[profh0011]

Many years back I used to see Kirby fans talking about "Funky Flashman" and had no idea what they were talking about.  And I'd read MISTER MIRACLE back in the early 80s.  But when I re-read all my early-70s Kirby comics... HOLY S***.  I got it.

I also re-read the issues of SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS that I had issues of.
#7 (Jun'77) was titled "Luthor's League Of Super-Villains", and features an intense rivalry between Luthor and Funky Flashman.  Yep, both guys in the same comic.

At the end, Funky yanks his toupee off.  Sound familiar?

Someone else had suggested this before it crossed my mind... but when I saw THAT comic, my jaw dropped.

Writer Tom Mankiewicz said in an interview that he thought the Salkinds had "NO IDEA" what the hell they were doing when they made SUPERMAN (1978). 

All of a sudden, I had the strong suspicion, that someone involved in that film had seen SSoSV #7-- and gotten the villains CONFUSED.

Yep.  Gene Hackman was playing FUNKY FLASHMAN.  Which means...
Gene Hackman was playing S*** L**.

[The Australian Panther]

The perils of posting late at night!
I had meant to refer to 'Funky Flashman' whose 'secret identity' is obvious.
But 'Glorious Godfrey' [forever people #3] is perhaps an even nastier hatchet job.
Read it and think about it!
Glorious Godfrey
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Glorious_Godfrey_(New_Earth)

An orator with incredible persuasive powers. 

Those who opposed Godfrey's position were hunted down and dealt with by members of his personal army called the Justifiers. These were generally Earthmen who had been swayed by Godfrey's preachings, then completely mind-controlled by the special helmets they all wore.

Justifiers? -The MMM? And how many fans attempt to 'justify' SL? 
cheers!

[crashryan]

Just sayin', I clicked on the link to Glorious Godfrey and got this:

There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, or search the related logs, but you do not have permission to create this page.

[The Australian Panther]

Very Weird!

I clicked on the link I posted.Got the blank page.
Clicked on search for this  page title
Clicked on Posts 'Gorious Godfrey'
Got the page of info!
This is the address
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Glorious_Godfrey_(New_Earth)
Same as the first link.
This time it worked.
If not use the navigation above.
Weird!

[crashryan]

I see what happened. The original link was missing the final parenthesis [ (New Earth ] rather than [(New Earth)] and this confused the poor little computer on the other end.

[profh0011]

Neither one worked for me.

Try this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Godfrey

Wikipedia has gotten increasingly unreliable (that's my experience, anyway), and their "editors" are IMPOSSIBLE to deal with. (Translation: they're excessively pro-corporate, talk like lawyers, and act like S*** L** fanatics).

Every single "Marvel" page is filled with untruths, and characters pages both go on WAY TOO LONG, describing "later" histories I just DON'T GIVE A S*** about, and, they insist on sticking "flavor of the month" artists at the top of every page, when, in my view, the TOP illo should always be by any given character's ORIGINAL CREATOR.

Of course, if they did that, half the illos would be by Jack Kirby.

Funny enough, this one DOES have a Jack Kirby illo at the top.  Of course, it's a DC page, not Marvel.  Wonder if that has anything to do with it?

Anyway, it says there:

"In 1971, an article in The New York Times Magazine about "relevant comics" described "a handsome toothy character named Glorious Godfrey, a revivalist. Godfrey is drawn to look like an actor playing Billy Graham in a Hollywood film biography of Richard Nixon starring George Hamilton"."

Weird.

[The Australian Panther]

What we need to understand is that the Marvel and DC that we grew up with, just don't exist any longer.
Marvel is a division of Disney and DC is a division of Warner Brothers.

The parent company of Warner Bros. is Time Warner. Time Warner, was acquired by the US telecom company AT&T. AT&T is an American Telephone &Telegraph Company based in Dallas, Texas. After being acquired by AT&T it was rebranded as Warner Media in 2019. There were minor tweaks made in the logo as well as the intro music and, this was first used in Nolan?s Tenet. As of 2021 Warner Bros. is owned by AT&T.

