C0m!x & mE

[NoJo]

One of my earliest memories is this:

I’m standing in my brothers room and pick up a paperback book off the floor. It’s filled with pictures. Two images horrify me, so much so that I carry them with me for life:

1. A man makes a giant vertical cut in a wild-eyed boys’ head, splitting it like an apple. The boy’s body convulses horribly;

2. A terrified man, his face lumpy with sticky sweat, sticks a cotton bud in his ear.

(Doubtless the second of these images was memorable to the three-year-old me because at that time I suffered from chronic and painful ear infections, for which I would receive frequent medication, and identified strongly with the man’s terror).

Many years later, well, nine to be exact, I could finally identify the book as “Inside Mad”, the third paperback collection of Mad Comics.

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/franknstein.jpg

By that time, I had become a devotee of the insane, iconoclastic and above all SEXY artwork of the early 1950’s Mad’s artistic triumvirate of Wallace Wood, Jack Davis and Bill Elder.

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/starchie.jpg

Mad Comics were a joy to me – they had all the irreverence and absurdity I loved in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books, but they had more besides: They had SEX. This was the period of brassy, pneumatic women – the era of Marilyn Monroe’s nudie calendar, of Jane Russell and of Bettie Page, so Mad’s sexy women were dirty.

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/blackandbluehawks.jpg

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/3-dimensions.jpg

Wallace Wood’s girls, in particular, stimulated my youthful domme fetish. I longed to meet a real-life “Lois Pain” , the high-heeled cold-hearted bitch, from “Superduperman”. Maybe I could one day date Little Orphan Annie, dressed up in her tight skirt and pearl necklace. Oh yeah. Thank you Wallace.

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Superduperman.jpg

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/LittleOrphanMelvin.jpg

 

[NoJo]

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/tintin_prisoners_of_the_sun_s.jpg

As a teenager, and even into my thirties, I used to dream Tintin. Really. I would dream a series of frames from a weird, vaguely menacing story from an imaginary Tintin book. And in my dream, I was there reading it, and I’d have this thrill of having discovered a new hitherto unknown Tintin book. Although I had long possessed all the Tintin books Hergé had ever done, I still had a hope that maybe he had secretly published another one.

Even now I sometimes impulsively enter some empty out-of-the-way bookshop, standing in a sad parade in some quiet and hopeless semi-residential suburb, although I do it with only the shadow of a hope of discovering a new Tintin Book.

When I’m doing the dishes, I make up whole Tintin books, with really quite good plots. I tried my hand at drawing one once, but like every other attempt I’ve seen at copying Hergé’s style, it was an abject failure.

As a kid I used to go to France on holiday, and in those days most of the Tintins were only available in French. I would happily buy and “read” these French Tintins, though I only got one out of every three words or so.

In France, I discovered, Tintin had some imitators: My favourite was Spirou et Fantasio – who inhabited a more urban, gritty Paris , populated by girls on motor scooters, heavy-eyed beatniks and chain-smoking hoodlums, thugs and street walkers.

Another pair of French usurpers, Asterix and Obelix, were very successful, and of course, brilliant. But to me none came close to the world of Tintin and Captain Haddock – the intrepid hero and his fallible but loyal companion.

 

[NoJo]

The cover of the second Pink Floyd album used a frame from Marvel Comics Strange Tales #158: The Living Tribunal shows Doctor Strange the past, present and future of the earth in one mind-blowing full-page “splash”. Full-page splashes were a new and far-out thing back in 1967, and Doctor Strange was a new and far-out hero.

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/dr_strange_and_clea_s.jpg

Invented, like all the other Marvel Heroes, by Stan Lee, he was different from the rest of the marvel stable: He smoked! He was the first hero to share a real kiss with a real girl-friend! He was not a muscle-bound Jock, but a lean, older man with silver temples! He didn’t fight with his fists, he used the power of his mind (unleashed, of course, in Tibet by a white-haired sage) In other words, he was way cooool.

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/dr_strange_full_page_s.jpg

As a skinny nine-year-old with a little fat Jewish father, I knew there was no way I was going to grow up to be like Thor or Captain America or any of the usual Vic Tanny gym members that packed the pages of Marvel and DC comics . Besides, those guys were all so STRAIGHT. The Human Torch probably listened to Lawrence Welk. But Doc Strange would probably dig The Brandenburg Concertos or Ravi Shankar’s Ragas.

