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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
What You Need
Some mornings, it's a picture of Wildcat groping Power Girl
"Karen didn't seem to like that much, Ted." "Yeah, well, that's what Joan said last night, Jay." "What?" "You heard me!" "But it doesn't make sense..." "Yeah, well, that's what she said." "What?"
"Say, Jay, what happened to Joan? Weren't you supposed to be bringing her?" "Well, I certainly didn't vibrate her atoms into a wall because she threatened to tell you and Ted about my premature ejaculation problem, if that's what you're implying Alan." "What?" "Nothing." "Did someone say ejaculation?" "Not now, Ted."
"Hey, Clark, I ever tell you about the time I tricked a female astronaut into thinking the Earth had been destroyed and we had to recreate the human species on an alien planet?" "Yes, Bruce. You have. Many times. That's exactly the sort of behavior that I'm sure makes your parents proud of you." "...Screw you, Clark." "What, do I look like an astronaut to you?"
"*sob* They just didn't know...how much it hurt...to be Superboy, Bruce." "What, am I your therapist now, Clark?" "I'm sorry, Bruce, I just thought, you know, seeing your parents gunned down in front of you might make you more sensitive to the pain of child-hood."
"I don't get it, Clark. I can do twelve backflips from a standing position, know a dozen ways to cripple a man with my pinkie, but I can't hit a damn baseball." "Well, Bruce, I know when I was a kid, my dad took me out to the fields every day and practiced throwing and hitting a ball with me. It's just a question of muscle memory." "..." "Oh, right, sorry. I forgot." "Screw you, Clark."
"As you can see, Clark, my name is a mystical sigil which encompasses all the words of the English language." "What about xylophone?" "...Screw you, Clark."
And Then There Was that Time the Marvel Family Fought Ghost Pirates
So Billy and Mary and Freddie are out looking for contributions for a charity rummage sale, when they stop by Pa Potter's antique shop to hit the old man up for some goods. While there, they find an old pirate map and decide to go get pirate treasure and donate that to charity instead. As you do... So, hopping into Pa Potter's helicopter they all go off to find pirate treasure. When the inevitable happens:
The HUGE ASS GIANT RED SKULL bites the helicopter's tail off and only by quickly shouting out their magic words do the kid's escape death. Also, even though they changed right in front of them, Pa Potter apparently doesn't realize that the kids are really the Marvels. Cap decides to take the fight to the skull, leading to this oddly disturbing panel: And inside we get this: Ghost pirates flying around inside a giant skull. Sims is weeping tears of joy right now, I can tell.
Cap gets his ass handed to him by the ghost pirates so he goes to help out the others while they fix the helicopter: Freddie, you're an idiot.
Billy, you're an idiot.
Ah yes, the obligatory, "the Marvels get knocked out and gagged, thus preventing them from saying their magic words" sequence which happens in every Captain Marvel story. Also, I have to say, after walking right into the not at all disguised skull, the kids kind of deserve it:
The kids find the treasure, which somehow kills the ghost pirates, and Captain Marvel leaves us with a not at all sanctimonious moral: Which means, don't become an immortal ghost pirate with a cool flying skull hide-out or it will catch up with you, I guess. Freddie's still an idiot, though.
What's a be-turbaned hero to do on a lazy Saturday afternoon, other than take his gal out to the ol' diamond and watch some more physically robust men earn twice what he makes?
Uh-uh...looks like Ibis had a little money riding on this game...
Ah, nothing like a good, wholesome old Fawcett comic to restore your faith in American traditions!
That's a pretty sweet Caddy the old guy's got there. As for the whole "war against the whiteman" bit and the...curious caricature of the villain, I'll remind you that this story is meant to take place in 1953...
Yes...scalping...sigh...
Truly these Captain Marvel comics are full of innocent and harmless whimsy and frolic.
Kanvasback's friend looks awfully eager to grease him up...I'm going to overlook the bear comment because, frankly, Kanvas doesn't really look like the typical type bears go for.
"Too bad there's no one out here on the street to see how bad-ass I am! I am so cool!"
Bonus Green Arrow is a Totally Useless Super-Hero Panels Oh, man, I wonder how Ollie will save that kid? Given tha- Oh, he is just going to fire an arrow at him. I guess putting him out of his misery before he's smashed into pieces on the ground is the kindest thing.
I showed this picture to Pal Kevin and his response was "omg 1976 orgy." I find it hard to disagree with his assessment.
I like the barely in focus couple in the background watching the unsuccessful flirtation in the middle-ground. Dude, if she's staring wistfully at the giant Tom Collins, you're not getting laid.
This picture looks like something out of every straight porn film made in the 70s.
If you're wearing special "Harvey Wallbanger" shirts and putting up "Harvey Wallbanger" decorations for your "Harvey Wallbanger" themed party...I think you might be an alcoholic.
I'm not quite sure how to explain it, but this image somehow encapsulates everything I've ever seen of advertising design in the 70s.
I've always had a sort of soft-spot for the Duck artists of the seventies. A lot of that comes from them being the artists I first associated with Duck comics. But some of it has to do with feeling a little bit sorry for them.
The artists in this period are doubly damned by most Duck fans. For one, people bash them for not being Carl Barks. Which is insane when you stop to think about it. Barks was the master for a reason, and it's grossly unfair to use him as the baseline. But the artists of this period are also complained about for not being the more stylized European Duck artists of the last decades, as if there was any remote way that the European style would have found a welcome home in cheaply produced licensed comics put out during a recession.
Granted, there's a lot not to like from this era. The characters are stiff. The backgrounds are frequently non-existent. The coloring is garish. And everyone is just a little bit off-model at the best of times, and grossly unrecognizable at the worst.
