Print

[crashryan]

The Window

I don't think I've ever read a Cornell Woolrich story. I did see the movie this comic is based on, but I was in grade school and I'm hanged if I remember anything about it. I'll have to review it strictly on its merits as a comic book story.

As a comic story it's darned good. It has a strong hook. Anyone whose parents didn't believe them when they were kids will appreciate the jam Tommy finds himself in. Suspense builds as one potential rescue after another goes awry. The climactic chase in the decaying building is well-paced and fortunately given the space it needs to build suspense further. I presume all these virtues derive from the screenplay. That plus the fact that at 45 pages the story has room to develop. A couple of the suspense points are a bit too much, like when Tommy sees his father getting into the police car but the car's engine drowns out his cries. Overall though everything works well.

I browsed user reviews on IMDB where several viewers pointed out attitudes that made sense in 1949 but are cringeworthy today. The cop advising Tommy to enjoy his beating stands out. Times have changed, yes, but I find it hard to believe that even lower-class 1949 parents would not only lock their kid in his room, but nail his window shut as well. What if there were a fire? No matter how angry they were with Tommy this seems excessive.

Over time I've come to appreciate H.C. Kiefer's art. For years I only saw him as one of the original Classics Illustrated artists, artists whom I disliked intensely. I judged him unfairly. He was a competent middle-tier artist who usually put honest effort into his drawings. He really shone in historical stories where his art often rose above merely competent. Strangely the other genre he did well in was Golden Age bolts-and-rivets science fiction. Go figure. Kiefer's art on The Window strikes me as so-so. I'm not sure why it doesn't click with me. He seldom cheats a shot, he draws solid characters and he does respectable backgrounds. I guess it's the layouts that seem mundane. The story needed more dramatic camera angles and light-shadow compositions. Can you imagine how Alex Toth would have drawn this?

In conclusion this was a good read.

Edited to add one quibble. One thing I still hate about H.C. Kiefer is his insistence on inking men's lips black with small highlights. It always looks like the guy (or in this case the kid) is wearing lipstick.

[SuperScrounge]

Though Lois Lane did win the Pulitzer Prize. Or did she? 

I believe she won two and Clark Kent one (in comic, not reality). For some reason editor Mort Weisinger felt it was important that Lois do better than Superman in reporting. (I'm not being flip, I just don't remember any reason given by Weisinger. I'd imagine it had something to do with all the trouble she gets into researching a story helped earn those awards.)

[Quirky Quokka]

Hi everyone

I'll put my review of both comics up towards the end of the fortnight, but I just had a slightly tangential question. Does it bug you when writers get facts wrong in stories?

I was reading the short story 'Blood Will Tell' in Police Comics, and I was interested that there was an Australian connection. Though I'm pretty sure the writer had never been in Australia (especially as this is 1942 and travel was admittedly a lot more difficult back then).

One of the characters in the story talks about a case in which he'd sailed to Canberra on a college cruise ship, which you can’t do because it’s inland. Then he clarified by saying they landed in Sydney and then went down to Canberra, but I don’t think he realises that Canberra is about 280 km (about 175 miles) southwest of Sydney and land-locked. He describes a murder that took place in Maidwood waterfront several miles from Canberra. Okay, there’s no such place, but that’s okay in itself. It’s fiction, so you can make up a place. But the way he describes the waterfront, with Stevedores etc, I think he's imagining something more like Sydney, rather than somewhere down the road from Canberra. He may have looked at a map, but didn't realise the distances. I guess there was no Google then, so he wasn’t expecting some Australian upstart to be reading it on a comic books site 80 years later. Ha!! You were wrong, Mr Robert Hyatt!

But what do you think? Does it bug you when you find errors like that? We expect people to get it right these days, but do we make allowances for the pre-internet days?

Cheers

QQ

[Quirky Quokka]

I believe she won two and Clark Kent one (in comic, not reality). For some reason editor Mort Weisinger felt it was important that Lois do better than Superman in reporting. (I'm not being flip, I just don't remember any reason given by Weisinger. I'd imagine it had something to do with all the trouble she gets into researching a story helped earn those awards.)

SuperScrounge, I have three compilation volumes of early Superman comics, plus the volume "Lois Lane: A Celebration of 75 Years" and I was surprised how mean she was to Clark in those early stories. She'd do anything to outwit him to get a scoop. Granted, in those early stories, Clark acted like a coward so that no-one would think he was Superman, rather than the later version in which he was just mild-mannered. But Lois was pretty brutal in her assessment of him. No wonder she climbed over him on her way to those two Pulitzers. I'm glad they softened her in later years.

