Comic Book Plus Forum
Comic And Book Related => Blog and Site Links => Topic started by: jimmm kelly on June 05, 2013, 06:22:17 PM
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I'm trying my hand at doing an ongoing blog--using wordpress--although I don't know just how ongoing it will be yet. Mainly just to see if and how I can do it. It's a learning experience.
Here's "issue no. 1":
"My Favourite Funnies"--
http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/05/26/here-there-be-giants/
Any suggestions, helpful hints, corrections, comments would be welcome here. And I mean here on this thread. I've tried to turn off the comment box on the site, because I just don't want to have to deal with moderating comments--and comment boxes tend to get messy from what I've seen. But I see that the comment box still comes up on the site--not sure what I'm doing wrong. But just so you guys know that it's not worth using it, because I won't put comments up there.
I will hopefully be adding to the site in the next few weeks, with whatever funny book related things happen to strike my fancy. And tweaking the site as I get more familiar with using wordpress and its weird eccentricities. And crossing my fingers that the whole thing doesn't crash into the sea.
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Interesting (if slightly disturbing) story about how you got your first comic. Sometime around that age, I jumped off the third step coming down the stairs in the living room, and accidentally tripped and hit my head against the door frame. It was the ONLY spot where a bit of metal was sticking out (where the latch was). Blood running down my face, it wouldn't stop, they had to take me to the emergency room (just a few blocks away!!) and for the first of only 2 times in my life, I needed stitches. The scar is still there, but mostly hidden under my hair.
I'd completely forgotten THE FRIENDLY GIANT. One more of an endless number of TV shows I watched as a kid in the 60's I haven't seen since. He was a sort of host for cartoons, wasn't he?
The blog looks okay. I got ONE single criticism of my own blog since starting it up 2 years ago, which was, the background was black, and the text was purple, which made it difficult for one person to read. My own reading glasses are several years overdue for a new subscription, but since I had no trouble reading my site, I figured it was okay. The nice thing was, the guy who complained said he copied the text of an article to WORD so he could read it, something he normally wouldn't do except he found it interesting enough that he really wanted to read it! I've done that myself with some websites that were FAR more difficult to read. ("Who designs this stuff???") Black text on white background should be no problem...
I must be the only one left online these days who's still using a "regular" computer monitor, instead of WIDESCREEN one. Fortunately, Firefox has this cool add-on, "NoSquint", which allows me to SHRINK a web page and at the same time BLOW UP the text (so the text is the same size, but the page is thinner). After a recent "upgrade", the "NoSquint" got ALL F***ed up!! But a more recent upgrade seems to have fixed it. (I did write in to them to complain 3 times.) Just wondering if you know offhand how wide your screen is? When I post images, I find 700 pixels is perfect for the width of MY screen. (If you go to the MASTERWORKS message board, the IDIOTS there love to post tons of images within messages which make it IMPOSSIBLE to read the messages without constantly scrolling horizontally left-right-left-right... or, using a different add-on to SHUT OFF all the images so the text actually fits in my screen.
This is why, when I do threads on message boards, I prefer links to images, rather than embedded images.
Anyway, for me to look at your blog without horizontal scrolling, my "NoSquint" settings are 80% for the page and 115% for the text. As it happens, the settings for the Comic Book Plus site are 115% and 20%. The thing is smart enough to save settings separately for EVERY site you use them on. (That's what got messed up for a couple months back there... settings from one site would be carried to another, so you'd have to manually adjust every time you'd go to a site.)
Is this any help? :)
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When I started my own blog, the most important thing about design was setting up the "widths" so everything would fit on MY screen. I have 3 blogs now, and when I start a new one, I have an older one open so I can copy the settings from one to another.
The same goes for the colors, and, the colors of LINKS. I've seen guys with BLACK backgrounds, and DARK GRAY links that turn BLACK after you click on them. So, if you want to click the link again, YOU CAN'T SEE IT!!! (Yes, I'm talking about Steve Thompson-- alias "Booksteve"-- heehee.) On mine, with the black background, the links start out RED, go YELLOW when you hover over them or click them, and turn ORANGE after you click them. So you can tell if you've been there or not, but still read them.
One thing I love doing is adding links. Sometimes I'll include links to articles and the link within an article, or in the middle of a page, but mostly, I like to pile up all the links to related stuff at the bottom of the page. In the case of my TIM HOLT restorations, I've begun adding links to EACH complete issue (AT THIS SITE!!) Of course, at the moment, this means going from a bright, pristene clean cover to a dark, dirty old cover when you jump from my blog to the CBP site. Maybe I can do something about that (if I can figure out how to upload stuff to HERE!).
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Interesting stories and insights guys. My older cousin did not collect comics so she passed them on to me. She got all the Harvey titles. I was not a big fan of Casper and Wendy or Little Audrey but the more mischievous characters I liked. The Ghostly Trio, Spooky and Hot Stuff were cooler than the lame Friendly Ghost. With Hot Stuff I also got Stumbo who was also a favorite of mine.
BTW: I share a scar on my head. I came from a logging truck. Several years ago n the way to work a 10 pound half a leaf spring bounced off the road, off my hood, through the windshield, off my head, off the roof and landed in the back seat. I had to drive a stick shift car 4 miles to the medical center. God was looking out for me. The truck never stopped. Don't know if he knew or not but the leaf spring had been welded together so it would have been a big problem for him.
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Thanks for the feedback guys. Keep it coming. I've tried to figure out how to change the fonts and sizes on Wordpress, but it always goes to the default settings. I think I have to upgrade to custom design to use other fonts, but you have to pay for that and I'm not ready to do that yet. But maybe there's another way to import settings--I'll keep working on it. Maybe by fiddling with html I can make it better . . .
It looks okay on my laptop (and even bigger on my desktop)--but I'll look at it on other screens--to see how it looks for other people. I share the same problem--although it's not so bad now that I have progressive lenses--I used to zoom the screen to read tiny type--or sometimes I'll take off my glasses and hold the screen to my face.
I'll consider what to do about hot links. I'm debating it with myself. I want to give other people and other sites their due and it seems like using hot links is a way to do that. I don't always trust that people are going to look at the footnotes.
My older brother (before I was born) also got a crack in his head around that same age as I was when I got mine. My parents were living in an apartment in a house and another kid was in the backyard and hit my brother on the head with a tricycle. I think my brother's injury was even more severe--at least from the way my mother tells the story.
I don't know just how bad my injury was, but I remember when they operated on my head, they put a cloth over my face and I believed I might be dying.
I was happy that not long after I got my scar, the Beatles came along. It gave me a good excuse to comb my hair over my forehead. Nowadays you can hardly see it except when I'm really mad.
Tarzan had the same thing--but I think his scar was more pronounced.
Again, thanks for the replies.
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Issue no. 2 is now up.
http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/05/26/the-last-days-of-the-dynamic-duo/
The subject will continue into the next issue--it was just too much to cover in one blog. I'm taking a certain perspective here that might not be the popular one.
I've tried to figure out how to change font sizes, by going into html, but Wordpress just reverts back to the default. I did find I could use headings to change the font sizes but this throws off the formatting on everything else--and even going through html line by line doesn't help much. So I'm using headings for specific portions of the blog, but not the whole thing.
Wordpress is a weird duck--I've found other blog builders that are less restrictive. But I notice that a lot of people use Wordpress, so learning how to use it might be a skill i can use in the future for something completely different.
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I just had to post this...
http://www.comics.org/issue/244959/cover/4/
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Would you believe, it's only been a few weeks since I realized the extent of the upgrade to this site, with regard to being able to read comics now without downloading them first?
I think it's cool to have that link to the BATMANIA page. I read about those quite a lot a few years ago, but never had the chance to read the zines themselve. There's SO much material at this site now, posting direct links to the magazine can really help cut down time. At my blog, I not only posted a link to the TIM HOLT section, I also began posting DIRECT links to each individual issue from each related cover restoration.
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Lots here to enjoy
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Yes it was pretty cool that i could link to BATMANIA on this site. When I was doing a search I found that someone else also linked their blog to BATMANIA on this site.
I read many of those BATMANIA issues around last Christmas and it put a bee in my bonnet about that transition period of Batman.
There's really a lot of material on this site--impossible to get to it all. Kind of like being a kid in a candy store.
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I loved 80pg Giants. I could get more for my money. It did not matter that they were reprints since I never saw the originals. What may have been the first I saw was #11 at the dentist office.
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I know the first actual 80 page Giant that I bought--SUPERMAN 197 (June-July '67)--but it's hard to say exactly which is the first one I saw.
Before I was old enough to go out and buy my own comics, I was depending on others for a lot of the comics I saw. I have memories of my brother reading Superman comics to me, but my older siblings didn't get a lot of super-hero comics--there weren't a lot around the house that I could steal. They preferred the Archie Giants. But I do remember being at my cousins and going through their stack of comics, which reflected completely different tastes.
I distinctly recall reading the "Superman and Robin" story at my cousins--the Giant Guide on Mike's Amazing World of DC Comics tells me that this was BATMAN ANNUAL 7 (Summer '64). I remember thinking how cool it was to have Superman and Robin as a team--they seemed to fit visually, because of their costume colours.
I also remember reading many of the stories in the 80 page Giant WORLD'S FINEST COMICS 161 (October '66)--in particular "The Caveman from Krypton" and "The Super-Batwoman." Probably while visiting the same cousins--and maybe on the same day.
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Sorry it's taken me so long to add something to this. I've been missing out. You're doing a good job jimmm - better than anything I could do. The Harvey item made me feel all nostalgic because I remember with fondness many of those comics. I also preferred Spooky and Hot Stuff to Casper.
Not long after I got married, so this would be mid '70's, I started reading comics again following a gap of about 8 years and I was finding Giants in newspaper shops, on the racks and spinners. I still feel a bit of the excitement I felt when I saw and bought the Challengers issue but it was the Batman and Flash Giants which tipped me over the edge into buying lots more comics. At that time, most newsagents had distributed American comics and some of them werel old having come over as ballast, and there still were some second hand shops where you could find a pile or two of old American comics. Bliss. All changed now with specialist shops and hardly anything in newsagents.
The one place I could be guaranteed to find free comics to read when I was a wee boy, was at the barbers but they would be British ones, being pre-distribution - Beano; Dandy etc. but, occasionally, something a bit more exotic would find it's way into the pile. A newspaper funnies section that some relation in Canada sent over, or an Aus. comic, or a real American comic - a Dell usually.
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My Uncle had comics in his barber shop. He would allow me to trade one for one. When his shop closed I had to go to the other barber in town. He had different comics for me to read.
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I remember in the early '70s, our family started going to a new dentist (who wasn't very good--thus my crooked teeth now). The only comic books he had in his waiting room were Jack Kirby's fourth world comics. I wasn't a fan of Jack Kirby at the time, but there was nothing else to read and that's how I was introduced to the New Gods. With feelings of dread.
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Latest issue is up, concluding the "Finals Days of the Gotham Gangbusters."
http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com
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There was a barber shop in Norwalk Cali, where my Dad's realty office was, and on some Saturday's we'd go get our haircuts there. This is where I found the Flyman and the Mighty Crusaders. Never saw such a motley crew such as these. Loved them on site. What a hot summer I remember well and what great comics they were. Not the somewhat downer Marvel or the straight laced DC (I was 12 at the time and soon to leave comics behind in a few years), and not realizing that Jerry S was the great Superman creator. Sigh... those were the days......
RB scanning away @ home
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Hey India Ink/Jimmm
I agree that there are some great Batman tales to be found in the late "Old Look" period. Clayface and Cat-Man are both favorites of mine. By coincidence, I'm going to be reviewing "The Cat-Man Strikes Back" in our DC Time Capsule this very month.
Love the blog - one technical glitch I see is for some reason your posting dates seem to be off by about 2 weeks for some reason.
Do you mind if I post a link to My Favorite Funnies back at the DC Archive Form? I'm sure a lot of people there would appreciate it.
And if you ever need some story scans to reference any of your entries, just look me up.
Best of luck with it.
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The reason that posting dates are off is because they reflect when I started to draft and publish the post privately so I could test out the links and make sure that everything else works the way I intended before they go public.
Even then it's not a guarantee. This particular wordpress design likes to make curly quotes out of straight quotes, but too often it gets it wrong and close quotes appear where they should be open quotes. I've found no work around for that--essentially I have to predict what the "brain" of wordpress is thinking by using punctuation or words before the quote that it will read correctly.
Doesn't always work. I do find that anything between square brackets has straight quotes--so maybe I should put every quote between ["brackets"]. But that would be silly.
Everyone is welcome to share links. I certainly do.
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There was a barber shop in Norwalk Cali, where my Dad's realty office was, and on some Saturday's we'd go get our haircuts there. This is where I found the Flyman and the Mighty Crusaders. Never saw such a motley crew such as these. Loved them on site. What a hot summer I remember well and what great comics they were. Not the somewhat downer Marvel or the straight laced DC (I was 12 at the time and soon to leave comics behind in a few years), and not realizing that Jerry S was the great Superman creator. Sigh... those were the days......
RB scanning away @ home
SUPER HEROES VERSUS SUPER VILLAINS was my introduction to that motley team (as I mentioned on my first blog--and will again soon). Like you, I could not guess that the writer was the same guy who had written so many other great comics.
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The reason that posting dates are off is because they reflect when I started to draft and publish the post privately so I could test out the links and make sure that everything else works the way I intended before they go public.
Yeah, wordpress can be quite finicky. I worked with it briefly when I collaborated with Nightwing over at his late lamented Superman blog and I remember he had to guide me through some of the finer points to using it.
By the way, we miss you around the old Time Capsule. Anytime you want to drop in for a visit, you're more than welcome.
I don't suppose I could twist your arm to review "The Showdown Between Luthor and Superman" for us, by any chance? :)
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I'm focused on my blog these days and I might "steal" SUPERMAN 164 for that at some point in the future--as it is one of "my favourite funnies."
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I know it is... that's why I had you in mind.
Maybe we could do a joint simulcast to celebrate its 50th birthday in August? I don't know how far in advance you've planned your blog entries.
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So far my blog seems a bit scatter shot, but there is a developing theme, I think. It would be too easy to just do DC comics, so I'm trying to expand my range. Hard to guess what direction I will go in the future or what schedule I'll be able to maintain.
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It really shows how how much of an impact comics have had when we can remember the first time we saw a particular comic book. The mention of Flyman reminds me of being at my cousins who also read comics. He really was not as into collecting them and had other friends he traded around with. I remember finding Jaguar for the first time in the stack of comics in his closet. I also found a curiosity that neither of us understood in an Adventures of The Fly where he was a kid who became the Fly. I remember thinking the art was really good but I did not understand what had happened. My first experience with a GA character called Dollman was in his tree cabin. I think it may have been issue 40, I am pretty sure Doll Girl was on the cover.
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I got my 1st Superman comic-- an issue of ACTION-- at a coffee shop in the Philadelphia Airport! I don't remember who was flying in or out (nobody in my family, I'm sure). But I remember what the shop looked like. Also, it was one of the few DCs from that period I got with a full cover, so I know we got it new. "Lex Luthor's First Victory Over Superman!" Lex (& Brainiac) team up and taunt Superman using a flying "satellite" that hovers over him and blasts Lex's amplified voice at him. As this is going on, Supes is "practicing" by (I'm not kidding) punching holes in cardboard cut-out "dummies" of Luthor & Brainiac.
