Daniel85

The back cover of New York World’s Fair Comics (1939; reprinted in DC Comics Rarities Archives Vol 1):

A lovely sentiment.

And here’s a couple of panels from the Zatara story within:

Ah, so…

And some of the sights of the Fair, as detailed in the numerous Sheldon Moldoff info pages scattered amongst the various stories by Siegel/Shuster, FINGER/kane, Fred Schwab, and other early DC luminaries: 

Not even our friends from the Red Planet are safe from negative stereotyping:

What a wonderful world.

This is an old one, but I just found it again accidentally and thought y’all might enjoy.

The guy in black and white is Northstar, one of the first openly gay superheroes. Thor isn’t out of the closet, but he’s totally gay too. “The Rainbow Bridge of Asgard”? “Enchanted mallet”? Yeah, we know what all that’s about.

And seeing a bunch of heroes beating the crap out of Professor X is perhaps a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure all the same.

From Friday’s issue of The Age: 

Marvel in the Middle East
March 23, 2007 - 12:01PM

Bam. Zap. Splat. Kpow!

Fans of comic book superheroes Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men will be able to see their favourite characters when a new theme park opens in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates by 2011.

(Full article here.)

My excitement at the news about Marvel-land is overshadowed by the backwards attitude towards comics. Same old ‘wham, bam, pow!’ attitude that the media have had towards comics for so many years. It’s depressing. No matter how far the industry and the form come, it seems we’ll never get away from that campy 60s Batman show.

Shakespeare and Rembrandt could come back from the dead, start collaborating on a new series for DC (with covers by Escher), and the news stories about it would still open with sound effects.

What is it about Dubai, though? Michael and Jermaine Jackson are hanging out there, now Marvel’s opening a theme park… why are all my favourite entertainment icons going all Lawrence of Arabia? (Yes, I realise the irony of my complaining about an anachronistic viewpoint and then referencing Lawrence of Arabia in relation to the Middle East.)

Caught the Fantastic Four 2 trailer this morning. Looks good.

To celebrate the Surfer’s arrival on the silver screen (ahem), here’s my favourite SS panel of recent times. Shit, this one panel is better than all 14 issues of his last series. 

(From She-Hulk #3, Feb 2006, Dan Slott & Juan Bobillo)

To put it in context, a whole bunch of Marvel characters are speaking up for She-Hulk at a trial of the Time Variance Authority where she’s been brought up on charges of violating the time stream. Only in the comics, folks.

I made a visit to my LCS* today, to catch up on the backlog of funnybooks I ain’t been buying lately.

Something I was vaguely interested in checking out was a series of one-shots commemorating the 65th Anniversary of Stan Lee’s involvement with Marvel Comics, in which The Man gets to meet some of his favourite creations. Actually, the only issue of this cashgrab that held any appeal to me was the Silver Surfer one, seeing as how I’m a big Silver Surfer nut and all. (I should add that calling the Silver Surfer Stan Lee’s creation is a touchy subject… the angsty, overwrought Silver Surfer we know is certainly Stan’s, at any rate.)

Anyway… comics publishers are forever using gratuitous T&A on covers to sell comics, but this cover’s a little different. The Surfer doesn’t have any T, but he has A for days…

(Word balloons my own. It just cried out for captioning.)

I could have lived without seeing some Norrin Radd asscrack. I really could’ve. Thanks a lot, Marvel.

* Local Comics Store - Ed.

So I got a couple of emails today informing me that two subjects I’d selected for next year have been cancelled. I was really looking forward to them, too. One was entitled “Television And Australian Culture”, the other “The Victorian Supernatural”. Now I have to find some replacement 3rd year Cinema and Literary Studies subjects, all the while avoiding the dreaded ‘tutorial presentation’ requirement.

It’s kind of annoying to have subjects cancelled this late in the year. I don’t know if there weren’t enough students enrolled, or the subject coordinators just decided to bugger off to Europe next year, or what. They’d better not cancel the William Blake lovefest subject (entitled simply “Blake”) on me, cos then I’ll really be pissed. I’ve been looking forward to that subject ever since first year.

I was at uni yesterday to return some books and pick up some holiday reading, but the self-checkout machine wouldn’t let me do my thang because there were ‘unresolved issues with my account’. Turns out I owe $24 in fines for overdue books. I just dumped the books I wanted at the nearest ‘recent returns’ trolley and got the hell out of there.

I could’ve just gone to the loans desk and paid the fine, but I was feeling like a bit of a dickhead and didn’t want to have some librarian tsk-tsking at my infringement. That’s the good thing about machines; they don’t judge you.

I’ll probably go back tomorrow morning and pay the fine so that I can drink deep of the font of all knowledge. I have a lot of reading to catch up on over the holidays, some of it academic, but most of it just taking advantage of the library’s many splendid hardcover comics collections. Will Eisner’s The Spirit, the classic E.C. titles, pretty much all of Marvel’s Masterworks and Essentials collections, and the handful of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman works I’ve yet to read… so much comicky goodness. Alternatively, I could just refuse to pay the fines and go sit in the library reading all day for FREE, but that’d be kinda tight-assed.

