Every once in a while, I remember that Aerosmith appeared in a Valiant comic.

filed under Categories valiant 6 Comments

from Shadowman #19 (Nov. 1993) by Bob Hall & John Dixon


Well, it was no Howard the Duck meeting KISS, but it was certainly…something.

Shadowman, like many of the early Valiant superhero books, was an interesting title, with the main character finding out in the time-and-space-spanning epic crossover event Unity that he was fated to die in 1999, with that knowledge coloring his actions and emotions through the rest of the series. Of course, that series ended before actually reaching the year 1999, and I don’t know if that particular plot point was resolved or even addressed in any of the spin-off material, like the next two Shadowman series which featured new characters, or the halfway-completed mini Unity 2000 by Jim Shooter and Jim Starlin. But it was a clever twist on the superhero crossover event, in that for once something that happened in one of these events actually had a dramatic, serious, and more-or-less permanent impact on the character involved. No “Hulk breaks a leg!” here.*

So, Shadowman…another reason why I miss those initial Valiant Era comics. Even that goofy Aerosmith issue.

* Yes, I know Shooter was involved with that, too.

More links to things other people are doing.

filed under Categories sir-links-a-lot
  • Ordered mere days ago and here they are, in my hot little hands…Lydia and She Died in Terrebonne #2, two exciting comics from Kevin Church and his super-pals (Max Riffner on the former, T.J. Kirsch on the latter) over at Agreeable Comics. Both are very handsome looking publications, and the contents ain’t half-bad either.

  • Also received this week was Awesome Hospital #1, collecting the strip’s first storyline by Chris Sims, Chad Bowers, Matt Digges, and Josh Krach. The print edition is apparently not currently available from sale, due to that initial print run selling out…but fortunately Mr. Digges happened by the shop and gifted me with a copy. It’s great stuff, so, if you don’t have yours, hound Sims ’til he goes back to press on it. He’ll like that.

    • Man, all these webcomics going to the print format…it’s the new hot trend, baby! Clearly the digital comics format is on its way out.

  • Bully the Little Stuffed Bull What Likes to Talk about The Comics explains Hydra to you, in the most fantastic way possible.

  • So Archie Comics introduced a new character into their books that also happens to be gay, and that introductory story…is actually pretty good! Pal Dorian tells you all about it.

I did not expect this post to invoke the name of Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man.

filed under Categories peanuts, swamp thing 13 Comments
  • 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.

Also, Elton John is mentioned in the March 8th, 1978 strip.

filed under Categories peanuts, swamp thing 21 Comments

Lah dee dah, readin’ the Complete Peanuts 1977-1978 book, mmm hmm mmm…WHA–!?


(Here’s the full strip.)

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) (EDIT 5-31-11): strips are non longer there, as the official Peanuts strip archive has been shut down) 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?

• • •

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.'”

    Granted, it’s not this Swamp Thing theme song, but it’ll do, it’ll do.

    And as someone mentions in the comments at the DCU blog, it’s a damned shame this song isn’t on the disc:


    Well, there’s always Volume 2.

  • Because my Twitter pals demanded it:

    ULTRA THE VOTE:

    OR

    OR

I began to realize Peanuts was getting a little strange…

filed under Categories peanuts 16 Comments

…when this happened:


I remember reading this particular sequence when it was new, and even as a kid it struck me as a bit odd. Yes, in a strip where Schroeder knocks out Beethoven on his toy piano and Snoopy keeps a van Gogh (later, after the fire, an Andrew Wyeth) painting in his doghouse, it’s Helicopter Snoopy that most greatly impacted my willing suspension of disbelief. “How…how does that even work?” young Mike wonders. “Does his entire scalp spin around? Does each ear spin freely in its ‘socket?’ How is Woodstock piloting him, exactly?”

I worried about weird things as a kid.