Cheers

QQ

[Robb_K]

The Window

I don't think I've ever read a Cornell Woolrich story. I did see the movie this comic is based on, but I was in grade school and I'm hanged if I remember anything about it. I'll have to review it strictly on its merits as a comic book story.

As a comic story it's darned good. It has a strong hook. Anyone whose parents didn't believe them when they were kids will appreciate the jam Tommy finds himself in. Suspense builds as one potential rescue after another goes awry. The climactic chase in the decaying building is well-paced and fortunately given the space it needs to build suspense further. (1) I presume all these virtues derive from the screenplay. That plus the fact that (2) at 45 pages the story has room to develop. A couple of the suspense points are a bit too much, like when Tommy sees his father getting into the police car but the car's engine drowns out his cries. Overall though everything works well.

I browsed user reviews on IMDB where several viewers pointed out attitudes that made sense in 1949 but are cringeworthy today. The cop advising Tommy to enjoy his beating stands out. Times have changed, yes, but (3) I find it hard to believe that even lower-class 1949 parents would not only lock their kid in his room, but nail his window shut as well. What if there were a fire? No matter how angry they were with Tommy this seems excessive.

Over time I've come to appreciate H.C. Kiefer's art. For years I only saw him as one of the original Classics Illustrated artists, artists whom I disliked intensely. I judged him unfairly. He was a competent middle-tier artist who usually put honest effort into his drawings. He really shone in historical stories where his art often rose above merely competent. Strangely the other genre he did well in was Golden Age bolts-and-rivets science fiction. Go figure. Kiefer's art on The Window strikes me as so-so. I'm not sure why it doesn't click with me. He seldom cheats a shot, he draws solid characters and he does respectable backgrounds. (4) I guess it's the layouts that seem mundane. The story needed more dramatic camera angles and light-shadow compositions. Can you imagine how Alex Toth would have drawn this?

In conclusion this was a good read.

Edited to add one quibble. One thing I still hate about H.C. Kiefer is his insistence on inking men's lips black with small highlights. It always looks like the guy (or in this case the kid) is wearing lipstick.

"The Window"

(1) I'm sure much of the way Kiefer drew the scenes was interpretation from the written script, but several of the scenes look EXACTLY like what occurred in the film, including almost exact backgrounds and camera angles.  So, I would bet that Kiefer received several (if not many) still photos of shots of key scenes.

(2) I agree completely.  A LOT more of stories in 1940s and early 1950s comic books were too short to have good pacing, suspense development and character development, and so, were too choppy, and didn't read well, and the reader couldn't "live" in those so-called stories.  Alotting 45 pages (almost a complete 52-page book (short of an introduction and advertising pages) to the story allows all those aspects the room to be included at a proper pacing, and the reader to get lost, living in the story, as if it were happening to him or herself.

(3) I might be able to stomach strict parents locking their child in his room, but nailing the window shut was very drastic.  Only super strict parents would have done that.  But, there really were parents like that back then.  There still are parents like that now, but they might risk being subject to local government Social Services interference in the way they raise their children, or even arrest, an/or loss of custody of those children.

(4) Some of those layouts you feel are too mundane might be that way because Kiefer subconsciously just used the exact layout that was shown in the still photos, as they were adequate, where, had the stills not been provided, he'd have imagined much more dramatic camera angles and light and shadow configurations.

[K1ngcat]

I browsed user reviews on IMDB where several viewers pointed out attitudes that made sense in 1949 but are cringeworthy today. The cop advising Tommy to enjoy his beating stands out. Times have changed, yes, but I find it hard to believe that even lower-class 1949 parents would not only lock their kid in his room, but nail his window shut as well. What if there were a fire? No matter how angry they were with Tommy this seems excessive.

I have no idea what amounts to good parenting in the forties, but the news is full of stories where parents imprison, abuse, enslave, and/ or murder their offspring so I guess anything is possible.

Maybe we should consider what experience Woolrich had of his parents, who were seemingly not together for long in his memory, or what experience he had of the Police (particularly if he was genuinely going cruising in sailor suits to hook up with other gay men at a time when homosexuality itself was unlawful.)

Of course as he was childless himself, and lived alone in a hotel room, there's the possibility he just made it up to increase the suspense? I don't think he was above using devices to advance a plot.

Anyhow if you've really never read any Woolrich there's still time to start! I recommend The Bride Wore Black or Phantom Lady as a starting point. 

All the best
K1ngcat

[crashryan]

Does it bug you when writers get facts wrong in stories?

This is a subject dear to my heart. Please forgive me if you've read some of these examples before.