I still have a plastic-wrapped copy of Strange Tales #158, with that great full-page splash. Oh, and Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D, who shares the comic, is also pretty far out, mainly due to the incredible and unique work of Jim Steranko.

 

[NoJo]

I was ill a lot as a kid, with one thing or another, and I’d have to spend weeks in bed. During one of these periods, a friend of my brother gave me a Peanuts book to read: “You Can Do It, Charlie Brown”, circa 1963.

Snoopy is no longer the lean dancing beagle of the early years, but he’s yet to meet the Red Baron. Woodstock and Peppermint Patty still haven’t arrived, Shermy and Violet are still hanging around.

Above all, Charlie Brown, Alice, Lucy and Linus’s interrelationships are as rich and complex as ever. Anyone who’s ever been an older brother or older sister, or who’s been a younger sister or younger brother, immediately gets the genius of Charles Schulz. Add to the that the very different unrequited crushes of Lucy for Shroeder, or Charlie Brown for the Little Red-Headed girl, and he pretty much nailed the whole of childhood, adolescence, and a good proportion of adulthood.

Peanuts is for me the greatest comic ever.

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/snoopy_in_love.jpg

 

[3113]

The cover of the second Pink Floyd album used a frame from Marvel Comics Strange Tales #158: The Living Tribunal shows Doctor Strange the past, present and future of the earth in one mind-blowing full-page “splash”. Full-page splashes were a new and far-out thing back in 1967, and Doctor Strange was a new and far-out hero.

That was Marvel Comics all right. In most of the comics super-powered females were all in love with some brainy super-guy who never noticed them Hmmm. Do we wonder if this was fulfilling some wish of the readers? A way of explaining why they were never with any girls (they had more important things on their minds....)

 

[NoJo]

That was Marvel Comics all right. In most of the comics super-powered females were all in love with some brainy super-guy who never noticed them Hmmm. Do we wonder if this was fulfilling some wish of the readers? A way of explaining why they were never with any girls (they had more important things on their minds....)

You just have to look at the gang of muscle-headed morons occupying the pages of the Marvel and DC comics at that time, and the inevitable Charles Atlas ads in the back, to see how original Dr Strange was. Geeks didn't have any cachée till, oh, Bill Gates. I guess he was more like of Sherlock Holmes, and maybe Mandrake the Magician. Later, David Carradine's character in Kung Fu was similar

 

[voluptuary_manque]

My official 'reader' in the primary grades was Fun With Dick and Jane but I really learned to read from Uncle Scrooge, Donald and the Nephews. The comix that enthralled you left me cold. Perhaps it was a more innocent age or at least a more innocent childhood but my heroes were Gyro Gearloose and Scrooge McDuck. Once I comprehended the idea that marks on paper could have meaning, I threw myself into non-fiction on every imaginable subject only turning to fiction when I encountered Robert Heinlein and Clifford Simak in the sixth grade. There I remained through high school, despising the "serious" literature that my teachers kept insisting was not really a waste of my time. Bah! Wasted time is wasted life and Emily Dickinson and her ilk wasted much more of my life than they deserved.

So comix are okay for many. I can't even get into graphic novels!

 

[jomar]

I was a big fan of comic books. And that's what they were then, not graphic novels. I still have a wide variety boxed up, some of them fairly valuable.

 

[xssve]

Cool. I got started on comix early on - my mom used to kick me out of the house to keep me
from getting underfoot - in those days, kids wandered alone all over the place, a far cry from
the paranoia of today - I usually ended up down at the Shopping center, a neighborhood affair,
what we'd call a strip mall today.

There was a Foodway, a hardware store, a Ben Franklin, a liquor store, Photographers studio,
a dry cleaners - and a Drug store.

It was a good place to hang out with your friends, looking at toys and models kits, even if you
had no money, compiling wish lists. There were always boxes in the dumpsters out back, for making
forts and ships, pirate ships, space ships, etc.

If you had some money, you hit the drugstore: candy was penny, candy bars a Nickel or a Dime,
and there was a soda fountain where you could sit and drink Cherry Cokes for hours.

If I ended up there alone, as I often did, the book and magazine aisle was an entire Aisle: paperbacks
on one side, magazines on the other with the comix rack at the end.

