Never Forgive, Never Forget

Dell house ad that advocated the destruction of their titles from the sad era when comic books where considered disposable. As bad an idea for posterity and collectors as clipping those Marvel Value stamps.

Absent-Minded Professor #1 (1961).

Cosmos magazine frontispiece (July 1977)

Lunchtime with Sleestak

Typically I prefer to take my breaks from work in the office. It is quiet and I am left alone to enjoy my meal and get caught up on paperwork or read and maybe watch a flick on the laptop. Often customers, oblivious or just being jerks about it, intrude with problems real or imagined if a manager is found in public. On this day I chose to take my lunch break out in the public seating area due to meetings in the office.

For a few minutes I watched the Hayley Mills film In Search of the Castaways, one of her successes from 1962, loosely based on a Jules Verne story. This film is noteworthy for featuring Hayley Mills' first adult on-screen kiss. Not a bad film, though dated and meant for a young audience. It is equal parts fun, ridiculous and Wold-Newtonish. One aspect I found annoying was the music. Disney makes a lot of money via their original movie soundtracks so it is understandable that every movie they produce has a few songs in it. This is done whether the plot can really support the intrusion of a tune or not. I love the Hayley, but I can only take so much Maurice Chevalier who in the course of the movie drunkenly bursts into song at the pop of a cork. So since time and my patience was was short I stopped the film, closed the laptop and started reading a book I had brought along.

That is when the first interruption began. I was leafing through my new book when a customer approached my table.

"You work here. The Wi-Fi works better in the middle of the room than on the sides..."
"Yeah. I'm at lunch right now."
"...So you need to adjust the coverage so that when I sit next to the wall I can get a better connection. If I don't sit next to the wall near a plug my laptop battery runs out after a few hours."
"Well, we offer free Wi-Fi, not free electricity."
"That's your response?"
"Sir, I'm off the clock, eating my lunch and reading. There are two managers standing right over there who are getting paid and they will be more than happy to listen to you complain about the quality of FREE STUFF."

The customer went away mad, upset that I declined to reconfigure the internet so he could leech our bandwidth for six hours.

While on the subject of free stuff, Bully and his pal John just sent me a copy of The Wolverton Bible, published by Fantagraphics. That was the book I was reading at lunch when Crybaby McLaptop accosted me. Some comic book fans are not aware that for nearly two decades, Golden Age illustrator Basil Wolverton worked for and was a ranking member of a popular religious organization. While Basil played a role in the organization speaking to the faithful he is best known for his art work illustrating the Bible for their various publications.

Through the course of his career Wolverton's art was typically graphic, shocking and at times sickening even as it was brilliant. To his credit, when Wolverton secured the job of illustrating the monumental task of illustrating the many passages of the Bible he insisted that he be allowed to render the stories with honesty and not have them sanitized for popular consumption. The Bible, like most religious tracts, is a product of the times and is as violent, raw and uncomfortable culturally as it is supposed to be inspiring. There is nothing about the book that would cause either the believer or reality-based reader to avoid it. It does not preach nor does it tear down the institution. Each reader will take from the experience what they choose to, be it a study of the evolution of an artist or an affirmation. The images may make some people uncomfortable, particularly those concerning the end of the world. The book, with just a few exceptions, reprints the entirety of Wolverton's work chronologically. It is a fascinating look at the side of an artist that most fans are not familiar with due to the scarcity of the material.

Get your own through Fantagraphics.

Thanks, guys!

Dastardly Idea Wheels

Close Shaves of Pauline Peril #2 (November 1970).

FOOMP!

Close Shaves of Pauline Peril #2 (November 1970).

Must See TV

Submitted for your approval are two ultra-rare issues of television programming magazines featuring the infamous teleplay Spiders Come Back, initially broadcast back in February of 1964 on the syndicated thriller anthology series Mysterious. The episode so horrified the audiences of the day that the U.S. Government itself took an unusual step and interceded, forcing the network to cancel the show or face the possible loss of their broadcasting licenses. Originally scheduled to be shown nationwide, after the east coast debut the show was preempted and not broadcast to the rest of the network time zones. In the annals of broadcast history, the intervention of the government over the content of what would be by today's standards a typical horror show is comparable to the censorship of the classic Judgment at Nuremberg, when the sponsor, a maker of gas kitchen ovens, successfully lobbied to have any reference to 'gassing' removed from the script.

As the new hostess of Mysterious, Hayley Mills gave introductory and epilogue framing sequences to teleplays, similar to those offered by Boris Karloff as the host of Thriller and Alfred Hitchcock for his part in The Alfred Hitchcock Mysteries. The producers of Mysterious also made use of the Hitchcock model, in which the host would appear for a short epilogue to assure audiences (and the censors) that the antagonist did indeed pay for their crimes, even though the actual feature usually ended with the evil-doer triumphant. The use of this device in Mysterious however did nothing to mollify the government censors. They acted swiftly to ensure Spiders Come Back and the then shocking themes of murder, abortion, homosexuality, adultery and the re-animated dead would never be again broadcast. It was possible that hostess Hayley Mills, though a fine and talented actress, was unable to convey the same air of gravitas when winding up a tale as her fellow hosts Karloff and Hitchcock so effortlessly conveyed. Disappointed with the cancellation of Mysterious, Hayley would leave television to star in several blockbuster films for Disney, proving the adage that the best revenge is to live well. A fine epilogue of her own story.

Making up for the Birds

Don't ask me, I don't know either. Picture was completely unrelated to anything in the magazine.

Follies (Winter 1933).

Extreme Makeover

Going Steady #1 (September-October 1960). This is my new favorite romance comic book cover. Art by Joe Simon, who is totally freaking me out.

Hayley Mills tells how she feels

From Inside Movie (January 1963) comes an article in all likelihood generated by whatever PR machine was gearing up to push the new film Summer Magic, which was about to be released into theaters. This article features Hayley Mills candidly relating how she is handling growing up and becoming an adult. At this point in her life Hayley was facing one of the greatest obstacles of any actors' career, that of growing up.

The article tip-toes around the subject of puberty pretty deftly as Hayley describes her casual meeting with a wolf (from the description, probably a drunken Mickey Rooney) while she is out shopping. While the text attempts to appear as an innocent, embarrassing though thrilling encounter about a young girl approaching womanhood, the magazine really comes off as kind of sleazy. The vivid descriptions of Hayley in a pair of high heels and being fitted for a brassiere made me woozy. Hayley Mills is not Lolita even though the article really tried to sell her as an object of desire without coming right out and saying it. There was a lot invested in keeping her sweet, but various markets had to addressed and courted. Still, once past the Hollywood PR hack attempts to make Hayley sexy without being overtly sexual the piece tries to be positive and is superior in tone to those finger-wagging articles that would be published ad nauseum in just a few years to come.

Click the pages to make tabloid-sized.

Thirteen - The Movie (Official Comic Book Adapation)

Once a regular, though often troubled presence in the marketplace, the Dell comic book company stuttered through a few short-lived and ultimately futile revivals before finally surrendering to the inevitable and being consigned to the dusty stacks of publishing history.

Dell published a few original series, some good and some just silly or a waste of paper and ink. They hit the ball out of the freaking park with a couple titles but were mostly known for quick and dirty adaptations of television series. There were few 60s and 70s television series that didn't get a Dell treatment. Like most of their titles the book would start out strong but would soon feature repeated covers and content as the sales figures didn't support investing in new material. Once a cover and interior content was reprinted, usually with a marked decline in the coloring process, it meant the book had been canceled.

Dell as a company has made a few attempts over the years to re-enter the market, mostly by re-imagining an old book or series. But in the fickle direct market economy the attempts were usually financially disastrous. After limping along through the 1990s, Dell would eventually only exist as the small company that printed the instructional illustration booklets that are packed inside new canisters of tear gas used by law enforcement. One of the more ill-fated, though intriguing, attempts to revive the Dell line came in the year 2003.

