The Secret Behind The Mirror

Yesterday we presented an odd little distorted reflection from seven decades back - two stories, nearly identical, presented at the same time:

While those two pages show what we're talking about, the full stories are in the previous post if you missed it and want to see the entire tales.

How did this happen? What's the strange story behind the stories?

This is one of those rare occasions when we actually have a first hand report from one of those involved. The story on the left is illustrated by Howard "Howie" Post; the tale on the right drawn by Ellis Holly Chambers. (If you ever wondered why Chambers sometimes signed his work with an E.C., and other times with an H.C., it's because he often went by his middle name. That is, in fact, how you'll see him referred to in the story below.)

Let's let Howard Post explain, from his interview in TwoMorrows' excellent Comic Book Artist magazine.

I went over to L.B. Cole who was running a place and I took my stuff to him (as discretely as I could because I didn't want to embarrass myself with Paramount.) So I left it there during lunch and they rejected it. I got it back and took it across the street to Bernie Baily's outfit (which was on 43rd St.; Lenny Cole was on 42nd St.) and Bernie bought it. But the next month, my story came out in one of L.B. Cole's comic books as well as Bernie's! Someone had traced off my story when I left it up at Cole's over lunch! Would you believe it? [laughter] That was my introduction to comics.

Post continues:

Not only that: When the comic came out I found out who did it and the guy wanted me to work for him! He had just gotten a big deal to do a whole book based on my story. He gave me an advance of $800, more money than I'd ever seen in my life! [chuckles] I said I'd do it under one condition: That he just keep me in the clear. (Bernie had asked me, after seeing the story he bought in a rival comic book, "Are you selling this to everybody?" I said, "No, they traced it off on me!") I told him to verify what happened on paper - it may never come up but as long as I had his confession for protection... He said okay because he wanted me on that job. So he gave me that piece of paper, and when Lenny Cole's outfit found out about it - Cole's seemed some kind of criminal outfit, into black market paper, and I heard all kinds of stuff - I got a phone call from a  lady one day who said, "Post, you'd better not make any trouble for us. If you speak up against us, you're going to be in deep trouble. We have ways of taking care of you." [laughter] I'm 17 years old, I just sold my first job, and this is what I wind up with! [riotous laughter] The actual tracer of my work gave me an advance of $800 (he had to get the book out in a hurry) and I cashed the check that day - that minute! - because I didn't believe it was valid. I went home and said, "I got something for you, Ma." She said, "What 'tis it?" (My mother had a thick Scottish accent) and I said, "It's money. Here it is." She said, "I will not take it if you dinna get this  honestly! I will not accept it!" She had never seen this kind of money either! I said, "Well, Ma, I have to admit I didn't get it honestly; I got it for drawing cartoons!" [laughter] So she was kind of pleased and awed, and that helped us pull the family together - and it put my father at ease while he was in the hospital.  (with TB)

When asked if he recalled the name of the comic, Post replied:

All I do remember is that it was about a little Indian and some bears. The first thing I had done for Bernie Baily was a story about a little Indian on a bear hunt. It was a couple of pages. So this guy had presented my idea to a publisher to get a whole book of it and I ended up with half of the money! But I really couldn't take on half the work because there was such a deadline and the guy - who, by the way, is legend in the industry by the name of Holly Chambers - did two-thirds of the work, saying, "Keep the money." He worked overnight to do it; he'd buy himself a half a pound of marijuana, seal up the doors and windows, and work through the night. I came in the morning to find a tremendous amount of work; he's slumped over the desk in this for of smoke with finished drawings stacked up by his desk. It was fantastic.

The title unremembered.

So the work kept coming and I kept working at that studio until one day Chambers got himself a gun. He said, "You gotta walk me to this hotel because I want to show you something." We go up to this hotel and he'd buy heroin and bring it back to the studio. When I saw that I said, "This ain't for me. This is a little too rich for my blood."

Ellis shooting up without a needle, using a razor blade to cut his way in, was more than enough to drive Howard Post away - and on to his own successful career, not to mention repeated appearances here. (Like he'd care)

As one might suspect from the story above, Ellis Holly Chambers was a bit of an outsider, and a mysterious figure about whom very little is known today. This interview is the most i've ever seen on Ellis Chambers, his life, or his works. Like many (most?) Golden Age artists, much of his works were unsigned and uncredited, leaving us to speculate just how much he created.