Neither company gives a rats ..... about integrity as far as comics go, and the comics take a back seat to the films. They just don't care.
What particularly upset me is that Chadwick Boseman who played the Black Panther and seemed like a nice guy, just before he himself passed away, said of Stan Lee, that he owed him a lot since Lee created the Black Panther. I doubt that he had even heard of Jack Kirby.
As we know, all the concepts for Wakanda and Black Panther were in Jack's head and on paper for the Harvey company long before that. 
Right now these two companies are pumping out "Superhero movies' like Sausages because they don't have anything else to get the punters back to the theaters. Over the last 2 years, most of them have not made money, the audience is dwindling, the quality is not what it used to be and corporate interference with the concepts keeps the traditional fanbase away. They are two hours of special effects [CGI] and not much attention to characterization or believable plot details. All politics and propaganda and no fun. Not that you would know this if you watch the trailers on IMDB [owned by Amazon, as are many other sites] or the many 'fan-based' internet news sites.
 
The last of these I enjoyed were SHAZAM and then the fairly independent BLOODSHOT
There is nothing out there now or about to be released that I intend to go see.
Also, the comic book characters change to suit the film versions in many cases. But that's another story.               

[The Australian Panther]

Sobering informatiion!
Who Owns Warner Brothers? ? Know More
https://howigotjob.com/parent-company/who-owns-warner-brothers-know-more/ 

[crashryan]

This is somewhat off-topic, but exactly what is "How I Got the Job," the site you linked to for the Warner Bros. article? The writing of the essay is startlingly poor. It has next to no structure and abounds with odd grammar and editorial glitches. I realize coherent writing isn't always an Internet feature, but still--! Take the paragraph on Warner characters. It bounces from "the Looney Tunes" to the Powerpuff Girls without mentioning any other characters. It says Looney Tunes "aired" from 1930 to 1969, capitalizes Black and White but not Technicolor or Cinecolor, and offer contorted sentences like:

The Wizarding World created by J.K. Rowling is owned by Warner Bros. Apart from this, they had also distributed the movies launched such as the Harry Potter series and the spin-offs.

The whole thing sounds like those AI-written aggregators that pop up every time you try to Google something.

[profh0011]

the comics take a back seat to the films. They just don't care.

I very much noticed this at the last comic-book convention I went to, in center-city Philadelphia (the new convention center), more than 15 years ago.  The "Marvel" and "DC" tables, there was NO HINT that either company published comics!!



What particularly upset me is that Chadwick Boseman who played the Black Panther and seemed like a nice guy, just before he himself passed away, said of Stan Lee, that he owed him a lot since Lee created the Black Panther. I doubt that he had even heard of Jack Kirby.

OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!  That really is painful to read.

Of course, there's more.  Someone pointed out to me how Kirby was inspired by the real-life situation in "Katanga", which was over-run by CIA-backed mercenaries in the early 60s intent on stealing the country's natural resources.

There's a scene in FF #52 were the Panther refers to the "underground technical jungle" as having been built "for a lark".  It was built to DEFEND the country against MURDEROUS INVADERS!!! That M***** F***** S*** L** (excuse me, I'm trying to be polite, but it isn't easy) had NO G** D*** idea what Kirby was doing, and kept repeatedly dumbing down KIRBY's stories, because he couldn't understand, or wanted to remove anything controversial that "the kids" might not understand.  (As a friend of mine suspects L** was a CIA "asset", it could be it was removed DELIBERATELY... the same way the Sean Connery film "WRONG IS RIGHT" was yanked from theatres after one week by orders of the CIA.)

When I mentioned the "Katanga" thing at the Classic Comics Forum, this arrogant A-HOLE "CodyStarbuck" posted an ENTIRE PAGE of text he copied from Wikipedia, in order to "prove me wrong".  I blocked his sorry A**.

When I mentioned the "Katanga" thing on DON McGREGOR's Facebook page... the arrogant A-HOLE who he has running his page for him, BLOCKED me, after first posting, "I can't wait to get rid of this guy."

And here we have the LEGACY of S*** L**. A guy who, when he was in the military in WW2, worked for the Army Signal Corps-- in other words, the department of PROPOGANDA and MISINFORMATION.




Oh, and by the way... althought I saw BP in theatres twice and enjoyed it immensely both times-- being amazed that (apparently) somehow hads managed the impossible-- SYNTHESIZING a story from 2 of the most diametrically-different writers in comics history (Kirby and McGregor!) , the more I thought about it, the LESS the whole story made any sense at all.

It was IDIOTIC for T'Challa to accept a challenge to the throne from a KNOWN TERRORIST, and EVEN MORE IDIOTIC that after he lost, half the country would INSTANTLY declare loyalty to a KNOWN TERRORIST and MURDERER.

But more-- they made a CIA guy one of the heroes.  The F****** CIA!!!  One of the most EVIL organizations on the planet, and, the ones behind the invasion and mass-murder that went on in Katanga, which inspired Kirby to create Wakanda in the first place!

