Where's The Enigma Force When We Really Need It?

Today belongs to arguably the most tragic story in comics. Unfortunately, the tragedy does not take place within the pages of the comics.

Today is Bill Mantlo's 66th birthday. Bill was a brilliant writer and is a tremendous person. He left writing as his main career behind and focused on being a hero to others. And then he was cruelly struck down. Rather than try to explain things myself, we'll excerpt from the introduction to Mantlo: A Life In Comics and let his brother Michael tell it...

I cut most of the introduction - meeting Jack Kirby, living with a member of The New York Dolls, and much more. And this was merely the introduction to a book filled with memories and behind the scenes stories of Bill Mantlo, Comics, and old Marvel. Not only is it great reading, it's also a benefit book to help cover Bill's medical costs. If you haven't read it, don't own it, nows a good time to correct that.
Personally, i found a new connection to Mantlo just in the introduction bits above. I used a Jon Nagy drawing board as my main drawing surface throughout the 70s and 80s. (It was an old Jon Nagy drawing kit passed down to me from the 50s)

While i enjoyed  his work on The Incredible Hulk and his Spider-Man tales, among many, many others; and loved creations of his such as Jack Of Hearts and Cloak & Dagger - one of the things that impressed me the most about Bill Mantlo as a young reader was Rom: Space Knight and The Micronauts. They gave him toys and he gave us fully fleshed out universes for them to exist and adventure within. Decades after it ceased publication, there are still hordes of fans aching for a return of Rom. Now if only the Enigma Force would find Bill to act as host for Captain Universe.

Of course, his most famous creation has gone as yet unmentioned - Rocket Raccoon of the Guardians Of The Galaxy. As we mentioned a couple of days ago, Rocket was based on the Beatles' song Rocky Raccoon (and we'll get to that a bit more next time). His first appearance was in Marvel Preview, one of the black & white newsstand magazines Marvel put out back in the 70s. Of course, being John Lennon's raccoon, Rocky had a British accent when he first arrived on the scene.

The story of Wayfinder began 3 issues previously, with this being the second part. In truth, the story is unimportant today. All that's really needed to know is that Wayfinder found his way to crashing on a strange planet known as Witch-World while on a quest for revenge. He makes his way to shore and seeks to get his bearings...

Local lifeforms have noticed the Wayfinder's ship, but it protects itself. Meanwhile...

The predictable fight erupts...

...but "Kirke watches without eyes. And when she speaks... Power flows through the very molecules of the air from her vocal chords...to the strangely humming gem at the top of her scepter..."

<Spoiler> the Pilgrims failed.

It would be over half a decade before our favorite Raccoon returned. But next time, he got the cover. Join us later for "Now Somewhere In the Black Holes of Sirius Major There Lived a Young Boy Named Rocket Raccoon" Meanwhile, here's the cover for the tale above for those what loves 'em:

text images from Mantlo: A Life In Comics (2007), pages by Bill Mantlo & Keith Giffen for Marvel Preview #7(1976)

Hero Of This World, And The Next

27 December 1951 - 8 November 1997

Today, as you might note above, is the 20th anniversary of the death of my favorite movie star. And you've probably never heard of him if you live in the USA. You may also have noticed that his birthday is seven weeks away. We'll be spending some time during the next seven weeks taking a look at some of his works. But today, let me introduce you to Lam Ching-Ying:

In the 1990s, he was my first choice to play Doctor Strange

While probably unfamiliar to you, you likely have actually seen his work. Well, indirectly, you've almost certainly seen his work. Behind the camera, he also trained others, including transforming Michelle Yeoh from a dancer into the top female action star in the world. But, while you probably never noticed his face behind John Saxon in the audience, you did see him fight in this little movie:

Shek Kin, the big villain of the film, was rather old by this time. Lam Ching-Ying is the one you see fighting Bruce Lee whenever you can't see his face clearly. Of course, since he was also Lee's fight coordinator, that wasn't really a stretch for him. You can see him in The Big Boss and Lee's other films, but where you should be seeing him is in his own films, and his work with Sammo Hung Kam-Bo. (Americans - remember that fat Chinese cop show from the 90s with the amazing action that made a joke of how Walker, Texas Ranger was filmed in the following hour? That was Sammo Hung.)
My favorite Lam Ching-Ying movie is probably the 5th in the Mr. Vampire series - Magic Cop:

He we have a modern cop who is also a Taoist, fighting a Japanese sorceress using undead thugs and evil magicks. It's a glorious mix of physical action and visual insanity. Lam Sifu was a master of Wing Chun (some of the finest on film is his work in The Prodigal Son) and his skills are on display again Billy Chow Bei-Lei (Billy Chong above) in fights, as well as the almost enearhtly precision it brings to his moves in magic rituals. We'll look more closely at Magic Cop later, most certainly.
But, for now, let's look at the life of Lam Ching Ying. Presented here is the biography i was able to assemble for my previous tribute site, from which the title of this post is derived.