The thing I CAN'T remember is... WHICH version of Superman did I see FIRST? The ACTION comic? His cameo in the BATMAN newspaper strip? (Doubtful) His guest-appearance (played by Milton Berle) on THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE ? The George Reeves show? Or Filmation's THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN ? (Actually, the latter is the most likely... I think.)
It was decades before I discovered that the voices in the Filmation cartoon were by Bud Colyer & Joan Alexander-- from the RADIO show and Fleischer cartoons! They were actually the ORIGINAL actors, the first to ever play the parts. Wasn't it so cool for Filmation to have specificaly hired THEM? (Kinda like when Hanna-Barbera FINALLY decided to get Adam West for the last 2 seasons of SUPER POWERS.)
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I remember seeing some Superman comic when I was really young, before I could read. I had the impression that there was a whole family. A Superman and a Superwoman and their Super-kids. Maybe this was an imaginary story. Anyway that's what I believed to be true until I started reading the comics a few years later.
But the Superman I clearly remember is George Reeves. Sometimes if the weather was just right and the signal was bouncing off the mountains, we could pick up the re-runs of THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN as a fuzzy picture. I probably also saw him on a re-run of I LOVE LUCY. And then when our family went down to Seattle in '62 for the World's Fair, I was so amazed to see the SUPERMAN TV show clear as a bell on the TV in the hotel room. I would have been only three or four years old, but that's one of the things from that trip that I remember most clearly.
But yeah, I think I was watching the Filmation SUPERMAN, before I started picking up the actual comics. Going by the dates, that would seem to be the case. And it was pretty cool that they used the radio stars for the voices.
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We got ABC, NBC and CBS. I remember when I was able to get a little TV of my own I got a UHF antenna and could pick up two other independent channels. I had to do all kind of things with that little round antenna to get a very fuzzy picture. But I discovered the Marvel Super Heroes cartoons. No matter how poorly they came in I eagerly watched them.
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According to an ad from May '66 issues of DC comics, which lists all the stations broadcasting ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN at that time (it's a very long list), the show was being broadcast from KIRO TV in Seattle--which is probably the station we were picking up with our antennae. Which was nearly a miracle. The stations we got on most days were CBUT channel 2 (CBC Vancouver), CHEK channel 6 (Victoria, carrying a mix of CBC and CTV content), CHAN channel 8 (CTV Vancouver) and KVOS channel 12 (CBS Bellingham). KIRO was a CBS affiliate broadcast on channel 7 and being so close to 8, it usually had ghosts from the other channel, if we could get it at all. Other Seattle stations were impossible to get.
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New blog is now published.
http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/super-heroes-by-any-other-name-would-2/
A bit long-winded this time. Next time I promise to have more pictures and less talk.
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Something I found interesting yesterday, while working on my checklist of 61 things that are super, was the twists and turns in Cosmo Cat/Super Cat's history. From looking at CB+ and the GCD, I was able to determine as it says on the list . . .
23. SUPER CAT. Originally, Fox published the adventures of Cosmo Cat in its magazines, beginning with ALL TOP COMICS No. 1 (Spring
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Unless it is before 1922 nothing from Street and Smith is PD. They copyrighted and renewed.
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I thought it must be something like that. But it's weird that an obscure character like Supersnipe isn't in the public domain, while so many bigger names are.
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Supersnipe believe it or not is not such an obscure character as you may think. He has a very rabid cult following. In reality S & S copyrighted their main characters and the contents of their titles but not their small features like the Black Crusader and the Red Knight and so on. You could create comic based on those characters and not get in trouble as they are PD. However their S & S stories are not. Small difference I know but still it is how the game is played.
RB @ home waiting to go to work.
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Richard they are copyright but the trademark has not been used. There is a big difference. I do not know of anyone using Supersnipe commercially. If the character has not been used then he could be used in new stories but no reprinting his old stories. Trademark must be used and defended while copyright just is.
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Ah okay. Those character that have a rabid cult following are the worst. I mean, this usually translates into the character having not so big a following that their comics are in large supply, but still having an aggressive following that demands high prices for any books that are avaiable. So it's likely any Supersnipe comics would be out of my price range. But I should remember to look and see if my favourite dealer has any, the next time I'm at a trade show.
I always found it weird that so many publishers were able to get away with calling their characters "Super" and dressing them so much like Superman. National was pretty aggressive in defending their copyright and trademark. You'd think that what happened with Wonder Man and Captain Marvel might put the fear of god in anyone else and nobody would try to tug on Superman's cape again. But the number of "Supers" never stopped. Just shows how much that label was worth--worth enough to risk a lawsuit, I guess.
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I see that Dell's SUPERHEROES, TOKA and NUKLA have all been removed from CB+. Good thing I checked! So I've removed the links to those that I had on my blog for this week. I hate to have links to nowhere. KONA is still here (for now), but I decided it wasn't really worth it to have a link just to that one title.
Too bad that they had to go.
I guess I need to make a habit of checking links, just in case others go down. Or maybe putting up links in the first place is a bad idea.
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Well ... they may reappear ... I certainly hope so. We just need to do some more checks.
There are tools you can use to check links Xenu is one that comes to mind. But it wouldn't help you with us as we are still returning a page and not a "404" ... but on 90+% of sites it would find bad outbound links.
Regards,
Mark
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Hey, thanks for telling me about xenu.
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No problems!
I am so busy, but had a look at your site a bit of time ago and I thought it looked cool. Nice and clean and good content!
Before I was involved in CB+ I had a new site in mind ... it was going to be a biggie ... basically the does and don'ts of making a website. By the end of the year I am going to launch it, but in a MUCH smaller form. Probably one page.
Here are the links that tell you all you need at the moment. DO NOT start link swapping, get involved with people saying they can help your rankings, or trying to game it in any respect. For a second time DO NOT!!! Google will eventually find it out and dump you into a black hole of no visitors
My three important links
http://cyrusshepard.com/1-rule-of-successful-seo-build-spaceships/ (http://cyrusshepard.com/1-rule-of-successful-seo-build-spaceships/)
The guy says NASA is a really disorganized site they pay no attention to trying to lure visitors in BUT the site is highly successful because they have spaceships! In other words interesting content.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html)
A top Google guy who's message is would your visitors trust your site with their credit card details or to buy on line meds. Have you the right signals, lots of little things that add up (eg: spelling,contact details etc). Do you look professional and trustworthy?
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_likes (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/facebook_likes)
Act like you would in real life!
I have a couple more. BUT get your head around these first. And it so simple :)
Regards,
Mark
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Thanks for the tips.
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The 5th post is now up on my blog site.
http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/a-convention-of-paper-dolls/
I hope that more people will check this one out than the last one. It's sure to please with lots of paper dolls to look at. Easy on the eyes. Also check out the extra page for more paper doll fashions. Not a heavy subject this time and not a lot of reading.
Yet still a lot of work for me in preparing this one. I'm trying new things with the layout--working within the Wordpress template, but using it in different ways.
I've mapped out my plan for the next couple of months which will bring me to issue 10. In August, I plan to cut back to one or two posts per month. Not that I don't enjoy writing my blogs and not that I don't have enough ideas for lots more to come--but I realize this is getting to be a distraction from things I ought to be doing.
Issue 10 should be up around the end of August and for that I plan to do something with Superman that will touch on SUPERMAN 164--but not in the way you'd think. So for Osgood Peabody, this will kind of cross over but not really.
Cutting back on the number per month will also give me more time to do research for each post--which is the thing that takes the greatest demand on my time. The one coming up after this one requires a lot of research, but it's a real labour of love.
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That looks good!
I had a bit of a poke around and I'd suggest that you had a look at the alt tag on your images and make sure they are populated and descriptive. It is important as search engines use it to work out what a picture is and gives you more chance of getting visitors who are doing an image search.
Add a Privacy link .... (it bulk standard stuff you can pretty much cut and paste).
Add some sort of contact page preferably form and email details
Put a few more words in the about section.
Unless you have a strong objection to it open a Google+ account and then link with your blog rel=me and rel=author .... it will mean in time an image of you will appear in the search results and people tend to like that and are more prone to click.
Look at making your own favicon and a few other bits like that.
When it's a new site I tend to try and do a little job a day on these sorts of things.
Content is obviously king and you have nailed that!
Regards,
Mark
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Again, thanks for all the tips. Ah yes about the images, I wondered why Wordpress asks for a description in the media library--but that makes sense. I did a web editing course (a long time ago now) and I know that you have to build search terms into your site so it can be found. But I wasn't really thinking about that for this blog.
The ABOUT page wil probably keep changing its content with my changing moods.
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Don't understand all that technical patter but, what an interesting read. Thank you. I had a rake around the internet and found this:-
http://mostlypaperdolls.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/paper-dolls-from-annibelle-comic-strip.html
The Bunty was a famous British girls' weekly comic and featured pages of cutout dolls and their wardrobes. This a great site dedicated to it and you can also read a couple of issues. The comic was published by D.C. Thomson, Dundee and was a big seller (my sister got it every week) and nowadays back issues just disappear when you can find them. Really popular in Australia.
http://www.beeworld.net.au/bunty.htm
As a sucker for the more obscure heroes, I really enjoyed your page on the Fab 4 and the Mighty Heroes. I was and still am a big fan
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Yes, I found a lot of different paper doll sites on the internet. It's a thriving interest among some fans--so I decided not to get into it too much, because others have done a much more exhaustive job. I also didn't want to fill up the space on my media library with too many images of paper dolls--however, as I find more I might add a few from time to time to my extra page, when I can manage it. Unfortunately, many images don't have info about which issue they come from--which is something I like to include when I can.
As I said about the Fab Four, whenever I find comments about them, they get no respect. But that comic really made an impression on me and I think they were a lot better than what they get credit for.
The Mighty Heroes were like characters that I was making up on my own back then. I could look at a pencil and say--oh this is Pencil Man. I remember making my own Rope Man figure by just using a piece of twine.
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Okay, it's that time for another issue of my blog! This one is the most work I've done so far. Not really so much for the blog post itself, but for the checklist page that compliments it.
For this I set myself the task of watching all 52 episodes of MEISTER UND SEIN PUMUCKL in chronological order. The majority of these I've already seen a few times--there were some I had never seen before. I'm happy to report that since I first started watching these more than four years ago, the availability of good video on youtube has gotten much better. I used to have to hunt around the internet for some episodes--with not very good quality. This time, using the German titles from my episode guide, I was able to find everyone with no problem.
Watching these is mostly a pleasure (except for a few dramatic episodes that cause me real angst), but I still have to deal with the language and trying to convey in English what is going on with these shows. But if people want to check them out, i put up a few suggestions and a few links on the blog, for easy to understand episodes. Especially "Pumuckl and the Pudding" and "Pumuckl and the First Snow." Whenever I'm wanting to smile, I click on "Pumuckl and the Pudding" and I'm in my happy place.
I don't know how much this will appeal to comic book fans--but I also put in a section on DC's fascination with imps in the early '60s. So funny book fans will have something that's up their alley.
But my blog and my checklist also perform a public service, since I have yet to find a site in English about Pumuckl--so mine is the one--and I throw in enough German for those who are learning or familiar with the language. So it's educational, too!
Anyway, I cannot stress enough how good I think this show is--but that should be evident from my blog.
MEISTER EDER FOREVER! ist hier! (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/07/05/meister-eder-forever/)
And 52 Pumuckl Pick-Up ist da! (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/40-uses-for-a-dead-funny-book/√-5-52-pumuckl-pick-up-holt-ab/)
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Yesterday as I was putting the finishing touches on my blog post, I found a Pumuckl message board. There's not a lot of activity on that board--and it's not exactly easy for me to communicate on it. But just now I did find that someone there has done English subtitles for the first episode on youtube. So I am just now putting the link for that video into the blog in the "where is pumuckl?" section. So English speakers can at least have that--although as an origin story episode it just gives a hint of what's to come. The subtitles for this episode were done over a year ago and apparently no more after that.
[added] Having now watched the subtitled version, the English is not the best and it misses some of the beauty of the German expressions (eine schoene Bescherung--means this is a fine mess--which they say a lot)--but it's a much better translation than what you see on other youtubes. A good enough introduction.
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My name is Jim and reading blog 3 makes me think that you are me :o Almost exactly my thoughts. I only knew Nukla from the hall of heroes and was not really interested in the other character and did not know at the time they had their own comics. But I really loved the Fab Four. I agree that issue 4 was a major let down. I really disliked Paul Reinman's art on Might Comics and it actually turned me off to reading the heroes I had loved. Oh wait maybe the terrible campy writing had something to do with it. These were such fun books.
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I suppose if I had been exposed to something else, then I might have thought differently about Reinman's art. But I guess it was because this was all so new to me, so it had an effect that was larger than life.
I mean, Sal Trapani's art isn't exactly all that great on the Fab Four--now that I look at it. But somehow it was super-fantastic at the time.
And yet there were other artists who are still hailed as geniuses--that worked for Dell or Gold Key or some other establishment--that I thought were terrible. Yet now I have to admit, I was kind of stupid to hold such opinions.
This might be something I'll get to eventually in my blog, but a lot of the Dell and Gold Key titles we were getting (by we, I mean myself, my siblings and everyone in our circle), we were getting because they tied in with some TV show or movie. So the standard for "good" art was how much it looked like the character on the screen. While I liked the two issues of GREEN HORNET that I got--I didn't think the artist (Dan Spiegle--who later became one of my favourite artists) captured the likeness of the characters, so therefore the art wasn't "good." Likewise, I remember the BEWITCHED comic had this cartoony art that didn't look exactly like the TV show, so that was an epic fail.
And yes, I think there's something about being a "Jim" that puts us in a special club.
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An artist in Sheffield England, Andrew Vickers, has made a papier mache statue using old funny books, including AVENGERS No.1. Apparently he found the comics on a tip--which leaves me to wonder who put them on the tip in the first place. News reports are saying he used
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My 7th blog is now up
http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/07/13/some-r-n-r-in-eden/
Those who like Matt Baker and/or jungle girls might want to give it a view. I relied a lot on my downloads from CB+ this week.
Here's something I started to wonder about. I haven't put up any video's for this week's blog, but last week's had a bunch and I tried out one on the week before that. They aren't absolutely necessary to understanding the blog--and largely for my own benefit--but I began to wonder if they actually play in other countries.
I'm forever going on some website where they have a video from Hulu which will not play for me, because I'm in Canada.
Have another video planned for next week, too. Would be nice if folks could play it. But even if they can't, I can and that's half the fun.
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The stuff that plays or not on Hulu etc have to do with the rights they obtained for whatever country.
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I guess that makes sense. Does youtube have to obtain rights for the different countries?
I'm always interested in the views I get from far away places. Two views from Jordan today. Meanwhile, Germany has overtaken Australia in number of views.
Added some Mopsy paper dolls. I like Mopsy. Gladys Parker, the creator, looked just like her. What I like are the single panels and strips she does with no words at all. If I could figure out how to do it, I would do a blog post with no words at all.
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Speaking of comic strips--as I was sort of--that got me thinking about other comic strips. And there was this one comic strip that popped into my mind that I read back in the '70s in the MENOMONEE FALLS GAZETTE, called AMBLER. So I did a bing search (don't use google if I can help it) and this blog came up--turns out the blogger just like me discovered AMBLER in the MFG.
http://booksteveslibrary.blogspot.ca/2009/08/last-days-of-ambler-by-doug-wildey_09.html
I think what grabbed my attention way back then was the good use of inks.
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Well it is Doub Wildey
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Well the Duchess was in labour today with our future king and I was labouring over my blog. But I finally got it done (not that I'm comparing my blog to childbirth--I wouldn't dare).
