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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 29, 2023 12:56:56 GMT -5
OK, "Pieface" is clearly offensive, but what about "Beppo"? For years as a kid I thought it was a made-up nonsense name, but it suddenly occurred to me that the inspiration for giving the super-monkey this Italian nickname for "Giuseppe" might have its roots in the cliché of the Italian organ grinder with his monkey. I certainly can't think of any other common associations of Italy with monkeys.
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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 27, 2023 16:32:50 GMT -5
Looking at that All-Select cover, it's no wonder the Nazis lost. They were tiny! The Invaders were a bunch of big bullies! That was a weird convention that was common on Sub-Mariner Comics. I've wondered before whether kids in the 40's ever felt cheated by the fact that Namor never used his power to grown giant-sized in the inside stories. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 26, 2023 20:02:50 GMT -5
Glad to see this thread! I was on board at the start, but I didn't stick with this one, so it should be a lot of fun catching up. I really think that Robbins' "problem" at Marvel was that he was being encouraged to be more "dynamic", and his renditions of what he was being asked to emulate led to more exaggeration in the poses than he would otherwise draw. That is, he was trying to get the house style but from his perspective it all looked like weird distortions. He tried his best to deliver that kind of feel, but it just wasn't in him. I mean, I can easily imagine Robbins looking at these Sal Buscema figures: ...and thinking, "OK, they want a bunch of awkward, twisted bodies with wide-legged stances and exaggerated poses. I can do that." Kind of like when Trimpe tried to deliver Image-style art but only picked up on the ways it varied from his own concepts of good comic art. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 26, 2023 19:51:13 GMT -5
Wild Boy of the Congo 14  |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 22, 2023 13:51:00 GMT -5
My son honestly gets upset about the way firearms are portrayed in most media. The number one thing drilled into him during all his years in shooting sports was safety. He’s forever pointing out the poor trigger discipline and the horrendous shooting techniques in movies and television. That's probably worth getting upset about. Sure, one's area of expertise is going to reveal non-authenticities in movies--I've seen two recently in which a supposed scientist/mathematician/engineer type exposed themselves when they referred to Euler's equation as "Yooler's equation"--but it's hard to imagine a situation where mispronouncing "Euler" (American academics, other than those few that know Swiss phonetics, approximate the pronunciation as "oiler") could be consequential. But thinking you know how to fire a weapon because you've seen it on tv? That could go very wrong... |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 22, 2023 6:36:02 GMT -5
Thank you 😊 (even if this example is technically Bronze Age). We had a similar discussion in The Spectre thread. The Code didn't explicitly forbid showing the good guys killing the bad guys, but people at DC and Marvel preferred to be very cautious, because the CCA had a lot of leeway to make its decisions and there was no way to appeal. Here's an example from RAWHIDE KID #70, June 1969, so late Silver Age, by most reckonings:  Prior panels are filled with the same kinds of cheats I mentioned before: the bullets seem to be hitting critical marks, but there's gun drops and shoulder-clasping to give (semi-)plausible deniability, and never explicit acknowledgment of death. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 21, 2023 17:32:13 GMT -5
But did bad guys ever die in a shootout in the Silver Age? And if not, was it more an editorial choice or a limitation of the Comics Code..? I don't have any examples readily at hand, but I believe it did happen occasionally. One trick Marvel used was ambiguity. Here's the first of two bad guys that Rawhide shoots in 1973' #110:  Followed by:  The script never explicitly says that they are dead, and Lieber conspicuously shows the pistols flying from the bad guys' hands, presumably allowing them to claim to the Comics Code Authority that it was the hoary old shoot-the-gun-out-of-their-hands gimmick, which was certainly depicted routinely in their Westerns. This cheat has a strikingly strange effect here, where they certainly seem to have been shot dead, while the reaction of the kids and Rawhide are disturbingly casual. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 20, 2023 21:28:39 GMT -5
A second welcome to you, genephillips ! I've been revisiting this topic as I consider doing a more focused study of the origins of WTU in another venue, but I wanted to bring up another speculation on the Dakota Kid. It occurred to me that Dakota may have been developed a few years earlier as a potential feature in WESTERN GUNFIGHTERS, but was rejected in favor of the grittier, less conventional type of characters like Gunhawk, Renegades, and Outcast. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 16, 2023 9:59:17 GMT -5
Jungle Explorer Narrates Own Comic Story:  |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 15, 2023 14:03:41 GMT -5
Kirby was clearly doing the heavy lifting on the SS GN; he leaves Lee only 9 panels to relate, through dialog only, the Lee-Buscema version of the Surfer's origin, during a confrontation with a woman who reminds him of Shalla-Bal on Zenn-La. Kirby reportedly objected to that explanation of the Surfer, and he apparently wasn't about to draw his own version of it for this project. There are several other references in the dialog, so Lee was certainly in command of the final scripting, but you're spot on with that observation. Excepting Kirby's eccentric choice of which words to accent in bold and his curious over-use of quotation marks, the scripting, especially the supporting characters' dialog, reads just like Kirby's Fourth World work. Thanks for the excuse to revisit this work, though. It reacquainted me with one of my favorite Kirby pages:  The long format of the graphic novel allowed Kirby to extend this sequence beyond the usual restrained conventions, to tremendous effect, as we see the Surfer fall, panel by panel, with Stan's dialog (again, very Kirbyesque) restrained to short, poetic, emphatic, rhythmic statements characterizing his downfall. Powerful stuff! |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jul 7, 2023 21:51:25 GMT -5
Back from spending the week in the hospital with my wife, so I hope to join in!
