Shame on you, Kal
Comics were at one time littered with these ads for cupcakes and fruit pies and Lord knows what else, but for some reason the only ones that get my goat are the Superman ones. I hold him up to a high standard, and he’s too wholesome for this crap. I don’t mind him shilling for milk or something like that, but this? No. At least with milk I can pretend he’s hawking skim. I don’t think there’s any such monster as a “skim” cupcake.
For shame, Superman. For shame.
And while I’m at it, where the hell was he keeping the cakes?
A couple of weeks ago I posted a half-cocked theory about how John Romita’s art on The Amazing Spider-Man rescued that title after Steve Ditko left Marvel, while Doctor Strange suffered a different fate in the immediate aftermath of that sudden departure. I threw that thought against a wall just to see if it would stick. I’m not sure if it did. As I write this it might be sliding down said wall like a slimy White Castle pickle.
My ruminations on the Doctor Strange comic in that other post led me to pull this Spidey book out of the pile to look at. It’s perhaps the best Spider-Man cover of all time — and that’s really saying something — and it represents what John Romita was at his absolute best. The fact that this came in his second issue on the title in the midst of one of the biggest moments of Spider-Man lore only adds to the magic of the whole thing. I mean, it’s the comic book equivalent of “Send it in, Jerome!” in college basketball:
I thought it would be kind of fun to break the cover down, and pick out the parts that make it so effective. Forgive the slight wear around the binding — I actually bought this comic very cheaply a few weeks ago because the rest is in very clean, unruffled and vibrant shape. I think that even the fine lines at the edges give it a distinguished look, like wrinkles on an aging but still-handsome Hollywood star.
Here we go.
First, on a broad level, there’s the contrast of colors, both between the primary red and blue of Spidey and the secondary green and purple of the Green Goblin, and then between the two principals and the yellow and orange flames behind them. It’s a rich, vibrant tableau if there ever was one.
This first smaller portion we focus on has to be Spidey’s posture:
His shoulders are tensed, his fists are clenched, and he looks like he’s poised to deliver a James Caan/Godfather/two-trashcan beating to his foe. He looks pissed. Even his “eyes,” which are always susceptible to subtle changes by artists depending on the webslinger’s mood, have “angry” written all over them.
Then there’s the Goblin:
He’s a beaten man. He’s down on his knees, his fingers are curled, perhaps from pain, and he can’t even raise his head, which keeps his face concealed and lets us imagive how twisted with agony it is. But the most effective flourish might be the way his cap dangles over his left arm. It gives a disheveled, thoroughly beaten apprearance to him. I should also note that his sinister purple European man-purse is still intact. I’m not sure if that adds anything, but it deserves to be noted.
In the background there’s the Goblin’s glider, which has been grounded and overturned and appears on the verge of being consumed by the flames:
And, finally, there’s a little touch that isn’t an artistic choice by Romita but more of an editorial leftover (and one that would last a few more issues) — Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man is looking down on it all:
If I could cook this cover in a spoon and inject it into my veins I would. Wait, did I just type that?
Seriously, this is great stuff. I’m not sure if it buttresses my earlier crackpot theory all that much, but it’s always nice to revisit these bygone days in the Spidey-verse. The elder Romita was (and is) a true mensch.
Excelsior!
Robby the Robot’s bastard children
The Zeroids — sort of an action figures/Tonka trucks combo.
And there’s actually a recent comic book featuring these things — talk about digging deep with the nostalgia…
I hate hippies, Part 2 of 2 – Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #118
In the first installment of this two-part post I was a bit disappointed with the lack of hippie fodder upon which I could vent my spleen.
This one more than makes up for it, and Jimmy Olsen gamely steps in to be the punching bag of one’s dreams. I can think of no better proxy for all of hippiedom than the normally straight-laced square cub reporter.
First I need to say a couple of words about the other story, written by E. Nelson Bridwell and drawn by Pete Costanza. In “The Touch of Life!” Jimmy gains the power to make various fictional characters come to life. Like, say, Robin Hood and Little John:
He can even start off a rumble ivolving dudes like Don Qixote, the Three Musketeers and Captain Ahab (and the aforementioned Merry Men):
His powers go beyond the realms of lore and literature — even corporate pitchmen come under his sway, like the Jolly Green Giant and his deadly corncob of doom:
Where’s Sprout?
Enough of that nonsense. It’s time for the main event, brought to our eager eyes by Otto Binder and the pulling-double-duty Costanza. And what does “Hippe Olsen’s Hate-In” have in store for us? Well, the title kind of provides a big whopping clue:
It certainly delivers what it advertises. And I would have imagined Jimmy’s naturally-grown beard to be a lot more splotchy. Anyway.
So Jimmy is off to infiltrate a local hippie community, and he in short order whips out those reknowned investigative skills of his:
The head hippie, the dream guru, is actually (surprise) a criminal who can trick people into believing that they’re dreaming while actually living their real lives. Jimmy gets the royal treatment, and soon “dreams” that he’s off to the Daily Planet. While there he has a close encounter with his chief:
Hmm.
Next he “dreams” about getting his revenge on his girl, Lucy Lane, who had turned her nose up at his new scruffy look and gone to a fancy dress ball with another man:
Hmm again. And the “Splash” bit kind of reminds me of R. Crumb’s art — or some of the material from Derf that I covered here.
Then there’s the hate-in from the cover (a cover from Neal Adams, for all you Adamsophiles out there), where the dream guru manipulates Jimmy into believing that a dream-Superman has turned his back on him. How does this hapen? Jimmy has this bright idea to spice things up by first making it appear that they’re crashing an award ceremony for Superman with a “hate-in,” but then doing a switcheroo and really having an old-fashioned love-in. What genius! The dream-Superman (the dream guru in disguise) does not take kindly to this chicanery, and Jim is crestfallen.
Jimmy’s solution for this rejection? Why, kill the dream-Superman, of course:
Jimmy makes some kryptonite beads out of the marbles (what a ridiculous explanation for them, btw) and almost does the real Superman in, but figures out the reality of the situation just in the nick of time.
I have to pause here and take issue with young Olsen — hence all my earlier “hmms.” You don’t have to be Freud or Jung or whoever to see that he has some issues with the most important people in his life. He has no problem with dreaming about punching them, tripping them, or KILLING THEM, without a whole lot — let’s be honest — of provocation for any of those deeds.
This strikes me as a problem.
Sadly, there’s no indication that Jimmy ever got any help for the deep psychoses he apparently has bottled up — the issue comes to a close shortly after his “awakening.” I would have killed to see his explanation to the big guy about, you know, TRYING TO MURDER HIM. WITH %&#*ING KRYPTONITE HIPPIE BEADS.
But we nevertheless end on a high note, one that satisfies some of my deeply held feelings in much the same way hurting those close to him satisfied Olsen’s.
This:
Yes! Yes! Perry’s clenched fist speaks for all of us!
He really is the odd man out
There’s a quick story that goes with this ad.
About a year ago I was in my favorite local comic shop and the owner, a friend whose knowledge of the comics world far outstrips my own admittedly limited cache, walked over to me with an open comic as I was browsing through some of his bins. He actually had a question for me. I stood up straight, as befits a man who’s about to make his bones and do a service to a pal.
“Do you know who this guy is?” he asked. “I can’t place him.” The book was opened to the above ad, and he was pointing to the character in the back and the middle, or the point of the V, if you will.
He had drawn a blank. And so did I. My big chance to be a know-it-all was slipping from me. If only he had asked me to ID any of the other B-list and lower characters in the ad… I grasped at the only straw I had.
“Crazy Quilt?” I said, with so little conviction it came out as more a question than a reply. I knew I was wrong.
“No. That’s not him.”
Damn.
Then a little while later I learned that this character was one of those oh-so-flickering creations of Steve Ditko’s — the Odd Man. He ran as a backup in a couple books in the late 70s, including Detective Comics. That was where I first made his acquaintance.
A day late, and a dollar short.
Just thought I’d share that.
When I’m old and decrepit I too want a wheelchair with side-firing vampire-killing darts – The Tomb of Dracula #57
I’m a bit of a skeptic when it comes to claims such as this title’s, that it’s “Comicdom’s #1 Fear Magazine.” I’m susceptible to being scared by movies and even by straight print books, but no comic has ever managed to truly give my the willies. Something about the combination of words and pictures renders scares inert.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate an ambitious little story well told.
“The Forever Man” was put together by Marv Wolfman (a man whose name is either incredibly appropriate or inappropriate for this title, depending on how you look at it) Gene Colan and Tom Palmer, and tells the tale of a man who, in 1792 India, learns of his past and future lives and his ultimate terminus:
We then see his various lives and the always violent ways that he meets his (temporary) end — duels, fights over cards, wars, safes falling on his head… Well, not the last one, but you get the idea. Then we come to his current Boston insurance salesman self, a gent by the name of Gideon Smith. The insurance biz seems to be a secure line of work, one that will keep him out of harm’s way.
Then one winter night he’s hit by a car. Oops.
In a parallel story, Dracula is rummaging around Boston (ulp!) of the present, looking for someone to feed on. He drops onto a young girl, but his meal is interrupted by a couple of policemen. He does not take kindly to this:
Dracula gets his revenge, but not before the cop manages to badly burn his face with a cross and render him unconscious.
This sets up this rather nice reveal as Gideon wakes up in his hospital bed:
Is it customary to let burn victims stay in the clothes that they were admitted in?
When the doctors finally remove the bandages, Mr. Smith freaks out. That face! Dracula then sucks some of the doctors’ blood to regain his strength and moves to make his escape. Then the coincidences really start to pile up:
Yes, the vampire hunters are in the same hospital. So did Quincy Harker’s darts work?:
“I’m comin’, ‘Lizbeth!”
Dracula returns to finish the job on Gideon Smith:
The cross causes Drac to turn tail and run (or flap his wings), and we’re left with this final look at Gideon:
I’m tempted to point out that he wasn’t actually killed by “the dead man,” but it’s my New Year’s resolution to not quibble as much. We’ll see how long that lasts. I guess we could interpret this as a final “mental” death, so I’ll let it slide.
I liked this issue. It had a Tales from the Darkside feel to it that I really dug, with elements from the Tomb of Dracula universe grafted onto the the story of the Forever Man. It had that Reese’s chocolate/peanut butter combo thing going for it. It works.
I’ve made no secret of my love for Gene Colan’s work, and no title is more associated with his name than this one. He (and Palmer — almost) worked the entire run of the series, and while in lesser hands such familiarity could lead to ruts and repetition, in Colan’s it spawns a greater aptitude and facility with the characters and their environs. The quality of this issue, much nearer to the end of the series than the start, certainly backs that up. Supernatural horror was Colan’s wheelhouse, and this title was his wheelhouse’s wheelhouse. Wolfman deserves his due as well, even if Dracula’s bombastic fulminations occasionally have him sounding more like Snidely Whiplash than a dignified Count.
And now it’s time to go plan my future cherried out wheelchair.
Heed thy siren’s call
I had one of the later iterations of this device. It emitted a variety of shrill wails that vaguely approximated those that might be respectively produced by police cars, ambulances and fire trucks. It was loud enough to be Ragnarok’s herald, and I think my father finally got fed up with it and buried it in the backyard one day while I wasn’t looking.
Just what every neighborhood needs — kids with sirens on their bikes.