∞ Θ ∞

Lam Ching-Ying was born as Lam Gun-Bo in the year of the dragon on December 27th, 1952 in Hong Kong. (Shanghai? I've found conflicting reports.) He was the third of seven children, with one elder brother whose name is unknown to me, and an elder sister named Ling-Chu. His younger siblings include two sisters, Bo-Chu and Wai-Chun, a brother named Chun-Hung, and one more of whom nothing is known to me.
He studied for 2 years at the Shun Yi Association Elementary School in Hong Kong before leaving school. About 1963-4 he joined what is usually refered to as the "other" Peking Opera School; that of Madame Fan Fok Fa (Fun Guk Fa). He studied at Fun Guk Fa's Chu Chau Opera School for 5 years, where he began his lifelong friendships with John Lone, Mang Hoi and Stephen Tung-Wai among several others. Less than a year later, he began to appear in his first public performance, White Beach. Madame is reported to have said that young Gun-Bo was disobedient, beyond her ability to handle. But he obviously learned more than she may have realized while her student.

At 17, he began his professional career as a stuntman and martial coach at Shaw Brothers. The slender build that had led to his playing many roles as females and old men at the opera school now served him as he doubled for female stars, as he did for Cheng Pei-Pei in his first movie, Gold (Silken?) Sabre Big Hero (Gum Doe Dai Hup) in which he appears onscreen as a young monk. He received a salary of HK$60 per day working on this movie, HK$20 of which went to his mentor. Half of what remained Lam spent on his "brothers" in those early times, a time that he once recalled as his happiest days.

Lam Ching-Ying in The Big Boss Lam Ching-Ying
In just two years he began Action directing, starting with Fist Of Fury (The Chinese Connection) in 1972 with Hong Ying-Kit. He was hand picked by Bruce Lee Siu-Lung as his assistant as well. On Enter The Dragon, Bruce insisted Raymond Chow bring Lam Ching-Ying in from Korea to serve as Action Director. He AD'd (with Billy Chan Wui-Ngai, with whom he would later share several HKFA nominations and wins) on all of Bruce's Hong Kong productions excepting Return Of The Dragon. He also had a supporting role in Lee's The Big Boss. Production on The Big Boss was delayed when he was arrested in Hong Kong for fighting.

Although from different schools, he was close friends with Sammo Hung Kam-Bo (close enough for Sammo to be there when he was arrested at some point when they were young - was this the Big Boss incident referred to above?)) and was a core member of the Hung Kar Pan (Hung Ga Ban), Samo's legendary action direction and stunt team. About this time (the mid-1970s) he moved from Shaw Brothers to Golden Harvest, where Sammo was under contract, and he was a stuntman/actor in many of their best films of the period, including such Sammo films as Enter The Fat Dragon, Warriors Two and Magnificent Butcher.

Lam Ching-Ying in The Prodigal Son Lam Ching-Ying
In 1981 the Hong Kong Film Award was created, and only a year later, in 1982 Lam Ching-Ying won his first for Action Direction on The Prodigal Son with Samo Hung Kam-Bo, Yuen Biao, and Billy Chan Wui-Ngai. Prodigal Son also picked up a Best Picture nomination, due in no small part to the work of the Hung Kar Pan. The following year the same team was nominated for another Best Action award for their work on The Dead And The Deadly (which was also nominated for Best Picture), but they lost out to Winners And Sinners. But, since the action team on Winners And Sinners was Lam Ching-Ying, Yuen Biao and Billy Chan Wui-Ngai, it wasn't really much of a loss, was it? More like a two-fold win.

Lam Ching-Ying in one of his earlier Taoist Ghostbuster roles. Lam Ching-Ying
He continued acting as well, appearing in a wide variety of roles over his career ranging from psychopathic villains to noble heroes to professional soldiers and weary men. Even his cameo roles in movies such as Pedicab Driver were memorable, but it wasn't until he began to play his "Eternal Sifu" character in Hocus Pocus that he began to ascend to international stardom. Movies like Close Encounter Of The Spooky Kind 2 and Mr. Vampire ensured his place in the cinematic heavens. In 1985, Lam Ching-Ying was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor HKFA, and Mr. Vampire for best picture. After that Lam became rather typecast in the role, appearing in many movies and two TV series playing his all-knowing Vampire Buster. Although this led to difficulty securing other roles, you couldn't tell it from his performances. Even in the worst of his films, Lam is always top notch, even if the rest of the material or production isn't.

1985 was a good year for Lam Ching-Ying. Besides his great success with Mr. Vampire and booming theatrical career, he and his then wife, Cheng Bing-Bing had their first child - a daughter whose name is, unfortunately, unknown to me. Three years later they had a son, Ka-Yiu. Both children were fans of his work and reportedly collected his films on video tape. (Not at that point in time, of course, but later when old enough to do so.)

Somewhere around this time the Western world missed out on a tremendous oppurtunity. At Golden Harvest, David Chan decided that with the phenomenal success of his recent films the time was right to make an English language version of Mr. Vampire starring, of course, Lam Ching-Ying. The film went into production with the title Demon Hunters, and American actors Tanya Roberts and Jack Scalia were brought in to co-star. Unfortunately, the project rapidly fell apart. The production was plagued with difficulties, not the least of which were the Hollywood actors doing their best to play the part of Ugly Americans, with Tanya Robert's ego out of control Jack Scalia's inability to cope with Lam Ching-Ying's lack of English. Sadly, after viewing the dailies and reviewing the situation, Raymond Chow shut production down and we were all poorer for it. And after the unpleasant experience Lam Ching-Ying turned his back on the foreign film market. I still wonder at times what might have happened if he had become one of the early break-out stars from Hong Kong in Hollywood had the production been the smashing success it should have been... >sigh!< ... ah, well. And so it goes.

In 1988, Lam began his directing career with One Eyebrow Priest, a character he co-created (with Chua Lam) and portrayed on camera for the Dai Lo Film company the team co-created. Because production ran over budget, Lam didn't receive his director's fee on this one. But since it was his own company, that was probably his decision, at least in part.

*

His martial coaching of actors continued as well, including helping to turn dancer Michelle Yeoh into the top female action star in the world, and mentoring rising star Chin Kar-Lok as a martial arts coach.

*

In 1991, Lam Ching-Ying opened a bar in Sai Gung, where his parents and brothers reside.

*

In 1993, Ching-Ying divorced from Cheng Bing Bing.

*

In 1995, ATV approached him about developing a series based on his Taoist Priest character for television. Far from his early salary of $60 dollars a day, he signed a $1,000,000 deal to do this series, Vampire Expert (Geung Si Doe Jeung) which earned some rave reviews and spawned two sequels.

Lam Ching-Ying from Vampire Expert 2 Lam Ching-Ying (Vampire Expert 2)
Early in 1996, while filming Vampire Expert 2 (Geung Si Doe Jeung 2) for ATV, Lam Ching-Ying became romanticly involved with Yuen King-Tan, an actress on the series with whom he had first started to develop feelings the previous year during filming Vampire Expert. During the filming of the series, she moved from her home in Happy Valley to Sai Gung so she could be near Lam Ching-Ying.
Later that year he starred in another series, Coincidentally (Dun Jeuk Nei Wui Loi), and the following year he was featured in the series Flower Monk (Fa Wor Seung). He was signed to do a third Vampire Priest series at the time of his death, but the world was denied that pleasure. ATV, the network that was home to the Vampire priest series, aired a one hour special on Lam Ching-Ying in the month following his passing.

In 1997, Lam Ching-Ying developed Liver Cancer. A quiet and private man, Lam asked his family not to reveal his illness to the public to avoid suffering the sympathy of others. He dissappeared from the public eye and sought seclusion as he received herbal treatment for his condition. The more he deteriorated, the less he wanted others, his loved ones included, to see him. In early October, as Lam Sifu was succumbing to his illness, he tried to send Yuen King-Tan from his side, asking her to move from his Sai Gung home, but she refused to leave him. Instead, he retreated to his sisters house, where he remained until slipping into a partial coma at the beginning of November. In the last weeks, even his children were declined visits, Lam not wanting to scare them with his current state. He spent his remaining days at St. Theresa's Hospital in Kowloon until he passed away on the 8th; much, much too soon.

His liver cancer has been missreported as due to drinking, but it actually came on quite sudden, and is hereditary in his family. Ching-Ying's older brother had died of liver cancer earlier in the year.


On November 13th, 1997, just past 7:00 in the evening, 50 Buddhist Monks began a 3 hour prayer ceremony to honor Lam Ching-Ying's exit from this world. His ex-wife and children, his girlfriend and his many friends were in attendance, as well as the press, of course. Yuen King-Tan had to sneak in to the funeral, and Jackie Chan entered and exited through the back. Offerings on the altar included cigarettes, mushroom and vegetable dishes, fruits and cakes. Not on the altar were a large variety of paper offerings, the "Lam Gun Bo Mansion 1997" - a two-story high garden mansion resembling Lam Ching-Ying's residence in Tai Po, and his favorite priest shoes and top hat.

