series. In a way, it was kind of a proto-
Astro City, throwing the reader into a generational superhero saga with just a touch of poignancy and a focus on how superheroes and “the real world” interact. This initial installment focuses on Victor, one of the last original heroes still active, and his encounter with the villainous son of a former comrade. Here’s a quick shorthand sequence of how Victor experienced the passage of time and changing attitudes:
This came out during the period of reimaginings of superheroes in “realistic” terms, trying to play out the implications of superheroic activity and relationships to their logical ends.
Watchmen and
Marvelman and even Mark Gruenwald’s
Squadron Supreme series were part of this movement, if not outright defining it, and
Hero Alliance kind of falls within this spectrum. Maybe more toward
Squadron Supreme‘s more “traditional superhero” end than the “dismantling of the genre” end of the Alan Moore works, but it’s definitely an attempt at a more mature superhero story.
The follow-up monthly series from Innovation unfortunately didn’t keep my interest for all of its short run (I only bought 11 of the 17 issues), and it did have maybe a few too many cheesecake-y covers, which wasn’t unusual for this particular publisher. But for a while there, Hero Alliance was an interesting series, and a reasonably successful experiment in an alternate take on superheroic funnybooks. I wouldn’t mind seeing this reprinted in a volume or two for modern audiences, someday.
from Batman #142 (September 1961)
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