In my younger days I read a lot of old books and magazine articles about how to write for the pulp magazines. (Well, I had to have something to read in the tub, didn't I?) A common bit of advice was to liven up your generic stories by injecting "local color" into them. You were to study up on whichever exotic locale you were writing about and work a few locations, local customs, and the like into your story. This made it sound like you'd been to the place and knew all about it. Alfred Hitchcock was big on local color. In an interview he said he liked to work in scenes featuring something unique to each film's location. In the Netherlands you do windmills. In London you do the Albert Hall. In South Dakota you do Mount Rushmore.

How much study you put into a story depended a lot on the market. You could afford to spend a month or two researching a slick-magazine serial, but not if you were grinding out pulps at a penny a word. Even if you researched your stories, you were limited to your own shelves and the contents of the local library. You were bound to get details wrong. It didn't always matter. Saturday Evening Post readers often called out their writers and illustrators for mistakes, but not so much pulp readers. Detective-story writer John Creasy told how he banged out a story for a Western-writer friend who fell ill just before a deadline. It was the first Western Creasy had ever written. "I didn't do too badly," he said, "except for the part where the coyote flew over."

Illustrators and comic artists faced the same situation. During the heyday of Terry and the Pirates Milton Caniff put great effort into drawing accurate locations, uniforms, and hardware. Knowing this his readers were always quick to point out when he got something wrong. One of Caniff's characters visited Boston. Caniff got photos of a real location which he reproduced faithfully. A reader recognized the location and informed Caniff that while he got the locale right, the street in the photos was a one-way street and Caniff had drawn a car travelling the wrong direction. I guess every comic artist has his or her own idea of how important accuracy is. One artist will give a character a generic automobile and another will give him a 1961 Plymouth Valiant (okay, I admit that was me). It probably doesn't matter outside of historical and educational stories.

I think I mentioned before that I drew backgrounds for the TV cartoon Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? On that show accuracy was important. Our reference librarian worked overtime to collect visuals of the different locations. One episode featured a noted museum in Hawaii. There was nothing we could find that showed the place. The librarian finally phoned the museum and had them airmail us some photos. The photos showed the museum just fine, but none of the nearby structures. The buildings across the street would appear in reverse angles and we had no idea what they looked like. We were out of time so we had to fake it.

My favorite local color story comes from a different (non-educational) show. The writer was, shall we say, not always the most diligent when it came to research. One episode of the show was set in Paris. Our director was a Parisian. He fumed about the mistakes the writer had made, like putting the wrong number of elevators in the Eiffel Tower and asking for an American-style fire hydrant on a street corner. What really set him off, though, was a scene in a pet shop. We don't even have American-style pet shops in Paris, he roared, but the topper was the name of the shop. It was called Maison du Pet... which actually translates as "House of Farting." Our director played with the idea of letting the goof go through and splitting the sides of French viewers but he finally thought better of it.

[Quirky Quokka]

Does it bug you when writers get facts wrong in stories?

This is a subject dear to my heart. Please forgive me if you've read some of these examples before.


Illustrators and comic artists faced the same situation. During the heyday of Terry and the Pirates Milton Caniff put great effort into drawing accurate locations, uniforms, and hardware. Knowing this his readers were always quick to point out when he got something wrong. One of Caniff's characters visited Boston. Caniff got photos of a real location which he reproduced faithfully. A reader recognized the location and informed Caniff that while he got the locale right, the street in the photos was a one-way street and Caniff had drawn a car travelling the wrong direction. I guess every comic artist has his or her own idea of how important accuracy is. One artist will give a character a generic automobile and another will give him a 1961 Plymouth Valiant (okay, I admit that was me). It probably doesn't matter outside of historical and educational stories.

I think I mentioned before that I drew backgrounds for the TV cartoon Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? On that show accuracy was important. Our reference librarian worked overtime to collect visuals of the different locations. One episode featured a noted museum in Hawaii. There was nothing we could find that showed the place. The librarian finally phoned the museum and had them airmail us some photos. The photos showed the museum just fine, but none of the nearby structures. The buildings across the street would appear in reverse angles and we had no idea what they looked like. We were out of time so we had to fake it.

Thanks for those examples, CrashRyan. I hadn't heard any of those. I can certainly understand the pulp writers and some of those early comic book artists not having time, or perhaps materials, in order to research things properly when they had to churn out stories. Most readers probably wouldn't have noticed any problems or could put it in the fiction/fantasy basket. I do feel sorry for the fellow who didn't know about the one-way street. That's the sort of thing that would be very hard to know unless you were there. I think readers appreciate it if they can see writers and illustrators have tried to get it right, and there's always some poetic licence too when it's a fictional story. Good on you for trying to get those exteriors right.

