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[narfstar]

The stuff that plays or not on Hulu etc have to do with the rights they obtained for whatever country.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[narfstar]

Well it is Doub Wildey

[jimmm kelly]

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

Then you've got an extra page on adaptations of H. W. Hudson's
GREEN MANSIONS: Mansions Green, I've Seen

And last you've got the checklist page on
RULAH AND RIMA: 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.

[profh0011]

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

[jimmm kelly]

That's shocking that they would go through so much effort to remove DW's credit from his work!

[profh0011]

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

[profh0011]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[profh0011]

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?).

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[MarkWarner]

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!!!

[profh0011]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[profh0011]

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!   

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

And no sooner do I say this than I get a view from Argentina. What will it take to get the Indian sub-continent?

[profh0011]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[profh0011]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[profh0011]

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!!!