(I got a lot of Fox Syndicate jungle comics read during that time, and folks, those are some wild comics!)
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Post by MWGallaher on Jun 29, 2023 13:13:49 GMT -5
ALL GREAT JUNGLE ADVENTURES was a one-shot release, 132 pages for 25 cents, published by Fox in 1949. Fox published several of these extra-long giant comics by removing the covers from four unsold, leftover, regular-length comics and reassembling them under one new cover. Fox published several such collections of their romance comics and superhero comics, but this appears to be the only giant jungle comic Fox attempted to recycle.  It's a sub-par cover, even by Fox's inconsistent standards. The blonde's face, on close inspection, looks very wrong. Rulah and the purple gorilla might be dancing, instead of fighting. There's no attempt to convey a jungle atmosphere, just a cavern entrance and what seems to be a rocky cliff with a mountain range in the background. The format might have seemed like quite a bargain, but as I mentioned in prior post, Fox had a policy of printing the first story page of its comics on the inside front cover, colored in tones of a single print color (cyan or magenta), plus black, of course. Consequently, four of the stories in each giant--stories which would have been the lead story in their respective original releases—would start on the second page, lacking splash or title page! The copy that you can read at comicbookplus.com evidently includes ALL TOP COMICS #16 and JO-JO COMICS #18, but if I’m interpreting the GCD entry correctly, collections of other Fox jungle comics were also issued between these same covers. From a stack of cover-stripped unsold jungle comics, they would grab four and rebind them under this cover, so there’s really no telling what combinations might have been released. Since the component comics are considered elsewhere in this thread (or are not relevant to the topic of jungle comics), I’ll refrain from digging into the stories on this one. The inside front cover is a one-pager in black and magenta called “Man Eater”, about the Bengal tiger. The stories feature Rulah, Jo-Jo Congo King, Phantom Lady, “Tropical Topics”, and a “True Crime” story narrated by Phantom Lady.  For those who were willing to get more pages per penny at the cost of a few opening pages, these were all pretty "great" jungle adventures, though! I had been avoiding going back to the Fox jungle books, having been burned by DOROTHY LAMOUR JUNGLE PRINCESS, SABU THE ELEPHANT BOY, and FRANK BUCK, but it turns out that the other features in Fox's jungle comics--Rulah, Jo-Jo, and Tegra--were all pretty awesome! I'll be digging deeper into those comics (as well as their very curious off-shoots) soon. Trust me, these are some pretty wild comics! |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jun 28, 2023 5:41:53 GMT -5
Remember the time that Spider-Man crossed over with...Cap'n Crunch?  |
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Post by MWGallaher on Jun 27, 2023 17:31:29 GMT -5
Prince Hal
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Post by MWGallaher on Jun 22, 2023 19:24:52 GMT -5
On second thought, I believe I'll step out of this one! I like to debate a little too much, but I don't consider myself to be a very persuasive person. I enjoy trying to piece together information, and it's fun to try to figure out what might have been going on behind the scenes and why people interpret things differently than I do, and I want to keep it fun!
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