First you've got the blog itself on
RIMA, THE JUNGLE GIRL: More R 'n' R in Eden (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/more-r-n-r-in-eden/)
Then you've got an extra page on adaptations of H. W. Hudson's
GREEN MANSIONS: Mansions Green, I've Seen (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/extra/x-3-mansions-green-ive-seen/)
And last you've got the checklist page on
RULAH AND RIMA: 3 Faces of the Goddess (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/40-uses-for-a-dead-funny-book/√-6-3-faces-of-the-goddess/)
The checklist page was the thing that gave me the hardest time. At first it was just going to be a simple list of some funny books, but I started to add more and more to it. So now it's a checklist of all the Rulah stories and all the reprints I could find. Plus the 6 printings of CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED 90 [GREEN MANSIONS] and the seven issues of DC's RIMA.
I just about had it finished this morning. Just one more piece of info to add and then the formatting completely failed. I couldn't figure out the problem--an HTML problem, maybe. But I couldn't fix it, so I had to go back and redo all the formatting. So I hope it's okay now.
No doubt I'll be finding problems to correct and new things to add. I'm always updating these pages. The last blog--about Rulah--has been really revamped a lot since I put it up.
Enjoy the pages and let me know what you all think. I'm sure there are things I've missed--especially with the checklist--but I see that as a work in progress.
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Somehow I never really heard of Doug Wildey until the JONNY QUEST revival in the 80's (the comic-books, not the 3rd-rate cartoons that they inspired H-B to make). I loved his RIO (in ECLIPSE magazine) but never connected that this was the guy who'd created my #1 favorite TV cartoon series.
The combination in his later work of flat figure drawings and painted backgrounds-- which looked exactly like animated cartoons-- inspired my own work combining 2D figures & 3D backgrounds.
It was very annoying that, at the time Alex Toth passed away, someone in ALTER EGO used it as an excuse to needlessly bad-mouth Wildey's animation work (as compared to Toth's). Some people are real A**H***s. I bet a big part of Toth's lifelong frustration was in not having been able to create a TV show as good as Wildey's (which Toth worked on extensively).
Do you know how obscene it is that in syndicated reruns, Hanna-Barbera actually had Doug Wildey's SIGNATURE removed from the end credits of JONNY QUEST???
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That's shocking that they would go through so much effort to remove DW's credit from his work!
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I like how between the 2 blog pages, you've given such a nice overview of EVERY version of RIMA from novel to CLASSICS ILUSTRATED to DC's run to THE SUPER-FRIENDS (!!).
I also liked seeing how Nestor Redondo had done 2 different versions of "Adam & Eve" between 1968 and 1975.
That kinda ties in with my own BIBLE blog project...
http://professorhrevisitsthebible.blogspot.com/2013/06/in-beginning.html
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I don't know if Wildey's name was ever mentioned in the opening credits (probably not). But it was definitely in the end credits... and not as regular text, but his recognizable signature (sort of like when you see Walt Disney's).
I taped the show twice over the years-- first off USA Network, and again years later when Cartoon Central ran a block of "Boomerang" on late Saturday nights (after midnight-- JONNY QUEST was usually on at 3 AM!!!). The cool thing about the latter run was, it only had ONE commercial break-- at the midway point in the stories. Which made it VERY easy to videotape the things! My VCR had an automatic timer which would throw a tape into "STOP" mode if you left it on "PAUSE" too long, to prevent damage to heads or tapes. So when the commercial would start, I'd wait a few seconds (to make sure there was something on the tape-- a blank space always causes the machine to go NUTS when it plays back), then hit "STOP". I'd wait about 2 minutes, then run the tape back slightly, hit "PLAY", then "PAUSE" at the exact spot I wanted, then "RECORD"-- then wait for the show to come back, and hit "PAUSE" again, which would start the tape running.
After doing this crap for more than 20 years, you get good at it... or, it drives you completely crazy. A little of both.
ANYWAY... on the Cartoon Central "Boomerang" run, I believe either 1 or 2 episodes had Wildey's signature left in (by accident?). So YOU KNEW it was supposed to be there. All the others, it was gone-- somehow surgically removed.
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Oh yes, I had that pic of Redondo's Adam and Eve from his Filipino Bible and I had meant to use it. But then this morning I realized I'd forgotten to include it, so I had to think of a way to get it in--took a bit of fiddling to make it fit--but it makes a nice contrast with the DC version.
And yes Prof H, I was thinking about your Bible project in relation to these two other Bibles from Redondo.
I considered doing more with the SUPER FRIENDS Rima, but decided to stick mainly to those works that adapt Hudson's novel, GREEN MANSIONS.
Y'know I bought that book in the mid-70s, after reading the comic book. The cover I show on my blog is the cover from my paperback edition which I got in a second-hand bookshop--published in 1969, which is why I guess it has a hippy style cover.
I've picked it up several times to read it over the years, yet Hudson's prose while impressive is rather longwinded. And he writes very long paragraphs of intricate description. I need books with short paragraphs. But in setting out to do my Rima blog, I had the motivation to finally read it this time.
Hudson was an interesting guy. And it's encouraging to know that he didn't write Rima until he was in his sixties. I wish I had known there was a memorial to him (and Rima) in Hyde Park, when I was there many years ago. Apparently there's also a memorial to him in his native Argentina.
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I'm thinking about doing an extra page for my blog on all those How to Draw features that always appeared in comics (which just seemed to be the artist taunting the reader--oh sure, it's that easy).
I have LEARN TO DRAW COMICS by George Carlson--this is a 2002 Dover republication of a book that Carlson did in 1933. The first time I picked it up I recognized some of the pages. There was a big book we had in our elementary school library which was full of features, and one of them was a feature on how to draw comics--I'm pretty sure these were also by Carlson, if not the exact same pages.
Then looking at the scans I have for NEW COMICS issues 1 to 4--there's a one page feature in those--"Cartoon Corner" which gives lessons in how to draw comics. Not comparing them with the Carlson book, I just assumed that National Allied had merely re-used Carlson's pages, but now comparing them I see that these are different pages.
It's pretty obvious to me that the NEW COMICS pages are also by Carlson, even though I can't find a signature on them--but I guess he did completely new drawings, even though he was going over the same ground as in his 1933 book (originally titled: DRAW COMICS! HERE'S HOW--A COMPLETE BOOK ON CARTOONING BY GEORGE LEONARD CARLSON--originally published by Whitman.)
The GCD doesn't account for these feature pages in its entry on NEW COMICS, so I'm not sure how long the "Cartoon Corner" feature lasted beyond the four issues I have as scans.
While I'd say that most feature pages on how to draw comics don't really teach you anything--except that you will never become an artist, because you can't turn an egg shape into Barry Allen---the Carlson pages on drawing comics really do give you a step by step instuction that is probably the best guide you will ever need. Well, unless you want to draw on a computer--Carlson never said anything about that.
George Carlson, of course, did JINGLE JANGLE COMICS for Eastern Color (available right here on CB+), famously written about in Harlan Ellison's "Comic of the Absurd" for ALL IN COLOR FOR A DIME.
I have no idea if or when I will get around to doing this How to Draw page for my blog--which is why it will be an extra. And--like the paper dolls- I can only touch on the subject, as there's more material available than I could possibly cover.
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I was surprised at how much fun I was having re-posting the BIBLE stuff "in order" (by story, not publication date). I decided to take a break until the 1st of next month, because the "archive" pull-down menu was getting too big for July (heehee).
I actually did a Google search and found a "chronological" listing of stories which helped big-time figuring out what to do next. Some stories they covered as many as 10 times, while others, like "Deborah" (the NEXT one up after "Joshua"!) they only did TWICE, decades apart!
I strongly suspect some of the strips from the late 60's are by Curt Swan and Al Williamson. Those would be the ones I read when I had the subscription back in '68-'69. Someone else suggested it, I agreed, and another BIG Swan fan said, "It could be." And while I was checking I found an article saying Williamson was Swan's favorite inker for his stuff. (I blame Al Stenzel, who was in charge, for removing artists credits during his tenure. That ain't right!)
I still wish I could I.D. the rest of the "mystery" artists. In between Novick & Bolle, there may be as many as a dozen different artists involved, ALL uncredited. Some of them may have done as little as a SINGLE episode!
Would you mind if I re-posted a couple of Redondo panels you used at some point for reference? It would be like where I posted the poster of the Dino DeLaurentis film (which I just watched again this week-- you know, that thing actually works BETTER if you watch it spread out over several days?).
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Oh for sure, use whatever pics you want. Once I post something on my blog I know that I'm putting it out there for everyone to use and I would be glad to see them put to a good use.
That would be interesting if Swan and Williamson were working together in the late '60s. I assumed that their team-up in the early '80s was the first time that Williamson inked Swan.
I liked Williamson as a Swan inker. His style of inking was quite similar to the way that Swan inked his own pencils--so it makes sense that Curt favoured him. The other inkers we think of as great inkers for Swan gave him their own look (such as Klein and Anderson)--not uncommon when it comes to great pencil/ink teams.
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I decided to take a break until the 1st of next month, because the "archive" pull-down menu was getting too big for July (heehee).
I've been thinking about how to reconfigure my blogs and pages, as the content increases. Unfortunately, wordpress.com doesn't allow a lot of changes. You're stuck with the settings they give you. To make more changes you have to pay money and upgrade to wordpress.org.
I also don't want to make changes that will make some links inactive. My Meister Eder blog for example has captured a lot of interest in Germany and additional countries and others have shared the links on different websites, so I don't want to make those links inactive.
But even working within the limitations, there are always creative solutions--it just takes some playing around with the blogsite to see what it can do.
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I really wouldn't fret too much ... just keep creating good content .. DON'T get involved in link swapping etc
There is stuff you can do to keep your links (rel=canonical and redirects and other bits). If you are creating original text, images and getting visitors then you'll be fine!!!
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I liked Williamson as a Swan inker. His style of inking was quite similar to the way that Swan inked his own pencils--so it makes sense that Curt favoured him.
Hmm... if that's the case, then if it was Swan (and I'm still not sure on that, but it sure LOOKS like his work!), then it could have been him doing it solo. Which might be more likely, as, as far as I know, everyone who worked on this feature did full art.
3 different people (including myself) think it looks like Swan, but so far, I haven't found a single reference to his doing it online. The only thing I ran across was a mention of his doing advertising work, "briefly", and that was in the 1950's. But these BIBLE episodes are the ones around 1968-69 or so.
I'm also dying to find out who worked on the series in the late 70's, just before Frank Bolle. It looks SO familiar, but I haven't been able to place it.
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Looking at those panels from '69 it's really hard to say. I could go either way on it being Williamson inking or Swan inking.
To give one an idea of Swan's inking on his own pencils--check out the splash page on "Mordru the Merciless" from ADVENTURE COMICS 369 (June '68). Swan inked that page, but then Jack Abel inked all the other pages.
It strikes me that Swan always had a prodigious output, but in the late '60s he was getting less work at DC than what he had before or after that. He might have gone looking for other work. And if it was the usual practice for BOYS' LIFE to have one artist pencilling and inking then Swan might've agreed to that deal.
But the style of the art is certainly similar to Williamson's, so I couldn't say without more research on the matter.
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It's like doing detective work, isn't it? Someone else (I'd have to check the Captain Comics board to see who) mentioned Swan. I looked at it, and thought, "Hey, yeah..." Back in '68-'69 when I was getting the magazine, and those were the strips I was reading, I'd seen Swan on SUPERMAN and LEGION (what very few DCs I had back then). A few days ago I found a blog set up by a huge Swan fan, and HE mentioned Williamson. Plus, at his blog, he also mentioned Williamson was Swan's favorite. But every other artist (as far as I know!) did solo work... so then you mention how close Williamson inks look to Swan inks. I dunno... that kinda clinches it for me.
Similarly (in a different sort of way)... I'd already mentioned on my blog how "something funny" was going on with the writing in the late 70's. This morning, I discovered, double-checking, that the very 1st episode which had its text REUSED VERBATIM later on was December 1975. And it's right after that the stories become even more elaborately told than before... BUT, at the same time, some very odd glitches begin to creep in, which I can't see happening for a guy who'd been telling versions of the same stories for 25 straight years. MY conclusion? Al Stenzel retired from the strip 3 years before he passed away.
Sometimes I feel like Hercule Poirot! ;D
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My latest blog about Charlie Brown is now published to my site:
http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/bottom-of-the-9th/
I get a real thrill from seeing what nations are viewing my blog on any given day. Of course, North America dominates in views--but it's nice to see so many places from around the world. I suppose there are some large countries (Russia, China) where the internet is blocked. And other countries where people don't have access.
I can't figure out why I've yet to get any views from India or South America. I get many views from non-English speaking countries--and English is a spoken language in India. And I thought maybe my GREEN MANSIONS page would catch some interest in South America--perhaps I'm just not putting the right searchable terms into my pages.
I'm all about world domination.
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And no sooner do I say this than I get a view from Argentina. What will it take to get the Indian sub-continent?
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I love that you posted my all-time FAVORITE Sunday strip-- "Comic Magazines / For The Kiddies". That's been known to bring tears to my eyes from laughing so hard.
Growing up, we only got PEANUTS in the Sunday paper. I started watching the TV specials from the very beginning. But my introduction to the dailies was the Fawcett paperbacks. Later on, I found some of the other paperbacks, which were somewhat bigger and had 2 strips per page (I think). Only on comparing the 2 did I realize, the Fawcetts were cheaper reprints, and, like Marvel reprints, the line reproduction wasn't as sharp as the "original" paperbacks. The strange thing was, the cover price for 2 Fawcetts was the same as 1 of the bigger books, with the exact same material, except, the bigger ones looked sharper. Go figure.)
At some point I noticed the evolution of Schulz' drawing style, and while I thought the early stuff looked a bit odd (at first), it also seemed to me the early ones were fresher and funnier. Charlie Brown also seemed more outgoing and adventurous. I imagine being put down by so many people, and maybe turned down by so many girls (he really had an eye for the girls early on) must have worn him down eventually. I was reminded of this by the strip where he first meets Violet, only to find Snoopy has beaten him to her.
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If I had found the Holt, Rinehart and Winston volumes and they were easily available maybe I would have got into buying those and not the Fawcett Crest books. It kind of shows my psychology even at an early age that i get obsessive about having the same trade dress on all my books.
Still, at a dollar or more per volume, I think it's unlikely I would have been able to afford the HRW books even if I could find them. For sure my father or mother would have yelled at me for spending so much money on a funny book. By the late '60s and early '70s, i was able to find some HRW books, which by then I could afford to buy--but I still preferred to get the FC books.
But when I compare the few HRW volumes that I have with my big collection of FCs, the HRWs have stood the test of time. The printing is better and the paper has not browned.
In my blog I used pages from different volumes from my original collection--even if other books have better quality--because I wanted to compare and contrast the different styles of layout. You can see in the HRW books that they printed the whole panel as it originally appeared but on a 2 x 4 grid, so they could fit two dailies per page. But in the FC books they put one strip per page for the dailies and they fiddled around with the layout and the panel borders. Different FC books had different ways of doing this.
At the end of my blog I used the Sunday from August 6 '72 from PEANUTS: A GOLDEN CELEBRATION, because I wanted to show one Sunday in colour and I liked the colours on that one--plus it has a nice commentary from Schulz. But I also have that strip in an HRW volume, THOMPSON IS IN TROUBLE, CHARLIE BROWN, where the panels are configured differently to fit the whole page.
