PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Comic Book Men Ep 1 & 2

I watched the first two episodes of the Kevin Smith reality show Comic Book Men. It started last month on AMC and there are 6 episodes planned. The show is hosted by Kevin and stars the guys who work in his comic shop. Kevin bought an existing shop called Comicology in 1997 and turned it into Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash. In case you want to shop there you'd need to get your ass over to Red Bank New Jersey. It's seems a fairly good sized shop, there are shops that big and bigger here in my area, but I don't know if we've seen the whole thing so far. 

The show is broken into two streams that wind around each other through the hour. One stream is shot in and around the store and the other is shot with everyone sitting around a table discussing the events of the day for the podcast. In the store we rarely see anyone buying anything. Mostly they seem to have people trying to sell some stuff. They show up hoping to get a big cash payment, often with completely unrealistic expectations, and the reality of the market punches them right in their guts. Then they're on tv and that's got to suck. In the first episode some guy brings in a signed Bob Kane Batman sketch from 1970. No one knew what it was worth, thousands seemed a good guess, they recommended using an auction house. There's a mix of toys and comic stuff that rolls in. Some lady brought a Chucky Doll but it had no box and the lady didn't take the money offered. The guy who had the Six Million Dollar Man Doll had a box and they bought that. A guy brought in some movie stuff and they had to call another guy who knew more than they did to help them out. It didn't go too well for the guy trying to hawk his stuff. He wanted a lot more than the expert said the stuff was worth. He didn't get paid.

That sort of encounter happened a lot at DreamHaven's front counter. People would come in with a box of "old" comics, and when you go to take a look, they were from 5 years ago. Over the last many years the back issue market has taken a deep plunge. No one is buying that stuff but this guy thinks he should at least get what he paid for them, you know, since they're old. Stuff before the 1960's still has some good value but hardly anyone is buying that either. Walt makes a joke about how hard it is to sell back issues when every second another collector drops dead and there isn't anyone to take his place. I've seen that happen a lot in many other hobbies. Ridin' high, then the wasteland. There's often a chance to pick up huge collections for cheap. We'll probably see a switch to digital comic back issues if the companies are smart enough. There's already an underground market out there handing the stuff around for free. It's a bit on hold as they work through the loss of Megaupload and recover from the SOPA/ACTA fiasco.

That's Ming Chen, Bryan Johnson, Kevin Smith, Michael Zapcic and Walter Flanagan left to right. Walter manages the shop, Ming and Michael work in the shop, and Walter's long time friend Bryan Johnson just seems to hang out in the shop. Bryan managed the second shop that Kevin owned. It was in LA for about 4 years ending in 2009. Ming and Michael have their own podcast about selling comics. Ming does a lot of web site production for View Askew Productions. That's Kevin's business, they make and sell all sorts of stuff. He also does a lot of podcasts.

The show is mostly fun to watch though sometimes they are a mean bunch. Not unlike when I worked at the comic shop. It's a place that sometimes attracts dicks. Of course all the cool people make up for that. Episode 2 has a guy show up with a replica of the 1965 Batmobile. I saw that car at the local comic book con a couple of years ago and it's a nice car. I didn't get to drive it like the guys in the shop did, that looked like fun. That episode had some guy come in with a light saber handle that he wanted appraised. He was told it was from the first movie but it was from the second movie. That was what the Star Wars expert they brought in thought. He said he was about 90% sure and if it was real it was worth north of $7000. Not bad for a $60 investment 15 years ago. Jason Mewes rolls in during the second episode and tries to run off with stuff from the store. He talks Ming into paying for his stuff. Then he bounces around the store acting all fucked up. I'd find that real annoying, and unless it was a gag, it was pretty sad to see him out of character. Glad I don't have a friend like that. I'll have to keep an eye out for the rest of the series. I've already down loaded the podcasts but haven't listened to them yet. It almost makes it cool to work in a comic shop. I'm kidding, it's always cool to work in a comic shop.

Merry Comics - Bogeyman

 

I found a link to this 1945 comic over at the Crosseyed Cyclops. It was buried in the Share section. The cover's got a goofy superhero type punching some baddies and the first story is a parody of the Will Eisner comic The Spirit. Bogeyman's got some work cut out for him in solving the case. You can read it below.

     

    

The art isn't up to Will Eisner's usual standard but someone named Cooper does an ok job capturing Eisner's style. The story is kind of fun but not too funny. The rest of the stories are about the same quality and they are more general parodies. I can't find out much about the character or the comic online. The comic doesn't have a number anywhere on it, just the 1945 date and Croydon Publishing. Just some more odd stuff, huh.