It mainly bugs me when there is something that can easily be checked and you feel that the writer or illustrator just hasn't bothered. I read a review of a book set in Australia, but written by an American. The reviewer mentioned numerous mistakes the author had made, including having someone drive from Sydney to Brisbane in two hours. It's about 1000 km (600 miles), so nope! 30 secs on Google would have sorted that one out. (And of course the same goes for Australian authors who write about overseas locations.) However, there are some things that you can't know for sure, or you run out of time, and you just have to do your best.

I had an historical novel published a couple of years ago that was set in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1882. Now, I've been to Halifax a couple of times (though not in 1882  ), but I live in Australia. There was a lot I could research online and in books, but not everything. At one stage I even got onto Google Earth and traced the remains of an old railway line so that I could see which side of a lake it went past. Why? So that if my character looked out the window, I wanted to know if he could see the lake or not. Maybe that was going too far. But there are other things I just couldn't find out and I had to make my best guess. A Canadian friend of mine, who'd lived in Halifax for many years, also read a draft of the whole manuscript and gave me lots of info I wouldn't know without living there (e.g., the dank smell in houses when they've been shut up for days on end after rain; the feel of the wind coming straight in off the Atlantic). But there'll always be something that you miss, no matter how hard you try.

If there's a big factual blooper though, it takes me right out of the story.

Thanks for sharing those examples.

QQ

[SuperScrounge]

Does it bug you when writers get facts wrong in stories?

Well, I usually post ones I come across on NitCentral. 

The nits closest to your area of expertise can usually strike harder than others and sometimes the nits are so over the top that you can't help but laugh at them.

[Robb_K]

Does it bug you when writers get facts wrong in stories?
We expect people to get it right these days, but do we make allowances for the pre-internet days?
Cheers
QQ.

It bothers me greatly, and interferes with my enjoying reading a story by taking me out of the flow of the story (and "living inside it"), instantly stopping my reading to concentrate on being alarmed that the author could actually be ignorant of something that most reasonably educated people know, or that the author would be so careless or uninterested in providing as much realism possible or necessary to give the reader the feeling that he or she is really at that location, or that the character is really capable of such action because of X situation you've "proven" allows that, etc. 

I don't give a pass to pre-Internet authors, because more of my story writing/storyboarding career was during the pre-1993 period, before most information one might desire was available at one's finger tip button click.  There were public and university libraries, and reference books, magazines, and journals people could buy at book stores, and most professional artists and writers had files full of reference materials they knew they would need for their favourite niche of their particular writing genre (such as authors like Carl Barks had and used).

I agree that a key consideration on the issue of how much effort should be put into providing the feeling of realism in a desired semi-realistic-style (any non-nonfiction, fiction story that is not intended to be a fantasy) should be whether or not the author wants his or her story to occur in a Universe that is the same as OUR worldly existence is, or if the author wants the reader to be transported into another, very different, WORLD OF FANTASY, as in a Science Fiction or Funny Animal story.  IF the author has placed real, currently existing countries, cities, or other geographic locations, and/or non-fictional geographic, characters or character-related features and details, and the laws of nature and physics are the same as in our World/Universe, I would expect the author to research those details in the areas related to story elements that will be related to what he or she will portray in the story, so that the reader will have the sensation that he or she is "living in the story", and will NOT be jarred out of that experience by coming across something that "looks wrong", based on the fact that the detail in the story is something he or she KNOWS is true in our World, but NOT in the story.

In that regard, If you set a story in THIS World's present or past, don't have details in it that would be clearly recognisable as inaccurate and wrong, by even 10% of potential readers, because that will stop their reading, and wrench them out of the flow of the story, and give them a different (unfavourable) opinion about the story, and you as the author.  If you set your story in real, currently existing places in current times or past eras, have the details be accurate, or, at least, not obviously inaccurate according to the details you've used.

I've read several hundreds of stories that have had such eye-catching, obviously inaccurate, or obviously false details, yank me out of my enjoying being "lost" inside a story, or almost instantly stopped me reading even near the beginning of a book or short story, or comic book story, deciding not to bother to go on reading it or start reading it.

Even though he wrote and drew Funny Animal stories, Carl Barks researched heavily enough to make his comic book Duckburg/Calisota/Anthropomorphic beings populated alternative World/Universe consistent in a semi-realistic relationship to our Universe.  I pattern my own storywriting/drawing methods on what he did, and I hold authors whose stories I will want to read, to a similar standard.  Write what you know about, and IF you don't know about something you intend to use, research it enough to portray it in a way that is NOT clearly inaccurate to almost all non-experts on that subject.

