Sunday, July 25, 2010

Memories of My Comic Book Golden Era

People ask all the time what comics I read growing up, and I remember most comics I've read, and specifically eras of comics I enjoyed. But this period, from age 5 to age 22 was the period in which everything I read I seriously got a thrill out of.

((PLEASE CLICK UPON THE PICS TO MAKE THEM BIGGER))

1968 Brave and Bold, Spectre and Batman fighting in Chinatown... I was on the way home from the doctor with a bad bee sting, Mother knows best, so I got a comic to feel better.



1969 The Wacky Races, bought for a trip with my brother and father ice fishing. I didn't quite understand why people would stand outside in winter to catch fish, and, I still don't.



1970 Christmas shopping, I saw my hero Underdog at Daly News and Drug, and demanded it. I received it. And I got my order form into the Underdog fan club and got a ring and t-shirt of the great hero as well.



1971 Two week summer vacation at a cabin at Fish Lake. What do you do when you are hot and tired? Sit in the cool of the dark cabin and read comics. I still dig Valkyrie.



1972 March or so, brother and I woke up to learn that my mother was gone because my father had had a massive heart attack in Milwaukee while on a business trip. Fortunately for him, he had it next to a hospital, with a special cardiac care unit. We visited, I read Turok and was amazed.



1973 I had a broken leg. My wonderful brother bought me my first X-Men. And oh yes, IT WAS GOOD.



1974 Summer bus trip to Minneapolis with brother and mother. GI Combat was my ticket to excitement.



1975 Nearly every book I read was about World War II, so a comic based in that era with Submariner and Cap? OH HELL YES!



1976 The Justice Society became my favorite Superhero group ever, so a reprint with a complete story and another with Batman and Superman to boot? Oh yes very fun reading. My copy got hail damage walking home but I still enjoyed it.



1977 Master of Kung Fu was better than any Bruce Lee film, or James Bond film, it combined the two, with perfect art and kewl stories and writing. Issue 48 was brilliance. Truly. Cinematic, big, wild, and completely awesome.



1978 was a time when I was starting to follow talents as well as characters, and Jack Kirby was my hero creator. Devil Dinosaur is funky, silly even, but I enjoyed it. I was beginning to learn how different I was than most of my friends and all of my "enemies", comics became a refuge for me.



1979 Again, the JSA rules. I was now living in a new town, with new friends, but I still sought refuge in the super heroics.



1980 New Teen Titans prove to me that comics are for adults as well. This stuff was great. I was a sophomore in high school, my grades were bad, but I was making friends, and life started to improve.



1981 A 27 page story that brings to an end the first full cycle of stories of the Warlord. Mike Grell was great (is great) but had balls aplenty to take his story into new frontiers by putting a bullet in the noggin of one of his most important characters of the saga. Stunning.



1982 In May I graduated from high school and moved on to university. Alone, depressed, I returned to a friend, comics, only to find a brilliant cover by George Perez, with the poopy art of Don Heck inside of a Justice League of America.



1983 Roy Thomas and the JSA. My first year of university nearly ended with my suicide, I was lost and depressed, but, I still liked the good old comics.



1984 While I was a Legion of Superheroes fan I had great hopes in 1984 when the Legion got its prestige series. I was horrified and wounded when my favorite hero Karate Kid died in issue #4. Nonetheless, it was a good run. University studies and female studies interrupted my comic buying, but I still loved them.



1985 Jack Kirby returned to end the story of the New Gods, with a fabulous looking graphic novel. It was ok but there were issues with it. On the other hand, I had a girl friend of sorts, though we wouldn't date technically until 1986. Then we would marry in 1988 June.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

WARBIRDS OF MARS!



Announcing Warbirds of Mars, a thrilling Neo-pulp/noir scifi WebComic by Doc and Kane! Warbirds of Mars

Created and illustrated by SCOTT P. ‘DOC’ VAUGHN and written by KANE GILMOUR. In 1944 the ‘martians’ (as the invaders are called) attacked the earth and super-ceded WWII, occupying much of the major cities of the world. Man must struggle to re-unite the ragged/ dispersed armies of the planet Earth in the hopes of fighting back with new technology.

The year is now 1948 and one brave band of resistance fighters will make the
difference between a free humanity and a world ruled by invaders from the stars!

The first pages are now available to read! Subscribe today! Click the link ---> Warbirds of Mars

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Toil, Labor, Sweat, and Art

Who we are as a culture, as a people, has always been determined by our willingness to work. Those who drive cars do not do so with magic beans to fuel their vehicles, but gasoline pumped from the ground, in vehicles made from steel and other materials, mined from the ground. Every thing we do, comes from labor. And so does art, but especially so, when the art reflects our reality, of labor.



Artist Diego Rivera
Migrant workers

“. . . when the farm workers strike and their strike is successful, the employers go to Mexico and have unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers to break the strike. And, for over 30 years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has looked the other way and assisted in the strikebreaking. I do not remember one single instance in 30 years where the Immigration Service has removed strikebreakers. . . .The employers use professional smugglers to recruit and transport human contraband across the Mexican border for the specific act of strikebreaking . . .”
Cesar Chavez



Elmer Brown
WPA Cleveland Mural

“Labor is man's greatest function. He is nothing, he can do nothing, he can achieve nothing, he can fulfill nothing, without working.”
Orville Dewey



Dorothea Lange
Sloss-Sheffield Steel and Iron Company

“Labour was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.”
Adam Smith



Dorothea Lange
Migrant Mother

“Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb,
and as he comes, so he departs.
He takes nothing from his labor
that he can carry in his hand.”
King Solomon



Soviet Union Agriculture worker Propaganda poster
"Day after day, life becomes even happier!"

“For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of the labor to its own produce.”
Henry George



Boris Jeremejewitsch Wladimirskij
Miner

“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.



Vladimir Il'ich Malagis
Steel Workers

“The workers asked only for bread and a shortening of the long hours of toil. The agitators gave them visions. The police gave them clubs.”
Mother Jones



Lee Lawrie
Atlas

“Human history is work history. The heroes of the people are work heroes.”
Meridel Le Sueur



Yevgeny Vuchetich
Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares

“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”
Thomas Merton



Lewis Hine
Power house mechanic working on steam pump

“Such hath it been--shall be--beneath the sun The many still must labour for the one.”
Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron)