Writer: Claes Reimerthi
Artist: Sal Velluto
Artist: Sal Velluto
This comics is scanned & edited by Kit Walker.
Sharing after additional editing. Enjoy!
Super-Swipes #7: The Olympics
Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Hai, 21 tháng 2, 2011
As I have mentioned in the past, Mort Weisinger operated on the assumption that his readership turned over completely every seven years, and so he had little compunction about swiping stories from that long ago. Here's an example that fits the time pattern precisely:
Action #220 is the September 1956 issue, while Action #304 is the September 1963 issue. Note in particular that in the earlier story, DC was capitalizing on a current event, as 1956 was an Olympic year, while in 1963 the games were a full year away.
The stories are very similar as you can see from these opening panels:
On the next page, things do diverge a bit; in Action #304, Lana Lang happens along in her helicopter and is pulled into space along with Superman, whereas in Action #220 Superman travels alone. There turns out to be an important reason for this difference.
In both stories, a scientist from an alien world has sent out the attraction ray to bring Superman to his planet for the Interplanetary Olympics. In both stories, the prize is the same:
That's rather interesting in that one of the promises of nuclear power back in the 1950s was that it was supposed to be ridiculously inexpensive; in fact the claim was that it would be too cheap to bother metering. That certainly didn't prove to be the case.
In both stories, Superman performs very poorly:
But Weisinger (and writer Leo Dorfman) do have a substantial change in Action #304 to the Action #220 ending (tentatively credited at the GCD to Edmond Hamilton). In the original, Superman discovers that the top contestant, Bronno, is a robot, and that the reason for his own weakness in the stadium is that a block of Kryptonite was used in its construction.
In the revised version, Superman was intentionally losing, because he caught onto the fact that the games were rigged. It turns out that the contestants and the scientist who had brought him to the alien world were actually crooks, hoping to tap Superman's powers and use them to evade the law. Naturally, Superman didn't intend to help them, and in fact the story ends with the interplanetary police arresting the trio.
This also reveals why Lana was brought along with him. In the original, Superman was puzzled by his own weakness, but with the revised ending Lana had to be the one expressing surprise. Note in particular that in the panel where Superman's climbing out of the water, that he carefully avoids lying. "I'm doing what I can," not "I'm doing the best that I can."
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Action #220 is the September 1956 issue, while Action #304 is the September 1963 issue. Note in particular that in the earlier story, DC was capitalizing on a current event, as 1956 was an Olympic year, while in 1963 the games were a full year away.
The stories are very similar as you can see from these opening panels:
On the next page, things do diverge a bit; in Action #304, Lana Lang happens along in her helicopter and is pulled into space along with Superman, whereas in Action #220 Superman travels alone. There turns out to be an important reason for this difference.
In both stories, a scientist from an alien world has sent out the attraction ray to bring Superman to his planet for the Interplanetary Olympics. In both stories, the prize is the same:
That's rather interesting in that one of the promises of nuclear power back in the 1950s was that it was supposed to be ridiculously inexpensive; in fact the claim was that it would be too cheap to bother metering. That certainly didn't prove to be the case.
In both stories, Superman performs very poorly:
But Weisinger (and writer Leo Dorfman) do have a substantial change in Action #304 to the Action #220 ending (tentatively credited at the GCD to Edmond Hamilton). In the original, Superman discovers that the top contestant, Bronno, is a robot, and that the reason for his own weakness in the stadium is that a block of Kryptonite was used in its construction.
In the revised version, Superman was intentionally losing, because he caught onto the fact that the games were rigged. It turns out that the contestants and the scientist who had brought him to the alien world were actually crooks, hoping to tap Superman's powers and use them to evade the law. Naturally, Superman didn't intend to help them, and in fact the story ends with the interplanetary police arresting the trio.
This also reveals why Lana was brought along with him. In the original, Superman was puzzled by his own weakness, but with the revised ending Lana had to be the one expressing surprise. Note in particular that in the panel where Superman's climbing out of the water, that he carefully avoids lying. "I'm doing what I can," not "I'm doing the best that I can."
The Phantom's Sunday Strips #168 to 172 (Better resolution)
Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Bảy, 19 tháng 2, 2011
TPH has sent followings 5 Sunday strips which are reasonably higher resolution than earlier shared.
Phantom S168 - The Accursed Land
Phantom S169 - The Jungle Lesson
Phantom S170 - The Eternal Triangle
Phantom S171 - The Lost Kingdom of Avaria
Phantom S172 - The Dirty Half Dozen
Interested persons can download from 100th post.
All thanks & credits for these strips go to TPH.