I've read so very many comic book stories whose authors clearly did not know much about the subject they were portraying and also clearly did not do enough (or any) research on it, but, rather, based what they wrote and drew was based on their perception of their own nation's popular cliches about them.  That is why I cringe when reading most US and British comic books in The US Old West (Western/Cowboy) genre, and many in the Historical genre, filled with inaccuracies based on what was shown in films and books based on stereotypes, rather than research or personal experience.  In the case of using Native North American tribes, the inaccuracies are rampant.  If you are going to use the real name of real tribes, don't set them in a setting thousands of miles from where they actually lived.  Don't show them wearing clothing they did not ever use, but was actually used by other tribes who lived thousands of miles from where you depicted them dwelling.  The same is true for comic books that portray the days of The Roman Empire, and other ancient times.  And the so-called Science Fiction stories that portray laws of physics that are so different from those of our real Universe that they seem totally impossible, and completely without any explanation given, are tough to stomach.  They are complete Fantasy, but that different Universe is just supposed to be accepted as is, without any preface or explanation in a development of the setting.  There are ways to remedy that, which I would like to be used.  Maybe the pay to comic book authors didn't allow such research to be done; but that doesn't excuse its absence for me, based on my taste. 

[Quirky Quokka]

Well, I usually post ones I come across on NitCentral. 

The nits closest to your area of expertise can usually strike harder than others and sometimes the nits are so over the top that you can't help but laugh at them.

Had a quick look at that site and saw so many of my favourite shows. I could spend hours trawling through Dr Who, Stargate, Sliders, original Star Trek, I Love Lucy, and I had to stop there or I would have disappeared into a time vortex and would never get my comics read 

[Quirky Quokka]

It bothers me greatly, and interferes with my enjoying reading a story by taking me out of the flow of the story (and "living inside it"), instantly stopping my reading to concentrate on being alarmed that the author could actually be ignorant of something that most reasonably educated people know, or that the author would be so careless or uninterested in providing as much realism possible or necessary to give the reader the feeling that he or she is really at that location, or that the character is really capable of such action because of X situation you've "proven" allows that, etc. 

Thanks for all of the info you've included in that post, Robb. Yes, I agree that the story should be true to the world you've created (whether that is a contemporary or historical story in our world, or one where world building has been used). I can let little things go, but the key for me is whether it takes me out of the story, as you've mentioned. I'm quite happy for Plastic Man to be able to stretch into all sorts of forms, but if he's driving a car down an American street in 1942, I expect it to be compatible with cars from the time. The Australian-flavoured errors I mentioned earlier really took me out of that story. And I agree with you about the inaccuracies and stereotyping with a lot of stories featuring indigenous people. We all see the world through the lens of our own culture and experience, to some extent, but it's more than annoying when authors or illustrators don't even try to research the topic. Thanks for sharing.

[The Australian Panther]

One artist will give a character a generic automobile and another will give him a 1961 Plymouth Valiant (okay, I admit that was me). It probably doesn't matter outside of historical and educational stories. 

Cars matter in detective fiction. Loren Estleman's Amos Walker stories are set in Detroit, for example, and as you can imagine he's is pretty accurate about cars.   

Does it bug you when writers get facts wrong in stories? I was reading the short story 'Blood Will Tell' in Police Comics, and I was interested that there was an Australian connection. Though I'm pretty sure the writer had never been in Australia. 

It bugs me a great deal when US creators in particular [ British Writers seem to be more accurate] try to do Australian slang and just end up making an insulting mess of it.
The worse example was the DC Villain, Captain Boomerang. In many ways he is an interesting character but in the early days, every time they had him speak, the dialogue was so bad it was insulting.
From another medium there was a US Police series McCloud starring Dennis Weaver. They took him around the world, a different country each episode.
So he is in Sydney, trying to get to the Airport and they show him riding a horse in the opposite direction across  the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The show was quite popular in Australia. It doesn't seem to occur to the producers that that sorr of thing is just insulting to the viewers in the country of location.             

[Captain Audio]

Speaking of cars in comics one might think some of these are pure imagination but there were some real doosies on the roads in the 30's
Bugatti built cars in 31 and 35 that look like they were custom built for bruce wayne.

[Quirky Quokka]

It bugs me a great deal when US creators in particular [ British Writers seem to be more accurate] try to do Australian slang and just end up making an insulting mess of it.
The worse example was the DC Villain, Captain Boomerang. In many ways he is an interesting character but in the early days, every time they had him speak, the dialogue was so bad it was insulting.
From another medium there was a US Police series McCloud starring Dennis Weaver. They took him around the world, a different country each episode.
So he is in Sydney, trying to get to the Airport and they show him riding a horse in the opposite direction across  the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The show was quite popular in Australia. It doesn't seem to occur to the producers that that sorr of thing is just insulting to the viewers in the country of location.             

