Uncategorized

Woo boy, that’s a long’un. Ad from Justice Comics #5 (Sept. 1948)…for a little context, here’s how the ad was originally placed on the page:

Note the old Slinky ad at the left hand side. And I’m about to do something horrible with that magic trick ad on the right.

So the other day, I saw a little bit of the Super Friends episode from which this clip was taken:

The set-up: Hawkman, Wonder Woman, and Black Vulcan are doing some work in orbit when Brainiac uses some device to cause the Earth to disappear. When the heroes notice this, they attempt to contact their teammates at the Hall of Justice. Brainiac’s Legion of Doom partner the Toyman mimics Superman’s voice, and sends then on a mission to a distant world.

Upon arrival at the coordinates given to them by “Superman,” the trio finds no planet, but do find a black hole that sucks them in and deposits them on a world within, filled with traps set up by the Toyman.

• When Hawkman, Wonder Woman, and Black Vulcan depart Earth’s orbit for the distant planet, they just sorta fly off. They don’t take a ship or anything…they just kinda hold hands and zoom off under Vulcan’s lightning power. Should only take about, oh, a hundred thousand years to get there. Pack a lunch!
• Is there a more annoying Legion of Doom member than the Toyman? How Gorilla Grodd kept from pinching this guy’s head off, I have no idea.
• And just dig this guy’s smirk. SERIOUSLY:
  

• I didn’t watch the entire episode, but I believe the plan was to get all the heroes off-world or incapacitated or whatever, leaving the Legion of Doom free to blackmail the world and rake in the dough. And yet somehow the Toyman…the Toyman…had the resources and tech to set up a planet filled with elaborate traps and weaponry inside a black hole. (Okay, maybe Brainiac helped…but more on Brainiac in a second.)
• And don’t get me started on the “inside a black hole” business.
• Wonder Woman trapped inside a clear plastic pinball, being bounced from bumper to bumper, is a fetish for someone, I’m sure. Thus, these pictures:
  

  

  
  Hello, internet traffic!

• “WONDER WOMAN IN THE HOLE!” sounds a lot dirtier than it is.

  “But first, we’ll have a little flipper action!” is as dirty as it sounds.

  Hello again, internet traffic!

• Black Vulcan says, when being pursued by the Wonder Woman pinball, that the gravity of this world is to heavy to allow them to fly. Except in the scenes prior to and after this clip, when he flies.
• Also, during that first attempt, Black Vulcan zips up into the sky, then comes back, saying the black hole won’t even let out light. Not that we’re dealing with hard, accurate science here or anything…but how is the Toyman getting that transmission from the black hole planet?
• Okay, now Brainiac…I caught a bit near the end of the episode (not in the above clip), when the villains, having apparently disposed of Earth’s heroes, are working in an air traffic control tower, directing in their planes full of money! Says Brainiac over the radio to one plane: “You are cleared to land…as long as you’re carrying ten million dollars!”

  Now, Brainiac is a machine from another planet, whose deal is flying around and shrinking and stealing cities. What’s he doing, stealing money on Earth? Seems a little…beneath him, somehow. I suppose it’s possible he’s stuck on Earth and needs the scratch, or he’s just being a good teammate. But it just feels like Brainiac’s slumming, really.

• The animation is typical Super Friends — i.e. awful — but the shot of the Grand Canyon at the end of the clip is nice. And I gotta be honest…that voice for Superman is damn near iconic, and I like it a lot more than some of the voices for animated Supermen we’ve received recently.

Also seen recently: my very first exposure to the ’90s Hulk cartoon, featuring the voice work of Mark Hamill as the Gargoyle, Matt Frewer as the Leader, and, most brilliantly, Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk. Hulk encounters monsters in the desert, mutated animals exposed to the same gamma radiation that created him, and there’s a lot of mayhem and things blowing up and the Leader trying to steal the Hulk’s power and it was all loud and annoying. Rick Jones (voice: Luke Perry) seemed to reflect the Peter David culturally-aware version of the character from the comics, somewhat, if only that Jones makes a minor pop culture reference (to “Trekkers”) during the course of the story.