I hate hippies, Part 1 of 2 – The Flash #185
This is the first of a couple of Silver Age DC comics I plucked out that feature hippies in a less than favorable light. And by “less than favorable light” I mean “how I envision hippies all the time.” They rub me the wrong way, and seem like just the sort of folks who’d turn on a swell guy like the Flash with karate chops and leg biting. I mean, really. Who wants to be around a bunch of spaced out peaceniks with questionable hygiene who… who…
GET A HAIRCUT!
“The Threat of the High-Rise Buildings” starts with Barry Allen and that frigid bitch wife of his on their second honeymoon in Paris. You’d think that Iris might tone down her frosty, holier than thou attitude in la ville lumière, but nooooo:
I don’t know if any of you out there have read Sinclair Lewis’ Dodsworth, but if you have, Iris is giving of one heck of a Fran vibe.
So what was it that finally dammed up her nagging?:
That’ll do it.
The Eiffel Tower, along with the other tall structures across the globe (like the Empire State Building), are being sucked up into space. You don’t see that every day, and Barry decides to investigate. He hooks up with the Parisian police, who speak with the usual “ze” instead of “the” and the like — you half-expect Inspector Clouseau to be around every corner. It’s not long before the E.T.s responsible for the doings appear, and Iris gets herself sucked up into one of their ships. Barry changes into the Flash and sprints into action — the aliens use magnetism for their defense (that’s also how they vacuumed up the buildings) and are able to repel the military’s bullets, but Flash finagles a way on board to rescue Iris.
But beware, Scarlet Speedster, there are hippies lurking.
A uber-hippie named Le Loup (a better choice of moniker than Le Cochon, I suppose) wants the magnet weapon so he can better rob banks. He’s a hippie criminal Frenchman, folks. His insufferability may run off the charts at any second.
He rounds up some easily led long-hairs, arms them and leads them to the trusting aliens:
How do they plan to wipe out the ultra-advanced visitors?:
Le Loup didn’t count on the Flash, who easily dispatches the arrows and sends all the foul-smelling hippies scurrying like cockroaches.
What about the aliens, you ask? To keep it simple, they’re from Titan and they had been bombarded by TV and radio signals from Earth and sucked up the tall buildings (and their broadcasting apparatus) because of disturbances the signals had been causing. Now that they know Earth isn’t a threat (no thanks to Le Loup and his hippies), they return the structures to their original spots and Barry and Iris can get on with their dreadful vacation. And the people who were inside the buildings when they were sucked up into airless space? Well, it turns out that there weren’t any people in the buildings. Because it was Sunday. Yes, that’s the explanation for that.
To paraphrase Chinatown, “It’s the Silver Age, Jake.”
I was hoping for a little more vile, dirty, evil hippie nonsense in this comic as was promised so awesomely by the cover, and Frank Robbins’ story was a bit sillier than I can normally stomach. Ross Andru and Mike Esposito’s art was nice, as usual, but not enough to rescue the dim plot, though I did like their design for the yellow, befuddled, bug-eyed aliens.
Don’t worry, there’s going to be more hippie nonsense in the second part of this two-part posting, when everyone’s favorite red-headed whipping boy gets his groove on.
Happy New Year, everyone. Even all you hippies out there.
Turn up the juice, Hal! – Green Lantern #106
As one might guess from the title of this post and the action on the above cover, I’m a bit ambivalent (to say the least) about Oliver Queen. While I respect the character’s pluck and balls of steel — he does, after all, work in a world of superhumans who could crush him with hardly any effort at all — his penchant for dismissing as fascists anyone whose politics are anywhere to the right of his extreme-left stands can wear thin rather quickly. Sometimes I want to ram one of those stupid little boxing glove arrows of his right in his ear.
And, on top of all that, to me he’s always looked an awful lot like Sam the Snowman from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer:
The green haberdashery, the whiskers, the little hats with feathers in them perched on top of their heads, the dark, shadowy eyes — need I go on? Since Rudolph is a treasured relic of my childhood, perhaps that UNCANNY resemblance is Ollie’s saving grace.