That is SO DAMNED WRONG... it has to be DELIBERATE.



As we know, all the concepts for Wakanda and Black Panther were in Jack's head and on paper for the Harvey company long before that. 

I know a lot of Kirby's ideas were things he reused himself over the decades.  Could you please relate this?  I don't seem to remember this particular story.



Speaking of "off-topic"... hey, could you guys PLEASE consider starting a separate thread for all this?  I'm still doing POE translations, but it's slow-going, and it's bound to get lost in all this other interesting stuff.

[Captain Audio]

Prof you seem very emotional about Katanga. Would you mind letting me know your primary sources of information on this subject?

[The Australian Panther]

If you are unaware of this source for Kirby's ideas, this will amaze you.
The Harvey title, ALARMING TALES features concepts Kirby did not use again until after he left Marvel, and pretty-well thought out.
Look at the cover for #1 and go on from there.
You will find concepts he used in Forth World, Kamandi, and the secret six saga.
Alarming Tales
https://comicbookplus.com/?cid=1354.
I'm now annoyed at myself. I thought that the Story that clearly anticipates the Black Panther tech jungle and the Eternals was in Alarming Tales. It is in a Harvey book of the same period, so I will look till I find it.
But what does it tell you that Jack never used most of these concepts again - Until he had left Marvel the first time!
OK Found it!
We are looking at the several issues of BLACK CAT MYSTIC
Black Cat 58
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=36491
Has a story re-used as an Early FF plot.
But the Motherlode is
Black Cat 59
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=40525
and the story The Great Stone Face
And there we have the true origin of the Black Panther mythology and the Celestials.
Thanks to CB+ for preserving these.
Why more people haven't twigged to this, I don't know.
Blew me away when I discovered it.
There may me other relevant concepts in the BLACK MAGIC SERIES which I haven't looked at in detail yet.
[That was a Simon and Kirby title, but for Prize.]   
Clearly, this period was a very fertile one for Kirby!     
cheers!

[profh0011]

I wish I could tell you where I first ran across this thing.  If it was on Facebook (probably), it's LONG since vanished down the "FB rabbit hole").

And since I was permanently banned from the CCF, I can't look up my own comments there.

However, a quick search now finds this:

Katanga Province:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katanga_Province

Congo Crisis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Crisis



It's the whole "CIA" thing that pisses me off, and in how it relates to that scumbag posing as a comics editor all those years.

That, and the way that, starting in the 1970s, SHIELD was repeatedly portrayed LIKE the CIA, when they're supposed to be anything BUT. Allegedly attempts at "realism" have NO PLACE in regard to an organization created as a POSITIVE fantasy.  By smearing SHIELD, by extension, they're smearing KIRBY, although, his editor had already done a job SEPARATING Kirby from his creation, as most people have no idea Kirby created SHIELD, and WROTE every single episode... until Jim Steranko took over from him in ST #154.




And I don't want to seem like I'm bad-mouthing Steranko... but he wasn't HALF the writer Kirby was. He might have become one eventually... but you-know-who DROVE HIM AWAY from comics.

[profh0011]

After I went to work yesterday, I remembered it must have been Chris Tolworthy, who wrote a book about all the stories JACK KIRBY wrote in the 1960s that were MUTILATED by his editor.  Most "Marvel" fans have no idea they were ROBBED of what should have been MUCH-BETTER comics for an entire decade!!

[profh0011]

At the time the movie came out, there were a LOT of reviews online. Several pointlessly made a point of bad-mouthing Kirby's writing on the late-70s BP comics, apparently unaware that he was the character's creator, and had written his early appearances in FF (before his editor dumbed those down at the dialogue stage).

But ONE review-- can't remember whose-- bad-mouthed the FILM for making black Africans look stupid. It took me a while to figure this out... but the guy was RIGHT.

I saw the film in a SELL-OUT showing where I may have been the only non-black in the audience, and the reception was overwhelmingly positive (which I can understand). But those "wrong" elements I spoke about were VERY DEVIOUSLY snuck into the story. It didn't need to be that way. But they would have had to have (GASP!) actually followed the stories Kirby & McGregor wrote to avoid such B.S.

[profh0011]

Before the film came out, I envisioned how I would have done a BP film. A "first" film would have perhaps dealt with his conflict with Klaw (the "terrorist" element) followed by his decision to get out into the world (as seen in his earlist adventures, and, his late-70s book-- the stories in which, presumably, Kirby came up with IN THE MID-60s-- it was suggested in the magazine itself at the time, that the book would make far more sense if viewed as "retroactive continuity"-- that the stories should take place between his debut in FF #52-53 and his becoming an Avenger).