Ultimately, though, it didn’t do much for me. Just too loud and shrill for my tastes. NOT BUY.

Another cartoon caught for the first time was the Fantastic Four cartoon from a couple of years back. I remember seeing the character designs, and thinking they looked awful at the time…seeing everything in action, the character appearances began to grow on me a bit, aside from Johnny’s Heat Miser hair. The plot’s one we’ve seen one or thrice in the funnybooks before, where Doom manages to switch his mind with Reed, thus gaining control of his body and causing hijinks to ensue. Done about as well as one could expect.

I also caught a couple of episodes of the ’90s Spider-Man cartoon, which took one of the greatest Spider-Man stories of all time and crapped it up to the point where any and all emotional impact is completely gone. The bit of that Wikipedia article which notes “the only difference [between the cartoon and the original story] being the boy was changed to a girl” is a lie, forgetting to mention the Doctor Octopus/Madame Web/Spidey being brainwashed/sassy Caribbean taxi driver plot points that were squeezed in.

Also, at one point we hear a television news broadcast stating that Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus have teamed up to wreak havoc on the city, and it was then I realized that the TV news in the Marvel Universe must be a lot like having professional wrestling on all the time.

And that’s enough of watching these silly kids’ cartoons. I’m going back to watching my Land of the Lost DVDs.

“SPECULATION CORNER

“‘FX,’ the series by Wayne Osbourne and John Byrne from IDW, saw its last issue drop out of the Top 300, selling in the low four figures and many issues sit, alone and unloved on shop shelves or 50c back issue bins.

“This is an excellent opportunity for speculators to clean up. At some point we are due a John Byrne revival in the next ten years, and this recent work will be so much rarer than his better-selling Big Two work. Also, ‘FX’ is prime for a movie adaptation, someone taking the basic idea and making a film around it.

“So this is a long term speculation. Pick up whatever copies of ‘FX’ you can, cheap. Stick them in the basement. And wait. Making a 20x return on your investment is not inconceivable.”

THREATS DIRECTLY OUTSIDE YOUR DOORS – IS YOUR LIFE AT RISK?

LOCAL POLICE INEFFECTIVE; CITIZENS TAKE EXTREME,
UNUSUAL METHODS TO DEFEND THEMSELVES

MURDER/CANNIBALISM RAMPANT; POOR DIETS DRIVE
UNDERPRIVILEGED TO UNNATURAL DESIRES

EDUCATION, TEST SCORES AT LOWEST LEVELS IN DECADE – 8 OUT OF 10 STUDENTS UNABLE TO RECOGNIZE PAINTED FOOTPRINTS AS FAKE

from Peter Pig #6 (August 1953)

from Supermouse, The Big Cheese #38 (Feb. 1957)

SQUEEKS THE MONKEY

IS GOOD AT HIS JOB

BONUS SQUEEKS FEATURE:

SQUEEKS VERSUS JAGUAR

images from Boy Illustories #94 (Oct. 1953)

Kid Chris: “Wow, Marvel Apes! It’s gorillas mixed with my favorite Marvel comics…two great tastes that go great together!”

Me: “How do you know what gorillas taste like? I mean, I know what Marvel comics taste like…I’ve eaten enough of them over the years.”

And that’s how our holiday-delayed New Comics Day began. To be fair, Marvel Apes did sell okay…customers seemed pretty amused by it, and a quick flip through the book did get a few laughs out of me, so, you know, it does its job. And while Marvel’s “retailer incentive ape variant” program is a transparent attempt at keeping the previous “zombie variant” interest going, it’s hard to resist MONKEY PUNISHER. (And I better not see any “would he punish other monkeys by spanking them” jokes.) (And please don’t tell me if there’s actually one in the series itself.)