Phantom S168 - The Accursed Land
Phantom S169 - The Jungle Lesson
Phantom S170 - The Eternal Triangle
Phantom S171 - The Lost Kingdom of Avaria
Phantom S172 - The Dirty Half Dozen
Interested persons can download from 100th post.
All thanks & credits for these strips go to TPH.
The First Underground Comics?
Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Sáu, 18 tháng 2, 2011
DC was able to launch several series in the early 1960s featuring characters without super-powers. Sea Devils, Challengers of the Unknown, and Rip Hunter all had decent runs before giving up the ghost by the end of the decade. But there were several pilots whose chute failed to open, including this one.
Cave Carson was certainly given a chance to succeed; his tryouts spanned eight issues or about 200 pages. That's longer than some characters that did get their own mags, like the Hawk and the Dove or Anthro.
Cave's crew consisted initially of Bulldozer Smith, a former sandhog (underground tunnel expert) and Christie Madison, a geologist (yet another early 1960s DC female character in a non-traditional woman's occupation). Looking at that lineup, you can see the one item missing in the standard foursome as exemplified by the Fantastic Four, Rip Hunter and the Sea Devils. Smart guy (Cave), strong guy (Bulldozer), woman (Christie), but no kid. The team would expand in later stories to include Lena, a pet lemur, and Johnny Blake, Cave's swaggering rival for Christie's affections.
The story begins with Cave trapped below the surface of the Earth. Via a flashback, we learn that Cave had gone down there to investigate some mysterious occurrences. A giant metal tower and some train cars had been sucked down into the ground. He left his two assistants behind to finish work on the Mighty Mole:
Fantastic modes of transportation were pretty standard in the Silver Age, from the Batmobile to the Arrowcar to the Pogo Plane to the Metal Men's flying platform. Kids are fascinated by unusual vehicles and the Mighty Moles' likely prototype was the Hillman car, a 1960s amphibious craft:
Christie and Bulldozer have completed the Mole and bore into the ground looking for Cave, whom they find trapped under some freight cars. After rescuing him, they learn of the cause of the mysterious occurrences:
And from there, the story has them chased from the magnetic monster to a giant lizard to the lava monster shown on the cover, then back to the magnetic monster who destroys the lava monster before being defeated by Cave and the Mole:
The story is standard early 1960s DC, with monsters and more monsters; Bruno Premiani's art is the main redeeming feature. Jack Schiff was the editor for the first five (Brave & Bold) tryout issues, and the stories feature his steady recipe of monsters and aliens.
Things do improve a bit when the series was given further shots in Showcase #48, 49 and 52. There is some character development and hints of depth in this sequence from #48:
By this point Murray Boltinoff was the editor, with Lee Elias on the artwork and Bob Haney handling the plot and dialog. Although I am not a fan of Haney's work on the Brave and the Bold and Teen Titans, he does a decent job here of making the characters more three-dimensional. He adds what would appear to be a long-term villain here:
But although the series improved quite a bit under the new creative team, it was not a hit with the youngsters of the 1960s and save for a few cameo appearances, Cave Carson has largely vanished. I recommend the Showcase issues as worth reading.
Update: An anonymous commenter points to the Pellucidar series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which Abner Perry invents the Iron Mole, a craft that takes him to a world at the Earth's core. This is obviously the inspiration for the Mighty Mole, although the latter does have an amphibious quality that I cannot find in ERB's creation.
The Tenderfoot (Lucky Luke)
Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Tư, 16 tháng 2, 2011
This comics is contributed by a regular reader of my blogs.
He says:
I do not own a scanner...Have used my nokia phone:-))..I think it has come out decently..
I'm absolutely agree with him. Try yourself. :)
All thanks & credits go to "Anonymous friend".
Here Come the Fanboys
Người đăng: Unknown on Thứ Ba, 15 tháng 2, 2011
It started, as did many things in that simpler era, with a letter. A young man wrote to Julius Schwartz, editor at DC Comics, inquiring as to the availability of back issues of All-Star Comics, a long-defunct DC title from the 1940s. Schwartz did not have any to sell the young man, but he did remember that the writer of those old issues, Gardner Fox, had kept his own copies.
The young man was named Jerry Bails, and following up on Schwartz's suggestion, he negotiated a deal to buy Fox's collection. Bails had read All-Star as a kid and amassed a decent collection before the title was canceled. Now he was looking to recover the issues he'd lost over the years and find the ones that he'd never read before.
If all this sounds a little strange, remember that back in those days there were no comics stores (forget about Ebay). Comics were sold in lots of little mom and pop newsstands and drugstores. Nobody advertised back issues in comics magazines, and so amassing a collection of older issues was pretty much a hit or miss proposition, involving checking garage sales and used bookstores.