Panther, that reminded me of the time in the early 1980s when Delvene Delaney was cast in a guest role as cruise director on The Love Boat for their Sydney episode. I remember hearing an interview with her and she said she was so excited when she was cast, but then cringed when she read the script because of the 'Australianisms' they had her say. For example, she invites a couple of the crew to her home where they can meet her china plate and play with her billy lids (i.e., mate/husband and kids). She tried to explain to the writers/producers that Australians didn't talk like that, but they had already made up their minds. We all cringed with her when the episode went to air. The 'billy lids' scene starts at about 1:10 mins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-zBsWrt7JQ&t=79s

Though I'm sure it goes both ways, with Australian writers sometimes not researching properly and misrepresenting other countries. I'm happy for our American friends to give some examples 

Cheers

QQ

[Quirky Quokka]

Speaking of cars in comics one might think some of these are pure imagination but there were some real doosies on the roads in the 30's
Bugatti built cars in 31 and 35 that look like they were custom built for bruce wayne.

Great cars, Captain. I'd be happy to drive those round the block 

[The Australian Panther]

Captain, you will undoubtedly know this, but for everybody else:-

It has been defined for good reason, the most beautiful car ever, we are talking about the Bugatti 57 SC Atlantic, the style masterpiece of the son of the founder Ettore, Jean Bugatti. Powered by a 200 HP eight-cylinder in-line 3.3-liter engine, the car was capable of exceeding 200 km / h, an amazing performance in the vehicle's production years, from 1936 to 1938. Only 4 units were built, the 57 Atlantic, has reached dizzying prices in auctions of 40 million euros, but experts predict that one of the specimens still in existence could change hands for the stratospheric sum of 100 million euros, thus exceeding the record figure of 57 million held by the Ferrari 250 GTO. 

Not only were there only 4 ever built, but one disappeared during WWII and has never been located, so there are only 3 in existence.
And yes,
I think whoever designed Michael Keaton's Batmobile looked at many vintage cars - and definitely looked at the Bugatti SC Atlantic!

The most beautiful car ever: the Bugatti SC Atlantic
https://www.deaworklab.it/us/blog/the-most-beautiful-car-ever-the-bugatti-sc-atlantic   

[K1ngcat]

Speaking of cars in comics one might think some of these are pure imagination but there were some real doosies on the roads in the 30's
Bugatti built cars in 31 and 35 that look like they were custom built for bruce wayne.

Thank you Captain. Now those are what I call cars! My favourite's a '38 Duesenberg, I'd have one myself but I can't afford to buy the car and still pay a chauffeur.

[K1ngcat]

And does it bug me when writers get facts wrong in stories? Well, honestly, only if I know enough to know they've got it wrong. It annoys me more if someone's covering a song and I know they've got the chord sequence wrong!

[crashryan]

Delvene Delaney was cast in a guest role as cruise director on The Love Boat for their Sydney episode. I remember hearing an interview with her and she said she was so excited when she was cast, but then cringed when she read the script because of the 'Australianisms' they had her say.

I know how she felt! I drew the onscreen artwork for an episode of the Remington Steele TV series. The story was about the artist of a newspaper adventure strip. Calamities that befell his comic character had started happening to the artist in real life. The show's gimmick was that Steele inserts his own custom continuity into the daily strip to trick the guilty party into revealing himself.

The entire story hinged on one of the oldest (and stupidest) misbeliefs about newspaper strips: that somehow a strip drawn today would appear in tomorrow's paper. Maybe things have changed now that everything is drawn digitally and can be sent around the world in seconds. But in 1985, as had been the case for the previous 80 years, daily newspaper strips were produced from 6 to 8 weeks in advance (longer if possible) to allow time for the syndicate to photograph the originals, make "mats" and proof sheets, and mail the material to the subscribing papers in time for them to do the pre-press work necessary to put the strip into each day's paper. Strip creators were always fighting deadlines and often fell behind. In a pinch you might get away with delivering four weeks before publication. If you did you knew your paycheck would be docked for the cost of rushing the material to the papers via express...quite a chunk of change if you ran in a lot of papers.

So the entire premise of the Remington Steele episode was nonsense. Having myself just come off of two grueling years drawing a pair of daily strips, I rather naively mentioned the matter to the producer. He listened politely, then wrapped things up by saying, "Izzat so? Well, it's sure as hell to late to do anything about it now!" Of course he was right.

Looking back on it, maybe 99% of Remington Steele viewers didn't know newspaper strips were done months in advance, and the goof didn't spoil their enjoyment of the episode. It certainly rankled me, though my ire was soothed somewhat by a rather nice paycheck. But wouldn't it be fun to have a similar story in which the long lead time becomes part of the mystery? Things that happen to the comic character start happening to the artist, but they happen during the lead time before the strip appears in the papers. Whoever is responsible must have access to the unpublished work. Syndicate staff? Darkroom workers? Delivery drivers? I think a clever writer could make something of that.