Amazing Adventures

 

I hadn't mentioned any comics for a while. Here's a nice batch of 6 issues that you can download from the Digital Comic Museum for free. You will need to register, it's free too, and they have a pretty nice bunch of old comics. These are from 1950-1952 and this is the whole run from publisher Ziff Davis. They tried publishing comics but never got real big in it. There are some well known comic guys who a story or two: Wally Wood, Curt Swan, Don Perlin, Murphy Anderson and Bernard Kringston.

   

The painted covers are more like covers to science fiction magazines. I thought they were pretty entertaining. Issue 2, upper left, is by Alex Schomberg, who did a lot of sf mag covers. Issue 6, the middle pic below, is fairly entertaining and kind of creepy. Next to it is the first page from the Bernard Kringston story. He was a mainstay at EC Comics

   

The stories are a mixed bag, some space opera, some monsters and some alien invasions. They aren't the best stories but typical of the time. Worth the look for those inclined.

Tarzan of the Apes

That cover above is the magazine that had the very first Tarzan novel in The All-Story Magazine from Oct 1912. For nearly 100 years the world has continued to follow the exploits of the Lord of the Jungle in books, movies, tv and strips in newspapers and comic book form. It's all popular. Turner Classic Movies has been running some of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan pictures in the last month or so and I have been watching them. All 12 of the pictures are available on dvd in various sets. I'm not at all certain that I've seen all of these pictures before but I know I would have watched just about anything with Tarzan as a kid and that hasn't changed hardly any since I grew up some. I was a fan of the tv shows and the comics and the novels, though I hadn't read the later until I was about 17. I never finished reading the whole Tarzan series but my mother did. Several years ago I went out and picked up copies of the old Ballantine series with the Richard Powers covers but I haven't read any of them yet. That's the cover to the first novel over on the left. I saw some of these originals at TorCon - the 1973 World Science Fiction Convention. It was my first convention and I meet Richard Powers there. I was already a big fan. He was a real friendly and nice to talk to. I kick myself for not buying one of the Tarzan paintings, it was only $75. That was alot for me in those days, more than a weeks take home pay, so I passed them up. I guess I have to be happy with the two cheaper Powers book covers I wound up with. Some day I'll sell them and buy a new used car.

Johnny Weissmuller, a former Olympic Gold medal winning swimmer, made a dozen Tarzan pictures, the first in 1932, the last in 1947. After that he did 13 Jungle Jim pictures before he retired from the movie business. I've only seen a couple of the Jungle Jim pics, they were ok, nothing outstanding. Six of the Tarzan movies were done at MGM and then Weissmuller moved to RKO Pictures for 6 more Tarzan pictures. The plots are pretty much the same. Some awful white people come to the jungle looking for treasure with larceny in their hearts. They'll take what they want at the point of a gun if the natives don't do what they say. Tarzan warns them to keep on the straight and narrow but they don't listen and the bad guys pretty much come to a grisly end. The jungle is harsh, death lurks around every tree, I know I would stay away. Adding the Tarzan brand of justice, which often involves a pointy stick, makes the place much more dangerous to the rule breaker. In one movie Tarzan is stuck up a tree with Boy. He breaks off a branch that is as thick as an arm, sharpens the point, and nails some guy who's chasing him right in the chest. That was a damn big tree branch, I bet that hurt, lucky it wasn't me. Another time he called to the elephants, who came down stream and helped Tarzan kick the ass of some cannibals. That made me laugh. I like elephants. I don't like cannibals. Unless they are being stomped on by elephants, then I'm going to laugh.

Like the creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, I have an issue with the barely literate Tarzan that you often see on the movie screen. "Me Tarzan, you Jane." In the books, which I started reading in around 1969 or 1970, Tarzan was raised by apes after his family perished. They had been the only survivors of a ship wreck. They build a cabin, soon after their son is born, and a bit after that they both are dead, leaving the infant boy all alone. His cries bring some apes  Tarzan is nearly killed by king of the apes, who had just killed his father, but luckily a female ape, who had lost her child recently, takes him under her protection. Years later Tarzan would kill that ape and take his place as king. Tarzan teaches himself to read from books found in his parents cabin. He rescues Jane without her knowing it and falls in love with her. He rescues a Fenchman from the local natives and that guy teaches him French and helps him find his family. Tarzan even travels to Wisconsin in his pursuit of Jane. Not liking the life in the civilized world he returns to the jungle to set up a large estate where he has plenty of adventures. Burroughs isn't the greatest writer but he tells a big story with lots of stuff going on. Mostly I found his writing easy to read, occasionally a sentence would make me stumble and fall, but you pick yourself up and continue on. There were a couple of dozen books in the series and they are in the public domain so you can read them for free from all sorts of places like project Guttenberg Australia or Amazon's Kindle. Not all of them are going to be jems but they should be mostly entertaining. I hope to get to read those sometime in the future. Unless I want to go digital I need to find out where I stuck those Tarzan books. They'll turn up eventually.

