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)

23 March 2018

Friday Facelift & Games

Y'know - it was never intended that a single logo represent our regular method of wimping out on Friday Night Fights. Laziness and inertia kept that same logo in use for ... it's been over half a year already?
Damn.
It's about time we rotated in a new logo for


Still bound up around here and running off kilter, so let's just continue with out previous puzzle trend and go to some more old Fanzine Quizzes this week. How about a half dozen of them?
Bestest League readers can probably guess where this first one came from...







Remember - these quizzes come from 1961-1971, so keep the temporal framework in mind when contemplating your answers.

While you're waiting for tomorrow's Saturday Solutions, here's a bonus pin-up of Superham from the Bestest League Of America:



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)

20 March 2018

Doing It Bunny Style

Oops. Still keyed up and distracted around here, and forgot the little story that was to accompany the previous post on fashion.

See, another nice indicator of how odd Bunny could be at times - the clothes could star in their own story.
No, really...


Nothing quite like fashion, Bunny style.
Oh, yeah - fashion for superheroes was covered, too -


So far we've talked about things and characters around Bunny Ball herself. So a big question remains, "What does Bunny DO?"

As Queen Of The In-Crowd!, mostly Bunny just  - IS, being naturally that which she is. This leaves others, like Esmeralda, to try while Bunny just does. You've seen that structure before, and it's not to hard to guess what she does for money - she let's others take pictures of her being her.




 This, of course, gives in-story reason for Bunny to go anywhere and do whatever feels groovy that month. It's easy to rationalize whatever one pleases when the plot is dealing with insane creative genius types.
Let's follow along on that Zooples story and see what a day with Bunny can be like...


Don't ya dig those ginchy text panels? Like the first one on this page:


The were a standard in Bunny, part of the style.
Of course, it wasn't all just Bunny. She also had some groovy friends, like fellow model, Marcy ...


...along with her own Archie...


No matter how different they may be, it seems Archies have similar goals, eh?
50 years later, some other things still seem familiar, too -


A context note for younger readers - Back in the 60's Dial was creating the market for deodorant soap using a marketing campaign with the slogan "Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everyone did?"

pages from Bunny #s 4, 6, 8, 11, & 12 (1968, 1969)