20 November 2019

Return To Comics

You folks remember "Comics" McCormick, - "The World's No. 1 Comic Book Fan" - right?
If not, the link in his name above will take you to the previous posts on our reality warped hero from Ed Wheelan

Either way, while the mind is off wandering, i figured we could do with a bit of revisiting, so here's trio of tales from his short run in Terrific Comics -




That brings us to about half of his published adventures. I suspect we'll get to the other half eventually, eh?

page art by Ed McWheelan for Terrific Comics #s 3, 5, & 6 (1944)

19 November 2019

Choose Your Own Introduction #01

Introduction 01:

When i was a child, my parents decided to put the family on a diet. We were in the first batch of adopters of the zero-carb diet - the horrors of no bread or pizza! (They tried a meatloaf crusted 'meatza', but it wasn't the same)

At any rate, during that time they switched over to Shasta diet sodas - a nasty little chemical concoction in a can. By the time we lived through that phase, something had changed. I thought that those nasty little sodas had destroyed my taste buds, but actually the soda manufacturers had dropped sugar for high fructose corn syrup during the interim. It wasn't until decades later drinking 'Real' Pepsi in Mexico that i figured out what had happened.

That formula change made Coca Cola undrinkable for me, giving it a cigarette ash aftertaste mixed with the chemical bite. We were living in the state of Georgia at the time - Coke Was It. Pepsi existed, but one had to forage independently for it. Eateries served Coke.

Not too many years later, we moved cross country to California. Not only was Pepsi aplenty, but there was a Royal Crown bottling plant in our new home town! To my taste buds, Pepsi and RC were fairly equivalent and both superior to all competitors i had sampled.

Now i had two favorite sodas with my preference leaning back and forth between them. RC was the outsider, so closer to my heart - but Pepsi had that nice tooled leather holster for my can.

How is one supposed to decide between the two?

Well, i know what the stars say...




...but with whom are they agreeing?

***

Introduction 02:

There is an odd category tucked into Un-Comics.

As regular readers know, Un-Comics is what we call comics that appear outside of comics, usually in magazines or books. Sometimes in boxes of breakfast pastries or cereal or packaged with a toy. Et cetera.

Today we're looking at Un-Comics that appeared in comic books. A contradiction? Well, yeah, but... there is a reasonable rationale here.
They're comics, but they were advertisements and so, in a sense, not part of the 'comic' itself. Some of them featured regular characters with ongoing adventures that lasted for years. There was a trend toward using comics to advertise in comics, and many followed the fad.

Let's look at the Adventures of "R.C." and Quickie for an example. I've spent the last couple days digging through comics during the time period these adverts ran - from 1944 to 1951 - and i've found most, if not all, of them. Two dozen one page ADventures -
























 They must have really liked that one...


Now i suppose i'm going to have to start collecting "Pepsi" the Pepsi-Cola Cop, Volto, Tootsie, "U.S." Royal, Thom McAn, and some of those other ADventures...

ads from various issues of Sensation Comics, Flash Comics, Action, Adventure, Captain Midnight, Boy Commandos, Mary Marvel, Funny Stuff, Real Fact Comics, Hopalong Cassidy, Ozzie and Babs, Strange Adventures and Fawcett's Funny Animals (but they were lots of other places, too) (1944-1951)

16 November 2019

Glow In The Dark

For those who might be wondering, i yet live.
The lack of posting is not due to any technical or connection issues, as have often been my bane. It's purely internal issues driving my mind deeper into the cave.

A nod of Thanks to the Mindbender for poking with a stick. Going to try to rope the brain and see if we can't drive it to one of the many posts awaiting.

In the meantime, i finally poked my head out to gaze around like some off-season gopher. On the local front, down the hill from the cave -

Congratulations to Spokane, Washington, for voting to embrace trump's America - choosing to support Fear, Hate, Evil, and Personal Greed, not to mention deciding to let Outside Money buy your future. I can't wait to hear the whining when you have to live with (and in) the results.

I'm confused about the big uproar regarding big name directors and such decrying the nature of Marvel movies. Why are people getting upset about a story you've seen a thousand times before?
"Old Guy Says We Did It Better In My Day"
Relax, folks. That's the nature of things.

By the way - there is some good coming out of the peripatetic mind's current meanderings. Things are finally getting set up again for a fresh batch of paintings in the near future. It's been far too long, so maybe we'll see some soon. Since it's nice to have a picture of some sort on the post... part of what it's been up to is building, or rather re-building, a few actors for future works. Eileen is the hero of that game i've been tinkering with, if one chooses the female character option. The male option is her brother Ben. Whichever one you choose, you automatically kill the other in the process - You Monster!
(Well, the backstory demands it)
Anyway, here's how the model for Eileen is looking currently:


I've currently been focused on face & body shaping - skin tones and textures will follow. She may seem familiar, likely having appeared in some artwork previously posted on this site, or in the back room. As i said, i've been rebuilding actors created previously in the old software.

And i've been zoning out for hours at a time, and catching old episodes of Bob. You remember that one, right? Bob Newhart as the artist who created Mad Dog is brought in for the modern comic revival and teamed up with a hotsnot trendy young writer back in the early '90s? It's the show that taught us just how very short Jim Lee is, especially when you stand him next to Mark Silvestri.
Oh, yeah - that episode also had Jack Kirby, Sergio Aragones, Mel Lazarus, Bob Kane...
So i'm sure you all remember that one, right?

Okay, i've rambled and proven that something in my shape is still here. Now maybe i can ride this beast into a post tomorrow. We'll see.

Oh, and, by the way again -
We did it better in my day.

Geezers gotta say what geezers gotta say.

I'll try to let you know if it makes me feel any better.

10 November 2019

Heading To Rio

We already saw Lily Renée's final two tales on Jane Martin in the previous two installments. Looking back from the Now, i see echoes of the coming future in some of her later tales. It's easy to see how shots like the opening panel below, with the woven bamboo head wear, might lead an editor to see how she'd draw a sombrero. And the second and third tale here, which were the last before the two mentioned above, feature fashions that might easily have shown up in Lily's Señorita Rio.




The dresses lead me to ponder whether Lily knew what she'd be working on soon and had such things in her mind, or whether an editor looking at them might have been influenced to choose her for Señorita Rio.

Of course, it's just as likely merest happenstance. 

Either way, we should visit the Señorita soon.

But... did we run that one with Jane Martin vs. the walking dead?

page art by Lily Renée for Wings Comics #s 41, 45, & 46 (1944)