TwinLUG at SpringCon 2011

 

TwinLUG was at our largest local comic convention this past weekend. We get a hunk of space in the cavernous room under the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand building, four tables with 80 square feet to fill, and all the food and pop we can cram in our pie holes. This is the first year that we were over in one area. I like that better. We are talking about putting all four tables together and making one large display. We'll see if that actually happens.

I was joined by Brian, Gary, Erik, Max, Roy, Alice and Lisa in guarding our stuff and greeting the comic con going public. Some of the other TwinLUGers are over at LEGO Kid Fest and our Micropolis was about half it's normal size. It still looked pretty good, it's got some of my favorite buildings in it. That's Roy's Halle Barry in the background. Funny story about that mosaic. Roy put it together and mixed up a couple of the squares. He's using the Micropiolis standard base to build with and connecting them together with a lot of technic pins. Very thick, a brick and 4 plates thick, and fairly solid with 6-8 pins per connection. No one noticied that the sections were in wrong all day. We were aiming for some western themed works this year and our spliting the group into two didn't hinder us in getting some nice ones. Brian can always be counted on in making some kick-ass minifig displays.

 

Brian managed two huge dioramas and I could hardly get two smaller ones built so I brought my Japanese diorama The Man In The Moat. My western diorama is called Song Before Bedtime and the western fantasy diorama is The Great Toy Story Train Robbery. It was inspired by the LEGO Toy Story Train set. That's Max's hangin', looks like fun, huh. Nice that the undertaker is so close. That's Roy's Reese Witherspoon. Sadly that hit the floor in the tear down and there was an explosion. Bricks went flying over 20 feet and a couple of them actually had broken.

 

Roy brought his mech and a hover car. Max brought his pink vic viper. That's Brian's big ol' fort with a lot of soldiers and three ladies. Lot's of people thought it was a civil war display but I think the LEGO Cavalry are from a later period, say the 1880's.

 

Brian's village diorama had a mountain with a cave and lots of minifig activity happenin'. Lisa brought a LaCrosse game that was packed with Native American highjinks. You can see more pictures of everything on Flickr.

Out Of This World Adventures

 

The Digital Comic Museum has both issues of Out of This World Adventures, an odd comic and pulp mix. It's mostly story but it's got 32 pages of comics and about 96 pages of text fiction. The DCM has both the whole issue and a comic excerpt. I got the whole thing. I thought the cover on the first issue was nothing special but I sure liked the painting on the second issue. It's highly entertaining. Now for some reason I want a barebreasted  space suit. Below are the first pages fromt he first stories in each issue. There's a barbarian story too. I haven't read them all the way through but I did skim over the comics and they are nothing special but could have some entertainment value. I started reading the A Bertram Chandler novel Raiders Of The Solar Frontier. It's about a guy who winds up on a prison planet. Not sure where it's going to go. Chandler is an ok writer. I read several of his novels back int he 70's but was never a big fan. He was reprinted in a lot of Ace doubles.

 
Avon released the first issue in July 1950 and the second in December of the same year. There were no more. I remember seeing these in Chester Cuthbert's living room back in the 1970's. I was more interested in comics back then but I didn't pick them up. Maybe Chester only had his own copies. He used to buy mass quantities of science fiction books, like several collections, and sell off the duplicates. His basement was full of stuff, floor to ceiling, with little cutouts for the furnace, the washer etc.  Anyway now I have my own and so can you. Well worth a look see for their novelty.

The Spirit - Quality and Fiction House reprints

 
There was a mention on Boing Boing today about a site that showed off some 3D comic art. Not the 3D you are thinking of, rather it's art where the elements of the title interact with the story and characters, like in the cover on the left. The characters are standing on the title. That site got me thinking about the series again. It sure as hell has been reprinted a whole lot, I have several of the attempts, none of which made it through the whole series,  at least, until the DC Archives finished it's 10 year run. That's about how long it took the original series to play out. I haven't finished reading all the 26 Archives collections yet but I did get through the 2 dozen books with the Spirit Sections. The collection of daily Newspaper strips is next and I'm kind of interested in those but some of the modern incarnations can wait to read again. It was 2000 when the reprints started, it might be fun to start them again, and finishing in less than ten years would probably be quite possible. Thinking about reprints took me over to the Digital Comic Museum where I found they had some. Both Quality and Fiction House reprinted many of the stories that originally ran in the Spirit Section. That was a 16 page comic that appeared weekly in many newspapers around the country. Eisner & Iger was a comic book production company back in 1930's. They packaged comics for Quality when they were starting out. The guy that owned Quality was also the guy who printed and distributed the Spirit Section. Quality later created their own characters like Plastic Man, Blackhawk and Bozo The Iron Man. I don't know anything much about that last series but it sounds intriguing.