There I would sit, hour after hour on a stack of comix, reading: Ritchie Rich and Donald Duck,
Huey Dewy and Louie, Little Lulu. Eventually I graduated to headier stuff, Magnus, Robot Fighter,
with it's elegant futurist designs drafted by the incomparable Russ Manning, EC reprints that somehow slipped past the censors, etc.

http://www.comics.pop-cult.com/H-R/images/Magnus-Robot-Fighter.jpg

I read them all for free so I read all of them, anything that looked remotely interesting, DC, Marvel,
Gold Key, funny animals, superheros, westerns, drama, horror, romance - Sgt Rock - DC had a title,
Weird War, that I loved:

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/weird-war-tales/8-1.jpg

Then one day, passing the magazines towards the comic books I saw:

http://www.creaturescape.com/unimonster/othermags/vampirella1.jpg

Discovered Creepy and Eerie, and if I wasn't hooked before, I was now - odd maybe to move from full
color to Black & White, but these weren't comix for kids, they were challenging stories, gratuitous sex and violence,
incredible art - all the things that make life worth living.

A neighbor turned me onto Mad and I added Kurtzman and Gaines, Will Elder and Wally Wood, Don Martin and Mort Drucker
were added to the pantheon of by Gene Colan, Reed Crandall, Angelo Torres and Alex Toth, Wally Wood, Gray Morrow,
Neal Adams, Dan Adkins, Steve Ditko, Esteban Maroto, Jeff Jones, Alex Nino, Alfredo Alcala, etc., etc.

So yeah, Movies are awsome, I love film, novels, great, but comix have a special place in my heart - stupid, moronic,
mindless, ironic, riotous - it's a disposable medium that has been the canvas on which an entire culture has been
dissected, celebrated, crucified, mocked, subverted and rebuilt continuously - if Burroughs were still around, he'd be writing comic books.

 

[glynndah]

Am I the only one who never really liked comic books because there weren't enough words? Just pictures that took up way too much space.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Vampirella was hot!


No, Glynndah, in time I traded off all the comix for hardcovers.

 

[CharleyH]

As a teenager, and even into my thirties, I used to dream Tintin. Really. I would dream a series of frames from a weird, vaguely menacing story from an imaginary Tintin book. And in my dream, I was there reading it, and I’d have this thrill of having discovered a new hitherto unknown Tintin book. Although I had long possessed all the Tintin books Hergé had ever done, I still had a hope that maybe he had secretly published another one.

Even now I sometimes impulsively enter some empty out-of-the-way bookshop, standing in a sad parade in some quiet and hopeless semi-residential suburb, although I do it with only the shadow of a hope of discovering a new Tintin Book.

Had horrid dreams about toothed Jaws (braces). Never wanted to go to a dentist, never wanted dolls in my house. Years later I came to realize that all my nightmares, and fetishes, were based in the movie Barbarella! Rowr!

 

[shereads]

I was ill a lot as a kid, with one thing or another, and I’d have to spend weeks in bed. During one of these periods, a friend of my brother gave me a Peanuts book to read: “You Can Do It, Charlie Brown”, circa 1963.

Snoopy is no longer the lean dancing beagle of the early years, but he’s yet to meet the Red Baron. Woodstock and Peppermint Patty still haven’t arrived, Shermy and Violet are still hanging around.

Above all, Charlie Brown, Alice, Lucy and Linus’s interrelationships are as rich and complex as ever. Anyone who’s ever been an older brother or older sister, or who’s been a younger sister or younger brother, immediately gets the genius of Charles Schulz. Add to the that the very different unrequited crushes of Lucy for Shroeder, or Charlie Brown for the Little Red-Headed girl, and he pretty much nailed the whole of childhood, adolescence, and a good proportion of adulthood.

Peanuts is for me the greatest comic ever.

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/snoopy_in_love.jpg

I like that there are no adults in Charlie Brown's world. We know there must be some adults outside the frame - parents and teachers and the like - and that they hold some vague power. But they are non-persons.

All the richness of life, and all of its terrors, take place down here beneath the notice of any person taller than, say, 36 inches. Jealousy, malice, love, rage, envy, wisdom, gullabiiity, forgiveness, disappointment ("Good grief."), and even anguish ("ARGH!") are played out against a backdrop of childhood haunts (bus stop, school yard, back yard, ball park) by a community of short-statured characters with the innocence of children and the sagacity of old men. The sophisticate among them is a beagle.

