Showing posts with label What The--?!. Show all posts
Showing posts with label What The--?!. Show all posts

24 June 2018

Sunday Morning Super Funnies

This morning we'll be continuing to poke around in the source of last night's feature. It was 30 years ago - 1988 - and Marvel was trying to fly an old style parody book. Since pretty much every term for mental illness had already been taken by other magazines, they called it What The--?!

They tested the waters with a four issue series, and they put a fair bit of effort into those issues. The series was picked up a half year later and continued numbering from 5, but those first four stand apart from the rest - despite some very fine efforts over the following one score and two issues.

Let's take a little look -


You might have already noted one thing that set those first four issues apart from later efforts - parody by big name series creators who weren't generally known for doing comedic parody. The above piece by Peter David, Todd MacFarlane and Jim Salicrup is a good example.

A better example still - getting the big name guys to parody their own works - like this team up of John Byrne and Jerry Ordway with their parody of Superman and the Fantastic Four (& friends) -


What The--?! featured silly little bits of fun...


...and quietly brilliant slams that none dare sign...


And every now and then, they slipped in some tasty oddity that i didn't know i needed to see until they showed it to me - like one of my favorite characters, Doctor Strange, as filtered through the wonderfully warped lens of another old fave - Phil Foglio* -







pages from What The--?! #s 2 & 4 (1988)

===
*(Really? We haven't done anything on Phil Foglio yet? Not even on Blue Monday? 
Damn. So much yet...
Dear Odd, so much...)

23 June 2018

Saturday Night Movie - Mutant Beach Party!

I hope you're familiar with late '80s Marvel Mutants, because that's where we're going with tonight's feature.
With The New Mutants movie coming (eventually) with heavy influence from Bill Sienkiewicz's visually ground-breaking period on the title, it seems like a good time to visit that period... sort of.

After all - one can frequently get  a better look at cultural artifacts by examining the reflections of the time. And for tonight's tale, we have perhaps the best possible combination of talent for that view. Kurt Busiek's reputation for his knowledge of comics, character & series history and the intricate delicacies of the medium are nigh legendary. I can think of no one better suited to take on Sienkiewicz's stylings than Kyle Baker, the only artist to touch his liberated inks back in the day. (Not to mention Kyle's own incredible sense of comic design and story telling)

So pop the corn, or the cap on the brew, or both, and kick back for our two part Mutant Beach Party! from 1988 -



Our apologies.
That was obviously the wrong reel, it being from tomorrow's matinee.
The projectionist has been sacked, and we now proceed with our Feature Presentation.
-The Mngmt



Tonight presentation has been brought to you buy...(sic)


page art from What The--?! #s 3 & 4 (1988)