[Quirky Quokka]

Delvene Delaney was cast in a guest role as cruise director on The Love Boat for their Sydney episode. I remember hearing an interview with her and she said she was so excited when she was cast, but then cringed when she read the script because of the 'Australianisms' they had her say.

I know how she felt! I drew the onscreen artwork for an episode of the Remington Steele TV series. The story was about the artist of a newspaper adventure strip. Calamities that befell his comic character had started happening to the artist in real life. The show's gimmick was that Steele inserts his own custom continuity into the daily strip to trick the guilty party into revealing himself.

The entire story hinged on one of the oldest (and stupidest) misbeliefs about newspaper strips: that somehow a strip drawn today would appear in tomorrow's paper. Maybe things have changed now that everything is drawn digitally and can be sent around the world in seconds. But in 1985, as had been the case for the previous 80 years, daily newspaper strips were produced from 6 to 8 weeks in advance (longer if possible) to allow time for the syndicate to photograph the originals, make "mats" and proof sheets, and mail the material to the subscribing papers in time for them to do the pre-press work necessary to put the strip into each day's paper. Strip creators were always fighting deadlines and often fell behind. In a pinch you might get away with delivering four weeks before publication. If you did you knew your paycheck would be docked for the cost of rushing the material to the papers via express...quite a chunk of change if you ran in a lot of papers.

So the entire premise of the Remington Steele episode was nonsense. Having myself just come off of two grueling years drawing a pair of daily strips, I rather naively mentioned the matter to the producer. He listened politely, then wrapped things up by saying, "Izzat so? Well, it's sure as hell to late to do anything about it now!" Of course he was right.

Looking back on it, maybe 99% of Remington Steele viewers didn't know newspaper strips were done months in advance, and the goof didn't spoil their enjoyment of the episode. It certainly rankled me, though my ire was soothed somewhat by a rather nice paycheck. But wouldn't it be fun to have a similar story in which the long lead time becomes part of the mystery? Things that happen to the comic character start happening to the artist, but they happen during the lead time before the strip appears in the papers. Whoever is responsible must have access to the unpublished work. Syndicate staff? Darkroom workers? Delivery drivers? I think a clever writer could make something of that.

That's really interesting, Crashryan. I must admit I didn't realise there was such a big lead time either, so that Remington Steele episode wouldn't have seemed strange to me. I just did a search and found that it was Season 3 Ep. 19 "Illustrated Steele" but I don't think it's on a streaming service I have. Will have to investigate. In spite of the writers and producers not having a clue what newspaper strip cartoonists actually did, it must have been an interesting experience working on the show.

What newspaper strips did you work on in real life?

Cheers

QQ

[Morgus]

Nice taste in Hitchcock films, QQ. I’ve seen REAR WINDOW on the big screen a couple of times, once back in the late 80’s, when Universal finally got them out of Hitch’s cold dead hands...he held it and about half a dozen more back for years to up their value...

THE WINDOW: nice comic book. It LOOKS like a first edition Classics Illustrated, right down to the label at the top of each page. To quote Crash’, it’s a mid level effort, but kept my attention all the way through. The kid did NOT look like Driscoll, but what the hey. The film was on ‘Afternoon Movie’ a couple of times when I was a kid, and I still haven’t gotten around to reading the original, so for all I know there could be a different ending...my favourite plot element of a Woolrich story was when he pulls the carpet from under you very suddenly, like in the short story version of ‘Rear Window’.
Nobody else has mentioned THE CHASE with Robert Montgomery and Peter Lorre, where you get set up in what appears to be an endless loop at the end, another Woolrich staple. THE LEOPARD MAN, for what it was worth, was one of Ray Bradbury’s fave horror flicks.
Plastic Man overshadowed the second Woolrich story for me as well. The Cobra gal was sexy and what more do you need? The rest of the issue was pleasant enough, and yes, if you are going to steal, steal from the best, Eisner included in that.

Now, Q,Q; my opinion isn’t going to be typical about getting stuff right. I’ve been in psychiatric nursing for over 30 years, and just sort of grin when the staff starts to list off where ER or GRAYS ANATOMY get it wrong. Besides, I’m also Canadian and there comes a day when you just give up trying to correct folks about the country. What’s that line from Mystery Science Theatre 3000? “..then repeat to yourself it’s just a show, I should really just relax..”

Both comics were a great read and I had never heard of either, so this was a lot of fun.