I miss Snoopy and his round-headed friend Charlie Brown. My dad taught me to read using Peanuts in the daily newspaper, and I'll always regret not having written to Charles Schlutz to thank him for those many small doses of happiness.

 

[shereads]

Had horrid dreams about toothed Jaws (braces). Never wanted to go to a dentist, never wanted dolls in my house. Years later I came to realize that all my nightmares, and fetishes, were based in the movie Barbarella! Rowr!

Barbarella had braces?

 

[NoJo]

I like that there are no adults in Charlie Brown's world. We know there must be some adults outside the frame - parents and teachers and the like - and that they hold some vague power. But they are non-persons.

All the richness of life, and all of its terrors, take place down here beneath the notice of any person taller than, say, 36 inches. Jealousy, malice, love, rage, envy, wisdom, gullabiiity, forgiveness, disappointment ("Good grief."), and even anguish ("ARGH!") are played out against a backdrop of childhood haunts (bus stop, school yard, back yard, ball park) by a community of short-statured characters with the innocence of children and the sagacity of old men. The sophisticate among them is a beagle.

I miss Snoopy and his round-headed friend Charlie Brown. My dad taught me to read using Peanuts in the daily newspaper, and I'll always regret not having written to Charles Schlutz to thank him for those many small doses of happiness.

Spot on as usual, Sher


You can find EVERY Peanuts comic ever drawn by Mr. Schulz, starting all the way back in 1951, by going here:

http://comics.com/peanuts/

You can type in a date, and see what the Lil' Folks were doing on that day.

 

[NoJo]

Had horrid dreams about toothed Jaws (braces). Never wanted to go to a dentist, never wanted dolls in my house. Years later I came to realize that all my nightmares, and fetishes, were based in the movie Barbarella! Rowr!

Barbarella is one case where I prefer the non-comic version to the comic:

http://*******.com/cmgwmd

(mmm)

 

[NoJo]

Oh, and Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D, who shares the comic, is also pretty far out, mainly due to the incredible and unique work of Jim Steranko.

Below is a link to a full episode of Jim Steranko's Nick Fury: Reminds me of the drug-fuelled paranoia of Philip K. Dick:

Steranko was the originator of the "photo-splash" -- a montage of photographs and hand-drawn images -- at least as far as Marvel Comics was concerned.

He also did the ever first "4-page splash", which required getting hold of two copies of the comic!

http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Strange_Tales(1200)_168_11_2.jpg
http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Strange_Tales(1200)_168_12_2.jpg
http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Strange_Tales(1200)_168_13_2.jpg
http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Strange_Tales(1200)_168_14_2.jpg
http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Strange_Tales(1200)_168_15_2.jpg
http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Strange_Tales(1200)_168_16_2.jpg
http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Strange_Tales(1200)_168_17_2.jpg
http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Strange_Tales(1200)_168_18_2.jpg
http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Strange_Tales(1200)_168_19_2.jpg
http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Strange_Tales(1200)_168_20_2.jpg
http://www.subjoe.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Comix/Strange_Tales(1200)_168_21_2.jpg

 

[shereads]

coMIX & We

Betty vs. Veronica predates Mary Anne vs. Ginger.

 

[shereads]

You can find EVERY Peanuts comic ever drawn by Mr. Schulz, starting all the way back in 1951, by going here:

http://comics.com/peanuts/

You can type in a date, and see what the Lil' Folks were doing on that day.

I tried a search by date and it didn't work.

Argh!

 

[NoJo]

I tried a search by date and it didn't work.

Argh!

rats.

 

[shereads]

Long live Calvin.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3375/3448496189_dc784f6800_o.jpg

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Long live Calvin.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3375/3448496189_dc784f6800_o.jpg

Well, I've turned out more than my fair share of historians, anthropologists and engineers but no, to my knowledge, cartoonists. It makes me proud!

 

[shereads]

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3605/3450017971_1a6b8a2309_o.jpg

 

[CharleyH]

Barbarella had braces?

No. Those wicked dolls had metal teeth!!! Edit to add: SHIVERS!

 

[NoJo]

I tried a search by date and it didn't work.

Argh!

That calendar thingy is a pain -- Just enter the date you want for the cartoon directly into the address bar, like these examples:


http://comics.com/peanuts/1969-04-10

http://comics.com/peanuts/1964-06-05