SOTI

Did I choose to do the glaringly obvious for my meme entry? Yes, but I'm lazy.

- For Brandon at Randompanels.

Grocery Store Artifact: The Illuminated Captain

Found an empty cereal box in the break room at work that an unknown co-worker progressively illustrated over a number of days. I rescued it from the trashcan and preserved it for the ages.

Bad lunch. Good art.

Behold the Power of Pie

Slouch on over to Progressive Ruin for more fun with Thom Kalmaku's Casebook!

Yes, I did feel queasy writing that caption. I also purposely spelled a word wrong, because the joke is that Thom is writing fan fic slash and that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Oh, the Inhumanity!

Medusa says: "Safety words" are for wusses.

- from Beyond! #2 (October 2006)

Overjoyness

Much to my delight, I found a collected set of the complete Land of the Lost DVD's a few days ago. Less than half price.

AND...

Finally, This Island Earth is out on DVD! I made the error of not picking up a copy when it was issued a few years ago and until recently most copies I could find are MST3K'd, over-priced or of poor quality.

AND...

Street Trash, the 80's cult film that is just so awesome is also available for a reasonable price. Why is this film so great? This sentence explains all you need to know: Bronson plays 'keep-away'.

My life would be complete if I could find a good copy of Frankenhooker.

Nearby monkey farms?

Panel from From Beyond the Unknown #25

The All New Atom: All you Byrne-haters can suck it

There are two things to like in DC's All New Atom.

1) Artist John Byrne. Yes, that John Byrne. One artistic facet that always seems to be ignored when drawing scenes based on things seen on a small scale is that nature is not pretty. It is not smooth and polished like the set pieces from Land of the Giants. Matter is rough, spiky, dirty and clumpy at that scale. So good on John.

I know John can draw dogs better than that though, so I don't know what is up with that weird looking mutt. I'll lay that on the inker. I read that John isn't staying on the Atom and that is too bad because I like what has been done so far.

2) Writer Gail Simone is leaving out much of the goofy self-exposition. A bit jarring at first, I quickly got to like it. The Atom has occasional outbursts of non-sequitors that make sense to his unseen internal dialog, but not to the reader. That is just like real life! Gail is not treating the reader like they are stupid and is making them work to keep up and make connections. Reading something by Gail Simone makes your brain overheat and that is a good thing.

Agents of Atlas is the New AoA

Introducing, the 'Hairball Special'

I am overjoyed that with the debut of Agents of Atlas that Marvel is finally able to have the letters AoA stand for something that isn't a big steaming pile of crap.

New AoA has a Human Robot and a gun-weilding gorilla. That is refreshing because it is neither from DC nor written by Morrison.

While you are at your local shop buying The Good AoA, don't forget to pick up a copy of What If #9 (v1, June 1978) to catch the back story on the '1950's Avengers' before it gets retconned away or comic shop dealers raise the price because it is the group's 'first appearance'.

Tags: Agents of Atlas

Things That Filled Me With Rage Today

The ass-clown who parks in my reserved spot all day at the condo and who crumpled and tossed onto the ground the note I left him under his windshield wiper requesting he not use our reserved spaces. I could have called the tow truck instead of leaving a polite message. I will next time, Sport.

DVD's that do not allow you to skip previews and force you to watch 10 minutes of crap before you can get to a menu. Yes, I'm looking at you, Matador. At least Disney, one of the worst violators of this annoying advertising tactic, has wised up and has started adding a Fast Play option to their DVD's.

Disney adding a Fast Play option to their DVD's supposedly letting a user skip the previews and menu and just start playing the film. It would have been simpler to just allow the owner of the disc to go straight to the main menu without forcing them either way through ad-driven garbage.

Bloggers who post cool panels from comic books but don't say where they are from.

Received in my email today an URGENT SECURITY MESSAGE WARNING from my bank about my checking account. The subject line was as follows: vise, lop. Ut guta. Sad zealot accelerant wad who spat Americana Vjlij. Guess I should click on that right away since it seems ever so important.

The local comic book store that says they will be open all day and is locked up tight long before posted closing time when I get there.

Yellow Elephants.

Limits on my card. It's my money. Why do I need the bank's permission to spend it?

Vince Vaughn's head on a bunch of bananas. It just makes me crazy for some reason.

Jonah Hex #10: Is DC relying on completist fans?

Some spoilers below. Like it matters.

I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with the current incarnations of two of my favorite comic characters from DC. One is the Warlord (which is incomprehensible in both art and scripting) and the other is Jonah Hex. The latest issue reads to me like nothing more than an unpublished Preacher fill-in issue with the main character changed from Jesse to Jonah.

