Showing posts with label Alter Ego. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alter Ego. Show all posts

25 March 2018

Groovy Grass

Okay. I promised more Grass Green and those early fanzine parody strips, and Sunday Funnies seems like a fair place to drop them. Seeing Roy Thomas's  Bestest League Of America comics inspired Grass and ignited his passion for comics.
So, only 3 issues after Bestest League wrapped up in Alter Ego, Da Frantic Four* appeared -


Not long after, over at Komix Illustrated...


It didn't stop after Grass turned pro, either. He got to draw his version of the Bestest League of America and have a Marvelous time, too, for Go-Go Comics -


Damn shame we lost Green just as the world was beginning to rediscover him in this century.

art by Grass Green from Alter Ego #6, Komix Ilustrated #13, and Go-Go Comics #6 (1963, 1965, 1967)


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*(Da Frantic Four was actually inspired by The Frantic Four, a single panel toon by Ronn Foss that ran in The Comicollector #8:

 )

24 March 2018

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)

21 March 2018

Bestest Beginnings

Finally!
I'm missing the first part, but knew i'd seen it in one of the archives to which i have access. But small and arcane university archives can be torurous to search at times. We're talking internet access that was established before the Web took over the Internet. One had best be familiar with FTP and willing to digitally walk through obtuse data mazes laid out when directory names were limited to eight characters.
But at last, chapter one is here and we may proceed...

Way back at the dawn of the Groovy Age there was a young guy who loved comics.
Actually, there were a lot of guys like that at the time, but we're talking about one in particular who would go on to be one of the writers with the biggest impact of the decades to follow. But back in 1961 he didn't have anyone to draw his stories when he decided to put out his own fanzine.

That didn't stop him. And, Lo - A League Was Born....


Alter Ego was launched, as many of you already know, by Roy Thomas.  CORRECTION/EDIT: Alter Ego was launched, as many of you already know, by Jerry Bails, of Jerry Bails' Collector's Guide fame, with the aid of Roy Thomas.
It went on to become such a legendary fanzine that it was revived as a professional publication in this century by Two Morrows. But back in that first issue, Roy was doing it all  drawing it by himself:


A note before we continue. Way back in those days before common access to Xerox copy machines, we had to use mimeograph technology for duplication. This was rather crude, involving preparing your pages backwards, so the master pages had a carbon sheet affixed to the back to create a reverse image of whatever was typed, or drawn, on the front side. That reversed image was then reversed again during duplication and was prone to fairly rapid replicant fading. For large runs, multiple masters often needed to be prepared. Not a terrible thing for a typed page of text, perhaps, but pretty limited for hand drawn artwork.

Also, the pages printed purple. I considered removing the colour data to allow cleaner preparation of these pages, but decided that the purple look was better suited to this post. I could be wrong, but this is what you get for now -



Yep. Even way back then, Roy was already working to bring back some of those Golden Age greats. Eventually that became something of his trademark at DC, while over at Marvel he's perhaps best known for the epic Kree/Skrull war.

Two issues later...


Now we're talking Groovy! Grass Green drawing Roy Thomas parody of 1963 era FF?
And an actual printer? Distribution must be growing.

Stay tuned for the return of Grass Green!

pages & covers by Roy Thomas for Alter Ego #s 1, 2 & 3 (1961)