I mainly stuck with the earlier strips, because I like that style. The Peanuts gang look younger and fresher. I have a book on cartooning where the writer says that Schulz's mature style was better suited to his themes. I suppose. But I think like you that they seemed funnier in the early ones. In my thinking as a kid, the earlier books belonged to the Kindergarten and pre-K years, while the later books were grade 1 and onward when kids get beaten down by their peers.
I bought other books back then that adapted movies, plays or TV specials--usually in colour--but I wanted to mainly focus on the earlier strips and not everything else.
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I used to wonder about that "Part 1" and "Part 2" business, until I saw some of the other books. I got a few of them-- somehow-- but for whatever reason, they never seemed to turn up much. Maybe they were distributed to different stores? (It's possible.) It's just strikes me as funny that the big ones were a buck, and the Fawcetts were 50 cents each. So... SAME price. But, I suppose it's easier to buy the Fawcetts if all you have is 50 cents.
So it wasn't just the line reproduction quality (better stats?), but also the paper as well? Maybe 50 cents wasn't the bargain it seemed...?
The Fawcett book with that "Comic Magazines" strip-- red cover, as I recall-- somehow went missing when I was loking for it awhile back. I had a few of the early ones, but the earliest I had were actually reprinted in a "Book of the Month Club" anthology. That's a thick hardbound book with like 4 novels and some other stuff all in a single package. And they included PEANUTS sometimes. Crazy. It was ne of those I got to really like the early stuff, I think, before I even got the "early" paperbacks.
More recently, someone began a "COMPLETE PEANUTS" reprint series, all in hardcover, one strip per page (I think). More than I could afford, but I did get the 1st book because it seemed a good idea. They said their intention was to feature EVERY strip in sequence, and some, apparently, had not been included in previous reprints (for whatever reason).
It was a blast reading the series right from the beginning, and seeing the characters introduced one by one and slowly start to develop.
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I have the first two books of the new hardcover line. Well not so new. I suppose I should buy the next few volumes soon, before they go out of print. But I don't think I will try to buy the whole series. I'm more interested in the early strips, anyway.
There's no way I would have had a whole dollar on me to buy an HRW paperback, back in the day. If I had that much money, I would put it in the bank. Even paying the forty or fifty cents for an FC pocket book would have been a problem. I likely would have begged my parents for the money to get them. As I say, it was hit and miss where I would find them. But when I saw one, I was desperate to get it, because I never knew if I would find it again.
Also it seems to me that the higher priced HRW paperbacks were always marked up above the suggested retail price, while I believe most of the FC books were sold for cover. I don't think there was supposed to be tax on books, back then, but that wouldn't stop the sellers from putting some extra charge on their books--given the suggested price was the American price, so they could set their own Canadian price.
This is why buying comics was a better deal, because it was almost unheard of that a new comic would be sold for a different price than the cover--same price in Canada as the U.S and no tax. When I did find a comic with some new price afixed, it was an offensive sight. All that changed in the '80s.
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The other day I walked by the place in my neighborhood that, back in the 60's, used to be a used book store. If memory serves, that may well be where I got most of my PEANUTS paperbacks-- which would mean, for LESS than cover price! I also got a small set of Charles Addams collections there (those really flipped me out!), as well as a number of movie novelizations (for some reason, SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN comes to mind-- I read that years before seeing the film, too).
The guys decided to go out of business in mid-1970, I think. Everything was half price. Got a lot then. He also had a deal, 4 books for half of that. So... I wound up getting a complete set of Ian Fleming "007" books for like 12-1/2 cents apiece!!!
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A few months ago, i was walking in a neighbourhood of the city I don't usually visit, when I caught the unmistakable scent of Fawcett Crest Charlie Brown books in the air. It's amazing how immediately the memory of getting those books came back to me--it was like I was instantly flashbacking to being a kid, tracking down a book I hadn't got.
I don't know where the smell was coming from, being unfamiliar with the neighbourhood, maybe a bookstore was close by. It wasn't simply the old paperback smell--all too routine for me--it was that specific smell of a fresh new copy of a Fawcett Crest pocket book.
To tie-in sort of with my Charlie Brown blog, I've now put up an extra blog page on those how-to guides for creating comics: Can You Draw, Too?
http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/extra/x-4-can-you-draw-too/.
I might add some more how-to instructions at the bottom of the page in the future, if I find some that I like and I can scan them. There are quite a lot of them in the DC tabloids from the '70s, but it's a bother to scan tabloids on my scanner. And then I have to sew them together. It was enough of a problem sewing together pages from the tabloid-size AMAZING WORLD OF SUPERMAN: METROPOLIS EDITION (if you look close you can see the line where I sewed them together).
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Issue 10 should be up around the end of August and for that I plan to do something with Superman that will touch on SUPERMAN 164--but not in the way you'd think. So for Osgood Peabody, this will kind of cross over but not really.
I just posted my own 50th anniversary salute to the story here... http://marvelmasterworksfansite.yuku.com/reply/658774/The-DC-Comics-Time-Capsule-August-1963#reply-658774 (http://marvelmasterworksfansite.yuku.com/reply/658774/The-DC-Comics-Time-Capsule-August-1963#reply-658774) in somewhat abbreviated fashion.
I've no doubt you will be more up to the task of doing justice to it, though, so I'm looking forward to your next installment!
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I'm working on it. Hopefully, I'll be ready to post my blog in another week.
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I strongly suspect some of the strips from the late 60's are by Curt Swan and Al Williamson. Those would be the ones I read when I had the subscription back in '68-'69. Someone else suggested it, I agreed, and another BIG Swan fan said, "It could be." And while I was checking I found an article saying Williamson was Swan's favorite inker for his stuff. (I blame Al Stenzel, who was in charge, for removing artists credits during his tenure. That ain't right!)
Getting back to this, as I work on my Superman project, I was looking at a book I have on Swan--CURT SWAN: A LIFE IN COMICS (2002, Vanguard) by Eddy Zeno--and there are three pages in there where he talks to Al Williamson. And it's pretty clear from what Williamson says that he hadn't worked on Swan's pencils before coming onto Superman in the early '80s.
In fact, the inking job on Swan came about because Williamson had done something for SUPERMAN 400 for Julie Schwartz and Schwartz asked him on the strength of that if he wanted to do some inking for him. To which he said, "You know, I've never really inked anybody else."
He goes on to say he helped other guys out--like George Woodbridge--"we always helped each other . . . But I never did a complete inking job over anybody."
He says that when he got Swan's pencil pages, he'd never seen Curt's pencils before--he'd only seen his work after it was inked. "I didn't realize he was such a good artist! He could draw very, very well."
Also, if you check my Can You Draw, Too? page, at the bottom, I have the inside back cover from SUPERMAN 245/DC-7 which came out in late '71, where Swan does Superman faces. This is made to look sketchy--but in those days they couldn't have shot it from the pencils, so I'm pretty sure it's an example of Swan inking Swan.
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Someone (it might have been you) mentioned Swan's inks looked like Williamson's. That was enough for me! I went back and changed all the credits at the blog to indicate Curt Swan on those strips. It looks like he did it for about 4-1/2 years, with a variety of inking styles on certain ones. There's a few that actually remind me of Vince Colletta-- except A LOT better!!! But overall, the general look and "feel" of the strips, faces, poses, figures, all scream "Curt Swan" (some more or less than others). My guess is he took over sometime in 1968 and stayed with the series until it ended (or went on hiatus) in January 1973.
A year-and-a-half later, it was revived, and went thru multiple artists over a few years, none of whom I have been able to identify. It's not until early 1979 that Frank Bolle takes over. I could tell when, they changed the text formatting, the line rendering changed (more straight lines, fewer sweeping curves), and, he SIGNED his work... but in a sneaky way. I think at some point someone either told him to stop doing it, or began having the signatures whited out. (Don't you hate that?)
I'm also wondering when Bob LeRose dropped off, as he'd been apparently doing ALL the coloring on the J&C and Stenzel Prod. strips from 1952-up. But he joined DC full-time in the 70's. There's a point where the art on the BIBLE strips looked like stained-glass windows, with highly-stylized shading lines and open spaces for contrasting color shading. VERY "Peter Max"-like. And then there was a point where those lines continued, but the colorist began to IGNORE them. WTF? My instinct tells me that may be the point where LeRose left, and his replacement didn't know what was going on with those lines.
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Oh yes, I know we discussed it and you changed the credits, but these questions stick with me and I'm always looking for information to either confirm or contradict what I think. So seeing those comments by Williamson helped clear up any doubts I had.
I think Frank Bolle did some work on the MARVEL CLASSIC COMICS. I have a stack of those I've been meaning to get to for years. One day, I'd like to read them--and any others I can get. If I ever find the time.
Right now, I'm bothered by the contradictory credits on DC covers in the early '70s. GCD says one thing, but Mike's Amazing World says another. In most cases I'm disposed to believe the GCD. But for example on SUPERMAN 245/DC-7, the GCD says that Swan and Anderson did the cover (front and back), while Mike says Murphy did the cover on his own.
Which to believe? If the GCD has Schwartz's files, it seems like they have the correct info. But Anderson was good at faking the Swanderson look. And the composition, the poses look like the kind of thing he would do. And on the back cover, you have all those characters, especially Hawkman, that Murphy would be good at doing. Swan was never as good at doing Hawkman. Anderson is a kind of Golden Age geek, so he would be into drawing Kid Eternity. Or it might be a case where Curt did some of the pencils, but Murphy did the others.
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When it comes to identifying artists, I like to think I'm pretty good (but mostly with older ones-- by which I mean, nothing in the last 10-20 years). But Nick Caputo blows me out of the water. When I worked on Nick Simon's site, I often consulted with Nick Caputo. Most times we'd agree. Most times, I'd realize he was right. A FEW times he's say I was right. But he was always helpful, and one of the guys who contributes to the GCD whose opinion I trust the most.
As for writer's credits... that's a MINE FIELD (as anyone who's on any "Jack Kirby" group will tell you-- the "Stan Lee" contingent will harass you to death for trying to speak the painfully obvious truth).
A particular one that sticks in my head was CAPTAIN MAR-VELL #11-12, which I believe have the wrong (or at least, incomplete) credits for writer listed. It's funny that a really HORRIBLE run of comics should draw so much of my attention, but I read the first 25 issues of that series 3 times in the last 12 years. And by the 3rd time, a lot of mysteries became quite plain to me.
Arnold Drake is credited with #11-12, but not only does the entire thrust of the story change 4 PAGES into #11, so does the writing style. And, from then on, it's all CONSISTENT with #13-15... which are by Gary Friedrich. Drake told me he had a record of being paid for #12, but couldn't find it for #11. No matter. My conclusion? Drake wrote #11-12... but what he wrote was NOT what was published.
Since #11 also switches artists ABRUPTLY (the "story" in the Bull**** page about Dick Ayers "wanting a break from drawing both SGT. FURY and CAPT. SAVAGE" is obviously bunk-- Ayers LOVED doing war comics!!!). You don't just swap artists because one of them wants a "break". Anyway, #11 contained the WORST art job I have ever seen back then from both Dick Ayers AND Vince Colletta. My conclusion? Stan Lee decided he wanted a DRASTIC change in the book-- NOW-- which, among other things, would give him an excuse to BOOT Arnold Drake out the door (Drake complained that Lee kept accusing him of being a "Communist", because back at DC, Drake had tried to get medical benefits for freelancers). And I suspect the entire book was done OVER A WEEKEND-- script and full art.
I keep picturing that, somewhere, there may be an entire issue of Don Heck pencils that were never used, sitting in some drawer.
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Trying to identify writers would be harder. But in the reading I've been doing lately, I've noticed some things that would probably identify the writer, if I didn't already know the credits.
Mort Weisinger maintained that he came up with the plots and gave them to the writers (Carmine Infantino, suggests that Mort stole plots from one writer and gave them to another). So in this sense it should be more confusing who wrote what. But when Weisinger has an old plot recycled, it tends to go through the same motions as the previous story. Whereas, when a writer re-uses one of his own ideas, he tends to try to come up with a new turn on it.
Also there are distinct traits to a Siegel vs. a Hamilton script--like on Legion of Super-Heroes. Siegel tended to do the more oddball goofy stories, while Hamilton tended to do stories that took alien cultures a little more seriously.
Some years ago, before all the credits were known on Elongated Man in DETECTIVE, I was reading all of those and I noticed that while Fox tended to do exposition in long captions, Broome tended to do exposition in dialogue balloons. Broome's was a more theatrical approach--where the characers in a play have to set up elements of the plot through conversation. While Fox was using a prose fiction approach, where things are explained through the narrative voice.
But to pick up on these things, I have to read a lot of one writer's work--and even then it's difficult to guess.
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The super spectacular tenth issue of my blog is now publicly published. What a big one this was. But I've divided it up into parts, which makes it easier, I think. You can select which part you want to look at by using the handy table of contents.
MY SUPERMAN SUMMER (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/08/20/my-superman-summer/)
And connected with that is the new checklist: 50 Light Years to Lexor (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/40-uses-for-a-dead-funny-book/√-4a-50-light-years-to-lexor/)
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I only decided to add my About piece on Edmond Hamilton yesterday, so I haven't had a lot of time to research his work on Captain Future. But as I say on the blog, Mort Weisinger was the one who actually came up with the idea (at the first Science Fiction WorldCon in New York, organized by Julie Schwartz). And Mort was working for Better Publications at the time.
Better got into comics around that time and there's some of their comics on CB+. So I wonder if the CAPTAIN FUTURE pulp magazine is in the public domain--or did someone make sure to keep up the copyrights on that?
I see that there's a mammoth book which collects those stories by Hamilton, as well.
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The thing that caught my attention, oddly enough, was SUPERMAN 238, with the art by GRAY MORROW. I downloaded that page for my collection.
It still makes me shake my head in dismay that it took me decades to "connect" that the "Gray Morrow" who did all those cool (and often weird) comics was the same guy whose name appeared as "storyboards" on the end credits of al the 2nd & 3rd-season episodes of SPIDER-MAN (1968, 1969). When I got the oversized art book collecting his work, I figured out that the reason he may have been hired by Ralph Bakshi to work on that show may have been that they shared the same color sense (PSYCHEDELIC, man!!). Once I made the connection, I realized just how recognizable his style was on those later episodes. It's criminal Steven Krantz gave Bakshi such a PITIFULLY tiny budget to work with, so we never got to see Morrow's wonderful design work animated "properly". It's no wonder Grantray-Lawrence went bankrupt earlier...
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http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/8784545/homepage/name/homepage.jpg?type=sn
This image pays tribute to both John Romita (Spidey) and Gray Morrow (the villains), plus whoever was doing those whacked-out psychedelic skylines (also Morrow?).
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I'm pretty sure Morrow must've been allowed to do his own colours on the varied jobs he got at DC--because all the ones I've seen have this unique aesthetic vision. But how amazing is that, that Morrow would be allowed to do that--rather than someone in the production department.
A lot of the work he got at DC was for other genres like mystery and western. And I didn't buy many of those comics. Some of this has been reprinted in SHOWCASE volumes, but there's no colour in those. And anyway, it's a totally different thing to see colour reconstruction rather than the real colours that were done expressly for those newsprint comics. I should make a list and hunt down back issues of them.
DC always had pretty good cover colours up until then, thanks to Jack Adler. But one of the things that struck me as I returned to DC in '71 was some of the great colour shading on the inside stories. The art job on 240 was another one where I noticed the colours on Swan and Giordano's art--a different aesthetic sense from the Morrow story, but stlll good stuff.
It is funny that Morrow was the guy who did the Spider-Man cartoons. That was something I totally missed for many years. But then I didn't really pay attention to the art when I watched those shows as a kid--and the animation was pretty bad.