Other new comics stuff:

• We had a fairly quick sell-out of the first issue of DC’s new ongoing Secret Six series…so did Chris Sims, it seems. We ordered based on past performance, but I guess more people want it now than wanted it then, so What Can You Do? Well, other than place a fast reorder and hope they actually show up, I guess. It was a good read, with the introduction of what is so far a darned creepy new villain that is mostly off-panel or otherwise hidden, and will hopefully continue to maintain this level of creepiness even after we start seeing more of him. Also: we get more Cat Man. And we all like Cat Man, right? Who even thought, years ago, that the phrase “we all like Cat Man” would have even been possible?
• Un-Men comes to a conclusion with its thirteenth issue, which is too bad, for a couple of reasons. First, after a slow start which may have hurt its chances for survival, Un-Men began to really find its voice and rhythm, becoming a grotesquely dark-humored and involving melodrama. Second, that’s pretty much that for the presence of a Swamp Thing-related series on the stands (oddly-colored cameos in the Ambush Bug mini-series aside). After the last couple of short-run series featuring Swamp Thing and related concepts, unless there’s a drastically outstanding or different take on the character (*cough* returns to DCU *cough*) I don’t imagine we’ll be seeing another series for quite a while. Ah, well.

  EDIT: Oh, okay, and Swampy spin-off Hellblazer‘s still going strong, too. Not quite the same as having a Swamp Thing title on the stands, though.

• Love and Rockets begins its new annual trade paperback format, and it’s just as beautifully done as ever. I’m going to miss having the semi-quarterly/bi-annual comic, but this book has about as much comics as you’d normally get under the L&R banner for a year, more or less, just under one cover instead of spread out over three or four issues. So I think I’ll live. Besides, it’s L&R by the Hernandez Bros. — I’ll take it in whatever format and frequency it’s delivered. Well, maybe not “one page per decade,” but I’m okay with a hundred pages yearly.
• Comics Journal #292 – almost entirely given over to interviews with the four three Deitch brothers (Kim, Simon, and Seth) and father Gene. (EDIT: Oops…I knew Gene was the father, I swear!) Since I’m about as big of a Kim Deitch fan as they come, I’m looking forward to reading this. No, I haven’t read this yet…I’m writing this blog post instead. Only so many hours in the day, my friends. I’ll read it over breakfast, honest.
• Myspace Dark Horse Presents #14 – not in stores, I know, but there’s a new full color Achewood strip, and, even better, a new color Beanworld story!
• Army @ Love: The Art of War #2 – haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but I loved the previous thirteen installments, so I’m gonna guess I’ll like this one, too. The first twelve issues have been collected into two volumes, currently available anyplace that sells funnybooks and has a lick of sense (a rare combination, admittedly), and is recommended reading to anyone with a need for some wartime satire that’s equal parts terrifying and goofy in the Mighty Veitch Manner. Also, looking at the first page of this new issue, I’m glad to see Mr. Veitch is continuing with the best (and most thematically relevant) expositional introductions for a comic book series ever.
• Invasion! trade paperback – 160 pages of good ol’ fashioned superhero punch-em-up adventure stupidity, and that’s not snark or a criticism…this three issue mini-series was almost the Platonic ideal of a Superhero Comic at the time. You paid your $3 bucks per 80 page issue, and you got non-stop superheroes fighting aliens, and it never pretended to be anything else other than that. Lots of weird alien creatures, lots of action, all your favorite characters, generally well drawn in cartoonishly-exaggerated style by Todd McFarlane and Bart Sears, with scripter Bill Mantlo right in his element.

  I did want to note this blurb that was on the trade paperback’s cover:

  
  “Secret no more!” is obviously a poke in Marvel’s ribs over their current Secret Invasion crossover event, also dealing with an alien invasion (though that series’ alien infiltration element has more in common with DC’s other newly-released-in-trade series Millennium). Outside of that context, the blurb seems strangely out of place…sure, there are secrets revealed over the course of the story, I suppose, but the main thrust of the series is “Holy Crap! Aliens have invaded the Earth and they know how to incapacitate our heroes!” more than “What is the dark secret of the Invasion?” It’s no slow, suspenseful revelation of hidden truths and shocking unknowns…it’s people in tights punching aliens and each other and blowing things up.

