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[jimmm kelly]

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.

[narfstar]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

***
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.

[jimmm kelly]

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

[narfstar]

Unless it is before 1922 nothing from Street and Smith is PD. They copyrighted and renewed.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[mr_goldenage]

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.

[narfstar]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[MarkWarner]

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

[jimmm kelly]

Hey, thanks for telling me about xenu.

[MarkWarner]

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/
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
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
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

[jimmm kelly]

Thanks for the tips.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[MarkWarner]

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

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[paw broon]

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

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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!

And 52 Pumuckl Pick-Up ist da!

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[narfstar]

My name is Jim and reading blog 3 makes me think that you are me  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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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

[jimmm kelly]

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.