Several years before the Archie company would experiment with altering the fabled house art style of the Riverdale gang that had endured virtually unchanged since the 1950s, Dell made a similar attempt with a property of their own. The small publishing house that had become Dell attempted to make an obscure teen comedy comic book series relevant by merging it with the box office smash teen drama Thirteen.

While the Dell company was in familiar territory by adapting a film property, the choice of cinema source material was raw, adult-oriented and full of situations that the comic book malt shop and bobby-sox gang of the 1950s never experienced except as subtext comic book fans would itemize, obsess and analyze many decades later. Of the four issues planned to bring the film to the printed page only one saw print. The following three issues were canceled due to low sales on the first issue. The remaining issues exist only as solicits in a few industry trade magazines and a cover gallery on the GCD.

The problems with the choice of Thirteen to relaunch the Dell company were many. Parents with fond memories of the Dell comics of their own youth were horrified when they themselves read the first issue, presumably long after their own child had it in their possession for several days. The book was returned by retailers in numbers not seen since Marvel published Void Indigo. Not only was the new, contemporary Thirteen out of place in the magazine rack of the local grocery store the company had no idea how to market what could have been a valid adaptation of the controversial movie. Instead of dealing with a niche demographic and garnering small though respectable and steady sales as a trade collection, the book was dumped as a monthly onto an open market that had no idea how to sell it. Dell took a risk and failed. What could have been an interesting effort on the part of Dell to make a come back did not work and it was apparent that the lack of a clear marketing strategy was what closed the Dell shop for good.

Your guide to fashion

From TV Guide (January 8, 1967). Photos by Ken Milburn.

Blah blah blah

TV Guide (July 1972) illustration accompanying article about broadcasters.

Programmed by a Famous Lover

Yes, your parents bought and used these. Probably at creepy suburban key parties fueled by rum and marijuana, during which you were conceived. Enjoy the nightmares.

International Insanity (January 1977).

Dell published some oddities back in the day

Probably about as NSFW as I'll ever get, original found at the GCB.

Come Ona My House

Secrets - The Magazine Women Live By (August 1962).

Radioactive Judy

Oh, the Cold War! I miss it. It was far easier and less stressful to be scared of an entire country on the other side of the planet instead of worrying about a few motivated, unbalanced individuals like we do today. Yet fear of nuclear annihilation was so pervasive in the 1950s it even managed to insinuate itself in a comic book about a boy-crazy bobby-soxer. Sometimes I think that comic books of the past did a much better job than portraying women than they do today. Sure, they were silly, daffy and helpless much of the time and only left the confines of the home to search for a husband, but I doubt a contemporary magazine would offer much better content.

Would a similar title today feature a young woman armed with scientific gear in search of Uranium or would they depict her wielding a credit card and shopping at the mall?

A Date With Judy #57 (Feb-March 1957).

Oh, come on!

I get what the creators are doing and what audience they are targeting, but come on!

From Terminator: Revolution #3 (2009).

Previous ridiculousness: Terminator: Babe-O-Rama.

Cap ruminates

Cap sure seems lost in thought.

"Hey, Cap! What do you think we should do about Norman? Cap?"
"I'll be in my bunk..."

New Avengers #50 (April 2009).

Ultimate Destiny

Ultimate Destiny is a long-lost, brilliant pre-code horror tale with a classic shock ending by the prolific Golden Age comic book creator Jay Disbrow. Included as the final story of the otherwise dull anti-crime comic book Crime Detector #5, this September 1954 tale must have been a giddy shock to the minds of young readers who flipped, bored, through the typical law and order morality tales that comprised the majority of the content of the book. Discovering this story must have been like unearthing a buried treasure and finding a gold coin among leaden slugs. I imagine this book was hidden from parents and surreptitiously shared, like some sordid photo magazine found in their Father's closet, with friends in alleys, forts and tree houses all over the America of the 1950s. This story has served as the inspiration for a number of teleplays and comic book stories over the years.