And then a very odd and significant thing happened. Another young man wrote to Schwartz, also asking about back issues of All-Star. Schwartz referred him to Fox, who referred him to Bails.
Bails was so thrilled to discover that there was another adult out there who liked old issues of All-Star that he sent the second young man, Roy Thomas, duplicate copies of several of his issues. Over the next several months, Thomas and Bails wrote back and forth dozens of times.
Not long after this, Julius Schwartz resurrected the concept of a team of superheroes, this time named the Justice League of America. He incorporated the two superheroes he had relaunched thus far, the Barry Allen Flash and the Hal Jordan Green Lantern and rounded out the membership with three existing DC heroes, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter.
Bails and Thomas were enthusiastic, but they had seen that comic books come and go. Bails wanted the Justice League to last, and so, during a trip to New York, he suggested to Schwartz that he start up a little newsletter for fans of the JLA, to help market the comics.
It was one of those situations where the stars were perfectly aligned. As it happened, Schwartz knew all about fan newsletters, because back in the 1930s he had started one for the then-new science fiction fandom. His two teen co-editors of Time Traveler had been Mort Weisinger and Forrest Ackerman (later the publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland). He told Bails that his project should be called a fanzine (combining fan and magazine), and started publishing the full addresses of letter writers so that Bails and Thomas could compile a database of older comic book fans for their market. Schwartz would provide Bails with information about upcoming stories so they would have a constant supply of copy.
Alter-Ego #1 (cover shown above) was the result. As you can see, it's something of a parody of the cover of Brave and Bold #29:
Bails opened with a mission statement that is largely what you'd expect, but he did throw a rather large bone to Schwartz and DC: he sprinkled cryptograms throughout the issue that could only be decoded with a key that Bails promised to send anyone who sent him a copy of their subscription label to Justice League of America.
The next few pages were devoted to previews of coming issues of the Schwartz-edited magazines, including a few classics:
If that format looks familiar to you, it should. DC used much the same layout for their Direct Currents house ads in the mid-late 1960s:
There followed feature articles on the Golden Age villain the Wizard (by Bails) and the Spectre (by Thomas), and Wonder Woman (Bails). The issue closed with the JLA parody shown on the cover; here's the splash page by Thomas:
Alter Ego was published sporadically throughout the 1960s; Julius Schwartz recommended it in the letters column of JLA #8, sending circulation soaring:
Thomas revived Alter-Ego as a glossy, slick magazine in the 1990s that is still published today. It's a terrific read; fans will love the special issues devoted to their favorite artists. My copies of the issues dedicated to Dick Sprang (#19) and Will Eisner (#48) are especially treasured.
Bails had already conceived of the next phase of fandom: the Alley Awards, kind of like the Academy Awards but for comic books. Compiling the votes for the awards led to the "Alley Tally", an early gathering of comic book fans, that led to the earliest comic book conventions.
The influence of organized fandom on comic books has been enormous. The comics industry drew much of its next generation of talent (especially writers) from the ranks of the fans. Roy Thomas went on to become a major force at Marvel (succeeding Stan Lee as Editor) and DC. E. Nelson Bridwell, Tony Isabella, Mike Friedrich, Martin Pasko, Jim Shooter and many others started their careers as fans. As the demand for back issues grew, comics companies began (starting around 1965) to emphasize the collectible nature of their products.
Note: I realize I have barely skimmed the surface of this topic. For more details on the birth of Alter Ego, see this article by Bill Schelly. I drew on other sources as well; Julius Schwartz's Man of Two Worlds was especially helpful.
D2-128 - "EMP” (5/28/84 to 9/29/84)
Người đăng: Unknown
Flash Gordon D-2 Series Strip
Art: Dan Barry
Summary: As Flash, Dale and Zarkov prepare to leave Mongo after saving Frigia from disaster (see D2-127 Rebellion in Frigia), an unassuming former robot repairman and programmer Hugo Greaser rises meteorically to become the most powerful man in Earth’s world finance.
Blackmailing governments with his business decisions on board his Megaspace Corporation satellite, Greaser then inexplicably unleashes disaster by detonating a massive electric magnetic pulse in space that irrevocably knocks out every magnetic and transistorized device on Earth..
Blackmailing governments with his business decisions on board his Megaspace Corporation satellite, Greaser then inexplicably unleashes disaster by detonating a massive electric magnetic pulse in space that irrevocably knocks out every magnetic and transistorized device on Earth..
(Source of summary: www.ipcomics.net)
It's from Emile's e-collection. All credits go to her & "Allen Lane" who scanned and first shared at net.
