Big takeaway from this ad? Gentlemen, Doctor Fate now has a magnificent set of breasts!
Doctor Fate has always had one of the best costumes going. The royal blue, the regal cape and the gold helmet have ever placed him among the more distinctive heroes in the DC pantheon. The only thing he’s needed? Boobs. Read more…
Trading Card Set of the Week – Mork & Mindy (1978, Topps)
Robin Williams has a new TV show debuting this week. The Crazy Ones, co-starring the Sarah Michelle Gellar (still trying to recreate that old elusive Buffy magic), looks like your typical bland network cringe-fest, made doubly so by Williams’ presence. Not because of the quality of his mirth-making, but because of what a return to television means. Wasn’t he a movie star of some significance at one point? Isn’t having a TV series, even in this age of TV-as-art ascendance, a bit of a comedown, a variation on seeing the same people on the way down that you saw on the way up?
To Williams’ credit, he’s been fairly up front about the reason for doing it, couched of course in verbiage about how excited he is about the project blah blah blah: he needs the money. Multiple divorces will do that to a man, even one with more money than most of us can imagine, much less split with an ex.
Reasons aside, we all wish Williams the best, and remember fondly those old stand-up routines of his, when he was coked up out of his mind, bedecked in rainbow suspenders and romping about a stage like a human dynamo. To commemorate his return to regular series television, today we briefly examine a product that commemorated his first foray: Topps’ Mork & Mindy trading cards. Read more…
Watching Steven Spielberg’s sprawling 1941 is an odd experience. You find yourself thinking “This is supposed to be a comedy, right?” on more than one occasion during the long, desperate stretches where nary a laugh can be found. The director of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had no fear at that point of a lackluster effort derailing his career, but still, there it is: the other 1970s movie starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, the one that isn’t funny. Jake and Elwood Blues are/were not amused.
That said, one wishes that Hollywood would shuck modern focus grouped marketing and go back to promotional materials like the two-page spread you see above, eschewing the bland, photoshopped, Sturzanesque yawn-fests that have become the standard for film posters. Even if it ain’t pretty, you can’t help but stare at it for a little while.
To: James Spader, Re: Ultron – The Avengers #68
The announcement of Ultron as the big HE’S IN THE TITLE villain in the next Avengers movie came as a bit of a surprise. The senses-shattering credits cameo of Thanos meant that many expected the Mad Titan to be the Big Bad for Marvel’s 2015 follow-up for their unfathomably successful 2012 hit. But there was always a question about using Starfox’s brother in the second movie of a three flick cycle: Wouldn’t that be setting off the big fireworks before the grand finale, before the culmination of the three-picture run? Read more…
This Thom McAn ad will make you either want to buy the shoes or savagely pummel the people selling them
This ad is a little late for back to school shopping for the kids — more than half a century late, actually — but it deserves to be posted just to gawk at the stunningly, teeth-achingly awful hep-talk within. Granted, Thom McAn, his pretentious “h” and his deformed silent elf sidekick are nowhere to be seen, but still — the infuriating rhymes are enough to put you off your lunch. One doesn’t know if the football player on top is really trying to couple “semester” with the made up “besta,” but he isn’t doing the dumb jock stereotype any favors either way.
The shoes don’t look that bad, though.
The End of the New (Universe), Part 1 – The Pitt
There have been many attempts to form cross-title comic book universes, those boutiques that propelled Marvel and DC to unexplored heights. Some, like Valiant, shine brightly like blazing comets before they lose their momentum and crash to the ground, victims of the gravity that makes comics such an unforgiving medium. Others aren’t even that lucky, and vanish almost as fast as they cohere, relegated to quarter bins and lining birdcages. Its tough up there on the industry’s macro level.
Most of the time, these crossover startups come from upstart publishers. Defiant. Continuity. Malibu. The list goes on. It’s rare that one of the big two, who have coasted on the rolling snowballs of their shared universes since time immemorial, get in on the action. But Marvel tried in a big way in the 1980s with their New Universe, intended to be a more cerebral, vérité-oriented and creator-driven line. For a time it held on — if by its fingertips. But eventually it too fell by the wayside, despite Marvel’s heavyweight backing.
It didn’t go out without a literal bang of sorts, or without a number of thick, square-bound comics that at least guided it like “Sully” Sullenberger into as easy a crash landing as possible. We’re going to look at them here on the blog, in a trilogy of posts called “The End of the New (Universe)” — yes, with capitalization and pretentious parentheses. Up first: The Pitt, the big event that ushered in the final days of the grand experiment. Read more…
Do not purchase anything from the man in this ad, even (especially?) a Bag of Magic
Though the disembodied spokeshead in this ad bears a passing resemblance to Alan Moore, comic book deity and notable practitioner of magic, he doesn’t strike one as a person to inspire trust in a product. He looks like someone who’d toss you in the back of a van and end the evening covering your corpse with lime in a crawl space. Or maybe, like Killer Bob in Twin Peaks, he’d put you in his “death bag” — forget the “Bag of Magic.” Move along, kids of America, that’s what I’m getting at. Leave Rasputin up there be.
The days of pulling a lame Baby Ruth out of a hat seem so simple, so pure, and so very long ago.
The 1950s Stewie Griffin appears in this quiz pulled from an old The Fox and the Crow comic
The oblong head and scant hair make this emcee somewhat of a forerunner to the megalomaniacal Family Guy infant. The natty attire means he’s most reminiscent of Stewie as William Shatner during his incredibly preposterous “Rocket Man” performance. The quiz? Pure bonus.