Enjoy!

This is one of the few times I've seen this story in color. I've only previously seen this story as photocopied pages with poor register in an old comic book anthology or two from the 1970s.

Tor in 3D!

Nice panel by Joe Kubert from 3D Comics #2 (October 1953).

Fatty's Got The Sleeping Sickness in 3D!

Break out the red and cyan glasses, kids! I found a free Anaglyph program on the web that turns photos into 3D images and I'm testing it with various pictures. Bright color comic book panels don't come out that great but it was a fun experiment anyways.

Freakin' awesome panels from Jungle Comics #6 (June 1940).

Hang in there

Cavalcade (1957).

Bibimbap is the shizznit

Being married to a Korean woman of traditional ways I eat a lot of Korean cuisine. Since I can't really exercise anymore because of the lower back, the high-veggie ingredients of my Korean-style meals are what I credit for my waistline going from a 46 to a 42. By the time the next San Diego Comic-Con rolls around I should look less like a stereotypical fanboy and instead more like a superhero. I don't mean Herbie, either.

I particularly enjoy Bibimbap. It is awesome. At most restaurants it comes in a huge bowl with a couple of pounds of condiments (including Kimchi) on the side. Like many of the items on the menu it has a high veggie to meat ratio. Vegetarianism is dull and boring. I couldn't face life if I had to eat carrots for every meal. A few days of that and I'd kill a cow with my bare hands and eat it raw. What would you rather eat, a plate of steamed veggies or a big, hot stone bowl of Bibimbap? You can be totally Vegan and not want to kill yourself out of boredom three times a day just by eating Korean food. It is true.

On Convoy street in San Diego are a few nice Korean restaurants that serve good meals. The favorite of the wife and I is one with the name of her home town in the title. The lunch specials are great and are a popular destination for the people who work in the area. We go there about once a week. The price is small and the portions are large.

One aspect of the place I dislike in principle is the information about the dishes in the framed printouts that line the walls. While the photos and descriptions serve to educate those guests not familiar with Korean cuisine they are also filled with paragraphs touting the health benefits of the food. But none of the descriptions contain much in the way of facts and instead make woo-woo claims similar to those found in books, articles and websites about homeopathy. It should be enough to state the benefits of real food over chemically-saturated and processed junk. Instead nigh-magical properties are attributed to the ingredients that 'clean the blood', 'improve the spirit' and ' such blah blah blah. The mystical, magical and junk-science claims are not necessary, but I am very aware they appeal to a certain type of person.

Not that one culture is particularly apt to take advantage of their own over another, but I am often angered by what I see as an incredibly predatory attitude among members of their own community. Magic cures, quack medical procedures and junk science abounds. Like an evangelical preacher will use religion to make a buck, these grifters exploit the cultural traditions regarding age, respect and ingrained social politeness as pry bars to open the wallets and purses of their marks.

One of the items a market near the Convoy area sells are six inch strips of neoprene cut from wetsuit material. This rubber is nothing short of magic and supposedly cures an amazing list of deadly ailments. By the way, the rubber is cut into trapezoid shapes, ensuring that every other piece leaves a smaller triangle-shaped scrap that is sold for around $300. Nothing is wasted, there. The product purportedly works through ions and magnets and other made up blather. My assertion would be any material that does what it claims doesn't need a large piece to work as the application of even the smallest piece should be equally effective.

That store and nearly every other in the area is full of quack items like that and is one of the reasons I don't let my wife shop alone when she is in the area. Many people of her background have shown themselves susceptible to the high-pressure tactics by salesmen who seek to take advantage of cultural predilections. Some of the salesmen, and I witnessed a lot of this tactic in Maryland, would find a family and prey upon them like a telemarketer with a sucker list. They used cultural and familial pressures to make a sale for some ridiculous device, juice or magic pill. Once a sale is made the word gets out and the vultures descend in a mighty flock.