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It's nuts. Martin Goodman struck a deal with Steven Krantz to do THE MARVEL SUPER-HEROES SHOW, and Kranzt (a distributor) got in touch with Grantray-Lawrence, who became notorious for EXTREMELY-limited animation on those shows.
I understand fans were horrified when they heard G-L would be doing SPIDER-MAN the next year. Who could imagine the show would have the BEST animation seen on TV since JONNY QUEST?
But after one glorious season, G-L went BANKRUPT after only finishing ONE episode for the 2nd season. That's when Krantz hired Ralph Bakshi to set up a new studio in a NYC warehouse, and knock out the 2nd season, so Krantz wouldn't have to pay the money back. Bakshi hired Morrow, and also licenced production music from the KPM, Capitol & DeWolf libraries. The 2nd & 3rd seasons were real hybrids, combining new and old animation, and new and older music. And the styles were COMPLETELY different! The new animation was NOT QUITE as limited as THE MARVEL SUPER-HEROES SHOW had been... but close.
The same year they did the 2nd season of SPIDER-MAN, they also did the 3rd series of ROCKET ROBIN HOOD. Like Spidey, these were COMPLETELY different from the earlier episodes. Watching as a kid, I kept wondering, "What the HELL is this???" The following year, when the money COMPLETELY ran out, and they were desperately trying to complete the last of 52 episodes needed for a successful syndication package, they started doing remakes of earlier episodes from Seasons 1 & 2... and also, 2 of the 3rd-season ROCKET ROBIN HOODs. Totally nuts!!!
It flipped me out that it took me so long to realize the weird, demented art was seeing in the later episodes was Gray Morrow's work. Right about that time, I'd just managed to put together a comp with some of the KPM tracks a fan in California had sent me (he was a fan of production music, but, had never seen the cartoon, and had NO IDEA the tracks had been used on the show!). I hoped to send Morrow a copy of the disc... but then I found out he had JUST passed away. (I hate when that happens...)
He spent the last 20 years of his life doing the TARZAN newspaper strip. He said it was his favorite of all the work he'd ever done. I never saw a single one of his strips until after he was gone. It was great stuff!
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Gray Morrow worked on a strip that was in the MENOMONEE FALLS GAZETTE, which I subscribed to circa '74. I believe it was FRIDAY FOSTER and as I recall the art didn't look like Morrow's style. I'll have to dig those out one day and check.
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I loved the new entry. I need to go back and read through it at more leisure when I have some time - there's so much to take in! I especially enjoyed learning more about Edmond Hamilton, one of my favorite writers.
Regarding the Lexor saga, I have some vague but persistent memory that ENB at some point explained away the scene in Action #365 where the people turn on Luthor as a Virus X induced hallucination, and that it never happened!
But for the life of me, I can't remember where it was - probably in some letter column response. I'll see if I can track it down, because now it's bugging me...
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I'll have to look through my issues, as well, and see if I can find that ENB comment.
I looked at some of the letter columns but not all of them, because that would be more work.
The issue where I think there would have been comment on SUPERMAN 164 had an acknowledgement of the JFK assassination in place of a letter column. It's such a sobering thought, that I didn't want to refer to it in my blog. Too painful a memory even now for me to refer to it in a blog about fantasy comics.
Another interesting factoid I didn't mention was that Edmond Hamilton created Batwoman. He says this in the article reproduced in the TwoMorrow's LEGION COMPANION (I couldn't find if this article appeared anywhere else before--Hamilton wrote it not long before his death). But he mentions the creation in passing, like it's no big thing that he created this character.
I knew that he wrote the first story that introduces The Batwoman. But I just assumed the character was given to him by Jack Schiff--and that Bob Kane played a role in her creation. Of course, Kane lies. But this was one case where I thought his claim was legitimate because she IS Kathy KANE.
I didn't mention it, because it didn't seem to fit (should I then mention all the other characters he created? we would be here all day) but also I wasn't sure about the claim. He wrote the script, but I'm sure that others had a hand in it. Jack Schiff most likely. And calling her Kathy Kane might have been Bob's idea--given his ego. So it's hard to say that Hamilton created the Batwoman--but he did create the story that introduced her.
Like with Captain Future. In fact, Mort Weisinger came up with the original idea, but after that there was a back and forth where Hamilton discussed the characters they wanted him to use and had his own changes he wanted to make. So in this kind of process it's hard to say who created what.
It's funny how much of this was created over the phone. In the LEGION COMPANION, Jim Shooter tells of his own phone experience. It's weird to think of this kid at home with his family and sitting on the phone talking over the plot for his next story with the belicose Mort Weisinger.
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ACTION COMICS 368 and 369 have comments on Lexor from 365, but I don't see any telling remarks from ENB.
When someone says Superman couldn't have seen Lexor with his supervision, because of the red sun, Bridwell says they goofed.
In fact, I would say that the bier passed close to the solar system, but not through the system. Superman would have charted a different course. We see the bier passing through the sky, but that makes no sense, because he wouldn't go so near any planet's gravitational pull--that would pull it off course. Having the bier go through the sky was the real error--but it's the nature of figurative comics to do that.
Good old Gary Skinner writes a letter of complaint about the Lexorian rebellion. Bridwell answers that they have a tale full of surprises for Lexor ahead. If by surprises he means ignoring it almost completely for fifteen years and then destroying it then, yes, those are surprises.
My explanation for the rebellion would be that this crowd is hopped up on Madness Flowers. We only see random groups of people, but not the whole population. So these people were rounded up and order was restored. I'd also say that Luthor confessed his crimes openly to Ardora before this--and she forgave him, as mentioned in 544--so when she defends him in 365, she's already made her peace with his actions.
In the grand tradition of all Bridwell letter columns, it's up to the reader to find his own explanations for these daft lapses in judgement.
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I pulled out a few of my issues of MENOMONEE FALLS GAZETTE and it was on FRIDAY FOSTER that Gray Morrow worked for awhile. His style is there, but not in the main figures. In the backgrounds and his inking on those, you can see Morrow's style.
On my Lexor page I speculated that maybe IDW would get around to doing the SUPERMAN Sundays for the early '60s. On the other hand, i see that another publisher is continuing SUPERMAN for the '40s. But it's like molasses waiting for these to come out.
Back when I was looking at '60s BATMAN on microfilm, I also looked around for microfilm of other papers that would've carried SUPERMAN or BATMAN, but I didn't have much luck. If I can figure out which papers carried Superman in the early '60s, I'll give it a go at trying to find them on microfilm if the library has them. As I'd like to see how Wayne Boring handled the whole showdown between Luthor and Superman.
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IDW plans to publish all of the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman comic strips that appeared through the years, at least according to this article:
http://www.libraryofamericancomics.com/blog/article/2519/
I've read the first volume of daily Superman strips from 1959-61, and they were fantastic! Curt Swan's version of "Superman's Return to Krypton" is like getting the director's cut of the story!
As far as the ENB comment on Lexor, I've got some people tracking that down in our Time Capsule thread.
I suspect it occurred sometime in the late 70s/early 80s, but I'll keep you posted.
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Thanks to Commander Benson, we've been able to track down ENB's explanation of the scene from AC #365- it was in an LC and later expanded on in a Superman vs. Luthor digest - see here for the complete details:
http://marvelmasterworksfansite.yuku.com/topic/23674/master/1/?page=8
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Oh thanks for that. I have the comics in which these comments appeared, so I'll find them and fit some of this into my blog page where it applies. Although, personally, I think Bridwell's latter day comments were a bit of a hallucination of their own.
A better explanation is that Superman used his powers to observe Lexor from afar and DiD see the rebellions, but the rest was his own extrapolation of what was happening, based on flimsy evidence. Of course, his mind was on other things, so we shouldnt be too hard on the old Kryptonian.
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Okay, I've now added another entry to my 50 Light Years to Lexor page to cover Bridwell's prevarications.
Glad that's sorted.
Sorted, there's a British expression. Many years of watching the telly, and British imports, seems to have affected my sense of the English language. So many times I was tempted to type an hallucination. That just sounds right to me. But according to most rules of English you don't put an before an aspirated h.
However, looking up this rule on the internet, I found that there's a British loophole, where it's proper in speech to put an before an aspirated h when the word is three syllables or more. And this is my automatic instinct. Before one or two syllables, I have no problem. It's when I come to those polysyllabic words that I have an itch to say an.
On another bizarre topic, I realized that maybe the title for my page should have been 50 Light Years from Lexor not to--because if Lexor is 50 light years away, then it's 50 years in the past. If it's 50 light years to Lexor, then we would get there 50 years in its future.
But these days I'm trying to come up with shorter titles for my blogs--for many reasons, including the length of the URL and how it appears on the index--so I'm always counting letters, and I save two letters by using to rather than from. And I save one letter by using a rather than an.
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Another interesting factoid I didn't mention was that Edmond Hamilton created Batwoman. He says this in the article reproduced in the TwoMorrow's LEGION COMPANION (I couldn't find if this article appeared anywhere else before--Hamilton wrote it not long before his death).
I believe that would be Weird Heroes Volume 6.
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Oh, thanks a lot for the info. I'll make use of it.
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I'm not planning to publish my next regular blog post to the internet until the beginning of fall. I wanted to leave myself lots of time in September for doing other things--this always being a busy time of the year.
But in the last couple of weeks, I had the idea that I might do something on the fly that doesn't require as much work. I've been toying with a few ideas, but it seems to be in my nature to always complicate things. And what starts out as a simple idea turns out to be something I need to heavily research.
Still it's possible that out of this might come a blog on the fly in between the regular blogs. We'll see.
But as I've been exploring different ideas I did find a site that might be of interest to some on here. It always pays to look at the bottom of Wikipedia, because there one can find the sources that were used and those always lead to more avenues of enquiry.
The site is a search engine for several old Austrian newspapers that are available online. So if you want to find some old German language comic strips (or if you just want to look at old Austrian newspapers--which is thrilling and sometimes chilling), you can use this site to pull them up:
http://anno.onb.ac.at/
That website is in German, but it's also possible to use one of the internet translators on the site. For myself, knowing a little German, I don't find I need an English translator to use it.
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My first OTF (on the fly) post (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/otf-03-09-13/) is now up: Travel through time and space in 20th century Vienna and read about the Seicherl and Struppi comic strip (continental Europe's first daily comic strip).
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As I learned when I took cartography in university, Mercator Projections are ridiculous distortions of the wold map. They make countries that are big look small, and countries that are small look big. But Wordpress uses a Mercator Projection to show what places in the world are viewing your blog. And it's become a kind of game for me. If I could only get someone from Greenland to view one of my posts, I would have most of the world's land mass sewn up.
But it makes my day to see just one view from some obscure place on the map. I'm just as happy with those as getting more views from the usual places. Central America (including Mexico), the greater part of Africa, India and China are the major holdouts. But I got a view from Russia--so anything's possible. Of course, that could just be a government spy (just joking NSA--ha ha).
I'm always looking for things off the beaten track. Thus today's blog on the obscure Seicherl and Struppi from Vienna. Although what got me on that track was something completely different.
In relation to Paul and Linda McCartney (for MY SUPERMAN SUMMER), I had found a cool video in German on Linda McCartney (on youtube), and that video was done to promote the showing of Linda McCartney's work at the Kunsthaus in Vienna (still going right now). Which got me looking at stuff on Hundertwasser, which reminded me that this is not so far from Wittgentstein's house, which reminded me of Kllmt and the Secession, which got me looking at information on early Viennese comic strips and led me to DAS KLEINE BLATT and Ludwig Kmoch's comic strip. So the actual progress of my blog is in the opposite direction to how it all came together.
The other day I bought on eBay some '60s issues of LINUS from Italy. The cost of the shipping was much higher than the cost for the actual magazines. When I get them--trusting that all goes smooth--and I've had a chance to look at them, I might do an OTF blog post about them in the distant future.
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Some kind of gremlin seems to be throwing off the formatting on my wordpress blog site. Rather than trying to fix every page--which I'm not sure I could do--I'll wait for a couple of days and hope that the matter resolves itself on its own. Apologies to anyone who has had difficulty with it.
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I have heard that wordpress can be wonky
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A week or so back Blogger got on my nerves... I'd hit "edit" and it would give me an error message saying, "You've signed out at another location. Would you like to sign back in?" Well, NO I hadn't, and, it wouldn't. Just had to wait an hour, then it was working again...
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It seems like I can't be the only one who is having this problem, so I'm hoping Wordpress will attend to it. In the meanwhile, I've switched the template which doesn't resolve the issues with the formatting but it helps to mask them.
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The problems with the Wordpress seem to be permanent, but I've learned to work around them. Unfortunately, I can't control image sizes like I used to. The edit page looks nothing like the published page--so it involves a lot of abstract thinking to work out how to get it right.
Today, I published three blogs that I've been working on. I could probably keep adding more to them--which I may do in the future--but I wanted to get them up on the internet.
Issue No. 11 of my blog: AS YOU LIKE IT (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/09/28/as-you-like-it/)
eXtra page 5: Another You-Revue (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/extra/x-5-another-you-revue/). I had so much stuff that I could have put on the AS YOU LIKE IT blog, that I decided to create this extra page so I have a place to keep adding look alikes, doubles, comic book versions of real life people, etc.
eXtra page 6: Our Man Norman (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/extra/x-6-our-man-norman/). AS YOU LIKE IT also got me looking at the Three Stooges and Norman Maurer's relationship with them--so I decided to give this its own page. Also included here are a few of the 3-D pages I've scanned from my THREE STOOGES 3-D comic--and pages from the 3-D WHACK No. 1, from CB+. Something I could also add to in the future.
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"How come?"
Yeah-- HOW COME? I'm sure the same thought filled my head back then.
(More later-- great article.)
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The 1st thing I noticed when I opened the FOUR COLOR adaptation of 20,000 LEAGUES was, the art screamed "generic Gold Key art!" --even though this was a Dell, and GK didn't exist yet. But you know what I mean. Truthfully, if I didn't KNOW it was Frank Thorne, I'd never have guessed. It was also very obvious that Disney had not sent him ANY photo-reference AT ALL-- with the notable exception of The Nautilus. EVERYTHING else in the comic looks nothing like the movie-- the characters, the costumes, the visual storytelling. it's all "Frank Thorne". More or less.
But then, as I described in my long blog feature (and not nearly in as much detail as many other websites have), it seems from the word go, every single piece of merchandise spun off from Disney's 20,000 LEAGUES was apparently aimed at an entirely different market than the film was. The film was an often-INTENSE adventure story aimed at general audience (that includes ADULTS!!). The merchandise was aimed at KIDS. So all that really powerful, emotional stuff involving Nemo and his background and motivations, is NOWHERE to be seen. Mind you, most of it isn't in the published novel, EITHER... but that's besides the point!
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I was not very impressed with artists like Frank Thorne when they worked on Gold Key or Dell comics--and yet in the '70s when they worked for Marvel or DC, I thought they were pretty good.
One of the many comics I didn't get around to (but maybe I'll put on on my extra page in the future) was DARK SHADOWS, which had art by Joe Certa--who did good art elsewhere--but I thought it was horrible, terrible art that didn't justice at all to the TV show.
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Hey, didn't he do TARZAN ? I didn't like him on that, either... :)
To my surprise, a few years back, I found a story Frank Thorne did in an issue of BORIS KARLOFF which I liked-- very moody. But I had no idea it was him until many years after-the-fact.
I told Frank I was looking forward one of these days to getting my hands on some issues of MIGHTY SAMSON-- which, apparently, is the closest thing ever done in comics to THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN.