In issue #10, Jonah acts again as an agent of revenge, this time taking a trip down south to hand out some retribution on a family of evil, inbred swamp folk. Jonah is of course the only person bad enough to take on the family, which has the local town folk and law enforcement scared into ineffectiveness for some unfathomable reason. Not one member of this family is a credible threat. The evil clan's chief enforcers seem to consist only of an old man with a knife and a shoeless guy with a shotgun and yet they manage to intimidate an entire region of tough frontier folks into submission. The sub-plots of interracial relationships and child murder fail mostly because they are shallow attempts to manipulate the reader.

Observe how easily Jonah takes out the two leaders of the clan.

The rest of the family is either gacked by misadventure or by Jonah himself off panel, in spite of them having guns and everything and Jonah being unarmed.

I am unable to decide if the book's creative team is just lazy or is actively treating their audience with contempt at this point. I have not seen sales figures* so for all I know this book may be jumping from the shelves. But as a fan I'd have to say that DC is keeping the book going only by counting on sales from completists (like myself) who are compelled to collect the monthlies and against possible future trade sales. I foresee this title getting cancelled once there are enough issues to fill a few trade volumes and justify the movie/cartoon/toys licensing deal.

My dissatisfaction with the current Hex series began with issue #1, which was little more than a re-telling of the 1977 series premiere issue and should have been much better than it was. Next month with issue #11 we see the bounty hunter meeting up with El Diablo, who hasn't been seen in the DCU for a while. Thus far in the series Jonah is depicted as almost supernatural in his acts of vengeance (he gets around the country pretty quickly for a guy who doesn't have a Hexmobile or Hexplane), so it might be interesting to see him in a story with Lazarus Lane, assuming that El Diablo hasn't been re-imagined as a mundane character.


* Commenter Dr. Obvious was kind enough to do some actual research on sales figures for Jonah Hex instead of winging it like I usually do. Here is what he found:

Found it:

(96) JONAH HEX
11/2005: Jonah Hex #1 — 33,771
12/2005: Jonah Hex #2 — 26,227 (-22.3%)
01/2006: Jonah Hex #3 — 24,671 (- 5.9%)
02/2006: Jonah Hex #4 — 23,569 (- 4.5%)
03/2006: Jonah Hex #5 — 23,496 (- 0.3%)
04/2006: Jonah Hex #6 — 22,763 (- 3.1%)
05/2006: Jonah Hex #7 — 21,910 (- 3.8%)
06/2006: Jonah Hex #8 — 21,006 (- 4.1%)
—————-
6 months: -19.9%

The decline accelerates.

Thanks, Doc!

Comic Book Ad: Swell for "Belly-Whopping"

It has Room for 2!

I remember these Flexy Racers. Dangerous, foolhardy and fun. Toys like these make me wonder how America isn't missing an entire generation. You braked by dragging the toes of your shoes on the ground, tipping over or slamming into immovable objects. When the racer got older and abused the middle slat would come loose at the back end and painfully pinch your thigh when it shifted or your knee would drop through the gap and get barked by stones while you were riding it.

Awesome fun. Good times. Would have been funner if I had a chance for some tandem belly-whopping, though.

Page from DC's Real Screen Comics #24 (June-July 1954)

Tags: Comic Book, Advertisement

Acknowledgements: GCD for the cover and the usual guys for the nifty vintage page.

A Comic Book Romance Euphemism

"And, of course, I just had to repay his generosity by...dating him..."

Whatever lie gets you through the self-loathing, honey.

- from DC 100 Page Super Spectacular #5 (1971)

Kid Power!

The Arisia relationship makes a lot more sense now.

- from Green Lantern #70 (v2, July 1969)

Tags: Green Lantern

Hal Jordan's Threesome

One of the many "3-Fer" hits to Hal Jordan's head that appear in the Green Lantern series. There are almost too many to count.

Guy Gardner went insane and violent after getting just one telepathic smack in the head by Sinestro. Going by that, a big yellow space bug was hardly necessary to make Hal become Parallax as he has received more than enough brain damage over the years that it's amazing he hasn't turned into the Anti-Monitor.

- Part of the Hal Jordan Head Injury Project, from Green Lantern #65 (v2, December 1968).


Tags: Green Lantern, Hal Jordan Head Injury Project

The Hal Jordan Head Injury Project

In celebration of the anniversary of one year of blogging on Lady, That's My Skull, I have just started the Hal Jordan Head Injury Project. I have accepted the calling of documenting and posting all the head traumas Hal has received in his career as an intergalactic status quo enforcer (I'm not including the full-body hits that cause the Emerald Crusader to take a nap, just the hits to the brain both physical and mental). This is a heck of a project because Hal was portrayed by creative teams as kind of a bull-in-the-china shop frat boy for about 40 years. I don't know if anyone else has taken on a task of this magnitude or done something similar but I won't quit even if they did. I'll keep it up as long as my scanner holds out*. As far as I'm concerned, you can never have enough images of Hal Jordan taking one in the brain pan floating around.