Speaking of comics, there’s an interesting-looking exhibition on at the State Library of Victoria from RIGHT NOW until February; Heroes & Villains: Australian Comics and their Creators. The title is a mild example of the ‘Biff! Pow! Zap!’ attitude towards comics from non-comics-type-people, but that’s okay. It’s nice to see the funnybooks getting some recognition in an institution like the State Library. I’ll definitely be checking it out, but there’s strength in numbers, so let me know if any of y’all wanna go.

If the first Secret Wars series was notable for just one thing (the debut of Spidey’s black costume), then Secret Wars II should have its own big drawcard, right? Some might say that it’s the fact the series spawned one of the worst covers in the history of comics, but for me it’s the debut of the world’s only CCCP-approved superhero, Thundersword! 

For those who came in late, the story of Secret Wars II is basically that this all-powerful entity from beyond our universe (The Beyonder) has manifested himself in a human avatar on Earth to learn all about our quaint little ways. In his innocence/stupidity, he gets into all manner of hijinks, and one of his first acts is to bestow superpowers upon a hack writer of Saturday morning superhero cartoons who, like all Hollywood writers, is secretly a dirty commie.

With his newfound powers, Thundersword goes on a rampage at a McDonald’s Family Restaurant (or its Marvel doppelganger, McBurger, which appeared in a few issues in the 80s but has unfortunately fallen out of use) spewing all kinds of anti-Ronald rhetoric:

(From Secret Wars II #1, July 1985, Jim Shooter & Al Milgrom)

 I must admit to laughing out loud at the ‘you deserve a break today’ line. Way to appropriate bourgeois tools like advertising jingles for the use of the Proletariat!

Of course, if this were published today, Thundersword would have to shout “I’m lovin’ it!” as he tore apart a McDonald’s restaurant. Still wouldn’t be as funny as Spider-Man stealing a guy’s Mcdonald’s, though.

I should probably make a joke about Thundersword’s being a superhero and the title of Super Size Me, but I can’t be bothered. Just pretend I did.

P.S. Secret Wars was notable for more than Spidey’s costume, being a milestone in mainstream comics publishing history and all. I was just being flippant.

On the drugs… 

(From Uncanny X-Men #196, Aug 1985, Chris Claremont & John Romita, Jr.)

Engaging in hate speech…

(From Uncanny X-Men #196)

Wow that’s harsh. It’s a good thing Priest was editor on the Spidey books rather than the X-books, cos he probably woulda broken Claremont’s face for that.

Not the cute Jewish princess we all thought, huh? (To be fair, that’s one of Wolverine’s cigars, not a fatty-boom-batty joint, and the racial slur is there to Make You Think.)

As a huge Michael Jackson fan, I was naturally PUMPED to hear that he’s heading back to the studio for a 2007 album release. I was just as PUMPED back in 2001, of course, and Invincible turned out pretty shit. But still, there’s always a part of me that hopes the King will return.

Anyway, I hit up Youtube for some footage I had heard about of MJ in the studio with will.i.am of the Black Eyes Peas, and as so often happens with Youtube I went on a merry journey through videoland. One of the things I found was the following bit (origin unknown) where Michael Jackson is answering fan questions in an Internet chat room, back in 1995. World Wide Web! The future! 

Some idiot asks the standard ‘if you could be a superhero, which one would you be and why?’ Insightful, probing questions here. Anyone would expect MJ to come back with something weird like ‘I am a superhero’, or ‘Peter Pan is my superhero’, but instead he proves himself a closet comics fan by talking about how much he likes Morph of the X-Men, because he can ‘become all things’ and ‘is very mysterious’.

Seeing as this is 1995, I think Michael’s exposure to the X-Men probably comes from the X-Men: The Animated Series (in which Morph was a recurring secondary character) rather than the comics. Still, it’s nice to learn that MJ’s an X-Fan, even if it does conjure up images of him and Macaulay Calkin in their PJs on Saturday morning, eating Cap’n Crunch and watching cartoons.

So I’ve been reading through Power Pack recently. And that’s not even the most embarassing series I have a complete run of in my collection. Dazzler over here! 

The storyline I’m up to at the moment is set during the time of Secret Wars II, when the Fantastic Four (along with every other hero in the Marvel Universe) were indisposed with the Beyonder’s King Louie hijinks (”I wanna walk like a man, talk like a man, yoo-hoo!”). With his parents away, lil Franklin Richards goes to stay at Avengers Mansion with Jarvis the butler. Jarvis is over the freakin’ moon to have someone to bake cookies and wash towels for, with “the ‘vengers” (as Franklin calls them) also off dealing with Jim Shooter The Beyonder.

One night Franklin has one of his little premonitions, this time involving the Power Pack kids, and so he sets out to warn them of the danger to come. Of course, he gets pulled into the intergalactic war that the Partridge Pack are engaged in (and that no other Marvel heroes have any interest in, apparently). This leads to a personality clash between him and the youngest Power kid, Katie.

It starts off with name-calling and tongue-sticking-outing, but then makes the (I think logical) move to ass-pinching:

(From Power Pack #16, November 1985)

This is especially disturbing when you consider that the Power Pack kids and Spider-Man became the spokesheroes for a child sexual abuse awareness campaign just a few months later:

It’s just like when Shane Warne got caught smoking after taking sponsor money to quit. Your game is up, Katie Power!