All Engulfing Sonic Sponge

Courtesy of Giant-Sized Fantastic Four #6. The team, minus the female part, goes toe to toe with the ideal, monologuing villain called Annihilus. Testing their superpowers while they go after the doo-dad on his belt (which will save the life of Sue Storm who's having a baby...blahblahblah), Annihilus starts throwing random stuff at them, which as you see here, includes that lovely Sonic Sponge. Apart from the continued insistence on the characters narrating everything that happens to them in the pictures, which again I find TOTALLY annoying, you see bucket loads of completely silly stuff like this, invented purely to give a man who flies while on fire a specific challenge.

Ought to be in jail for taking so many liberties

Weird War Tales #74, from April of 1979. So many liberties are taken here with science and history that it's almost impossible to keep up with them. Tanks running around in the snowy mountains of Scandinavia, tank crews dressed up in nice warm clothes like they just came out of a Macy's Annual Sale, woolly mammoths suddenly coming to life after years in the ice, and instant domestication of the animal by a crew that uses their destroyed tank parts (after the mammoth stomped it to bits) to build an Indian-style canopy on top so they can ride the beast in comfort. The artists and writer responsible for this goofiness I'm sure had plenty of time for research, but they obviously didn't take it. They couldn't even get the time frame right for when the woolly mammoth was alive. Mind you, cryogenics was a very big fad around that time, and like cold fusion, we all thought it would usher in a new era of human possibilities. A lot of wild imaginings get pulled into the general stream of popular culture and used without regard to realism.

Remember folks, peeps in the fifties thought that nuclear power was going to mean practically instantaneous flight between cities on opposite sides of the globe.

The Incredible Plastic Faces of Richard Corben

My own humble attempts at art are fed by influences from many sources. Most of these sources are graphic artists such as Wendy Pini, Milo Manara, Moebius, and, as we see here, Richard Corben. One of the major contributors to the movie Heavy Metal back in 1981 with his "Den", he has the most wonderful facility with faces that morph and change from one emotional expression to another with fantastic fluidity. This is coupled with a finely honed appreciation of anatomy that a lot of artists today would do well to study.

You've come a long way, baby

Published four months before I was born, this is what a teenaged girl might have been reading back in 1968. From Teen Love Stories #3.

And yes, the title of this post is meant to be ironic, although only those who remember Virginia Slims ads from women's magazines back i the seventies will know why. They even popped up in my mother's favorite magazine Family Circle.

Blinded by the light, the 3D, etc.

From September, 1985, folks. I have this one stored to read later. Thoughts on it to follow, but in the meantime, a picture speaks a thousand words, doesn't it?

Ears of Corn...er...Spock

Now across the galaxy to the world of Star Trek. Some would say that pointy ears had their origin in the illustrations for The Lord of the Rings. I can't say for sure, but "ears of Spock" have been popular culture shorthand for ages. It's amazing how many alien species on series like Star Trek are really just humans with one or two little tweaks. Spock wouldn't be Spock without the pointy ears, but he would also look equally weird if his eyebrows didn't tilt up.

You didn't really see aliens get "alien" until the late 1970's, when movies like Star Wars and Alien came out. Sure, the aliens were all still humans in suits, but shapes and balance centers were changed. Once the 1980's arrived, and prosthetic makeup and animatronics improved, more elaborate aliens with more lifelike appearances could appear. Mind you, we still had "V" and its "aliens in human suits" reversal...:)

Once we got the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park out of the CG box, very few of us wanted to put them back. George Lucas couldn't resist giving us a CG Jabba. But then Farscape came along and prosthetics and animatronics were back in vogue.

In the end, though, we're all still humans in suits. Pointy ears and pencilled-in eyebrows don't really change who we are. We all love putting on different costumes and seeing ourselves in a different light. That's one of the reasons I loved Kick-Ass so much.

Fast Forward 52 Years

This tiny little cutout, from Batman 695 (March 2010) has quite a lot to tell us about how much things have changed since issue #117 in 1958. First of all, printing advancements mean that newsprint limitations on color have been left behind. Second, although the Spandex fetish still reigns (Batman is on the same page in the background art looking ridiculously buffed as usual), there is a lot more emphasis on folds in the clothes. A coat like this would never have appeared back in the 1950's. Third, there are quite a few graphic enhancements, which are partly due to the computer-assisted nature of the process and partly due to the fact that, unlike the 1950's, when big publishers like Marvel and DC demanded that everyone draw basically the same way, LOTS of individualism creeps into frozen moments like these. You really didn't see this start until the 1980's, when of course we saw "Dark Knight" appear. Artists all over demanded the right to play with frames like you see here, among other graphic stylings. In the daily strips, Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame demanded the same thing and was able to pull off some truly brilliant moments of expansion and contraction in the adventures of 6-year-old Calvin.

Last, but certainly not least, this may not be at first instantly recognizable as a woman, which makes the caption more than permissible. And a woman holding a gun in such a menacing, aggressive way? Hell, guns themselves were almost useless back in the 1950's comic book world. You couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with one, especially if you were a bad guy. And Batman's Batarang was always somehow faster than the bullets they fired. Sure, you had female icons like Wonderwoman, Mary Marvel, and the original Batgirl, but their powers always seemed passive and defensive in nature (and I was never able to figure out how Wonder Woman's gauntlets attracted bullets, when most of them contain no ferrous metal). Even the male superheroes tended to depend on fists (wouldn't you if you could swing at three guys and lay them out unconscious with one punch?).

Depth of field, more emphasis on pure anatomy, the list just goes on and on. There is an innocent charm to the early comic books, but me I prefer the gritty realism. Unless it comes to a choice between watching Adam West or Christian Bale...:)

Mr and Mrs Batman

I did have to do a double take on this one, since at first it looked like Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were sleeping in the same bed. Even then, I was immediately reminded of Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo's bedroom on I Love Lucy, where TV censorship rules declared that even married couples couldn't be shown sleeping in the same bed. All kinds of oddities bubbling under the surface here...:)

Look out Batman! Bananas!

I find it incredibly irritating that artists and writers of comic books back in the so-called Golden and Silver Ages seemed to be working blind, never seeing each other's work. If a giant brace of bananas is descending in the picture, there is NO reason to actually have Batman say so. I've seen it happen before when a character drove off a cliff in his car. His line? "Oh no, I just drove off the cliff!". Pfft. We humans do love to belabor the obvious.

Laughing at the past

I take as the title of this blog a line from a comic book - Batman #117, in which Batman and Robin join forces with an alien cop on an intergalactic manhunt for an alien/human duo who are planning a combined life of crime. When the three crime fighters land on the planet where their quarry has chosen to hide out, they find it much like Earth, except that all of the fruit on the trees is a hundred times normal size. The bad guys hide out in the trees and throw giant fruit at our heroes, including, as an excerpt will shortly prove, a brace of giant bananas.

Published in 1958, this comic book's scant 20-some pages have provided many laughs, and quite a few questions about the thoughts that ran through the minds of its creators. I am a big fan of the 1966 silly-fest that was the original Batman movie, and I know the whole thing was supposed to be tongue in cheek, but nothing displayed in that movie, or the TV show with Adam West, can compare to the outright goofiness of this comic book.

I love picking these things apart and hope to dissect many more before too long. Stay tuned.