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Funny thing that Joe Certa did KORAK for Gold Key and Frank Thorne did KORAK for DC. Thorne on KORAK was okay, but a bit of a poor man's Joe Kubert and he didn't stand comparison to Murphy Anderson or Russ Manning.
Looking for info on Jonathan Frid, by the way, I found that he worked on a production of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA--but I think this was a CBC television production. I haven't found more about this as yet.
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There have now been so many film versions of 20,000 LEAGUES... and there seem to be countless websites devoted JUST to the Disney version... you may have noticed I tried to limit my blog feature to just particular spin-offs of that.
I thought I wasn't imagining it, there was one point where 2 different TV films were done in the SAME year. Kind of absurd, isn't it?
I've gotta dig out the comics Frank Thorne wrote himself and re-read them one of these days. He was, at the least, far better than several of the writers he got stuck with at Marvel! (The best one, Bruce Jones, nobody seemed to even notice at the time. I remember when he started doing his version of KA-ZAR, all the letters printed seemed to say the same thing. "WHERE did you find this guy?" I guess none of them read Warrens...)
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My latest blog is now up -- CAN COM 101 (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/can-com-101/)
And relative to that is this extra page -- The Yot Time F'got! (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/extra/x-7-the-yot-time-fgot/)
As always seems to happen, I start out with a plan for a short blog and it grows bigger. This is the biggest page I've done and it's not meant to be read in one sitting. Really it's a resource page and I've tried to make it so you can jump to different parts that might interest you.
The idea was to give a general overview of Canadian comics history. I've gotten into more detail for some things than others, since I'm more interested in the '40s, '50s and '70s comics. But I've left the possibility for myself to go back and develop some entries when I have better information or new scans.
Hopefully the amount of images on the page don't make it a bitch to load. But if anyone has problems with loading it, let me know and I'll see what i can do about fixing that.
Much much shorter is The Yot Time F'got! but you'll want to look at this page (I'm just sayin' if you know what's good for you, you'll give it a gander).
Thanks to CB+ Couldn't've done it without you.
Enjoy.
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Another problem with images on wordpress, I've discovered is that on the desktop PC some images will appear as thumbnails rather than regular size. On my Mac airbook, the images look how i set them to look--wordpress only allows three settings--thumbnail, medium, or large. But if you refresh the screen on the PC, the images should reload in the proper dimensions.
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When I was putting together CAN COM 101, I was self censoring a bit around the underground and ground level comics that came out in the late '60s and early '70s. I worried about any images I could use and running afoul of wordpress restrictions on pornographic content. With both HARALD HEDD and FUDDLE DUDDLE I had to edit the images to make them family friendly.
It's too bad, because there are some adult level comics I'd like to talk about on future blogs, but I don't want to run the risk of offending someone and being forced to take down my whole site. I still might go ahead with some discussions--on NATIONAL LAMPOON for example--but just being very selective in what images I use.
Or I could start up another blog not associated with MY FAVOURITE FUNNIES, expressly for any adult subject matter. At least that way, if I had to take it down I wouldn't lose everything.
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I have no interest in the adult comics but some of the humor is hilarious.
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I've never been terribly interested in underground comics, but if you're going to talk about the history of comics in Canada, then it's necessary to at least mention them. Between '57 and ''73, there were virutally no maintstream comics published in Canada. They were all American along with the odd British comic or--in the case of Quebec and other French speaking communities--Belgian comics. So the only source ofCanadian produced comics was the undergrounds and the fanzines. And many of the important Canadian talents started there. ORB magazine drafted most of its talent from the undergrounds and the fanzines.
The weird thing is, at different jobs, with different co-workers, whenever I mentioned that I collected comics, they immediately would ask me if I read THE FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS or HARALD HEDD. Apparently that's the only kind of comics they could conceive that I'd be interested in. When I had to tell them that I preferred BATMAN and SUPERMAN--they'd look disappointed.
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I have a Barbarian Killer Funnies and a couple issues of Barbarian Comics. These would be ground level today. Some of the scifi was good also.
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For the 13th issue of MY FAVOURITE FUNNIES it's a Hallowe'en horror event, as things get WEIRD AND STRANGE (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/weird-and-strange/).
After last issue's intro to Canadian comics, I now can get more in depth. So this time around I get into some of the horror comics from Superior. Folks here might want to check out some of those issues on CB+
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Reading so many horror stories in such a short space of time really wore me out. Of course, it's great to have these Superior horrors available on the CB+ site, but I find reading off a screen gets very taxing. I'm sure one day they will make a screen that is as friendly as a real paper book, but we're not there yet.
I very much need to find more information about the Iger studio and all the artists who worked there. After reading the Rulah stories they did for Fox and now these for Superior, it gets frustrating not being able to put a name to the artist. There are a few distinctive artists on the horrors and it's almost like having a word on the tip of your tongue--I have the vague sense of having seen their work before on other things, but I can't quite place them.
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An On the Fly blog post for November 12, 2013--breaking the fourth wall and visiting the DC offices in New York City. OTF.12.11.13 (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/otf-12-11-13/)
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Today I start my WEIHNACHTSMARKT (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/weihnachtsmarkt/) blog--kind of a combination of an Advent calendar and a Christmas market. So each day up to Christmas day, I will be adding to it an item for each day. So be sure to visit and check to see what's up next.
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For the 2nd of December (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/weihnachtsmarkt/)--samples of the SUPERHERO CATALOGUE from the mid to late '70s.
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For the 3rd of December (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/weihnachtsmarkt/)--the Hassenfeld brothers offer a plastic, posable figure for creative play.
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I remember working on the final Superhero catalog back in 1979 during my first year at the Kubert School. Doing pasteups and the occasional spot illo. I can still picture myself and several others students working on it at night with Big Joe in the old school building at 45 Lehigh Street in Dover.
We cannibalized sections from the art boards of earlier catalogs. I salvaged one old page that Joe tossed in the garbage after he cut out a section he needed for the new catalog. It had a nifty drawing of several Marvel superheroes on it that Joe had done himself which I thought was pretty cool. I still have that packed away somewhere.
Best
Joe
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I always enjoy reading stories from you and others who were at the Kubert School and your experiences there. I applied to it circa '78, but didn't get in. Part of the reason I joined the navy in '77 was to save up enough to go there. So as those catalogues arrived in the mail, I always imagined the students who must have worked on them--as I still do.
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For the 4th of December (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/weihnachtsmarkt/#day-four), MASTER COMICS 21 sets in motion events which will lead to the origin of Captain Marvel Junior--in the meanwhile the United States suffers a catastrophic attack on its people which will have fall-out for the whole world.
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I always enjoy reading stories from you and others who were at the Kubert School and your experiences there. I applied to it circa '78, but didn't get in. Part of the reason I joined the navy in '77 was to save up enough to go there. So as those catalogues arrived in the mail, I always imagined the students who must have worked on them--as I still do.
Yeah I had to work two job for two years (while taking night classes at a local community college) in order to save up to go to the Kubert School myself. Had very little time for anything else during those two years. Always seemed sleep deprived. The Lil Missus and I were just starting to date in those days and she still laughs about how I would nod off every time we squeezed in date to go to the movies.
Because I lived on the other side of the country I did my interview with Big Joe over the phone when I applied to the school. I remember being very nervous during the interview but very little about what we discussed and then a couple of weeks later I was very relieved when I got the news I had been accepted.
When I finally got to the school we started off with a class of 44-45 students but only 6 of us made it through to graduation after three years there.
Best
Joe
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For the 5th of December (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/weihnachtsmarkt/#day-five) I revisit Stumbo the Giant.
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The 6th of December (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/weihnachtsmarkt/#day-six) is Nikolaustag, the feast day of St. Nicholas--a big holiday in many European countries, especially for German people--and from which many of our Christmas traditions spring. Naturally there's some German content today--I get far more views on my blogsite from Germany than any other country other than the U.S. or Canada--so I like to give them something. But don't despair, there's some English content, as well.
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For the 7th of December (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/weihnachtsmarkt/#day-seven), if you haven't sent out your cards yet, Sugar and Spke can help you out with that.
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On the 8th of December (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/weihnachtsmarkt/#day-8) it's time to light the second candle on your advent wreath. Captain Action is featured on this day. I'd still like to know who inked Schaffenberger on those ads.
For the second week in December, there were some really amazing comics released--a stunning number. I could only mention a few.
Prof H. must be excited because Dell's FOUR COLOR 614 came out on December 14 '54. And Walt Disney's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA came out in theatres the following week on December 23.
Such good fortune.
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For the 9th of December (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/weihnachtsmarkt/#day-9), a brief look at CAPTAIN BILLY'S WHIZ BANG, the December 1924 issue. I encourage checking out the whole issue on CB+.
And I also encourage searching out the bittersweet tale of George Washington Johnson and Maggie Clark--and the poem inspired by their love story, WHEN YOU AND I WERE YOUNG. MAGGIE.
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Hey, looking forward to further entries from your blog!
In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy this latest entry of mine in this month's DC Time Capsule, as I give my tip of the hat to the 50th anniversary of the "New Look", including the celebrated "Ear in the Fireplace"':
http://marvelmasterworksfansite.yuku.com/reply/699886/The-DC-Comics-Time-Capsule-March-1964#reply-699886
Enjoy!
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The blog was not generating as much interest as I hoped. The posts that continue to get the most views are all from June, July and August of last year. Not that I'm just in it for the views, but I don't want to do a blog that only satisfies myself--that seems vain. So I decided to lay off doing more new posts until I could think of a way of doing it that I thought was truly worthwhile.
But I had always planned to do something to recognize the 50th anniversary of DETECTIVE 327 and I may still do something about that--although I haven't given it much thought. Since that great milestone book came out on March 26 '64--I hope I have a stroke of genius before then--but time is running out and the Old Wizard seems to be low on thunderbolts.
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OK I understand.
And hey, even if you're not moved to compose a full-blown blog entry, stop by the ol' Time Capsule and share your thoughts... your perspective is always welcome!
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These days other stuff calls me away from my computer and I can't always connect to the internet--necessary for doing the research on my blog. But hopefully those interested caught the old/new post back in March. And recently I've been updating the information on some past blogs. I've gone through Mike's Newsstand--where the information has been updated--and I'm incorporating this new information into the 8 Days Louise! blog pages and other posts, when I have the time. I'm also adding new images for those old pages. Everything old is new again.
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For Canada Day, I would return to Montreal, with artist Doug Wright. Also a bit on Expo '67 and Lily Renee.
OTF.01.07.14 (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2014/07/01/otf-01-07-14/)
By the way, the map of the Expo site was found on the internet--taken from an issue of the Belgian comic SPIROU.
I never knew anything about Spirou before this--I'll have to do more research on the character.
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Found a fascinating article on NESTOR REDONDO I just had to pass on!
http://thegeeksverse.com/2010/10/27/filipino-art-in-american-comics-part-2-nestor-redondo/
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Thanks for posting that. Looks like he found some of the same scans I found for my blog--plus a few I didn't use. I might rely on this source if I ever do a sequel to my ever popular More R n R in Eden post (the blog post that continues to get the most hits for my site--a testament to how popular Redondo continues to be).
Right now I'm working on a different project (somewhat comic book related) that requires all my attention, but once I've put it to bed, I can get back to the next blog I have planned but haven't had a chance to write.
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I think (not sure) I may have exactly ONE Nestor Redondo comic in my collection (a coverless copy of RIMA). But I can see what a talented guy he is. And I'd rank him WAYYYYYY above his probably-more-well-known (and inexplicably more-popular) fellow Phillipino, Alex Nino.
I keep doing research for my "classic authors" project... and I'm still on Jules Verne. Heck, I only just got started on "JOURNEY" this week!! Found a site that had the Gilberton version posted online and am in the middle of reading it. I like the art MUCH better than their version of "20,000 LEAGUES".
I was under the impression the entire Pendulum Press line of "classics" were reprints from WEEKLY READER, but the Wikipedia page doesn't agree with that. I was also surprised to find the Marvel version of "WAR OF THE WORLDS" was brand-new, not a reprint of the Pendulum version like damn-near all the others were. According to the post at the "War of the Worlds" website, the Pendulum version (with Nino art) had the script dumbed down for kids in the 70s. 3 years later, Chris Claremont (of all people) decided to go the whole route and include ALL the "nasty bits" nobody else wanted to touch. Also, I'm not big on Yong Montano, but I find his stuff a lot easier on the eyes than Nino.
This'll sound bizarre, but Nino's comics remind me of Jess Franco's movies... :)
Anyway, it was the Redondo DRACULA that really caught my attention. I gotta do a DRACULA blog page one of these days!
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It's taken me a long time to get around to posting another blog on MY FAVOURITE FUNNIES, but I finally done it, before the end of another year. This is the first of two blog posts on the Norse--in particular, this one is on Erik the Red and his colonizing of Greenland. I've also thrown in related stories about Vikings in the New World.
GR (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2014/12/22/groenlendinga-saga/)
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Continuing from where we left off with the previous issue, Erik the Red's son, Leif, as well as others from that family go looking for a new world in:
VINLAND SAGA (http://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/vinland-saga/)
Scroll down to the bottom for more of My Favourite Finds, with G.I. Joe and Hot Wheels.
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NICE thanks
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Jimm, thanks for putting together this great compilation of comics and other info. A fascinating subject, indeed. Cheers, Bowers
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Thanks.
I'm always wrestling with where to draw the line in offensive text and images from vintage comics, when I'm doing my blogs. With the Greenland Saga, I didn't show much of ASTERIX AND THE GREAT CROSSING--partly because what I have is a translation and not the actual French version of the comic--but also because I think the illustrations of the native people in that book are too over the line.
That's my fuzzy determination of the line. I thought Hal Foster's illos were the best and probably very well-researched (though likely anachronistic)--but every comic I looked at had a very different take on the indigenous people.
On the one hand, I want to present the work without much editorializing, but on the other hand I want my blog to be welcoming. I had a similar problem with my blog on Seicherl und Struppi last year.
Today I was looking at pages from O TICO-TICO, a Brazilian magazine that published a lot of comics art in the 20th century--and for most of its run, every issue features what I would call extremely offensive images of black cartoon characters. It's odd, because this specific stereotype was prevalent from the '20s to the '60s, by many different artists. Yet in the very early 1900s, O TICO-TICO features images of black cartoon characters that are relatively inoffensive.
While I'd like to use some of the art--such as that by J. Carlos--the stereotypes are so far over the line that I don't think they belong on my blog. It's okay for a site like this or other historical archive sites to feature them--but on a regular entertainment blog, I just can't see using them, because people could click on them unawares. I want people to smile when they look at my blog, not get depressed.
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It took me a few more weeks than I anticpated, but I finally published to my site the blog on Bob Oksner.
THE MANY LOVES OF BOB OKSNER (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/the-many-loves-of-bob-oksner/)
It's a very long blog, and may take time to load, given all the images I used. But once I got into Oksner's work, it was hard to limit myself. I focused on that work that Oksner actually pencilled (and often inked, as well). All Bob's work as just an inker would be too much to include. And I didn't include any of Hasen's DONDI art, as Bob was usually just the writer on that strip.
I also mainly focused on panels and covers with women and girls--as that's what Bob is known for, though he's an all around artist in reality.
I've been an Oksner fan all my life, before I knew what an Oksner was or how to spell it--since we had BOB HOPE comics and JERRY LEWIS in our house by the time I was born. But it was really Bob's Mary Marvel that made me admire the guy so much.
