Bedtime Gory

Continuing from yesterday morning, it's Twilight Of The Heroes - a classic tale from the golden days of yore by Ron Wilber. When reading along, remember that this was back in 1977 - so long ago that my then wife and i were still expecting our first child when it was published in Rocket's Blast Comic Collector. Long before the 'Dark Age' of comics, and way back when we could only dream of characters from different companies ever appearing together.

Some dreams are decidedly more twisted than others...

...and that being the case, we've had to put this tale in our 'back room' - The Other Voice Of ODD! - to keep things tolerably Safe For Work (and the search engines) here on the main blog.

Head on back and enjoy this odd and unique bit of hidden comics history.

page art by Ron Wilber for RBCC #s 143-146  (1977)

It Started In January 1955 When The Police Discovered The Body Of One Comics Code Official...

Thus did it begin...

Late last year, while presenting Ron Wilber's Star Woes from the old Rocket's Blast Comic Collector, i realized that i hadn't yet run his classic Twilight Of The Heroes despite having thought i had. Perhaps i was confusing it with The Massacre Of The Innocents, another strip from RBCC which did run previously. Or perhaps my deranged mind was playing tricks on me once again. 

Regardless, it's past time for another dive into those old zines and long past time for this tale to appear. However, we're going to break it up for a couple of reasons. The first is length - the story runs for 32 pages. You need a bit of room when telling an Epic, y'know. So we'll break the tale into two posts.

Moreover, we're also going to break this first post as well. After Wonder Woman shows up, it soon becomes NSFW. Fortunately, that's why The Other Voice Of ODD! exists. We can run the uncensored pages safely behind the adult warning.

Twilight Of The Heroes ran over several issues of RBCC, beginning in #139 - the same issue which featured Ron's above linked Star Woes tale.
 

Yeah, that got pretty grim. And that's just the beginning. However, next chapter Wonder Woman shows up (and shows other things) and so, as mentioned above, we're going to have to move the rest of this tale to our 'back room' for adult content.

Head on back past the age check for the rest of the first half of the tale, and we'll continue on the morrow.

page art by Ron Wilber for RBCC #s 139 & 140(1977)

Stellar Tribulations

Did everyone enjoy yesterday's Hide & Seek edition of Friday Fun & Games?

Yeah, still trying to get my peripatetic mind to wander back this way. We'll get there. Xmas is coming - that'll give it something to focus on here, eh?

Meanwhile, let's jump back a few days and revisit that issue of Rocket's Blast ComicCollector from which we pulled Don & Bill's Star Wars/Oz comparison. Star Wars, as you might recall, was making a big splash back in 1977 and unsurprisingly that was not the only reference in that issue. In fact, we got a short comic tale from Ron Wilber, whose work we've seen previously in Twilight Of The Heroes.
Wait - Did we get to that before the crash? Hmm...
If not, we'll go there soon.

For now, here's Ron's Star Woes from RBCC #139. Due to word size and density, these pages are a tad larger than usual for easier reading -

Actually, RBCC #139 was a Star Wars Special Issue, so there's plenty of other SW material, including artwork from Ralph Fowler, Steve Fabian, and others as well as a Mark Hamill interview. If i can get my brain to cooperate, we'll peek a bit more at the issue this weekend.

page art by Ronald Wilber for RBCC #139 (1977)

Sincerely Flattering Flash

We previously looked at a few Flash Gordon parodies from back in the 1940s & '50s, but we only stopped due to the growing length of the post, not lack of material. Satires continued over the decades, sometimes tucked away in odd little corners, like this tale from the 2nd issue of Drag Cartoons back in '63. The story was published without art credits, but when the original art showed up for auction it was attributed to Mel Keefer -

From the 1970s, let's look over in one of our favorite old fanzines, the Rocket's Blast ComicCollector. In RBCC #134, Ron Wilber took part in the Flash Gordon celebration that filled the issue with his own satirized take...

Even as 1980 rolled around, Flash was still getting spoofed, as here by Dave Angus & Kevin O'Neill in 2000 AD -

Of course, once the Sam Jones/Queen version of Flash Gordon hit the theatres later that year, parodies naturally experienced a resurgence in popularity once more. Here's Paul Kupperberg and Bob Camp's version of the film, sporting a cover painting by Bob Larkin...

By the way, that story from the RBCC that we opened with came with a pretty cool Flash Gordon illo from Steve Fabian (Whom we somehow have yet to get around to featuring even though i started tucking things away for posting over a year ago) on the cover -

We'll be back this afternoon with another batch, and even a little bit of Buck Rogers, too.

page art from RBCC #134 (1977), 2000 AD #181 (1980), Drag Cartoons #2 (1963), and Crazy #75 (1981)