As of this posting I'm only up to issue #38 of the 1960's series of Green Lantern and there are more THWACKS! than you can shake a stick at. That's a lot of dead brain cells. For Hal, I mean.

A big old hat tip to the Absorbascon's own Scipio, who sparked the idea and started it all.

* If anyone wants to contribute to this historic archive then please feel free to email it to me or provide a link. Thanks to those real friends, internet friends and others that have already worked on some of the panels for me. This is my hobby but any assist will be appreciated and you will get a credit as a contributor. All I ask is that the image be in color (unless the original source was b/w and that you provide some basic info like the title of the book and issue number of where the image came from). The b/w collections are okay....but some panels, like the lamp scene from Showcase #22, work better in color.

Tags: Green Lantern, Hal Jordan Head Injury Project

Leave it to Hal Jordan

...to make it hard for us to love him.

- from Green Lantern #33 (v2, December 1964)

Tags: Green Lantern, Leave it to...

Leave it to Oliver Queen

...to invent the Pearl Necklace Arrow.

- from Lois Lane #29 (November 1961)

Tags: Green Arrow, Lois Lane, Leave it to...

Contest? What contest...Oops!

I can't believe I forgot all about the Caption The Meme Contest. Well, I mean I can believe it, because I did. I delayed administering to the contest for a few weeks because of my work schedule. It flips around daily from day shift to night shift. I'm also a slow runner (more of a shuffler, really) and those darn Marshall's run so very, very fast. So the result being I was exhausted, and then it slipped my mind. I only remembered it now because I saw a butt-load of lurker-hits going to that page over the last few days.

Since I am a lizard-bug of my word, I am prepared to give up my mint copy of the Heritage Watch comic book Wrath of the Phantom Army to the winner.

It was too hard for me to choose the winning entry from the posts and e-mails because they were all so funny, witty and some of these people were friends. So I showed them to a few non-participating friends in the comic-geek and non-comic geek sphere and they voted for the one they liked the best.

And here is the winning entry for the dead meme contest...

Congrats, So-Called Austin Mayor!

Your comic book is on it's way! Those who did not win have my thanks for participating and need to STFU because it's an honor just to be nominated.

Boogie Emerald Nights

I don't know if anyone has noticed, but the last few years of increasing awareness of how women characters are portrayed in comic books has yielded changes that I believe were an unintended consequence for the audience. The wide spread protests, snark and educational essays in blogs and forums have, ironically, actually caused the problems of the exploitation of gender to become worse.

Instead of writers and artists toning down the cheescake and soft porn in regards to women, they have instead increased the hyper-sexualization of the male characters in order to make all things equal.

Case in point, Alan Scott...

Cripes.

Guess the shoe is on the other foot now, so to speak.

The Best Comic Book Ad EVER EVER EVER!

"Simba, my friend...What! You're not Simba!"

What long-time comic fan doesn't remember the classic line from the 1975 comic book advertisement Tarzan Discovers the Land of the Prehistoric Animals drawn by Joe Kubert for Pom Poms candy and Aurora's model kits?

The ad ran for several months in various comic books of 1975 -1976 as a tie-in from Nabisco and the long-time comic book ad standby, the hobby company Aurora, pushing a series of mail-order Prehistoric Animals model kits. This particular copy was found inWorld's Finest Comics #234 (December 1975) and is permanently burned into my brain, taking up precious memory space I can ill afford to squander on ancient pop media. But it is worth it for the Kubert!

As far as ads go, it is a truly memorable one due to the art and subject matter. The ad is unique in that it is a small and self-contained story of Tarzan, who falls through a time-hole and is stranded for a short time in a land where extinct dinosaurs and mammals coexist. This ad is so complete it is very nearly a comic book back-up story in itself! It has great layouts and pacing by a Kubert who was, as usual, putting in a talented and professional effort. In the first panel Kubert draws Tarzan as exhausted from his unexpected journey, traumatized and possibly injured by events he can not comprehend. Tarzan encounters a big cat he mistakenly believes a friend and Kubert shows how devastated Tarzan is, who narrowly escapes with his life. Then in a following scene Kubert shows the reader that an important survival lesson was learned as thereafter, Tarzan warily avoids the big predators and lives long enough to make his way home. You can also see how Kubert worked to make the static poses of the models appear dynamic and exciting.

Click the ad for dino-sized picture and enjoy!

As a funny* aside, Tarzan's dialog was a short-lived meme among San Diego comic book geeks way back when.

Eat the Kuberty goodness!


* Not "funny-ha-ha", but "funny-you-had-to-be-there". For instance, if you and a friend were confronted by an aggressive stray dog in an alley, Tarzan's dialog is what you would say in all mock-seriousness to the dog right before running away as fast as you could.

Tags: Tarzan, Ads