In Maryland I was often asked by members of my family and the community who had questions about a product to check out the claims. I printed out evidence from the FDA, warnings about scams from the BBB and other sources, pointed out the miracle health pills being pushed on them for $175 a bottle was in fact powdered baby formula. I even once held a presentation for a group revealing that the test for "bad" tap water a salesman was performing in selling $2500 water filters was a scam the government has been warning people about for over 40 years. I often wondered why I bothered to help because in nearly every instance the salesman was able to babble some nonsense and I would be dismissed. On one occasion I'm aware of the product representative asked why anyone would believe a "Westerner" over a fellow countryman.

Just before I left Maryland a member of a small local church asked me to look into the claims of a company pushing miracle Amazonian berry juice. Someone was aggressively contacting the entire congregation. Product aside, it turned out to be an up-sell scam using high-pressure in-house visits to sell a customer a case of very expensive juice on a recurring bank withdrawal or debit card. On the basis of the sales tactic alone I advised against it. Many people signed up anyways and bought nearly $1000 worth of Acacia juice any organic market sells for far cheaper. The funny part was when one of the customers discovered the added protein ingredient in the juice was from shellfish, shrimp casings to be precise. The consumption of shellfish was against one of the tenets of their religion. Massive soul-cleanings then resulted along with the usual problems associated with canceling an account with a company that doesn't have public email address and won't return telephone calls.

Sadly, against all evidence and common sense most of the time people would shell out the cash. Not because they were stupid but because the grifter was working several fronts at once and had already ingratiated themselves to an elder member of the family. If anyone failed to accept the dubious claims of the salesman, they usually withered under the generational influence of an elder who berated them into purchasing the magical, magnetic, ion-saturated vitamins or device. The alarming fact is that for most people, even when the product or service turns out to be useless, they just go on and accept a different incredible pitch.

I have little reason to doubt that many similar scams are being worked here, also. I have never really witnessed a hard sell like I did in Maryland, but considering the claims some of these products make I'm surprised someone hasn't shut them down for fraud or questionable sales tactics. Salesmen in certain stores communicating with my wife step quickly away when they notice me approaching. I doubt I'm scaring them as I usually appear neutral if not jovial. It must be due to awareness that the husband, especially one of another culture, is a greater influence on the wife than they will be in the short time allotted. Unfortunately the desire or need to purchase products and items that can otherwise only be found in Korea leads us into certain stores like the one that sells the magical healing rubber.

But woo-woo claims aside, Bibimbap is the shizznit.

In which Hayley banishes the Curse of Eternal Winter from Elfland

It's the water that is filtered, not the air

While shopping the other day found a big old moth floating in a jug of filtered water.

No reason to get upset. Stuff happens. The moth could have gotten into the jug anywhere and anytime prior to the container being sealed, even as far back as the manufacturing, storing and shipping of the empty jug to the bottling plant. It isn't like this plant has leaking roofs covered with bird feces that drained down into the food processing area.

I hope.

I don't drink bottled water anyways if I can help it. The quality isn't any better than what comes out of my tap, and no insect ever made it through the filter on my faucet.

Cocky Porcupine: A Study in Terror

Like olden fairy tales, comic books were often used as a way of teaching children to stay on the path of righteousness, fear strangers and obey authority. Comic book stories were also similar to folk tales in that that horrible retribution will result for any child that fails to learn the lesson of the story, like this cautionary tale of sportsmanship from from Circus of Fun #3 (December 1947). The moral? Learn to get along with others or face the prospect of horrible, maiming torture at the hands of an angry mob.

A paleface, you do not be

This has been done before somewhere, right? I was eating lunch at work and goofing on my laptop yesterday and thought this up. Seems an inevitable image. I had intended to put a tiny Darth Vader under the tree waving and change the slogan to something in Yoda-speak, but I lost interest. Huge SF fan and this is about all the enthusiasm I can muster for Star Wars. Plus, my sandwich needed attention.

Good retaining walls make for good neighbors

You probably can't drive down any highway or freeway and not see the scars and cosmetic damage caused by out of control cars striking and scraping the concrete retaining walls placed between the opposing lanes of traffic.