On to this issue. “Pull up an iceblock,” if you will.
The action in “Panic…In High Places and Low” continues from the previous issue, and finds Green Arrow, Black Canary and a couple of other random souls stuck on a snowy mountain and trapped in a downed plane. To make matters worse, they’re confronted by a hellish monster (one that looks a sort of like a Gene Colan-drawn beast from an issue of Night Force I looked at a while back):
There’s not a lot of Plan B when the arrows don’t work, is there?
The other half of this verdant duo is dragging the villain Sonar back to the crook’s homeland of Modora. Sonar is quickly acquitted of all wrongdoing, which is the opening of a rapid series of blunders for Hal Jordan:
Yeah. Let the corrupt Euro-trash bums lead you down into a dungeon on trumped-up charges. And you have a power ring because…?
Oh wait, you don’t:
Fortune favors the moronic, however, and a well-timed avalanche gets Hal his ring back and apparently his wits, too:
Things aren’t going all that well for Green Arrow and Canary, but some well-timed assistance from Air Wave brings Hal to the rescue:
Hal feeds the monster some calcium (turns out that the tentacled blob is Itty, an old friend of his) and the sated beast heads on its merry way.
Denny O’Neil wrote this one, with Mike Grell and Bruce Patterson teaming for the art chores. I like Grell’s art quite a bit, but no matter what he’s drawing his pencils always scream “WARLORD!” to me. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s sort of the comic book equivalent of typecasting, I guess. And while I normally enjoy O’Neill’s scripts, Green Lantern letting himself be manacled and de-ringed was a bridge too far for me.
I’ll let Mr. Queen’s long-lost twin sing us out:
I know what this ad is trying to say, but isn’t it all backwards?
So Aunt Minerva wants to grab control of the airwaves to manipulate the minds of youth… You know, like companies do every day . Except her message, the one that’s supposed to seal her domination of the world, is for kids to NOT like Twinkies. Step two seems to be missing in this three step plan, but if that’s how she want to tackle things, more power to her.
Thankfully Captain Marvel is there to put a stop to her machinations and to ensure that future generations will grow disgusting and fat on mass-produced cream-filled confections.
Bravo, Cap. Bravo. I think. And don’t let Mayor Bloomberg catch you.
Are you a good nurse or a naughty nurse? – Soap Opera Romances #1
My grandmother was a nurse. Though she retired long before I was born (she and I shared a birthday 67 years apart, by the way), she remained the family medical authority throughout all of my upbringing. Whenever I had signs of a fever or any impending illness, I’d be driven the three miles to her house and brought before her like some sick tribesman dragged in front of an aged witch doctor, and once there she’d check my throat glands and peer into my mouth and tell me to say “ahhhhh” and, finally, pronounce whether I had signs of strep throat or some other dreadful malady. If I did, it was off to the doctor with me. She was a gatekeeper in that regard, the H.R. Haldeman of family medicine.
So this one is kind of for her.
This series was a last gasp for the pure romance genre, and it only reprints Nurse Betsy Crane comics from the ’60s. So while the cover date may be 1982, the ethos at play is more 1962.
The story (with pencils from Charles Nicholas) opens with a nurse coworker of Betsy’s (Diane) out for a swim on her day off. She promptly goes into damsel in distress mode when she gets in over her head, but thankfully there’s a rugged he-man with Clark Gable shoulders around to rescue her and carry her to safety:
And he’s a widower with a young daughter. There’s a lot to love here, ladies.
After the introductions are made, things take a brief, creepy turn (from my p.o.v., not the story’s):
Hopefully, when Jeff and Diane are later locked in an amorous embrace, Jeff doesn’t accidentally proclaim, “Oh, how I love you, Deceased Wife!”
