Blue Monday Calendar 2018 Week 35

Smoke Screen is this week's lovely Gil Elvgren painting from 1958 -

Yes - i'm still alive, even if the computer is barely on life support. Hopefully what we need will arrive this week, but who knows if that'll make things better instead of worse this time? Meanwhile - it's 60 degrees outside and i'm sitting here with the Air Conditioning blowing full blast and freezing to keep this unit running long enough to post and check emails.
I'll return when i can.

painting by Gil Elvgren (1958)

Blue Monday Calendar 2018 Week 34

Gil Elvgren's beautiful painting this week is a NAPA Advertisement oddly dated 1968-1981 -

art by Gil Elvgren (1968-1981)

Down Break

Computer rebellion underway.

The rebuild on the new desktop system lasted over 36 hours before mysteriously devolving into a paperweight. This system upon which i'm typing realized i was working on a replacement for it and now will only function for more than 10 minutes if positioned for the AC to blow full into it. Thunder and lightning took the reliable beast.
So instead of being fully up and running and back to being able to work and paint, they've taken away my work, my play, my music, my vids...

I'm just going to be depressed in the back of my cave for a while. I'll get tomorrow's BMC calendar page into the queue, but not sure how soon the next post will be after that.

But, hey! We got the net connection working well now.

Don't Leave Your Mind Alone In The Dark! by -3-

The Step-Father, Uncle and Grandfather of Invention

As mentioned, we're returning to visit with Supersnipe and his crew this weekend.

Let's start by checking in with Ulysses Q. Wacky, Unlimited Inventor & Genius. Truth be told, very few of his inventions work out as he had planned. In fact, there may be only one truly successful working invention to come out of Wacky's workshop. He created it at the end of volume one, and it returned at the beginning of volume three.

Let's take a look, shall we?

Yeah - this one would never sell these days...

page art by George Marcoux from Supersnipe v1#12 and v3#1 (1943, 1946)

Girl Guerrila, Not Gorilla Girl

No Friday Fun & Games today. Still in rebuild and reload mode on the systems here, but have at least moved enough data onto the new desktop to get a quick post up.

With our recent look at "Comics" McCormick, we were looping back around for another look at Supersnipe. While we're heading there, let's take a quick peek at another of George Marcoux's characters from the series - Roxy Adams, Girl Guerilla.

She first appeared to torment Koppy McFad back in '43 in Supersnipe #9 - both in the lead feature and the text story. In the years that followed, she had 9 more adventures, one of them being another text feature. We'll take a closer look at her after things are back in what passes for order around here. Meanwhile, here's her first solo story to give you a look at Roxy -

Okay - back to work on the machines and the data. Hopefully things will be back to full function by the morrow. (Maybe two morrows, we'll see...)

page art by George Marcoux for Supersnipe v.3#01 (1946)

Return From Fae?

As mentioned yesterday, we're ripping systems open and rebuilding today, so offline most of it. But for a quick post, i'm going do a minor spoiler on Infinity War. Since it's just getting disk release, we'll go ahead and put a spoiler buffer here so you  can avoid even the minor reveal.

Post continues after the trio of Infinity War posters -

  Okay, we're back. 

Now, can we take a moment to appreciate Black Widow's reaction... 

... when she looks over at Thor's arrival with a walking tree and gun-toting raccoon that no-one on Earth has seen before. Obviously, Thor is returning from one of the Fae realms after running around in Faerie Tale land...

...now she really believes he's a "god"

Okay - it's been said before, but - I'm off!

images from Avengers: Infinity War and advertising (2018)

Hey, Kids! "Comics"!

Going to be working on the hardware today and tomorrow, so might not be around a great deal.

Meanwhile, a little more of Ed Wheelan's  "Comics" McCormick - The World's No. 1 Comic Book Fan. As mentioned last time, he had just shy of a dozen adventures, but they were fairly unlimited in scope. Let's take a look at those splash panels -

McCormick's second story introduced his first recurring villain - The Octopus.

The Space Pirates would return as well. Both the Octopus and the Pirates return for the tales in his final issue.

Fat And Slat #4 featured the above two tales, and "Comics" McCormick's only cover. Sadly, the title folded and the promise of more next issue was never realized.

We didn't run the splash panels from yesterday's stories - nor to his first story to appear. Here's that first tale in its entirety -

art by Ed Wheelan from Terrific Comics #s 2-6, Cat-Man #28, and Fats And Slats #s 1-4 (1944, 1945, 1947, 1948)

McFad, Meet McCormick

Regular readers of this blog know that Supersnipe is a favorite around these parts. If you're not familiar, Koppy McFad was "The Boy With The Most Comic Books In America" and was prone to strange adventures based on his perceptions of the world.

As oddly unique as Supersnipe might have seemed as a character, he wasn't quite alone.
Koppy McFad,  meet "Comics" McCormick - "The World's No. 1 Comic Book Fan"

"Comics" premiered a few years earlier in Terrific Comics #2, but we're starting our look here in Fat and Slat simply because this is where they first ran his introduction. It's interesting that back in the 1940s Ed Wheelan was trying to offer a bit of a mixed cast. Our hero's best friends are a fat kid and a black kid. Yeah, he's depicted in the rather off-putting style of the times, and they had to justify his existence by making him the son of the maid (considerably more cringe-worthy than Ajax himself as we'll see later), but he seemed to have been pushing things forward as far as he could get away with at the time.

So - How do his adventures stack up to Supersnipe?
Well, they've got a decidedly different flavour, happily enough. (Cheap imitation wouldn't be that much fun) While Koppy took his adventures out into the "real" world, "Comic"'s adventures were purely in his imagination.
Let's take a look at a couple tales -

McCormick didn't last as long as McFad. He only had about a dozen adventures, and never got his own title. I think he's worth coming back for another look, though - and so we shall...

page art written & drawn by Ed Wheelan from Fat and Slat #s 1-3 (1947)