Blue Monday Calendar 2018 Week 26

This week's Gil Elvgren painting is a NAPA Advertisement from 1971 -

painting by Gil Elvgren (1971)

Forget Rolling Stone & The Music City News...

...I want my face on the cover of The Monster Times!

Why? Here's the first 3 dozen covers so you can see what a geek paradise it was...

Yeah, we'll be going inside. But if you can't wait, you could pop on over to Frederick's My Star Trek Scrapbook for a look inside their second Star Trek special. (Thanks again for reminding me of TMT's existence!)

covers from The Monster Times #s 1-36 (1971-1974)

Saturday Solutions Fan Fest

As mentioned in the previous comments, some idiot thought spam for plastic surgery would fit naturally with yesterday's post. So, fair warning - we may have to implement human detection on comments before too long. But no plans on requiring registration, don't worry there.

Meanwhile, how about some of those promised solutions, eh?

Yes, i know that there's no 'M' for married on answer E in the puzzle above. But there's no 19, either.

BONUS FUN!
The first puzzle mentions that Julius Schwartz appeared regularly in a couple titles, so here are examples by Sidney Greene.

Mystery In Space -

Strange Adventures -

Now let's see if today's topic title brings on the spam for room cooling devices...

Quizzes from Alter Ego #2 and RBCC #s 74, 79, 80, & 90 (1961, 1970, 1971)

page art by Sydney Greene from Mystery In Space #69 and Strange Adventures #130 (1961)

Saturday Solutions - Mostly

Here's the solutions to yesterdays' puzzles, sketchy though they may be. As we can see, it was considerably harder to lay these things out using a type writer. I remember great frustration from those days.

On to the "Tricky Quiz"...

Why is this quiz tricky? Well, see...  this quiz ran in Howard Siegel's zine, Comic Collector's Comments, in issue #85 of Rocket's Blast Comic Collector, with the answers scheduled for #86. But things happen, and Siegel missed the deadline for #86, and in the  frenzy that followed, he seemed to have forgotten the quiz answers when his zine appeared in #87. He probably followed up with the answers in #88, but i don't have that issue.  And so, we have a quiz without answers available.

But, surely, that can't stop us, right?

Well, not for the most part...

My Answers:

1. Bullet Girl

2. Walt Wallet

3. Spark Plug

4. The colours of his uniform

5. Steamboat

6. ???  I think maybe this is a trick question?
I have fewer than a dozen issues of Planet Comics, but none of them has a letters column.

EDIT: Ah-Ha! Finally found the letters column in #50. It was called The Visigraph.
It appears to be significant for possibly being the first letters column in comics? This is the impression gathered from comments in the letters appearing therein.

7. the Monster Society Of Evil

8. neither's face was ever shown

9. Pretzelburg

10. ???   This one seems a bit too vague to me without some sort of limiting context. It's not hard to list at least a dozen commonalities.

11. Jigsaw, Man Of A Thousand Parts

12. ??? No Damn Clue.  Fortunately, TC came through for us on this one in the comments:
"J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director.
In his book The Great Comic Book Heroes, Feiffer said that a lot of WWII comic book stories ended with the hero being thanked or congratulated by FDR or Hoover, "the president and vice president of the US, as far as comics were concerned.""  Thanks, TC!

Anybody got a copy of Jerry Bail's Collector's Guide to see what he's got to say about questions 6 & 10?  That was the authoritative source guide for these quizzes.

puzzles from Rocket's Blast Comic Collector #s 84, 85 & 91 (1971, 1972)

Back In The R.B.C.C.

As mentioned recently, i've been digging through old fanzines as a part of my dive into the Groovy Age.
One of the biggest of those was the Rocket's Blast Comic Collector from editor James Van Hise, which ran for at least 150 issues in the 60s and 70s. I described the RBCC previously as a fanzine "that featured a great pool of talent and the print equivalent of the dealer's room from conventions of later eras" and that's still the best description i have for it.

But, y'know - That doesn't touch upon how delightfully Odd it could be, too. So let's take a look at a little tale from Brad Caslor that ran in issues 85-87 back around the end of 1971 entitled The Massacre Of The Innocents.

But first, the covers of the issues to offer another taste of the talent that passed through their pages-

Bill Black

Berni Wrightson

Don Newton

As a further indicator of how appealingly odd RBCC could be, note that they considered the title to be a completely optional feature for the cover.

Now, on to our story...

 

Alas - while it may have been a Groovy Age, not all Happenings were groovy.

Though, perhaps, foreshadows of kingdoms to come...

story by Brad Caslor, covers by indicated artists, for RBCC #s 85-87 (1971, 1972)