Trading Card Set of the Week – Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992, Topps)
I want you to bring me, before nightfall, a set of postmortem knives.
An autopsy? On Lucy?
No, no, no. Not exactly. I just want to cut off her head and take out her heart.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s innovative, bizarre and at times flat as week old soda early 1990s horror film, was and is a veritable cinematic cornucopia. It’s a horn of plenty of good and bad: of stellar acting and of bad acting, of stunning visuals and campy line recitals, of posh and gore. From the opening sequence, with impaled Turks in silhouette and the titular Count wearing bizarre meat armor, you know you’re in for what will at least be a strange interlude. The vampire of vampires may have had better incarnations onscreen, but never one quite like this. It was a new take on the character, though one that stuck close to the narrative structure of the original tome, fittingly so since the author’s name was right there in the movie title.
Dracula, long a subject of comic book tales, was perfectly suited for a comic adaptation — even in this strange instance. The company that got that license? Not Marvel, who had given more life to the undead fiend than anyone else over the years (even reviving the dead undead), but Topps, whose bubble gum card portfolio was at that time was bleeding (no pun) over into comics. The adaptation miniseries featured art by Mike Mignola, and the deep shadows always present in his work were perfectly suited for Vlad Dracula’s nocturnal milieu — and with the equally deep colors, said art foreshadowed the look of Mignola’s Hellboy, a character who would debut the very next year.
Of course, in marvelous corporate synergy, Topps uncorked a Dracula trading card set to go right along with the newsstand fodder. Why the hell not. Presenting Topps’ Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Read more…
There are roughly a dozen odd things going on in this 1950s baseball-themed Tootsie Rolls ad
Are there twenty guys playing the infield? Are they at tee ball depth? Are there dugouts at this ballpark? Umps? Is it next to an ocean? Is the vendor on the field? Is he on giant Uncle Sam stilts? Is that a cookie dough sized sleeve of Tootsie Roll he’s holding? Are the kids up in heaven or something? Are there any adults in the crowd? Is this “Play Hooky” day at the stadium? Ad infinitum.
When Hulky met Supey – Incredible Hulk vs. Superman
Intercompany crossovers almost never work. Yes, there’s an initial burst of excitement as two or more famed characters meet and duke it out, but the built-in reticence to have any events of lasting import spring out of it — since both sides of the equation will henceforth be sequestered — limits the potential. One needs only to look as far as the first and biggest to have an illustration of the rule: Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man. In that classic tale, the two superheroes lived in the same “imaginary” world yet had never met up at the start of the story (despite both having established crimefighting bona fides). It felt fake. It felt forced. These things always do. They’re events, but they’re non-events everyplace but the cash-box. They’re infuriating in their way.
Usually the only way any juice is squeezed out of the rind is when those crafting the book just say “screw it” and go crazy. Or take the concept and shake it up a bit, turn it on its head, as John Byrne did with his Batman/Captain America WWII plot. Or even Green Lantern Versus Aliens, though that rapidly collapsed under the weight of its own artifice.
Yet sometimes, in spite of the limitations, in spite of the ingrained transience, an intercompany meet-and-greet is at least a pleasant diversion, a pill of encapsulated nostalgia and old-fashioned storytelling mastery — a feast for the eyes, if not for the intellect. Enter Roger Stern’s, Steve Rude’s and Al Milgrom’s Incredible Hulk vs. Superman. Read more…
Don’t let their staid portrait fool you — Def Leppard is fully poised to rock the living hell out of us all
I was one of the millions of young men for whom Def Leppard’s Hysteria was the greatest thing in the world. We were legion. Read more…
Dubble Bubble: Gum and Anti-Bullying Device
Fleer’s Dubble Bubble wasn’t just a gum so hard it could rip your teeth out by the roots. It could also serve as a MacGyver-like tool to put a neighborhood bully (who looks like a young, unbearded Bluto/Brutus) in his place. Versatile. And hey, you don’t need Rosie Grier and a racist Ray Milland to make The Thing with Two Heads — just a few sticks of Dubble Bubble! Neat!
Gaze not too long into Hansel’s eyes, lest Hansel’s eyes gaze also into you – Hansel and Gretel
In filmed puppetry and stop-motion animation there’s a fine line between whimsy and nigh-unspeakable creepiness. The eponymous ape in the original King Kong? Great. The elves, reindeer, bearded prospectors and bumbles of Rudolph’s Christmastime classic? Magical. The stone-faced cast of Gerry Anderson’s colorful Captain Scarlet? A little off-putting, but the closing theme song more than makes up for it.
And then you come to something like the 1954 stop-motion film Hansel and Gretel: An Opera Fantasy. And you look into the eyes of its titular protagonists. And you know what it is to experience true terror.
Ganthet will show you Green Lanterns in a handful of galaxies. Or something.
Remember the original house ads for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series? The ones that had the titular Morpheus holding up his hand in front of the reader, with grains of sand swirling about? The one with the tagline “I will show you terror in a handful of dust”? This one? Or this one? Well, this house ad for the Larry Niven/John Byrne tale of Ganthet, one of the Green Lanterns’ more individualistic Guardians, is reminiscent. Maybe the folks at DC were in a hurry just dusted off the relatively recent template.
So Ganthet would show you Green Lanterns in a handful of galaxies. Or galaxies in a handful of stars. Or galaxies in a handful of dust. Or terror in a handful of Green Lanterns. Whatever. Something pilfered from T.S. Eliot, anyway.
Jared
blog into mystery 