Pallbearers were Wu Ma, Samo Hung Kam-Bo, Cheung Wing-Hong, Billy Chan Wui-Ngai, Chin Kar-Lok on the right and Yeung Siu-Hung, Chin Yuet-Sun, Lee King-Chu, Ng Ming-Choi, and Chung Fat on the left. Lam Sifu was cremated, and his ashes returned to the United States, with Cheng Bing Bing and his children, for burial with his favorite clothing & sunglasses, and a caligraphy of One Smile Returns To The West from Chua Lam.

∞ Θ ∞

Sifu, You are missed.

Join us over the next several weeks for less words and more pictures, maybe a game or two. Heck, you got your old NES emulators handy? I'll see if i can't dig out the ROM for the video game based on his undead fighting Taoist Priest movies - 

(found it)

Secrets Of The MCU?

We all know that Bill Mantlo based his now famous creation, Rocket Raccoon, on the song written by John Lennon, Rocky Raccoon. (We do all know that, right? Especially that part about Bill Mantlo being his creator, yes?)

Did you ever wonder what inspired John Lennon?
No, i don't mean his pet raccoon. I mean, what inspired him to name his raccoon Rocky. Could it have been Happy Comics?

We know John and the Beatles read comics. I think we covered that a bit during the King Kirby 100. He even doodled and drew images from the comics he read.
So it could be entirely possible that Rocky Raccoon owes his name to -  Rocky Raccoon.

So far, i've only found him in the very first issue of Happy Comics, but i'm still looking through as i find issues. Meanwhile, here's that first story for your perusal:

Ol' Rocky does seem to prefer banjo to guitar, but...    What?

Oh.

Never mind. My staff has just pointed out that i misread things. His name isn't Rocky, it's Racky...

Oops.
Carry on.

RACKY Raccoon written & drawn by Gene McGregor for Happy Comics #1 (1943)

Blue Monday - Climax

 Welcome back.
How'd you like that lovely Beauty & The Beast piece at the top of Maroto's blog page?
You did go look, right?

Okay, you were promised another story, so let's start there. This tale, like the previous trio, comes from Vampirella, because - Blue Monday. Previously we had a tale in the "tradition of Scheherazade" by Bill Dubay & Esteban Maroto. I believe the same team brings us this tale, but the writer goes uncredited, so it's hard to be certain. The other big question: Is this Maroto's colours?


NOTE: Most of the images for this post contain nudity and have been moved to our back room for adult content. The text remains that you may make a fair guess as to whether or not you wish to look at the pics.
Please follow this link to The Other Voice Of ODD! archive of the original post to view the artwork.


...or until the next writer decided otherwise.
Finally, for today, we have another half-dozen images by our esteemed subject. We'll start with a bit of black & white line work, and climb up the ladder to full paintings:

If i wasn't already an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, this might get me to buy Tarzan's books:

We've seen Maroto drawing other famous characters, but he also is prone to creating tributes to other artists, such as this piece honoring/homaging Milo Manara:

...and these two paintings in tribute to Jose Segrelles:

This last piece is a little special for a sad reason. The original has been damaged; the canvas scraped and flecked to white in places. Here is a semi-restored version. (No reference of the undamaged version available for full restoration)

*sigh*
A fitting end to this piece.

all art by Maroto. Pages from Vampirella #72 (1978)

Welcome to part 2 of our Blue Monday celebration of Esteban Maroto.

It was mentioned last time that he designed Red Sonja's metal bikini. Here's a couple of model sheets for reference:

One thing to note here - most of today's images, like those above, are photographs rather than scans of the originals. As you can see quite easily if you look at the red border lines, things can get a little distorted that way. But, moving right along...
Not surprisingly, Maroto also drew a bit of Conan while passing through at Marvel. This Conan drawing came a bit later-

NOTE: Most of the images for this post contain nudity and have been moved to our back room for adult content. The text remains that you may make a fair guess as to whether or not you wish to look at the pics.
Please follow this link to The Other Voice Of ODD! archive of the original post to view the artwork.

If you prefer your fantasy a bit more up-to-date, you can follow the evolution of everybody's favorite Khaleesi through some of his artworks...

...or perhaps more classic fantasy, such as Alice...

...or Dracula...

...or even simply nameless faeries...

You can also find him rendering characters from other comics and media, such as Barbarella...

...Drunna...

...and Valentina...

...and, all sorts of beautiful renderings...