A 2nd movie would be a straight adaptation of McGregor's "PANTHER'S RAGE". Don described having the job tossed at him. "Hey, Don, wanna write BP?" "Sure!" "Okay. First episode's due Monday." (It was late Friday.) Decades later, Don found out Roy Thomas HELD HIM IN CONTEMPT for not writing "Marvel Method", and handed him the assignment expecting and hoping he'd fall flat on his face. Instead, Don started getting more fan mail than all their other comics combined.

Don read all BP's previous appearances, and noticed something VERY wrong. It may have made sense for the King of a country to go out and have occasional globe-hopping adventures. But it made ZERO sense for him to move permanently to NYC, join a super-hero group, and then set up a secret identity as a school-teacher in Harlem. Don's entire story was CREATED in a direct rebuttal of Roy Thomas' STUPID fanboy decisions regarding the "JSA" and the movie "To Sir With Love"!!!!!

When T'Challa went home, he assumed he'd fix whatever was wrong in 2 weeks. But it took 2 YEARS. He had ABANDONED his country-- and it fell INTO CHAOS!! Eric "Killmonger" was a good friend of his while they grew up. Eric felt BETRAYED-- and angrily determined it would never happen again. It wasn't a civil war that erupted-- but merely a ragtag group of rebels deciding that their King had FUCKED UP, and deserved to be REPLACED, no matter who else got killed in the process.

Don became one of my favorite writers as a result of that story, and remains so to this day... despite my having been BLOCKED from his FB page by a follower of S*** L**. Don is barred from bad-mouthing anything Marvel does, in order to get any tiny "benefits" from his involvement in the BP movie. That's SICK. God-damned corporations.

[The Australian Panther]

There is a new BLACK PANTHER movie dud November. Marvel being totally WOKE at the moment, it focuses on the females of the Ruling Family, The comics have already had a female Black Panther, so that is what I expect.
Totally against african tribal traditions, I believe, but they don't really care about Africa.     

[Captain Audio]

There is a new BLACK PANTHER movie dud November. Marvel being totally WOKE at the moment, it focuses on the females of the Ruling Family, The comics have already had a female Black Panther, so that is what I expect.
Totally against african tribal traditions, I believe, bu they don't really care about Africa.   

There have been Black African matriarchal cultures, mainly on islands off the coast. Female warrior queens with armies of highly skilled amazon warriors are known into the 19th and 20th centuries.

[The Australian Panther]

I said, 'I believe,' not I know, because there are exceptions to rules.
However, can you give references and details to that statement?
What islands?

What tribes?   

known into the 19th and 20th centuries.

References?

[Captain Audio]

I said, 'I believe,' not I know, because there are exceptions to rules.
However, can you give references and details to that statement?
What islands?

What tribes?   

known into the 19th and 20th centuries.

References?

https://historyofyesterday.com/african-amazons-give-frenchmen-a-dressing-down-b0dcfb117f41
http://mmstudies.com/matriarchies/west-africa/
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/g28565280/matriarchal-societies-list/

Yaa Asantewaa was queen of the prosperous Ashanti Empire, also called Asante, in now modern-day Ghana. As queen, she was the official protector of the empire?s most sacred object, the Golden Stool. Made of solid gold and believed to house the soul of the nation, the stool represented the royal and divine throne of the empire. When British troops invaded in 1886, and demanded possession of the sacred object, Asantewaa refused. Instead, she led an army against them.

?I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight the white men. We will fight until the last of us falls in the battlefields,? Yaa Asantewaa famously said.

https://www.history.com/news/african-female-warriors
https://clearwest.org/2017/03/23/african-warrior-women-queens/

The Island civilizations are a complex subject.
Starting here you can trace back to possibly the earliest civilization on the islands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranavalona_I
The Vazimba who were often ruled by women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vazimba

The history of these island cultures is just too much to unpack here.

[profh0011]

ALRIGHT, back ON-TOPIC:

from DOSSIER NEGRO #16:
(Ibero Mundial De Ediciones / Spain / July 1970)

"LA CAIDA DE LA CASA USHER"

Art by MIGUEL GOMEZ ESTEBAN

http://professorhswaybackmachine.blogspot.com/2022/06/poe-1970-pt-5.html

[The Australian Panther]

Very nice work!