  Point being that, intercompany nose-thumbing aside, the “Secret no more!” blurb seems a little out of place. Not a lot out of place, but it’s obviously there for more reasons than describing the book’s contents. But, let’s be honest, that’s still an improvement over a permanently affixed DVD ad on an archival $75 hardcover.

---

Suddenly…BATMAN PLAYS BASS:

Boy, this comic is almost like printing money for Marvel. That cover above is one of the two used for the 2008 reprinting of this Garth Ennis-written one-shot, which originally came out in 1995. Guess people just like seeing the Punisher blow up those Marvel superheroes real good, since it seems like the comic is always in demand from our customers. It’s one of our most requested back issues, so when a new edition showed up, it just flew off the stands.

I didn’t buy it when it came out originally, because by the mid-90s I, like most folks, never wanted to see another Punisher comic again for the rest of my life. But when the first reprinting of this one-shot rolled around in 2000, I figured “hey, it’s Garth Ennis, it’s got that swell Steve Dillon cover, what the heck.” And it’s not high art or anything, but it delivers what it promises…Punisher wiping out the Marvel Universe…and it’s sufficiently brutal and a touch dark-humored and I got just the right amount of entertainment one could justifiably expect from a comic book titled Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe.

And I should note, since it always comes up when one is discussing Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe with, you know, your grandparents or your pastor, that, yes, Fred Hembeck destroyed the Marvel Universe first.

Anyway, that latest printing has sold out, and Marvel is going back to press for what they’re calling a 2nd printing variant…think they’re off by a couple of printings, there, though I suppose this would be the 2nd printing in the staplebound format (as opposed to its original squarebound releases). The new printing will have that Dillon cover the 2000 edition had.

So, Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe…a Comic That Always Sells. Kids love it!

From the back of card #82 of Topps’ Star Wars: Clone Wars set:

“Just outside Jabba’s palace, Ahsoka is surrounded by the relentless magnaguards. Holding her own, she flips herself over and away from them into a position of more leverage. ‘Okay, stick-tinnies, you’re going back to Dooku in pieces,’ she proclaims defiantly. It takes a bit of doing, but the feisty padawan swings back into action and winds up vanquishing all three of her magna-foes.”

I keep wanting to read that as “manga-foes.” “‘Your tentacles will never get me,’ proclaimed Ahsoka.”

Here’s the front of the card, if you’re interested:

And just for fun, here’s one of the original sketch drawing cards, featuring Count Dooku:

If that awful-looking Clone Wars movie had instead been animated in the style of that Dooku sketch, I might have bothered to go see it.

---

Speaking of movies, the man behind That Voice you all know from your movie trailers, Don LaFontaine, has unfortunately passed on. Please peruse this selection of YouTube videos and enjoy that wall-shaking voice. Be sure to turn your computer’s volume way, way up.

---

Do I really need to link to Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome browser comic…you know, on the off chance that you haven’t heard about the comic or Google’s new web browser on every website in existence. But I like Scott, so there’s your link.

---

Hey, remember when I used to talk about comics and comics retail on this site? Oh, those were the days, weren’t they? I’d talk about some comic I read, or about some silly thing that happened at the store, and we’d laugh and laugh, dabbing tears of mirth from our eyes. And then the laughter would quickly ebb away, moving into a comfortable silence…just two friends, sitting together quietly on the back porch overlooking the fields of corn, simply smiling softly and gazing downwards at the ice bobbing up and down in our frosty glasses of Mr. Pibb.

Well, okay, it’s only been a couple of days. Hey, this almost turned into “Land of the Lost Week,” so consider yourselves lucky. Real comic bookical content will return shortly.

---

Hold on, I do have one bit of news about comics retail…keep in mind that, for U.S. retailers, new comic shipments will be delayed until Thursday this week due to Monday’s holiday. But go into your shop on Wednesday anyway and spend money, just because you love Your Local Comics Retailer. And then come back on Thursday and spend more money! It’s a win/win situation! You get comics, we get money! Everybody’s happy!

* Does the title refer to this post’s first entry, or to the actual experience of reading the entire post itself? Who can say? Who can truly say?