Once I got into looking at all the other stuff he did, I discovered new loves. Of all these the most amazing and surprising was PAT BOONE. I knew that comic existed, but I never gave it much thought. Little did I realize how innovative that comic was.
It's like Oksner or Nadle or whoever was behind the project decided to totally take a new approach to comics that hadn't been done at DC. Everything is different--there aren't panel borders for a lot of the work, there's no balloons for the dialogue. Colouring is completely new--not filling in the figure, but using the colour with discrimination to create lighting effects.
It was because Oksner lived in Teaneck, where Pat Boone also lived with his young family while he was making his TV show, that Bob ended up doing the comic. Oksner would come over to the house, to draw Pat and his family. So I wonder if some of the ideas for this comic weren't born there.
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Fabulous blog post (if a little long). I only really had time to briefly (very briefly) skim over it, but my appreciation for Oksner has definitely gone up.
I LOVE his stuff on JERRY LEWIS. In the last few years, I've commented multiple times that in the 70s DC missed a real sure bet by not having Arnold Drake & Bob Oksner do a DON RICKLES comic.
Tons of incredible stuff here. Thanks in particular for posting the "JOURNEY" pages from PAT BOONE; I'm sure I'll eventually get around to using them in my Jules Verne project (once I'm done with my Edgar Allan Poe project-- 4 months now and counting).
The ONE thing Oksner seems totally wrong for, in my view, was super-heroes. He was TOO GOOD for that crap! It was particularly jarring when I glanced at a page you posted INKED BY VINCE COLLETTA (aaaaaaaaugh!!!). How many countless artists did that guy desecrate over the years?
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When I saw the pages on JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH in PAT BOONE No. 4, I immediately thought of you Prof, so I had to scan a couple and include them on the blog. There's a couple of other pages that I didn't scan, so if you want those let me know. Not that my scanning is any good--I don't have your skill with that.
The blog post IS too long. I considered breaking it up into multiple posts, but decided against that. By breaking it down into several parts in one post, with a contents list so you can click down to whichever part you want to look at, I hoped to make it a little easier to use.
I tried to avoid any Colletta inked pages as much as I could--but I thought it was important to include a little of the Vixen. I didn't use any Oksner art from SUPERMAN FAMILY because it was hopelessly ruined by Vinnie's inks.
Bob Oksner (according to his interview with Jim Amash) had no interest in super-heroes, but when DC stopped doing humour there wasn't much else he could do. For a guy who didn't think he was any good at it, he seemed to do a good job at the super-heroes. I loved his covers for all the Super titles.
As I say, his Mary Marvel was my favourite. But then the Marvel Family are better suited to a humourous take. As much as I liked Kurt Scaffenberger's work, I much preferred it when the art duties were split between Bob and Kurt in the SHAZAM! book.
It's telling that one of the last things Bob worked on for DC was AMBUSH BUG--even if he was just inking it. I think he must have enjoyed how it ridiculed the state of affairs at DC at that time.
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Sure, I'd love to have all of those pages. The further I've gone into these recent blog projects, the less I've tended to be squeamish about posting stuff that isn't "PD". I tend to think the context helps.
Side-by-side in my mind with the JERRY LEWIS stuff (which I love) is the JIMMY OLSEN pages where Oksner was inking Mike Sekoswky (GHASTLY!!!!!). They succumbed to the SICK compulsion to (AHEM!) "fix" Jack Kirby's art, but they let Sekowsky-Oksner go out as-is. And some people think comics editors actually KNOW what the hell they're doing!
Every time I set up a new blog page, half the work (half the fun) is setting up the "links" to other pages-- so you can easily read from one page to the next one, or go back to the previous one, or, jump around to multiple versions of the same stories. And then there was all those dramatic readings and radio shows I found and posted links to...!
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So for profh0011, what I've done is put up the other two pages of A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH from PAT BOONE No. 4 on my blog, under the pages that are already posted there. I'll leave them up for a few days to give you time to copy them if you want them.
These two pages are largely text so they don't add much to my post and I'll take them down again in a few days.
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I grabbed 'em! Thanks.
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That's a great piece of work, jimmm. I've bookmarked it for reading later and, if you don't mind, I'll send a link to a couple of folk. This is a revelation to me as I was never a big fan of his work, not realising he did all those genres and I only knew his name from the credited stories I had seen. Thank you.
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Oh please do share the link.
I think Oksner is one of the most overlooked of the great artists that worked at DC. Maybe because a lot of his stuff wasn't in the super-hero category.
For example, I'll be on the lookout for more SGT. BILKO comics to add to my collection in the future, as that's one I used to dismiss as not worth my time. The wonderful thing about these comics is that even if the story is by the book, there's so much eye candy to make it worthwhile.
Oksner's early art for Ned Pines was not that great--by his own admission--but Comic Book Plus needs to find COMPLETE BOOK OF COMICS AND FUNNIES, which features the first appearance of the oddball Wonderman by Oksner. I've been looking around on eBay for a copy, but so far no luck.
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The latest of my checklists is now up on my blog. This one I call 27 Shades of Swan (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/40-uses-for-a-dead-funny-book/√-27-shades-of-swan/) and I list some of the more significant inkers on Swan from over the years, ranking them from 27 to 1. Try to guess who you think will be in the 27th spot and who will be number 1.
As always, it took me longer than I thought to get it done. I always think this will be a piece of cake and then I encounter obstacles along the way. A lot of inks I thought were by one fellow turned out on further investigation not. Many contrary sources out there, but I'm putting my faith in Bob Hughes and Craig Delich.
It may well turn out that the credits I've given for some inkers are in error. And I may have to make revisions in the future. It's an evolving thing.
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A splendid piece of work, Jimmm, full of new discoveries for me. I love the plentiful examples, especially the original art which gives a much clearer picture of what each inker was up to. Thanks for your monumental effort.
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The inks on the Hostess ads are really hard for me to identify. On my blog, I use an original art page that is credited to Vince Colletta--so I guess it's Vinnie's work, but it looks pretty good--I guess I expect the worst from Colleta.
One thing about that Hawkman Hostess ad is that in the background you see the concert is by Pete McCarthy and the Flyers. Any old time DC reader knows that Pete McCarthy and the Flyers were a doppelganger for Paul McCartney and Wings on Earth-One.
In his story from TEEN TITANS No. 46, Bob Rozakis establishes that, on Earth-One, two of the top bands are Pete McCarthy and the Flyers--with their rock anthems--and the Woodworkers--a soft rock duo, a la the Carpenters. But in actual fact, they are the very same people. I used to wonder if the Captain and Tenille and the Eurythmics weren't pulling the same stunt.
Since Pete McCarthy and the Flyers are headlining in that ad, I wonder if this means Bob Rozakis wrote the script.
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Astute observation and as good a guess as any. I will run it by the GCD crew.
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In time for Carnaval, MY FAVOURITE FUNNIES is On the Fly down to Rio de Janeiro--OTF 17.02.15 (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/otf-17-02-15/).
A relatively short post after the last ones I've done--this time I take a look at O TICO-TICO--the first magazine in Brazil to publish comics--and featuring the art of J. Carlos.
Up until just a few days ago, I had this great resource for looking at O TICO-TICO pages and hundreds of other Brazilian periodicals from the past--Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira--a digital directory I found by looking at the bottom of the Wikipedia page for O TICO-TICO.
However, this site went down a few days ago and it hasn't been up since. Lucky that I managed to save some PDF files for a sampling of O TICO-TICO issues before that happened. Or else I'd have nothing to put up today.
I'm no wiz at converting PDF files. The only way I could manage to extract the images from those files was by taking a screen shot. The screen shots are in turn saved as .png files and I then had to open those and save them as .jpg files--which I could then crop and prepare for posting as images on my blog site.
There must be an easier way.
I'll keep checking the link for the Brasil directory. There were some nice pages from CARETA that I wanted to use, but there weren't PDF files for that periodical. Had I known the site was going to go down, I would have taken screen shots directfly from the web page.
In the meantime, the University of Toronto Libraries has a master page with links for international digital journal directories. Click this link for the page (http://guides.library.utoronto.ca/content.php?pid=249879&sid=2063523#7444555).
I haven't checked all the links on the U of T page--some like the Brasil directory might not work--others might be inaccessible for some reason. But I know the Austria link works--as I used that directory before.
There might be some publications there that Comic Book Plus can use.
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Good news, the Brasil directory is online again. A little late for me--oh well--but here's the web address--
http://hemerotecadigital.bn.br
I don't speak Portuguese, but I've kinda learned some just from going through these pages. The directory is alphabetical, but if you know the title you're looking for you're better off entering the name in the Titulos search engine.
This doesn't work for Para Todos--which I've figured out must mean "for all"--and just searches for everything in the directory. As such I haven't been able to find PARA TODOS in this directory--which is a shame because J. Carlos did some amazing covers for that publication over a long period of time.
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Jimmm, I checked out the Brazilian archive site. Looks interesting, but I can't find the link you mentioned to an alphabetical list of their periodicals. How is it labeled?
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If you click Titulos, the search page that comes up has all the titles listed in alphabetical order [below the search box] that you can scroll down, page by page. Total de t
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I'm on a roll. Someone at another site just e-mailed me the "Peter Pan" comic version of "JOURNEY". Wow! Won't be able to get to it for some time, the POE project is going and I don't wanna lose momentum.
By the way, someone else pointed me to "Archive.org", which apparently has TONS of stuff posted online... but I, for the life of me, haven't been able to figure out their damnable search engine yet. Don't you hate when people get paid good money to do TERRIBLE, incompetent design work?
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There's lots and lots of stuff that is housed under the Archive.org umbrella. I never find stuff by going to that home page. For instance, I am listening to several old time radio shows that are under that umbrella, but I found them by doing individual searches using Bing (Google would also work)--you just need to know the terms to use.
As example, if I enter in the Bing search engine: richard diamond radio show complete series
--the top option that comes up is the archive.org site for that radio show (which I already have bookmarked).
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Somebody supplied me a link top CREEPY #69, and I was able to download every single page of it!! I tried using the search engine... CREEPY #70 did not come up, but #76 came up, yet refused to let me go any further than a listing and a tiny thumbnail. Someone else who knows the siter more than me then told me, as a matter of fact, CREEPY #70 is NOT on the site! I said, "What are the odds?"
Someone else offered to supply me directly with MUCH BETTER scans of several books, including CREEPY #69 (after I already spent hours downloading it), but then the next day abruptly got bent out of shape because I was making MINOR adjustments to some of his scans. It's a good thing I have so much to keep me busy. I don't have time to worry about behavior like that.
The other day, by dumb luck, I ran across a Spanish POE comic, which apparently has never been published in English. I spent ALL DAY today searching online and in mid-afternoon finally found a COMPLETE copy of the story (a mere 6 pages), which I got as part of a CBR file containing an ENTIRE reprint collection (I only needed the 6 pages plus the covers). All cleaned up and posted now (the interiors from 3 DIFFERENT websites). So now, I'm planning to use Google Translate to help me create a brand-new ENGLISH version. This oughta be fun!
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Seeing that The Night of March 31st (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/minim/001-the-night-of-march-31st/)came out in SUPERMAN No. 145 on newsstands March 16th, in 1961--I wanted to take a look at it again and the rest of that comic. Possible spoilers.
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I'd like to confirm just who the guy in the bowtie is supposed to be:
https://myfavouritefunnies.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/curtstansm145.jpg
One source says it's Stan Kaye, another says it's Harry Donenfeld. That it's Stan Kaye makes more sense, given he's standing next to Curt Swan. That it's Harry Donenfeld seems rather random. Sheldon Moldoff inked this, but at the time Curt probably assumed Stan was going to ink this story (this would have been around when Stan left DC) so he put him in the scene.
I haven't been able to find photos of Stan and Harry from this time for comparison.
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It's the Craze! (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/its-the-craze)My latest blog that is.
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Celebrating my anniversary with an 80 PAGE GIANT ANNUAL--sort of. Check out 80 PIC. GIANT--it's the 20th (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/80-pic-giant/)issue of MY FAVOURITE FUNNIES, featuring the greatest super stories published during the last two years.
Also to keep track of all those ANNUALS and GIANTS, there's My Checklist: 80 Pg. Giant DC Classics (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/40-uses-for-a-dead-funny-book/√-80-pg-giant-dc-classics/).
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Here is something I noticed about SA giants. Harvey came out with their superhero line after the popularity of Batman on TV. Their teen Bunny comic outlasted their thriller line. Tower had more Tippy Teen and her friends books than superhero books. Even MF Enterprises had more Henry Brewster books than Captain Marvel books. Just an interesting observation I made.
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Here is something I noticed about SA giants. Harvey came out with their superhero line after the popularity of Batman on TV. Their teen Bunny comic outlasted their thriller line. Tower had more Tippy Teen and her friends books than superhero books. Even MF Enterprises had more Henry Brewster books than Captain Marvel books. Just an interesting observation I made.
Now you tell me. I was going to do a little bit more with Archie, since I have some Giants from back then that I wanted to look at. But I ran out of time and I'm not sure where I stashed them.
But I've noticed that the Giant format was given over to teen humour in the latter half of the '60s as you mention with Tippy Teen. So maybe I'll make this its own theme for a future blog post.
DC branched off with other lines of Giants in the late '60s that weren't part of the G line. Who knows, I may get around to writing about them in the future.
As for why these big funny books may have been more popular than the super-hero type--from my own experience in the late '60s, I'd pick those up because they weren't such hard work. They were a good deal--and better to have a collection of funny stories, that way if one doesn't work there's a chance that the others will be better.
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I didn't remember how many new Archie-style comics appeared in the mid/late 60s. I never saw Henry Brewster though MF's gadawful Captain Marvel and Todd Holton comics appeared in the local drugstore. The other kid titles I ignored because at the time I was all about superheroes. My favorites were THUNDER Agents and its spin-offs. I liked the art and I liked the sense of humor in many stories. Tower comics were deucedly hard to find in our area. Tippy Teen was on the racks next to Dynamo and Co. but I never even bothered to pick one up. I missed a lot of interesting stuff back then (Angel and the Ape comes to mind) because of my monomania.
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I was fortunate enough, at the time, to have a cousin who picked up all the Archie books and Harvey books. She did not collect them just read them then GAVE THEM TO ME. I do not remember her every getting Bunny or Henry Brewster but I think she got some Tippy. I think that the squarebound looked bigger even when they were not. For 25 cents you could get a 68 page Archie or Harvey Giant or for 24 cents two 36 page regulars. I never counted the pages but I thought the giants were over double the regular. I suspect that I was not the only one fooled.
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I have a BUNNY comic, which was one of the oddest "treasure" of my then-small collection. It's one I tend to forget about when I think back on those days, but I must have read it several times more than MOST of the comics in my collection. (When you have few books, you read 'em over and over a lot.)
One of these days I MUST do a blog feature on my earliest comics. There was such variety in them!
It's funny, when I decided to do a funny comic about a not-too-bright girl, I called her "Bunny"... BUNNY ROGET. (It was a tribute to BUCK ROGERS.)
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By the way No. 1: I happened to find too late on eBay a coverless copy of COMPLETE BOOK OF COMICS AND FUNNIES. Found it only after the auction was over--still kicking myself about that. But I copied the first page from that auction and used it on the blog.
As you can see from this page (https://myfavouritefunnies.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/oksnerwonderman44.jpg) the comic was copyright 1944 by Editorial Art Syndicate - Wm. H. Wise & Co., Inc. Publishers.
That publisher must've been a company that functioned as a surrogate for Ned Pines--in the same way that THE BIG ALL-AMERICAN COMIC BOOK was also published by Wm. H. Wise & Co., Inc. Publishers as a surrogate for All-American Comics.
