14 November 2017

Famous Creepy Eerie FreakOut

We're running out of year pretty soon, did you notice that?

Any 50 years ago in 1967 sort of things must be tended to in the next several weeks. There was a lot happening in '67 - in fact, it was A Happening in '67. But i'm not in an overly wordy frame of mind, so let's take in something visual - I trust not too abysmal. And let's intersect with another subject i've had on the back burner for quite a while - Warren magazines.

We'll later be talking about what goes on inside the magazines, but today, let's just take a look at Warren's '67 covers. As they developed over the years, their magazines often sported some of the coolest and most interesting visuals on the magazine rack.

Their Big 3 comic magazines were Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, with a host of other titles supporting them over the years. But back in 1967, Vampirella was still a stirring in Forry's... imagination. So, instead of Vampirella, here's his other magazine - Famous Monsters Of Filmland. Not a comic magazine, but just around the genre corner:








There's a reminder - Christmas Is Coming! That sounds somehow very different in a post Game Of Thrones world...
Meanwhile, back at Warrens premiere comic magazines... Creepy is the Big Brother of the two titles, being a whole year older. So we'll honor the elderly and let them go first-






Frank Frazetta was a frequently featured cover artist on Warren's publications. Even when re-purposing a pre-existing illustration that many had likely seen before, it was still a good draw on the newsstand. A great number of other fantasy and horror artists' paintings were used on the cover, Warren seeming to splurge on the colour covers to offset the mostly black & white inner contents.
Worked for me, though these were before my time buying the titles. I was still living in Asia at this point, and Warren was having enough troubles with distribution in the USA.
On the cover's of  Eerie's mere five issues for '67 we had Frazetta once again leading off-






I particularly like that Gray Morrow cover on #10 above. So simple & clean compared to the typical offerings of the time, and a striking design that makes good use of the white space to draw the eye to the image.

Though perhaps not up to later levels at the peak of their covers, not a bad collection for the year of 1967.
Of course, this is The Voice Of ODD!, so we'd be remiss were we not to peek at the covers of Warren's oddest publication for '67 - Freak Out U.S.A.



Yes, the second issue is actually cover dated for 1968, but it was published in '67 and it was just too damn odd to leave out. I mean - how many of you looked at that and Austin drawled "Yeah, Baby!"?
You can expect to at least see a bit of The Monkees from the first issue (16 pages they got!), as might be expected from some of my previous indications of Monkee mania.

But the question looms in my mind - which covers make you want to look inside the magazine?

all covers from Warren publications (1967)

13 November 2017

Blue Monday - Cafe Redux

Nope. This isn't the feature that got bumped last week. (But the last reference resource has been stalked and trapped, so - next week?) This week we have another feature that we said we'd get back to, prompted by recently finding an old favorite print by the late, great Dave Stevens, the star of today's



We'll get to that print mentioned above in just a bit. First, let's take a look at some pose sheets, from which you might recognize the beginnings of works you've seen previously. Here's a half dozen pages for a peek behind the Master's work:


NOTE: Most of the images for this post contain nudity and have been moved to our back room for adult content. The text remains that you may make a fair guess as to whether or not you wish to look at the pics.
Please follow this link to The Other Voice Of ODD! archive of the original post to view the artwork.



*sigh*
That Priscilla, she's one clever lady.
With preliminary sketch work like that, one hardly needs fully rendered works. But, we got those.
We've got black & white images, both lovingly textured pencils and finely delineated inks...





 

...and colour works, from outre comic book stylings...







...to more painterly styled images of lovely ladies...


 

...to even his rarely seen cartoony side in this poster for the 1984 movie Up The Creek...




And, then, of course, there's the immortal Bettie Page, with whom Dave gives us all of the above. Black & white...



...colour...




...cartoony...




...and the preliminary sketch...




...for that favorite old print i found last week:




I had to remove the lid from the scanner to capture this beauty in sections and stitch it together in Photoshop, so this image is larger than is typical here. Enjoy a close look at this lovely print, and then scroll back up and delight at the more subtly erotic look on Bettie's face in the preliminary sketch.
Dave Stevens is another one of those cases where i wonder just how much we lost with him. At only 52 when he died, he was just reaching the age at which many artists are entering a peak period, with decades of learning and practice to draw upon. That print above, for example, was painted when he was not yet 30.

It's probably best not to dwell on what we lost with him. Better to scroll back up and appreciate all he left us.


everything but the logo by Dave Stevens. Thanks, mate.


12 November 2017

Another 50 Years Later...

If you were reading along yesterday, today's star of Sunday Morning Funnies will likely come as no great surprise. Please welcome-

As mentioned yesterday, Adam had an ongoing strip in TV Comic from #s 788-835. Americans might have a little difficulty grasping long form story telling in short segments, something we'll see in much greater depth when we get to The Trigan Empire. But in UK comics, it's quite common to have lengthy stories told in one or two page chapters. (Well, maybe American audiences can feel somewhat familiar with getting only one or two pages of story per issue with the recent trend of "decompression" storytelling) At any rate, here's Adam Adamant's final tale in TV Comic. It came out just about the same time as the Adam Adamant annual, so it's a bit hard to be sure where his final story appeared. Of course, i could be entirely wrong and there are still other stories unknown to me waiting to be discovered. This final tale is only five single-page chapters:


Over in his annual, Adam gets the deluxe star treatment. (That means colour) Though dated 1968, it was released December of 1967, just as his run in TV Comic was winding up. As mentioned yesterday, three of the seven stories were presented in comic format. Here's the second of them:


As is often the case with early BBC series, many of the shows were lost to time. Only 16 episodes survive* from a mix of 35mm and 16mm prints. But they have been collected on DVD, and do include the first and last episodes. And so, Adam Adamant Lives on-


pages written by Thomas Woodman, art by Patrick Williams and Selby Donnison from TV Comic #s 831-835 and Adam Adamant Annual (1967)

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*(My information here may be out of date. There has been an active search for missing episodes, and i know that the audio for another one turned up this past year. Chances are good that there are currently more than 16 episodes.)

11 November 2017

Nerd Humor**

As TC noted in the comments, the US show mentioned in the previous post was The Second Hundred Years, starring Monte Markham as a Civil War veteran who took off for the Alaskan Gold Rush and was buried in ice & snow in 1900, remaining in hibernation until being revived in 1967.


In the UK, a year earlier Adam Adamant Lives! debuted, starring Gerald Harper as a Victorian Gentleman buried in a collapsed house in 1902, remaining in hibernation until being revived in 1966. Adam Adamant stayed on the air for two years, so the shows overlapped in 1967.


As similar as the shows sound above, they were vastly different from each other.  Luke Carpenter, Monte Markham's character in The Second Hundred Years settles into a quiet life, hiding who he is as he lives with his great-grandson in a typical sitcom view of the generation gap, filtered through Luke's outdated, but not necessarily outmoded, perceptions.
Gerald Harper's Adam Adamant, as one might guess from the logo above, was a bit more wild - groovy, even. The 1960s was merely a new adventure for Adam, and he quickly hooked up with a mod girl for balance and took to solving crimes and odd mysteries. Some say the only reason Adam didn't last much longer is that another, somewhat similarly toned pair took to the airwaves about the same time - The Avengers. Monty Berman & Dennis Spooner had more money for their program, and a spiffier shine on it.
Mind you, it wasn't that the producer of Adam Adamant Lives! didn't have sufficient genre cred - it was Verity Lambert, the original producer of Doctor Who. What else did this woman do? We should probably know.