Here’s the full strip that panel is from, embedded here courtesy the official site:

Peanuts

As you may have gathered, I’m currently reading the recently-released Complete Peanuts 1977-1978 hardcover from Fantagraphics, which included the above strip. Now, the sequence of strips from later in the book that this next image comes from is not a story I recall, because I’m pretty sure I would have remembered this character design of the fellow on the left:


That’s a little odd looking for a Schulz design, though perhaps that’s more attributable to the unfamiliar strangeness of any kid character in Peanuts that isn’t part of the regular cast. That fella probably isn’t any more bizarre than, say, Pig-Pen. But mostly I’m just pointing him out because it took me a moment to parse out the character’s face…I had a hard time visualizing that it was his ear on the left there, and his nose on the right. It just looked like a cylindrical blob resting between the turtleneck and the hat. (Link to the full strip.)

Now this panel is awesome:


Yeah, it’s an easy gag, but it’s a perfect gag for the circumstance. And, it’s in the first panel of the strip. I’m sure it would have served just fine as the closing punchline in a strip that wasn’t Peanuts. (Link to full strip.)

For some good Peanuts commentary, may I recommend Roasted Peanuts, a weblog devoted to discussing the strips.

I haven’t mentioned “Ghost Rider” on this site for nearly two years.

filed under Categories retailing 4 Comments

So this turned up in a collection at the shop…it’s one of the pack-in comic books from a Marvel Legends Toy Biz action figure, this one reprinting Ghost Rider #2 from 1990. (The reprint itself is dated 2002.)


First thing we noticed was the fuzziness of the cover image, like it was taken from a bad scan or photo. And not just that…check this out:


Those small white creases there? That’s not spine damage on the reprint comic. That’s spine damage on the original comic this cover was scanned from. Apparently it was crazy hard to find a mint copy of Ghost Rider #2 a whole twelve years after the fact. (Should’ve asked us…we could have sent them a whole pile to choose from.)

Well, okay, there may have been other factors involved here, like, say “OH CRAP we need the cover for this scanned like five minutes ago, HURRY UP FIND A COPY,” or “man, just scan the file copy, no one’s gonna care that it doesn’t look mint except some dork on a blog eight years from now.”

On a related note: a long time ago…why, way back in the year foretold by Prince, 1999…I was contacted by someone either at Marvel, or someone doing some design work for Marvel, seeking a cover scan of Amazing Spider-Man #122 for a trade paperback they were working on. I just happened to have a copy in the shop at the time, and sent a scan along…and eventually Spider-Man: The Death of Gwen Stacymade it to the shelves, and lo, there was a blurb in the book thanking our store for helping out. When the next edition of the bookwas released, the credit was gone, but we enjoyed our moment in the sun. Oh, and SPOILER: Gwen Stacy dies.

And in case you’re wondering…no, that copy of Amazing Spider-Man #122 I scanned wasn’t in mint condition. Man, it’d only been out for 26 years, we couldn’t cough up a mint copy? We suck.

Linking Accomplished.

filed under Categories sir-links-a-lot 6 Comments
  • Fellow Bureau Chief Eugene, AKA “Adam Warrock,” has unleashed the West Coast Avengers Mixtape, featuring, yes, raps about your favorite West Coast Avengers members. Completely free, completely available for download at that link, and completely awesome. And in case you’re wondering…yes, there’s a Moon Knight song.

  • That’s pretty harsh, Batman.

  • Some recent goodies from Armagideon Time’s Andrew: in appreciation of Tawny the Talking Tiger, strange clothing names of catalogs past, and Nobody’s Favorite, The Owl. Plenty of solidly entertaining and brain-filling reading.

  • Here’s a quickie three-pager called “The Bunker” by Kevin Church, Carlos Pedro and TJ Kirsch.

  • IF YOU MENTION THE NAME OF HARRY KNOWLES, HE WILL MAGICALLY APPEAR. (This is the review in question, in case you’re wondering.) (WARNING: review should not be read by anyone.)

  • Dean Trippe writes a letter complaining about a senator’s mailer presenting comic books in a negative fashion. Well, to be fair, exposing a kid to Marvel Previews at that early an age surely isn’t a good idea…but still, just coming right out and saying “without education, your kids could be (gasp) reading comic books” is not exactly thinking things through very well. I mean, God forbid kids get interested in reading.