I wonder how many high-speed head-on collisions a day never occur because of the barriers. A common-sense safety measure that I would lay good odds no one ever thinks twice about. But every mark on those walls represents a potential horrible accident where the results or complications from accidents were at the least minimized.

The Red Flu

A good number of employees called out today with what I have come to call the "Red Flu". The Red Flu is an ailment that typically lasts 24-48 hours. The symptoms usually express themselves as headache, nausea, cramps, chest pains and can be diagnosed as Red Flu Type A or Type B.

Red Flu Type A and B both are contagious annually on or about February 14th. Type A is largely psychosomatic as the illness subsides once the employee has successfully called out sick from work. Any discomfort vanishes completely by the time they step out for a party that promises plenty of hot, drunken babes or the dinner reservations are confirmed with that special someone.

Red Flu Type B is initially similar in the way it affects the employee, with the exception of the added symptom of uncontrollable sobbing, as the employee becomes truly ill once they come to the sick realization they are alone and unloved.

Happy Valentine's Day!

We Accept Party Animals

This week a customer in his early 20s comes through my line and makes a purchase using his EBT card.

For those who do not know what that is, an EBT card is basically a debit card connected to a Food Stamp account. People in need are allotted by the State a certain amount of funds so they can eat and pay bills. Many EBT accounts allow the user to receive cash back from their purchase so they can pay for things they couldn't otherwise by debit card, like the rent. There is nothing inherently wrong with needing a hand every now and then. As I am fully aware, things happen. I was almost there myself back during The Bad Times.

The purchase? A pack of cigarettes and cash back of $100. The employees and customers who witnessed this were not amused.

But wait, there's more! A few minutes later the same customer comes back through the line with a cart full of beer and party supplies. He pays for it using the cash I gave him as change from his previous purchase.

Now I have some gripes with this:

1) Our tax dollars are being used so some kid can buy cigarettes and booze. A system set up to aid people in dire straights is underwriting a party.

2) In my opinion, anyone on food stamps should not be shopping in this community. It's a free country, but the prices are on average higher at stores located in affluent areas. Less than four miles away are many grocery stores with prices much lower than this one for the same products. If I was given a limited amount of funds each month to feed and house my family I'd want to stretch those dollars as far as I could. The customer also declined to use his store discount card, which would serve to drop the prices by an order of magnitude on the alcohol. It is likely the guy didn't want an electronic trail of his monetary purchases generated and wanted to remain anonymous in the event he was audited.

3) My California state tax return this year will be in the form of an I.O.U. because the government is supposedly broke. Yet somehow California can afford to issue people EBT cards that have little or no accountability in regards to their purchases.

4) I mean, seriously. WTF?

Get a cave

If by 'wonderful' you mean 'disgraceful'.

Brides in Love #12 (April 1959).

Sean Penn

Rock N' Roll Comics #17 featuring Madonna (November 1990).

Shame

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

Sleestak's Logic Puzzle

Triangle is what?

Of course you know

Due to an asshat bombarding the site with his religious wingnuttery (who is also spamming other sites and boards, I've found) I've had to enable comment moderation. As usual for the woo-woo type and their hit and run attacks, this person is hiding behind 'unavailable status' so no one finds him and can launch his special brand of loony and threats from the safety of anonymity while pretending to be a Lamb of God. Here's the response to demanding he quit spamming the site:

Use "Comment Moderation" or I'll be back.

Now that you know the truth, you'll be held to a higher standard when you make your account to God. Good luck ; )

It isn't like this person is totally anonymous. A-holes always advertise, don't they? Usually what happens is these types get exposed and scurry away like roaches when the spotlight gets switched on. The accounts they use to spam and threaten get closed, their ISP bounces them and sometimes, if the emails originated from a workplace, they get unemployed for being wacky on company time.

I don't like comment moderation because it slows the pace of the fun. Like playing chess by mail.

It's this or the chair, doll!

Sam Hill, Private Eye #1 (1950).