Happy 100% Heterosexual Memorial Day!

...It's a Christmas Miracle!

Tomorrow: Content resumes!

...Only to Find...

Can anyone save us? Come back tomorrow...

Home for Christmas...

Oh That Treacherous Little Scamp!

One of Those Days

I was going to have a real movie for you guys today, but instead I find myself under attack by weird mummy insects. You know how it is.

Our Travelogue

So we decided to go on a big final vacation before the baby comes...

But while we found some amusement...

It's still good to come home...

Now I've got two screenplays to write in record time, so hopefully I'll be filling in that calendar again and still, somehow, giving you people the posts you crave...

The Reindeer Became Scandalously Unruly

Fortunately, A Lake of Nice Springy Cranberry Sauce Received Him

Great Moments in Comics #17: The Adventures of Two-Gun Bob

I’ve talked a lot about Robert E. Howard this week, creator of Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, and many more adventure heroes. But Howard is also the star of a non-fiction comic strip that runs in the back of all of the Dark Horse comics that are licensed from Howard’s properties. An old English major / history buff like me loves the idea of turning an author’s bio into a comic and parceling it out in neat little half-page vignettes that often feel like zen koans. The strip is beautifully done by Jim and Ruth Keenan, who also have a blog. They don’t collect all the strips there, though, and for some reason they get left out when the comics themselves are reprinted. Track down the individual issues to enjoy this neat look at a fascinating, ornery guy. Here's a few of my favorites from the early days of the strip:

Yeah, those lucky New York guys sell everything...

Comics I Love Even Though I've Only Seen the Covers #16: Wartime Romances

Let's celebrate another year of independence by showing our men in uniform how much we appreciate them-- as long as they don't want us to, you know, settle down...

Great Moments in Comics #15: Madame Fatal Gets Her Man

Once again, I’d like to sing the praises of a blog I’ve haven’t highlighted before, and bogart some of their recent content along the way… Every damn day, Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine reprints at least one classic comic story in full, along with some smart commentary. Pappy’s knowledge is deep and his scans are often wonderfully obscure.

Pappy recently highlighted one of my favorite costumed adventurers from the early days of comics. Art Pinajian’s “Madame Fatal” is a beautifully simple concept—so simple that it makes all the other superheroes that much sillier. Think about it—If you wanted to fight crime on your own, would it actually make sense to dress up like a big scary bat and try to intimidate these macho thugs, or would it make more sense to dress up like a little old lady and approach them when their guard was down? If you’re serious about putting the smack-down on crime, the little old lady act is probably the way to go. Here’s a story from, where else?—Crack Comics #3:

Great Moments in Comics #14: Ditko's Mr. A

And now for some black and white comics—some VERY black and white comics. I’ve talked before about that moment in the late ‘60s when Patrick McGoohan decided to transform his TV show Secret Agent into a wildly surreal allegory about mechanisms of control in modern society, re-named “The Prisoner”. What you may not know is that Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko had a similar revelation around the same time.

At first Ditko tried to graft his own increasingly radical liberatarian politics onto Peter Parker, but when co-writer Stan Lee called a halt to that, Ditko went out on his own. He ultimately decided to self-publish his vision of the ultimate hero, Mr. A, who took his name from Ayn Rand’s objectivist dictum: “Above all else, A is A!”

I’m no Randian, but I love Mr. A more than anything. It’s like the rosetta stone of all other comics: Mr. A says out loud what other heroes merely imply—he actually gives impromptu lectures about why he should be allowed to use force while he’s beating up the bad guys! One thing I love about this comic is that, for all its claims of moral certainty, Ditko and Mr. A himself never stop thinking about this stuff. Each page in this short story ends in a philosophical dissection of the story so far, diagrammed onto Mr. A’s symbol: a card on which black and white do not mix. But by page 6, he’s already had to adjust the diagram to show how corruption causes the two sides to bleed through onto each other. Maybe the world wasn’t all black and white after all… Maybe he just wanted it to be that way.

Great Moments in Comics #13: Kirby from Pappy's

Here’s another great website I’ve never linked to. Pappy’s Golden Age Comic Blogzine posts at least one classic full-length story every day with insightful commentary. Pappy recently posted Harvey Comics’ Alarming Tales #1 in its full glory, featuring five stories by the great Jack Kirby, though this one seems more like something his trippy future colleague Steve Ditko would draw. It’s a thing of beauty! Pappy’s is worth checking out everyday, and if you like this one, head over there to check out the rest of the stories in that issue…

Great Moments in Comics #12: A Monument to Mortimer

I love this story!

After coming across yesterday’s stories, I decided to track down some more on my own and I’m now officially addicted to Atlas’s four-page sci-fi stories! (Atlas would later transform into Marvel Comics) My new favorite is “A Monument to Mortimer” from Journey Into Unknown Worlds #20, a story about a futuristic society who celebrate the life of one despicable little kid from the ‘50s. The reason why cracked me up! The artist was Hy Fleischman but the writer is unknown...

Great Moments in Comics #11: Torres is Astonishing

He’s been sitting over there in my blog roll all this time, but I have yet to mention in a post how much I love Mr. Door Tree and his blog “Golden Age Comic Book Stories”. It’s one of those blogs which has expanded far beyond the mandate of the original name, because it now spends most of its time showing off massive galleries of paintings by the great illustrators of the early 20th century. But he still does post comics stories now and then, and since I particularly loved yesterday’s posts, I thought I would steal highlight it.

Until I saw these stories, I was only familiar with Angelo Torres from his later Mad Magazine work, which was good but never excited me. I was blown away by this post showing several of Torres’ early sci-fi stories, done in a lush style reminiscent of the late Frank Frazetta. It turns out that these are actually from a book I’ve already highlighted in “Comics I Love Even Though I’ve Only Seen the Covers”, Astonishing. I would have assumed that the insides were just EC Comics knockoffs, but, upon reading these, I discovered that I loved the writing on these pithy little stories almost as much as the art. EC stories were all 7-8 pages and too verbose. These four pagers are much tighter and really hit the spot. Here’s my favorite, but check out the others too: