Dictating Three Stories At Once -- A Slow Day!

So, ol' Stanley Lieber's getting a street named after him in the Bronx. (His old home, so it makes sense) And, i'm assuming, regardless of the inherent dangers, that you've seen the lovely tribute from the MCU cast members for Stan...

Search for We Didn't Light The Fire and Stan Lee if you've not seen it.

Amazing as it might seem these days, there was a time when not everybody loved Stan Lee. Let's let Arnold Drake (creator of the Doom Patrol and Guardians Of The Galaxy, among many others) tell you about it...
 

(You didn't think that Funky Flashman was the only one out there, did you?)
  
Well, that was an awfully short post, wannit? Why don't we look a little deeper into the issue of Sick that brought us Ego Man?

Here's another from Drake, lampooning another still-popular feature. (No, not All In The Family...)

They went on to parody 3 other shows from the time - Soap, Three's Company and Carter Country. Just if you was the curious type.

page art from Sick #120 (1978)

Saturday Solutions - Epic Fail Edition

The bestest thing about yesterday's Trekki quiz was the artwork on the banner, so let's run that again!

Here are the "Official Answers" that ran with the quiz in Marvel's Pizzazz magazine -

Ummm - yeeee-ah...
Let's take it by the numbers, shall we?

1. Mr. Spock plays the Vulcan Lute, which does look like a small harp. And it is sometimes called a Vulcan Lyre or a Vulcan Harp. We'll give it a half point for correctness. (minus a half point since he can also wiggle his ears)
2. - 4. Answers lie within acceptable parameters, and remind us that we are reading a Marvel magazine.
5. Arell Blanton's Lt. Dickerson was the "Chief Security Guard" for one episode - The Savage Curtain - and never seen again. All ranking personnel wearing red who weren't a part of the Engineering staff would be classified as "Security officer aboard the Enterprise."
6. I would have said "Trouble" which doesn't make their answer incorrect.
7...   8...
9! Well, apparently there was an un-aired scene where Bruce Hyde got carried away as Kevin Riley when he usurped Kirk's captaincy. It seems he must have swiped Montgomery Scott's nickname, too.
Obviously, it didn't stick. As i recall, they called him "Kathleen" in the mess hall for quite a while. (Kevin, not Bruce. Bruce was/is cool.)
10. Yup.
11. Okay... Maybe this guy actually does know his Trek and he's just playing with us?
See, Zarabeth was a woman played by the lovely Mariette Hartley. And the answer "the only meat Spock ever ate" was likely a technically correct answer at that point in his life. We weren't privy to the specifics of their coupling on 1960's TV to fully confirm one way or another, but it seems logical given the parameters of the situation.
13. The name of the High Priestess of Yonada was Natira, not Matiza. And Yonada was an asteroid ship, not a world.
14. The Horta was the creature appearing in the episode Devil In The Dark. The first aired episode was The Man Trap, featuring a shape shifting salt vampire named Nancy.
15. Well, at least they knew the Horta was just protecting her eggs.
17. The Hyena, of course, was Leena.
18. "Medical Check-Up"  Is that the new euphemism for an uncontrolled mating rut? Y'know - like Shatner's title for that episode... "What Makes Salmon Run?"
21. Jeffrey Hunter played Captain Chrisopher Pike in the first pilot - the officer who handed over command to Captain Kirk at the beginning of his tour on the Enterprise. William Shatner was, indeed, the only actor play James T. Kirk on film, both live action and animated. (On vinyl record is another matter. And this quiz was last century, before the reboot with the punk kid version of Kirk)
22. "A Villain? Oh! You wound me, Sir! I BLEED that a Noble Rogue such as myself might be branded a villain by a cruel and unjust governance!"
23. There are six pads on the transporter platform and six is the maximum recommended safe transport, but we did see that number exceeded on at least one occasion. (And shouldn't the hanger and storage facilities on board the Enterprise have a cargo transporter? (Your Honor, we call Speculation - Irrelevant to the answer. (Agreed. Move along.)))
24. I would have said "Half Human." That's what they told him when he was growing up.
26. Seriously? A total non-aggression pact forcibly imposed upon both stellar empires and maintained by highly evolved outside parties because Kirk and Kor lose their shit every time they meet, and all they're going to do is mention who signed it? The description could have been   Glorious.

*sigh*

The rest is close enough. I'm too depressed to go on.

But!
We do have a Bonus Saturday Solution!!

An answer to yesterday's Matinee query* as to the nature of Micro-Face. No, i don't mean an answer to why the poor sap was hobbled with the name Micro-Face, and why there was no talking badger or something to harass him for it. I mean, to what did the name refer?
As it turns out, he did not have a shrunken face on a normal sized skull, like Little Face. But he did not have tasers from his face, just like Taser-Face. However, the name Micro-Face is derived from the Micro Mask our hero, Tom Wood, developed.
No, it's not a very small mask. It has "Micro" tools built into it. Like Microscope, Microphone, Micro... ears?

Okay. But still...

Micro-Face?

puzzle from Pizzazz # 5 (1978), Micro-Face from Clue Comics #1 (1943)

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*(My apologies to any who tried the link and hit a dead page earlier. Blogger is now "correcting" the code and such directed links are no longer possible)

Friday Fun & Games - 'Trekki' Style

A cautionary note on today's Friday Fun & Games entry:
Some of the proffered answers are consistent with being unable to spell the word 'Trekkie' as it is spelled by Star Trek fans. Be prepared to supply your own answers when necessary, with bonus points given for context solutions to Al's errors -

Puzzle answers (and corrections) available in tomorrow's Saturday Solutions, as well as the puzzle source.

puzzle from ... weren't you reading that line above? 

Why is all this empty white space down here?
Oh... it's not empty. There's words!
In fact, this whiteness is filled with 600 characters.

Why?
Because this is the 600th post!

But, really - is there any point to celebrating that milestone? Certainly not worth offsetting the scheduled Friday Fun & Games post; not in my opinion. More fun to wait a bit for the 666th post to roll around. We'd have fun celebrating that comic book character that Disney bought along with Marvel - Satan!

So, we'll probably visit with his kids then - they both have had their own Marvel comics features.
See you then!

Star Trek Vs.

We'll resume out series on the Fly Girls after the weekend. In the meantime...

With the never-ending battles between Star Trek and Star Wars fans, folks tend to forget that there used to be another battle for SciFi Top Dog. It kinda-sorta went like this...

pages by Flash Kiernan and Buck Tallarico for Quasimodo's Monster Magazine v2 #8 (1976)

More Than Monster Times

Though a lot of the early work i've shown from The Monster Times was dated 1971, the cover date of the premiere issue wasn't until 26 January 1972. While we generally presume that comic books were published 2-3 months before the cover date, that's likely not the case with a purported newspaper. I'm inclined to think that it did ship to the stands on that date, or at least the week of that date.

A Note: Due to the larger size of The Monster Times, typical image size has been increased by 50% in width (125% in area) to help keep text readable.
Continuing on...

Let's bring back that first issue cover from our previous post:

King Kong and Frankenstein (yes, that's his name. He's Adam, not Victor, but he's the created son of Victor Frankenstein, so he shares the name) was not a radically new combo, but it was always cool to geeks back in those days. Didn't know yet who this Gray Morrow guy was drawing the cover, but could definitely dig it.
Mushroom Monsters? Sure - we knew that one!
End of the World? Pick One!
But Frankenstein a "fake"? What was that about?
Monster-Sized Color Poster Inside? Well, this thing is folded in half... what's it look like if we check the interior of the fold...?

Okay - decision made. Gimme! Gimme!
Again - no clue at the time who this Wrightson guy was, but gimme more!

And that's before we even opened up to the table of contents.

Let's pause and take a closer look at that credits box bottoming the Almighty Editorial (which i trust you read?) -

That's a pretty damned impressive line-up, and only the first issue. The list of contributors would grow only more distinguished over time, and it wasn't uncommon to see early work from future stars in multiple industries.

It was immediately clear that The Monster Times was going to be about more than just monsters. The editorial promise a slew of science fiction features and the comics influence was very evident, with both old comic coverage and comic stylings sprinkled throughout the issue. As we proceed, i'm going to run the first page of several articles to give a better feel of the overall publication.

First up was Nosferatu... What Ever Happened To The Vampyr?

That's a question fans often ask almost a half century later, eh?
Even from the first article, they had a comic sidebar:

The Nosferatu comic from Izzo & Wrightson that ran yesterday was also from this issue.

Der Golem told of Rabbi Loew's* Golem and the influence on Victor Frankenstein's flesh golem -

The Men Who Saved King Kong spoke of how King Kong was almost never made -

The Mushroom Monsters on the cover blurb turned out to not be Matango (AKA Attack Of The Mushroom People) as we were thinking, but a generic term to refer to creatures created by the mushroom cloud of the Atomic bomb. This inaugurated an ongoing series, as was the book review section sharing the spread -

Back in those days before home video, The Shape Of Things To Come was a movie that existed mostly in legend. This was one of the first looks i go of the film -

Again, the comic sensibilities arise with a photo-comic from the movie -

We skipped past the biggest comic highlight from the first issue. It dovetails nicely with The Shape Of Things To Come, being science fiction from the first half of the 20th Century - the classic Buck Rogers comics. Here's the full article -

That first issue was enough to hook young me. The second issue only increased the allure of The Monster Times - an all Star Trek special, including an interview with William Shatner -

Inside was a variety of features on the show...

...Trek parody photo-comics...

...and a bit on the cool UK Star Trek comics we've seen here before -

The first half dozen issues did a fine job of feeding a young comic junkie's addictions, making sure i'd be back for more. Issue 3 brought us an article on insect themed characters in the comics -

The 4th issue gave us an article on the new "relevant" comics -

For an ERBophile, issue 5's piece on Joe Kubert & Tarzan was pure delight -

Zombies were all the rage back then, too, and issue 6 looked at zombies in the comics -

Yeah, it was The Monster Times - but that wasn't all it was.

Sadly, the bi-weekly publication schedule didn't last. After a little over half a year, it switched to monthly and then eventually to bi-monthly. The last few issues were published on an erratic schedule and distribution seemed poor on them. Issue 44 was the last i had, though another 4-5 issues were released.

Not quite 50 issues, but a whole lot of geeky goodness packed into them.

pages from The Monster Times #s 1-6 (1972)

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*(Yes, i know they spell Loew as Leow in the article. 2 + 2 ≠ 5.)