Betsy enters the story when she’s giving vaccinations to Jeff and Joy. Joy’s goes just fine, but Jeff gets irritated, snaps, and then storms out of the hospital. Later, when confronted by Diane, there’s a bit of a scene:
Sure she isn’t.
Betsy turns P.I. (watch out, Magnum) and tries to uncover the reason for this sudden change in behavior. The big eureka moment comes when she talks to Joy:
The change in mood, the hydrophobia… Betsy figures it out — rabies! Eek! Being a medical layperson, I always thought that once you started showing rabies symptoms you were toast. I could very well be wrong, because according to this comic one can be cured with injections and a lot of tender loving care. And a comic book could never be wrong.
Oh, and Joy’s rabid dog and the animal that infected it are hunted down and killed. How cheerful.
Jeff makes a full recovery thanks to Betsy’s intervention and a doctor’s ministrations, and there’s a hint that he perhaps feels a little too much gratitude towards his nurse savior:
But all is right with the world — Jeff and Diane are once again reunited in love, and Joy gets a new friend, a dog replacement to go along with her father’s dead-wife stand-in:
The story’s followed by a few pages on the fulfilling joys of nursing (leaving out the bedpan unpleasantness), and then there’s this little unrelated one-page ditty — something about this era, with its moustaches and navels and free love, always makes me think of porn:
One final note on the comic — in a previous post I noted the incongruity of a fly fishing advertisment in a romance comic. This one is riddled with bodybuilding ads, common enough in regular comics but sore thumbs in this one. Here’s a whole page of them:
Just what every little girl who dreams of romance wants — bulging quadriceps. I can perhaps see the “Power Bracelets” catching on with the fairer sex, but I’m not so sure about the “Power Krusher.”
All in all, this is one of the more enjoyable romance comics I’ve read through. But I haven’t read many, so that’s not saying much.
My nurse grandmother passed away almost five years ago, a couple of weeks after the last of our shared birthdays. I miss her. She had shrunk to about the size of Yoda by the end, but she still had a laugh the size of Texas, and when I get sick I always harken back to her terse all-business examinations of my throat.
I’m not sure she ever cured anyone’s rabies, though.
Santa Kingpin is comin’ to town – Spider-Man: Christmas in Dallas
‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the blog…
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and, perhaps most importantly, Happy Festivus to one and all. It’s time for the obligatory holiday-themed blog post, and for this one I thought I’d stray a bit off the beaten path with my fodder. Hence this comic. It’s one of a series of issues that were inserted in various Sunday newspapers across the country back in the day, and it’s chock full of local advertisements (more on that in a second), the umpteenth recapitulation of Spider-Man’s origin, and an original story. This one’s centered in Dallas, home of the Times Herald newspaper — the feature story (brought to us by Jim Salicrup, Alan Kupperburg and Mike Esposito) is actually a pseudo-sequel to an earlier insert set in that burg, one that had Spidey teaming with (*gasp*) the Dallas Cowboys. I think I’ll hold that one until sometime around the Super Bowl.
On with the show.
The story reason for Spider-Man heading to Dallas is some Christmas charity party with billionaires that J. Jonah Jameson gets invited to (perhaps to fill their “flattop a-hole” quota), and he drags Peter Parker along to snap some pics. Before they head out Spidey stops by the Bugle to give Jonah a unique brand of Christmas cheer:
Soon Jameson and Parker touch down in Texas and head to the charity ball. Meanwhile, the rent-a-Santa hired for the event is waylaid by a familiar face:
Why did Mr. Fisk bonk Santa, you ask?:
L. O. L.
Kingpin wants to hold the various billionaires in attendance for ransom, but Peter makes a quick costume change and dukes it out with him in his Spidey guise. Their tussle ends with some help from an inventor Spidey met in his previous Dallas adventure and that inventor’s anti-gravity device:
“FORWARD MY MAAAAAAAAAiiiiiiiiiillllllllll……..”