Amazingly, The Second Hundred Years may be the only television show from the time period that did not get a comic book. (Okay, i'm sure there were others, but it doesn't seem like it when looking at all that was there.)
Adam Adamant Lives! may not have received an ongoing comic, but our hero did get a strip in TV Comics starting in #788 - 2 page chapters for 13 issues, and then another 35 single page episodes. In 1968, he received his own annual-


The book contained seven stories, three of which were in comic format, and another four text stories sporting illustrations such as this one:


I enjoyed The Second Hundred Years when it was run at 4 or 5 am by the local station where i lived at the time. I typically worked until dawn with the television as company while waiting for the computer to render the latest animation frames or effects layers. (It was so nice to bill for machine hours while watching old shows and reading comic books)
But, that said, it kind of sucked by comparison to Adam Adamant Lives!

And, there are those who say that he yet lives...  *


screen caps from respective programs, images from Adam Adamant Annual (1968)


 ===

*(yeah - that's actually Carson Napier. I know.) 

**(Here's an example of how my mind works. The title of the previous post was the Nerd Humor referred to in the this post's subject line: Quantum Broadcast Entanglement? 
You see, classic quantum entanglement experiments use two twinned pairs of particles - AB & BC.
The Second Hundred Years was on ABC.  Adam Adamant Lives was on BBC. ABC + BBC = ABBC, reflecting the entanglement reference linking the similarity of concepts. Nerd Humor.
They all make sense, just rarely get explained)

Quantum Broadcast Entanglement?

Here's an Odd little intersection of time and concept -
If one were to watch television in 1967 in the USA and the UK, one could find two different programs that both fit this description:

An adventuring man from turn of the century finds himself revived in current times, offering a satiric view of contemporary society filtered through his historic perspective.

Can you name our two shows and their respective stars?

Back later today with that Solution.

Solutions? Sure!

Welcome back to our Space Fact & Science Fiction quiz. Or, more accurately, to the quiz answers.
Let's jump straight to it, shall we?










And for our bonus questions:

Bonus01. How many known Solar Systems are there?

Trick question!
There Can Be Only One. The Solar System is the name of the stellar system in which we reside, located around the star Sol, from which it derives its' name. The stellar system (or star system) around the star Andromeda would be The Andromedan System. When you hear other people talk about other solar systems, they're just galactic yokels without comprehension.
This is why you hear new planets discovered around other stars referred to as "exosolar planets" or "extrasolar planets" - they exist outside the Solar System.

Bonus02. Which Klingon commander, previously seen in Star Trek films, was given the honour of the killing blow to the Enterprise in the Star Trek: Starfleet Command trailer? (good luck with that one)

Commander Kruge. The renegade Klingon commander played by Christopher Lloyd in Star Trek III: The Search For Cash Spock.

At this point, i'd planned a little bonus answer to the question who would win in a race?
N!xau (of The Gods Must Be Crazy fame) mounted on a hopping vampire, or Lam Ching-Ying riding a wrangled ostrich? But my copy is so old it's a VCD and the images are soooo tiny.
Let me see if i can't come up with something else for later in the day instead, eh?


puzzles from the 2000AD Space Quiz Book (1980) and Star Trek Annual (1979)

10 November 2017

Friday Fun & Games - Space Station 017

With the recent reflections on anniversaries and the past, i find my mind has been wandering through my own past as well. It was 20 years ago that i achieved Galactic Villain status by destroying the Enterprise and killing Kirk, Spock & crew for E3 and Star Trek: Starfleet Command.
As we wimp-out of Friday Night Fights once again, dwelling upon that past has led to today's theme of Space Fact & Science Fiction for this week's


We've got an odd little assortment of questions today. As is often the case, some of the answers may have expiration dates and be a little stale by now. For your reference, pretend that the year is 1980.


 









Here's a couple of Bonus Questions with a 2017 time-stamp on them, one for each category:

Bonus01. How many known Solar Systems are there?

Bonus02. Which Klingon commander, previously seen in Star Trek films, was given the honour of the killing blow to the Enterprise in the Star Trek: Starfleet Command trailer? (good luck with that one)

As is usually the case, join us here tomorrow for Saturday Solutions to today's puzzles & quizzes.

What? Are you looking here for hints?