[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

My first OTF (on the fly) post 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).

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[narfstar]

I have heard that wordpress can be wonky

[profh0011]

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...

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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

eXtra page 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. 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.

[profh0011]

"How come?"

Yeah-- HOW COME? I'm sure the same thought filled my head back then.

(More later-- great article.)

[profh0011]

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!

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[profh0011]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[profh0011]

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...)

[jimmm kelly]

My latest blog is now up -- CAN COM 101

And relative to that is this extra page -- The Yot Time F'got!

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[narfstar]

I have no interest in the adult comics but some of the humor is hilarious.

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[narfstar]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

For the 13th issue of MY FAVOURITE FUNNIES it's a Hallowe'en horror event, as things get 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+

[jimmm kelly]

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.

[jimmm kelly]

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

[jimmm kelly]

Today I start my 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.

[jimmm kelly]

For the 2nd of December--samples of the SUPERHERO CATALOGUE from the mid to late '70s.