Problem solved, and the poor little billionaires are free to enjoy their holiday festivities.
Perhaps the funniest part of this whole comic is the way Spider-Man is co-opted into shilling for assorted local Dallas stores and their respective wares. For instance…
Doors:
TVs, boots and jewelry (with a personal appearance at the boot store):
Spidey isn’t in this ad, but I couldn’t resist the chance to showcase the VHS predecessor, the videodisk:
All you Apple drones who shout “How high?” whenever Steve Jobs says “jump,” be warned — one day your precious iPads and iPhones will seem just as ridiculous. Even if you don’t watch Flashdance on them.
On with the ads.
You can climb into the hot tub with your favorite web-slinger:
And yet more boots, with more appearances by Spidey:
How’d you like to be the guy on the Spider-Man/boot store circuit… Sheesh.
Have a good one, folks.
Rom: The Spaceknight Who Fell to Earth
I arrived late to the game with Rom, but, had I been reading comics when this house ad made the rounds, I definitely would have added the Silver Spaceknight to my list of musts. “Blazing new paths of glory” indeed.
How much do you want to bet that the phrase “Only dopes use dope!” worms its way into this comic? – The New Teen Titans vs. Drugs
The is the for-sale version of DC’s second 1980’s anti-drug comic featuring the Teen Titans — the free versions were given away in schools. I think I have a copy of the other one hanging around somewhere. Perhaps that can be fodder for a future post.
This comic, though a superhero “Just say no” diatribe, has more of the feel of a romance comic. The main character, a recovering addict, is seduced away from a nice girl by a pink-haired floozy who shares her drugs with him and only uses the lad to make her pusher boyfriend jealous, and all the while the Titans (Cyborg, Starfire, Kid Flash, et al.) flit in and out of the story. That’s about all you need to know about the plot. Here are some highlights of the entire issue, including the feature, “Battle!,” written by Marv Wolfman with art by Ross Andru and Joe Giella …
The inside front cover has then-First Lady Nancy Reagan’s seal of approval:
We can debate the effectiveness of old people telling young people not to do drugs, much in the same way we can roll our eyes at Michelle Obama’s thin-rich-person spiel in favor of organic gardening and against sugary drinks. But it’s the thought that counts, I suppose.
This one is riddled with endless moralizing sermons from the Titans. It seems that every time they show up there’s a lecture in the offing, even when they’re in the midst of real honest-to-goodness crimefighting. To wit:
And:
Yawn.
The best part of the entire issue is a cocaine spill in the school bathroom and its immediate aftermath:
Visions of Barney Gumble sucking spilled beer out of shag carpeting are dancing through my head.
The issue ends with some exercises that kids can do to develop their anti-drug repertoire. Here’s one:
It’s kind of like those old Mad Libs. Remember those, and how much fun it was as a kid to insert as many profanities as possible into each sentence? Here I’m tempted to put “Go f*** yourself!” into every word balloon.
I’m skeptical, as always, of the efficacy of comics of this ilk. Its heart is in the right place, though.
If you come across this sight, then RUN IN THE OTHER DIRECTION – The Terminator #8
Here’s some knowledge for life… If you ever see a cyborg from the future coming at you piloting a fanboat, then that, my friend, is when you need to HEAD FOR ZEE HILLS. I’m not even throwing the gigantic machine gun into the mix.
The great Norm Breyfogle, whose stupendous Batman work I once praised here, created this cover, but I was bitterly disappointed when I found that he didn’t handle the art chores inside. That, combined with the fact that Arnold and Linda Hamilton’s ripped arms are no where to be found on the inside, kept me from wading through the story. The latter is kind of a problem with all Terminator comics, I guess, but I thought that cover was cool enough to merit a quick post. Come to think of it, most of the Terminator covers from Now Comics were pretty nice.
“Da moah contact I have wid humans, da moah I luhn.”
Jared
blog into mystery 