[Quirky Quokka]

Nice taste in Hitchcock films, QQ. I’ve seen REAR WINDOW on the big screen a couple of times, once back in the late 80’s, when Universal finally got them out of Hitch’s cold dead hands...he held it and about half a dozen more back for years to up their value...

THE WINDOW: nice comic book. It LOOKS like a first edition Classics Illustrated, right down to the label at the top of each page. To quote Crash’, it’s a mid level effort, but kept my attention all the way through. The kid did NOT look like Driscoll, but what the hey. The film was on ‘Afternoon Movie’ a couple of times when I was a kid, and I still haven’t gotten around to reading the original, so for all I know there could be a different ending...my favourite plot element of a Woolrich story was when he pulls the carpet from under you very suddenly, like in the short story version of ‘Rear Window’.
Nobody else has mentioned THE CHASE with Robert Montgomery and Peter Lorre, where you get set up in what appears to be an endless loop at the end, another Woolrich staple. THE LEOPARD MAN, for what it was worth, was one of Ray Bradbury’s fave horror flicks.
Plastic Man overshadowed the second Woolrich story for me as well. The Cobra gal was sexy and what more do you need? The rest of the issue was pleasant enough, and yes, if you are going to steal, steal from the best, Eisner included in that.

Now, Q,Q; my opinion isn’t going to be typical about getting stuff right. I’ve been in psychiatric nursing for over 30 years, and just sort of grin when the staff starts to list off where ER or GRAYS ANATOMY get it wrong. Besides, I’m also Canadian and there comes a day when you just give up trying to correct folks about the country. What’s that line from Mystery Science Theatre 3000? “..then repeat to yourself it’s just a show, I should really just relax..”

Both comics were a great read and I had never heard of either, so this was a lot of fun.

Hi Morgus

Thanks for that. I've seen 'Rear Window' on the big screen a few times and we have the DVD at home. Even though I know how it ends, I can still enjoy it over and over. It's such a great cast and script, and visually stunning. I read Woolrich's version years ago and can't remember the twist you're talking about, so will have to try to find it again. I think it might have been in a compilation I picked up at the library. I actually like Hitchcock's adaptation better. My hubby and I have a big collection of Alfred Hitchcock DVDs. He's definitely one of our favourites. I remember the period you're talking about when they released some of his films that had been kept out of sight for 30 years. I know there were at least five because a movie cinema near me showed one a week, and a friend and I went to see every one of them. They were Rear Window, Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Trouble with Harry, and Rope. Those movies, along with his version of 'Rebecca', started my love of Hitchcock films, though I mainly like the period from about 1936 to late 50s. I'll have to check out 'The Chase' and 'The Leopard Man' (though if the Leopard Man is too scary, I'll have to pass - I love suspense, but horror creeps me out.)

Good on you for working in psychiatric nursing for so long. That's a tough gig. I was a psychology lecturer for 25 years, though my specialty was social psychology. I admire anyone who can work in the mental health field for so long. I've been to Canada four times and love it. Would go back tomorrow if I could. The sense of humour is a bit more in line with Australian humour. We discovered 'Murdoch Mysteries' last time we went in 2012 and have all the DVDs. We're also big fans of a lot of the sci-fi that's come out of Canada, like the Stargate franchise (especially Stargate Atlantis), Sanctuary, Dark Matter, Continuum and Travelers.

I'm glad you liked the selections. I haven't see 'The Window', but might end up getting the DVD so I can have a look.

Cheers

QQ

[The Australian Panther]

We're also big fans of a lot of the sci-fi that's come out of Canada, like the Stargate franchise (especially Stargate Atlantis), Sanctuary, Dark Matter, Continuum and Travelers. 

Now you are talking my language, wonderful stuff.
I don't know what it says about Australia, but we have no equivalent.
No equivalent of Dr Who, Star Trek, Star Wars or any Science Fiction franchise at all.Although the last three Lucas produced Star Treks were mostly shot in Sydney. 
Dark Star was based on a Graphic Novel and Australia had one of the best Flash Gordon inspired comics, Silver Star. [Not Jack Kirby's Silver Starr] Unfortunately we don't have any examples here on CB+.
And Re Canadian-produced Science Fiction TV shows, don't forget the best Gene Roddenberry creation ever,
Andromeda.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213327/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_130

Britain does quite well with Science Fiction and co-incidentally, yesterday I picked up the DVD set of the first season of Blake's Seven - which I will be watching again.   

Cheers!

[crashryan]

...one of the best Flash Gordon inspired comics, Silver Star. [Not Jack Kirby's Silver Starr] Unfortunately we don't have any examples here on CB+.

In fact we do have one issue of Silver Starr Super Comic (issue #6), featuring some of the "Flame World" storyline.

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=76840