Saturday Matinee With Vana, Danny, & Mitzi

With my personal obsession with 3, it should come as no surprise that today's matinee is, once again, a triple feature.

First up, our ongoing serial - our fourth chapter of Oskar Lebeck & Alden McWilliams' classic newspaper strip, Twin Earths. Then we've got the return of Joe Kubert's Danny Dreams, and the return of Matt Baker with a new strip for this blog, Mitzi Of The Movies.

Previously on Twin Earths: Vana, an agent from Terra - the world orbiting the sun opposite of the Earth - has managed to convince the FBI of her origins and her desire to defect to our planet. Agents of Terra, having already eliminated Vana's partner, are now attempting to terminate Vana as well...

Twin Earths - Chapter 4:

To Be Continued...

We're skipping ahead to the 4th appearance of Danny Dreams today. His 2nd & 3rd tales originally appeared in 3-D Comics #s 2(a) & 2(b). They've been reprinted a few times in 3D, and at least once with the 3D removed. Haven't found that comic yet, nor the ambition to create a non-3D version myself (yet), and so it's on to #4. This one has another surprise - while Joe Kubert continued scripting, this time Alex Toth stepped up for the art chores!

No worries - we'll check in with Danny again tomorrow.

Finally, we've got Matt Baker back again. Matt's the artist behind a couple of our Fly Girls - Sky Girl and Canteen Kate. In addition to his lovely ladies, once again we see him using colour plates to handle some of the primary inks for non-corporeal images. This was something done rarely enough that it seemed like a brilliant innovation decades later when the Legion Of Super-Heroes started using the same technique for holographic communications and such. (It was Keith Giffen doing that, right?)

Mitzi Of The Movies ran in Movie Comics, which featured a mix of movie adaptations and comics that took place around the movies - such as Captain Stand-In and Johnny Danger Of The Screenland Patrol. Movie Comics folded after four issues, and she only appeared in those four stories ... sort of.

We'll get to that another time. For now, this is her second appearance, from Movie Comics #2 -

page art from Twin Earths, Tor #3, and Movie Comics #2 (1952, 1946, 1954)

Saturday Solutions (Of Course)

Okay - I got a bit of sleep, and the answers have been prepared, so here's your Saturday Solutions for yesterday's puzzles.

Nope. I'm calling BS on that last one. Here's my corrected answers:

puzzle pages from Puzzle Fun Comics #1 (1946)

Loco A Medianoche

So, my peripatetic mind went wandering today, and it brought a little something back with it for a midnight posting...

Ever encounter Hermi Y Max?
Ricardo Pergrina turned out a bunch of Hermi Y Max strips around the turn of the century in the Spanish fanzine, Amaniaco. You might never have heard of them, but you'd likely recognize them anyway...

See what i mean? Bert & Ernie have been fodder for a great number of parodies over the years, but Ricardo's were notable enough to earn him a nomination for a Barcelona Comic Fair award for his work on the strip.
But i don't believe that Hermi Y Max has ever been translated into English.

So, that's how i spent my evening...

Sorry about all those notes at the bottom of page 2.
I decided it was better to include them on the artwork rather than as a text addendum for the sake of any who (almost inevitably) encounter the translated pages elsewhere. If you notice any cultural context bits that i've neglected to cover, please do make note of it.

I'll try to sort out a standard policy for contextual notes in the future. While translating some comics has been a part of the plan from the beginning of this blog, it's taken ten months to get around to doing the first one. I suspect we've got time to figure out how to handle that extra information.

Another question that needs answering:
Should i also run the untranslated originals for others to compare and perhaps offer better transliterations?

Meanwhile, here's the cover to the collection from which this story was pulled:

Saturday Solutions might be a few hours later than planned since my mind took off to do this instead of prepping the answer images and Morpheus's embrace yet awaits.

Edit:
Hola, amigos - ¡Bienvenido!
Es sorprendente y agradable ver a tantos de España por una traducción al inglés. Por favor, siéntase libre de ayudar a la comprensión de este viejo estadounidense y ofrecer sugerencias para mejorar la traducción.

pages by Ricardo Peregrina from Los Impresentables de Amaniaco # 3 (1998)

translations and notes by -3- (2018)

Friday Fun & Games - Puzzle Day

Caught up enough on that whole time thing  to realize that Friday is upon us and it's time for

We're going old school comic book puzzles & games today, with a variety dozen from back in 1946 -

As usual, tune in tomorrow for Saturday Solutions and the sources for today's puzzles.