I thought that was an interesting detail and might be useful in tracking down a copy of COMPLETE BOOK OF COMICS AND FUNNIES.
By the way No. 2: I was quite surprised that Bob Hughes credits the Supergirl stories reprinted in ACTION COMICS No. 360/G-45 (March-April
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My second minim page looks at Doll Man vs the Fuehrer of America (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/minim/002-doll-man-vs-the-fuehrer-of-america-2/) in THE DOLL MAN QUARTERLY No. 2 (Spring
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By the way No. 3: Some of the page counts in my blog might be off by four. I couldn't figure out if some of the numbers given by sources or on covers were counting the cover or not counting the cover. Generally, for the sake of consistency, since 80 PAGE GIANT does not include the cover, I used the interior page count. On the GCD site, I couldn't be sure if indexers were counting the cover or not. It seems more likely to me that the page count (not counting the cover) should be divisible by 16--a half signature. But with some comics--especially the squarebound--it was possible to add less than a half signature.
Indexers are supposed to count the covers.
Which isn't to say that all the page counts at the GCD do that, but according to the rules of the GCD they are supposed to.
The page counts printed on various Comic Digests from Archie Comics only count the interior pages (at least, it's been that way with those digests I own).
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Indexers are supposed to count the covers.
I'll try to apply that knowledge. For my blog, of late, I've been using just the interior page count because that's what usually appears on the covers and advertisements from publishers, in my experience. Instances of counting the covers seem less frequent. So I figure it's better--creates less confusion--if I use that count in my blogs and make note of the counted covers on the occasions when that arises. But now I'm second-guessing myself and I'll have to go through my blogs to make sure I've been consistent.
You would think publishers would advertise a higher count if they thought they could get away with it. But it may be that certain numbers are more pleasing to us than others. I think square numbers are more pleasing. 4 squared, 10 squared may be more pleasing than 68 or 96. Not that 96 isn't a nice number--it has nice symmetry--but I don't think in the 10 fingered world it can compete with 100.
I like the number 36, but the number 32 seems even better--2 to the fifth power. Anything to the fifth power has got to be awesome.
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Another minim item. This one on The Dynamic Duo's Double-Deathtrap (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/minim/003-the-dynamic-duos-double-deathtrap/) from DETECTIVE COMICS No. 361 (March '67). My favourite story of all time.
I'm really pushing the spoiler page with this one. I don't like to spoil stories for people who haven't read them--so the idea of doing this kind of feature allows me to link to a spoiler without ruining the comic for folks who want to check it out first. But I've noticed that while I get a lot of hits on the main pages, the spoier pages get almost none. And there's a lot there for brave souls to check out.
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My latest blog post--KNOCK ON WOOD (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/06/28/knock-on-wood/)--asks the musical question what do Woody Woodpecker, Don Arr and Big Little Books have in common?
And speaking of music, I was listening to some Danny Kaye and the Andrews Sisters recordings off the internet yesterday and--man--I gots to gets me some of those records. Danny and the sisters are having so much fun on those. I was killing myself listening to them.
If you want a good time, go look for their recording of "Amelia Cordelia McHugh." Sublime.
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WARNING: after you see my latest blog, you'll want to hug your comics and keep them safe. This is not for the faint of heart. Click the link below if you dare, but prepare yourself for the worst thing a comic book lover could ever see.
My Favourite Funnies No. 22: THE RUIN (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/07/29/the-ruin/)
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I'm a new member and I'm writing you with a question about Comic Book Plus. Hope you can be of help. I posted an introduction but as far as I can tell it hasn't landed in the forum. Did I do something wrong?
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Your introduction post was there--I know because I read it. It seems to have been modified.
https://comicbookplus.com/forum/index.php/topic,13.800.html (https://comicbookplus.com/forum/index.php/topic,13.800.html)
Maybe try posting it again or ask MarkWarner (https://comicbookplus.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=5518) about it.
EDIT: Well actually your introduction is there but in a different forum--
https://comicbookplus.com/forum/index.php/topic,10156.msg58090.html#msg58090
Maybe like me when you went looking for it you got redirected to the wrong forum. Easiest way to find your posts is to click on your name.
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OTF.22.08.15 (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/08/22/otf-22-08-15/) -- My latest On the Fly blog post visits Liverpool home of the Beatles, from whence came BEATLES BUBBLE GUM! Also celebrating the 51st anniversary of the Beatles in Vancouver--which I didn't see (darn). If you only visit one of my blogs, make it this one, please please me.
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Another minim page--this one on Troublesome Double (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/minim/004-troublesome-double/), from TIPPY TEEN No. 22 (March 69), plus other features of that issue.
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Just looking at that Big Ethel-esque face on Troublesome Double, I'm 90% sure that's Samm Schwartz's work and some of the poses you posted from that story look like poses from Schwartz-confirmed Jughead stories.
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I used panels with air around them, because I thought that was neat and a kind of signature of Troublesome Double. But there's a nice silhouette panel in that story that I didn't use for the blog. And there's silhouette panels for Socks Appeal and Treasure Bent, as well. I've read this is something that Schwartz would do. Of course, a lot of other artists do that, too.
However, I think that the Animal story--Outside Wire--is most like Samm Schwartz, from what I know from his Jughead work.
Doug Crane puts his name on one of the stories here--Two on the Isle--and he uses silhouette differently to create a contrast between foreground images in silhouette and midground images in detail. I've seen his name on other stories in various TIPPY TEEN comics, so I wonder if that means only stories with his name on them are in fact by him.
Letter Perfect looks different from any of the other stories in the mag (not as good) and I don't think it was done by either Schwartz or Crane.
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For me I tend to notice either a distinctive face (Jughead, Big Ethel, a recurring bald guy in the background), poses (shock, fear, running) and the overall lanky, coloring book style outlines with little to no shading before I notice things like the airy panels or part of a figure going over a panel border.
Funny how different people spot different "tells" first.
I sometimes think there should be an art-spotting website where people list what they use to recognize various artists.
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Well, I have to confess, my main resource is my gut. I look at pages and think that looks like so and so. But it's not all that reliable and if I think about why my gut tells me this then I can't put my finger on it. I must be seeing something, but it's not something I can articulate--and I'm not sure I want to.
I'm always in awe of the people--like so many at CB+--who have a much more rational approach and can spot things that would go right past me.
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Oh, yeah, my gut (well, my subconscious anyway) tells me that such and such drew it, then I consciously start analyzing the art to be sure.
A while back I was indexing a Golden Comics Digest for the GCD, and I was reading this Barney Bear and Benny Burro story when my subconscious said, "Carl Barks."
What? This can't be Barks, it's not a Donald Duck story or even Disney Characters!
"Carl Barks."
Now I've never been a Barks art spotter, although I had recently read a collection of just Barks' Duck stories, so I tried to remember what had stood out in those stories (in particular more shading lines than usual) and it seemed similar. The story also felt like a Duck story (Donald & Barney both have tempers). But the thing that cemented it was a shot of Barney & Benny driving and the pose of the silhouetted car in the mid-ground looked almost exactly like a shot of Donald in his car.
So then I pulled out my books on comics & comics history and found a reference stating that Barks did indeed work on the Benny Burro series. So yeah, my subconscious seemed to know what it was talking about there.
Of course my subconscious isn't perfect (the DeCarlo drawalikes can often fool it) so analyzing the work for specific tells is just a way of double-checking my instinctive reaction.
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Here is something I noticed about SA giants. Harvey came out with their superhero line after the popularity of Batman on TV. Their teen Bunny comic outlasted their thriller line. Tower had more Tippy Teen and her friends books than superhero books. Even MF Enterprises had more Henry Brewster books than Captain Marvel books. Just an interesting observation I made.
MY FAVOURITE FUNNIES No. 23 developed out of this comment from narfstar earlier on this thread--and morphed into my latest blog post: I Was a Teen-Age Giant (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/i-was-a-teen-age-giant-2/).
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One thing I noticed when I was scanning covers for the Archie comics is that on the covers in the early '60s, it says PDC in small letters, this then changes to MAC. Then in the early '70s it changes to Fawcett.
What's this all about?
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I believe those are the distributor marks.
Other comics will have similar marks like ANC (American News Corp, I believe) or IND (Independent News). Not sure what PDC or MAC are short for, but they were probably the companies that distributed the comics to the various newsstands and whatnot.
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That's what I figured. I have no idea what PDC and MAC stand for, but Fawcett clearly means Fawcett, which would indicate that Fawcett was distributing Archie's comics for them in the '70s. Which I find interesting.
I've just updated and modified my checklist of 61 Things that are Super (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/40-uses-for-a-dead-funny-book/√-3-61-things-that-are-super/)--which actually lists 75 things (now with pictures and links). I also added an A - Z sub-page to that page, which makes it easier to find specific things (for my own benefit if no one else's).
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I've now updated my checklist for 12 Last Months of Batman and Robin (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/40-uses-for-a-dead-funny-book/√-2-12-last-months-of-batman-and-robin/) with better information on each story and lots of pictures--plus a sub-page if you want to quickly go through the list of stories in chronological order according to on sale dates.
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Another blog page revised, this time The Yot Time F'got! (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/extra/x-7-the-yot-time-fgot/)
Many added cover scans and updated info for this LUCKY COMICS feature from Jon St. Ables. But much more needs to be found--so I'll probably have cause to update this one again in another two years.
Hopefully there are people out there who will be adding more to the Maple Leaf comics on CB+.
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The first of what should be an ongoing--but only when I have the time--series of book reports on funny book books. This one being on SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT--A Handbook of Horrors. (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/10/28/a-handbook-of-horrors/)
There have been multitudes of blogs and articles about SOTI. And I didn't want to add to that. But I think what is lost in all those commentaries is the sense of SOTI as a book about comics. I don't know if there was another book before it that actually made comic books its main subject. And even though the aim of the book might not have been to the liking of the fanbase, the very fact of SOTI as a funny book book was something I wanted to get back to--rather than adding to all the clamour over its point of view.
It's sort of like what SUPERMAN THE MOVIE is to comic book movies--it sets the template for all the other works that will follow.
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For anyone that's interested, THE FIRST DAYS OF THE ACTION ACE (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/the-first-days-of-the-action-ace/) takes a look at Superman's early run. The next issue of my blog will continue with that--once I've written it.
I also did a checklist. 20 Original Months of Superman (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/40-uses-for-a-dead-funny-book/√-20-original-months-of-superman/).
For both of these I looked at all Superman comic books and comic strips that would have come out in 1938 and 1939 up to the end of that year (when it just so happens that Vin Sullivan leaves as editor).
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Before there was Magazine Enterprises, before there was Columbia Comics, there was another publisher that Vin Sullivan worked for--who some CB+ members may never heard of--it was when Vin worked for that early publisher that he put in print a couple of outlandish characters. One was a jolly jumper in gaudy long johns and the other an over-aged trick or treater. Whatever became of them?
Extra: Begin the begin, Vin Sullivan. (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/extra/x-begin-the-begin-vin-sullivan/)
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The latest in my Sisyphean effort, continuing to look at Superman during the Vin Sullivan days.
THE MAN OF STEEL'S EARLY RUN (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/11/29/the-man-of-steels-early-run/)
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Loading up the sleigh with some gifts for all the Comic Book Plus kids. You guys are so quiet--it's hard to know what to get you.
Checking my checklist, I've got 11 Elementary Darknight Detectives (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/40-uses-for-a-dead-funny-book/%E2%88%9A-11-elementary-darknight-detectives/).
I put in some research on these and added some notes that even the GCD doesn't have. The detail-minded might want to pass on some of this info to the guys over there. In particular, I think the Speed Saunders story in 'TEC 30 is scripted by Gardner Fox--given that the last page of that story features the law office of Fox, Fox & Fox.
And tying in with that 'TEC list is my own issue No. 27 of My Favorite Funnies, THE FIRST DAYS OF THE DARKNIGHT DETECTIVE (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2015/12/23/the-first-days-of-the-darknight-detective/).
Some of you will want to scroll down to the bottom of that blog post, for My Favourite Finds. This week, I just happened to unearth this little guide from Charlton Comics that tells you everything you want to know about making comics and I knew I had to post some scans to my blog so you Plus ones could see what I found.
Don't be strangers, let me know what you think. And be of good cheer!
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Thanks for posting this. Very interesting blog.
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Gardner Fox credit added to Det 30 thanks
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Wow, that was quick work!
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On the fly -- January 11th, 1966 (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/otf-11-01-66/). My origin story.
Some stuff about the Batman TV show and other things Vancouver and 1966 related.
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This was a very interesting bit of autobiography which brought back many memories. My family moved to Washington State (first to Everett, on Puget Sound, then 15 miles inland to Snohomish) around 1960 after Dad retired from the Navy. We'd come from two years in Alabama and two in The Philippines. Having another country just over an hour to the north appealed to our sense of adventure. We visited Vancouver many times over the next seven years. When I left home for college in '67, I'd make it a point to visit Vancouver a couple of times during my summer breaks.
I was something of a Canadaphile as a kid, for very kid-like reasons. I liked the English spellings, which I affected throughout my school career (to my teachers' exasperation). I liked the TV shows, especially Danger Man. I liked how Meteor cars were really Fords with garish centerpieces in their grilles. I liked Stanley Park. When I was an Explorer Scout our post attended the big air show in Abbottsford, a huge thrill.
It baffled me that the majority of my classmates in insular Snohomish (pop. 4100) had never bothered to visit Canada. For that matter, most of them had never left the State. But it went to show America's self-absorbed attitude toward Canada. I learned almost nothing about Our Friendly Neighbor to the North. Other than the French and Indian wars and a brief mention in the "54-40 or fight" chapter, Canada was ignored in our history books. Canadian politics were ignored by everybody. My single brush with Canadian politics was being handed a "Diefendollar" (a fake Canadian dollar bill cut in half) by a protester in Vancouver. This led to the man attempting to explain inflation to me. My 12-year-old brain failed to grasp the concept. And then there was the summer when I visited Vancouver with a college friend who liked to wear a beret. A shopkeeper threw us out because seeing the beret he concluded that Pedro (a Spaniard) was one of those god-damned frogs.
I'd like to visit B.C. again, this time to stay awhile in Vancouver. Maybe some day.
"Time gentlemen please
It's time to drink up your beer
Time gentlemen please
It's time you're no longer here
We've had a few stories and dancing and song
We'll hold hands together as we sing along
We'll be back here next week, so Please come along
For it is time Gentlemen please."
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Well, hopefully you'll make it back to Vancouver one of these days.
Now that our dollar is so low--our misfortune is your gain--it should be pretty cheap for Americans.
I'm always interested to see what other people made of my city and those times in the past. Being a kid back then, I don't always remember them so well--but it's the one time in my life that I want to remember better. Because, well, that's when everyone I loved was still alive and young and making my world so good.
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On my minim page .007 The Duel of the Super-Duo (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/minim/007-the-duel-of-the-super-duo/)and the sub spoiler page (https://myfavouritefunnies.wordpress.com/minim/007-the-duel-of-the-super-duo/007-spoiler-page/), I took a stab at identifying some of the artists that did the ads in WORLD'S FINEST COMICS No. 163 (December '66).
I've been wondering about those ad pages for some 50 years and I'm not really sure which writers and artists worked on them. So if anyone has more information, I hope they'll set me straight.
One half page that I couldn't identify was the Kat from AMT--this is one of those I always found quite odd and more info would be welcome.
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its really very funny blog and blog interface look like a comic book