And, besides childhood nostalgia, that's actually, I think, part of their charm for me. I'll take a well-meaning failure over a cynical exploitation of what a big corporation thinks their customers want anyday.
Thumper decided to take up blogging as a pastime, sharing with the world everything there is to know about himself and his furry forest friends.
Thumper gained some popularity early on for, basically, telling the other forest creatures who were online what they wanted to hear and engaging in a not subtle at all campaign of complaining about the activities of the animals who hung around that other watering hole.
Which led to lots of comments from Thumper's readers along these lines:
One day, flush with his own ego and determined to show the world how great he is, Thumper tried to make some cash-money off the fact that he had a "very popular blog." It was then that Thumper discovered something very important, when he tried telling people who had never even heard of his blog how important he is:
Namely, that the real world doesn't give a good god-damn about how "important" your commentators think you are.
THIS is Why You Never Get in a Car with a Celebrity
Actually, it's probably not even a good idea to be anywhere near a motor vehicle owned by a famous person...
Ouch...
I wonder if there was ever any questions in the DC editorial offices about whether or not it was in good taste to do a story about the death of James Dean in one of their horror magazines.
Wh...why would Thumper need bathing trunks to go swimming? He's a rabbit. He's not even an anthropomorphic rabbit, he's just a rabbit. Thank God the children of America were spared the site of a naked rabbit...
Although many emotionally distant couples had found that erotic role-playing brought them closer together and renewed their marriage, it only seemed to worsen the relationship between Henry and Alice. Henry would offer to play "Cable Installer and Housewife" and Alice would decide that she would play the cable installer, and never show up for the appointment. In fact, nearly all of the role-play scenarios Alice agreed to seemed to involve Henry wearing a dress. She had told him that her experiences with her room-mate in college were only "experiments." Had she been lying to him about that all these years as well?
Still, the role-play was more successful than Henry's attempts to install a sling...
Henry Mitchell's plan to "lose" Dennis in the downtown shopping district was thwarted by the meter maid. With an eyewitness placing him and Dennis both near the rail-way tracks at noon, there was no way he could claim that his son "wandered off" while his back was turned at the mall. His new life, free of a wife who hated him and the son that bound her to him, would have to wait for another day...
"I was young once. I had a future. I was going to be an Olympic show-jumper. I was going to travel the world, wear glamorous dresses, be wined and dined by the most handsome and sophisticated men in Europe, before settling down in America with a trophy husband fifteen years younger than me and get a job as a newscaster or fashion designer. "And then I met Henry Mitchell. "Goddammit, when is the insurance company going to approve that vasectomy for Henry..."
I find that how you react to the sight of a crying Sivana is a good indication of whether or not you should be reading Captain Marvel comics.
I'll tell you this much, Luthor never cried over his failures to kill Superman. Destroyed a national monument or beat a hench-man to death with a wrench, sure, but he never cried about it.
Two things: One, judging by that second panel, Lana forgot to mention the role meth played in her current situation. And two, since when does Silver Age Lois give a damn about anyone but herself? What is this, Bizarro-World?
You know, as uptight as that last panel makes Katar look, it's still hard to hold it against him. Given that, you know, he's talking about Ollie.
Bonus Batman Being An Ass: "You know all about 'junk' dealers, right G.A.? Oh, wait, no, you don't, otherwise your ward wouldn't have become a junkie."
Four issues later, Batman is still thinking about that time he kissed Black Canary. Instead of paying attention to the JLA's monitors.
Of course, Green Arrow being Green Arrow, he's just got to be an asshole about it...
And then, this;
Let's review that kiss, shall we: That's how Black Canary kisses her brother, huh? And I thought the Superman/Supergirl relationship was as creepily incestuous as the DCU got...
Given that this is Batman we're talking about, I vote for option two.
Inter-office romances weren't unusual in the Justice League, especially amongst the characters without regular titles of their own. Zatanna alone worked her way through most of the team at one point. But, before DC editorial selected Green Arrow as Black Canary's most obvious partner, they did briefly experiment with giving her a romance with another Leaguer.
Oh, go cry about it, Dinah. You are? Well, all right then.
"Everyday affairs" is a particularly cruel way of reminding her that she's not from this Earth...has no friends...no job...nothing to live for except monitor duty, really.
Wait, I know this one...Selina! Talia! Vicki! Silver! Dick! Cripes, Bruce has had a lot of "one true loves."
What I like about this panel is that it's almost as if Dick Dillin is daring Roy Lichenstein to swipe it.
And now, Bruce Wayne, Ladies Man: "With the awkward tenderness of a man?" Really? Because, honestly, what he's most likely thinking in that moment is that he knows twelve ways to cripple her from that position.
And Bruce moves in...GOAL!
And then Dinah remembered her dead husband and Bruce realized that in the time he spent kissing her, the Joker could have escaped from Arkham and killed a half-dozen people. And besides, he can't surrender any of his vital energies while he wages his war on crime...
Before there was "the internet" comic fans used to share their opinions about stories by writing these things called "letters" and doing this thing called "mailing them" to the editors and publishers of the comics. This was bad, because it meant that it took several months after the publication of a comic to see what other people thought about it. This was good, because it meant that the bug-fuck crazy fans didn't get their letters printed. Also, there was no such thing as scans_daily. So basically the good outweighed the bad.
So, since I alluded to the "Snapper Carr betrays the Justice League to the Joker, because apparently Snapper is the world's biggest idiot" story yesterday, I thought I'd share some period reactions to the story:
I love that idea that it's simply implausible for the Joker to defeat the Justice League. At the time, the team's membership consisted of three aliens and a woman from a parallel reality...but the Joker taking out the League, no, that's straining credibility...
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