  
Quality closed in 1956 and National bought some of their characters. National later became DC Comics. They are the home of Superman and Batman. The  first three issues were under the Vital Publications banner, then they turned into Quality with issue number 4. Not sure why, I didn't find much about them on the internet, but I didn't look too hard either. Quality had 22 issues and Fiction House only 5, Most of the comics have 5 or 6 stories. It's well over a hundred stories, though I haven't checked for duplicates between the two titles, and some of  later Quality issues have less pages, stories with other characters, and more ads. The printing quality of the original comic books was pretty darn good and the scans are nice. For some reason issue 13 is missing in the Quality run. It's a nice cheap way to get to read some stories, as opposed to buying the nice but expensive DC Archives. You get a good variety of stories. Maybe you'll like them. I'll read some of the scanned issues and that will hold me until i want to tackle re-reading the whole kit and kaboodle.

Toy ads from Netherlands Comic books of the 1980's

  

I got a bunch of ads from the Danish Donald Duck comic series. They are from random issues in the 1980's. I was interesting because some were LEGO ads. These are all toy ads that I thought had odd art or goofy toys or were of some other interest to me. Odd art in the HeMan ad. Not a cartoon or toy that I was a fan of. I understand there are people who love these guys. Same for Construx, not a toy that I thought much about. Thought the space ad was marginally interesting. The Power Monsters have claws on their wheels. That's just goofy. I bet the kids liked it.

 

I don't remember the Playmobile space sets. I could have missed it or they were only out in Europe. I never bought any Playmobile but I've always liked their nice figures and colorful playsets. The train looks nice too.

Baffling Mysteries Comics

    

I'm having trouble finding time to get the Science Fiction Sunday post done so I thought I'd mention another bunch of comics that I picked up at the Digital Comic Museum. It's a public domain free download comic site. Lots of old comics from the 30's and 40's and into the 50's. Baffling Mysteries had some great covers. DCM has over a dozen issues of the early 1950's comic. The stories are typical comic horror stories, not too scarey but occasionally weird. Lots of demons, ghosts, and various other monsters, stories of revenge, very typical of the horror short story that you'd have found in fiction magazines of the time. The covers are about as racy as they get.

       

I like the lady in red and that man eating plant in the last pic on the right. Sadly there's no story inside to go along with the cover. By the covers alone you knew exactly who they are selling that comic to and it would be me. Kids and adults read comics in the 50's. I'd have bought these when they were new.  The art inside ranges from fair to good. Occasionally something slightly different is tried with various degrees of success. Worth a look for the horror comic fan.
 
 
 

City of the Living Dead

 
I just love this comic cover. Soon as I saw it I wanted to keep a copy for later revisiting. I say that but I have so many things like this that I never get back to. Burn them onto dvdr's and forget about them. Maybe when I retire. The cover might be the best thing about the book. I sure like that pose and the creepy skull guy. I'd probably have bought that comic if I had seen it on a newstand but I wasn't around in 1952 to pick it up. It's an Avon Comic. They broke into the publishing world in 1941 and for a while they published a lot of comic books. I'd never seen a copy of City of the Living Dead for sale but it wasn't something I was looking for either. It doesn't have a number and looks like it was a one shot from the little mention on the internet. I don't know where my Overtreet Priceguide is right now or I could look it up. Maybe they'd have something about it. Oh well. It'll turn up.

I found this over at the Digital Comic Museum. It's a place, like the Internet Archive, that collects public domain material and puts it out for people to download for free. The DCM only deals in comic books, old comic books, ones published before the mid-1950's. They are better organized than the IA, but you've got to register before you can download stuff. No charge, easy to do, downloads are quick. The comics are sorted by company and title. Not all runs are complete by any means but there are plenty of entertaining books to be seen. In the Avon section I found several issues of The Saint, a comic book adaptation of the Leslie Charteris crime series about my favorite globetrotting rapscallion Simon Templer. They weren't as good as the prose work but entertaining for me who has always had a soft spot for the TV series with Roger Moore. I have read many of the novels and collections of short stories and pretty much enjoyed them.

     

I thought the ads were fun to look at. Here's the best from the issue. The story art is really colorful and interesting to look at, even if it's not all great. The first story in the book is the strongest in art and writing. It's titled City of the Living Dead and the art's by A. C. Hollingsworth. I don't know who wrote it. A group of archologists travel to Mexico, and against the advice of the locals, they go to a dangerous and forbidden city populated by the living dead. I know when I hear about that sort of place I immediately want to rush over and see what's up. Lots of people die. Like that's a big surprise. The stories are about average for a horror comic, certainly not EC quality but readable. There are three more stories and a two page prose story. It's a good reason to stop in at the Digital Comic Museum and take a look around. They have lots of other entertaining books to look at. Lots of horror, science fiction, crime, western, humor and romance comics to pick from. Here's the Hollingworth splash page and the one to the witches story. That's some weird ass shit, huh.