Oh! But, i haven't told you the best part.
Señor Maroto maintains an online contact point where you can not only see all of the above images, at larger size, and Many more - but you can also request custom commissioned artwork from the man! It doesn't update too frequently, but it is still active, and just up the digital street from here:

Esteban Maroto's Blog

We'll be back once more today with another story or two, and more artwork (that isn't from his blog, so go ahead a peruse the lovely works there while you're waiting)

all art by Esteban Maroto

Odd how things work. I decided to push my planned subject back a week due to the amount of work required to try to cover things a tad more than her costume. So i pulled some pages that were in the pile and decided this would be good. And then things started spiraling...
In the end, i suspect it would have been less effort to go with my original plan. The only way this is going to work is if we make this a multi-part

You see, my plan was just to run a few ... sort of fairy tale interpretations, illustrated by Esteban Maroto. But then there was that fourth colour tale. And when digging for a few biographical notes, all these damn beautiful pictures kept getting in the way. So, forget it. I'm not going to agonize over what to not use, i'm just going to spread things out into 3 posts over the day.

Anybody who was a fan of Warren's main magazines back in the 70s and 80s knows who Esteban Maroto is. But, while he produced a goodly amount of work in this country (over 100 stories for Warren alone), he only worked with DC and Marvel briefly, usually on a mini-series here and there. So many fans may not be familiar with his beautifully rendered work. Which isn't to say he didn't leave lasting marks while briefly passing through. For example, he designed her iconic outfit-

NOTE: Most of the images for this post contain nudity and have been moved to our back room for adult content. The text remains that you may make a fair guess as to whether or not you wish to look at the pics.
Please follow this link to The Other Voice Of ODD! archive of the original post to view the artwork.

Like it or love it, it's hard to deny the impact her chainmail bikini had on designs in the decades to follow.

But we'll talk more extensively about Señor Maroto later in the day. For now, let's start with those first three tales to which i referred previously. Two tales written by Bill Dubay, and a third by Timothy Moriarity.

First up, a tale in the tradition of Scheherazade, of a bold adventurer by the name of Ali Addan...



From Arabian tales, we travel to the classic Greek myths, and Perseus-



 Continuing on, we travel to the Danish coast and the story of a Little Mermaid-



All three of these tales appeared in Her magazine-

Here are the covers for those who enjoy them, or want a visual reference for hunting down the issues:

Join us later today for a colour tale, and more about the man and his lovely artwork. After all, you wouldn't want to bypass a man who still remembers Rima, The Jungle Girl, would you?

I know i wouldn't.

all art by Esteban Maroto, story pages for Vampirella #s 60, 68, & 102 (1977, 1978, 1982)

Sunday Supersnipe (sans Supersnipe)

For our Sunday Morning Funnies this week, let's revisit Supersnipe. The comic, not the hero, this time. We spoke previously of some of the back-up features and promised to come back to them later. I checked the calendar - it's later.

All three of our strips today come from issues for which we've already seen the covers, so they're presented here in smaller size, just for reference:

So, first up, let's visit with Dotty.
As we've seen on previous covers, "Dotty Loves Trouble". In later issues, they added a dog named Trouble, perhaps to soften the character a bit. Here in her first appearance, there's no dog named Trouble - she's just fond of the concept. While Koppy McFad is "the boy with the most comic books in America," Dotty "gets into more trouble than any other little girl in America." An interesting counterbalance they attempted here, before the cultural assumption became "comics are for boys" in this country. Like Supersnipe, Dotty was also drawn by George Marcoux.

Dotty for the win. As speculated above, they may have added the dog so she didn't come across as a completely wicked child.
And speaking of "wicked children" - it's well past time to take that promised look at Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer and their Robot Duck!, don't you think? We'll skip to their second episode, because that's when they find it. The first episode had them find a haunted house and have a first encounter, setting things up for the strip to really get going...

But we won't be following along on their adventures. Unlike the Wing Woo Woo strip we peeked at previously, which seemed to be trying to be a positive character portrayal, in a fumbling way, Dwig has no such intentions. In the following episode we get one page...

...and then they go to the jungle. Even the sea monsters...

So, anyway - now that we've had our cultural sensibilities jarred, how about screwing with how perceptions of people over time. Today, one can't hear the name Lou Gehrig without the word 'Disease' following right behind. Once upon a time...

Here, his death was merely a too soon end to a stellar career. Now, his death defines him. A little reminder of how perception of people (and things, and ideas) shift over time.

Hmm.
That wasn't very Sunday Morning Funnies-y, was it?

pages from Supersnipe v.2, #s 2, 3, 7, & 9 (1944)