Swimming Bear, Not Bare

(EDIT: The title makes a tad more sense now)

Yes, we're back with The Bear from Eric St. Clair and Paul Eismann today, along with a side of silliness. We've previously seen the Bear seek Justice and a Timid existence in the zoo. Those tales came to us from the mid-to-late '60s, but the Bear himself goes back a fair bit further. Today's tale, The Pearl Divers, comes from 1955 - but he was already a star before this point. And he's got one of the oddest starts in comics, really. 

But, we'll come back to that. 
For now, let's read Comics!

Part two of the tale took the cover -

Good job, Boomer!

Maybe tomorrow we can see your odd origins.

page art by Paul Eismann from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v10 #s 13-15 (1955)

In The Days Before Ken Jennings

It'll come as no surprise that a lot of my favorite books and movies as a youngling were about oddballs and outsiders. I ran into one of those old faves while poking through some comics this morning in an old issue of Hollywood Film Stories from 1950. It's one of those movies that i really loved as a kid, but that nobody else i knew seemed to have ever heard of - Champagne For Caesar. It's not like it was a back lot one-reeler with no distribution and no stars. Ronald Colman was tolerably Huge, and Vincent Price - n'uff said? Celeste Holm playing leading lady opposite Colman, and Barbara Britton rounding out a nice foursome.

Beauregard Bottomly, our hero, is a bit of a social misfit who feels abused by a corporation and finds a unique way to take his revenge on the company via the gameshow they sponsor. Burnbridge Waters (don't you love the names in this script?) is the esoteric chairman of Milady Soap company, the Soap That Sanctifies, to be sure that cleanliness is next to Godliness.

It's a fun little romp in a twisted little corner of Hollywood, and it's all broken down for us in eight pages...

And even a believable conclusion.

Now i'm in the mood for some more old movies. I'll have to go digging through the video closet. But not today.

Today i've already got 007: From Beijing With Love lined up.

no page art, just pages from Hollywood Film Stories #5 (1950)

Covering Out Of This World

This machine is still limping along without hard drive, running off of USB sticks. But it's actually the least impediment to posting lately. My mind is scuttling away from the outside world, making focusing on the posts more difficult, but fighting my way past that, too.

And then there's Blogger's 'upgrade' and the thoroughly frelled image uploads. That's a killer. It was only on the last attempt before giving up for the day that it finally upped the images for this post.

So, my apologies for the gaps lately - i'm working on it, but others are working against it. Hopefully things will smooth out soon.

Meanwhile, since the brain doesn't want to focus on wordly bits much, lets take a look at some covers. Out Of This World only had 16 issues between 1956 - 1959. That run of fewer than a dozen & a half issues sure produced a number of nice covers, don't you think...?

Of course, it never hurts to have Steve Ditko on your team.

cover art by Bill Molno, Steve Ditko, Maurice Whitman, Pat Masulli, Rocco Mastroserio, Charles Nichola, Vince Alascia, and Dick Giordano from Out Of This World #s 1-16 (1956, 1959)

Yes, We Have No Abners

Yesterday we took a gander at Gumbo Galahad, the star of Hillbilly Comics, from Art Gates. Today, we're doing the same damn thing again. (This might not come as a surprise, since i think i said we would.)

As noted above, despite any similarities to the contrary, we have no Abners here -

There were only two more issues after what we saw last time, but  Abner  Gumbo had three more tales in the two books. Let's be complete and view them all..
 

There was, of course, no next issue. I guess Gumbo ran off with thet strange gal...

page art by Art Gates from Hillbilly Comics #s 3 & 4 (1956)