Yesterday's post also noted that there was a connection to this story:

(Again, full story in the previous post)

The hidden connection?
This is the only tale in the book, beyond the original traced and modified story, that is credited to Howie and Ellis working together. The rest was Chambers' drug fueled late nights. Ellis was at his best, in my opinion, when teamed with a stronger writer - but i love his artwork.

We had no Sunday Morning Funnies today. Instead, let's enjoy some more of Ellis Chamber's work now with some Sunday Chamber Funnies -

page art by Ellis Chambers and Howard Post for Prize Comics #49, Hi-Ho Comics #s 1 & 2, and Wotalife Comics #s 5 & 9 (1945-1947) Howard Post interview text from Comic Book Artist #5 (1999)

A Mirror Oddly Crack'd

Let's take a look into an odd  little mirror -

Not a true reflection, and yet...  these two stories were published at the same time. How could this come to pass? Was it merely an odd coincidence with the splash panels?
No - oh, no. Not at all.

Due to the nature of today's oddity, we're presenting our stories a little (or lil, your choice) differently, so as to enable easier comparison. Though they appear smaller here, pages are still the usual 800 width.

Most passing strange, is it not?
Almost as strange as the story behind the stories.

We'll get to that tomorrow. In the meantime, one might ponder how this ties into it...

Answers tomorrow.
(And we'll even tell you why Ellis Chambers signed a bunch of those funny animal pics with an H.C., too)

page art by Ellis Chamber and Howie Post (1945)

Saturday Solutions - 20 July Commemorative Crossword

Inner hermit crawling to the back of the cave for a bit after that last one. So, few words - just the answer to the 20 July Commemorative Crossword puzzle:

puzzle & art by -3- (2018)

Music By 88 Fingers Louie (Him, Not Them)

We're not talking comics or movies or culture this time - it's all personal rambling.
Fair warning that you may choose to step out now and look for a more entertaining way to pass the time elsewhere.
Well, all right...  just one picture appropriate to our post -

Moving right along...

Here's a Freebie answer on the 20 July Commemorative Crossword puzzle from the previous post.

25 Across:

Today in 2017, ______ went live with the first meandering ramble and a painting of the Composite Stan Lee. (four words)

Answer:

The Voice Of ODD! (Exclamation point not used in puzzle answer, but wth)

Yep - Happy Anniversary me!

Astoundingly, it's been a year of fairly consistent posting. I wouldn't have put money on it lasting 10 weeks at the outset. Two primary factors converged to create this ongoing result - Therapy and Kirby.

Kirby first. (ALWAYS, Kirby first.)
As you may well know, Jack Kirby's birthday is next month. Shortly after launching The Voice Of ODD!, the realization that the upcoming birthday would be his centennial slapped me upside the head. Jack was a formative influence in my life, and while contemplating how to celebrate the occasion, the King Kirby 100 was born. One hundred posts on The King over the month of August. That's about 3 1/3 posts each and every day. And, as much as possible, i wanted to avoid little posts highlighting only a single drawing or that sort of thing.

That means that, thanks to Jack Kirby, only ten days after launching the blog i had to develop an obsessive work rhythm and gathering/sorting/indexing habits to match if i had any hope of completing the project.
Had it been anything else, there is a very substantial chance that this blog wouldn't be here any longer. But it was Jack. Not finishing would feel like dishonoring him. I couldn't do that. By the end of the KK100, the work habits were fairly well ingrained and sorting directories began to fill with material for use and reference. Old contacts and curators were reconnected, and access restored to archives i hadn't visited in seeming ages.

And so the method and means were at hand to continue.
But means and method yet require will to drive them, so now we get to Therapy.

No, i'm not in therapy, despite what some of you may be hoping.
Rather, i'm self aware enough to create my own therapies to address some personal shortcomings. (Others i heartily embrace) Regulars know that i am, by nature, what i refer to as a Hermit, though technically/objectively speaking, it's a degree of sociopathy and alienation mixing in happy combination.

A year prior to launching this blog, i became aware of my self-imposed isolation reaching a point of diminishing returns, with incremental negative effects beginning to weigh heavily on the postive benefits. And so a re-connection began, reaching out to many whom i'd not seen or heard from in years. Sparks were good, and it was generally pleasing all around.

It was soft connections, of course. Since i live without a telephone and have no use for social media, i'm simply not directly a part of their world. But still, it was nice to have them there.
And when the isolation turned inwardly destructive, i needed a connection to the outside world. About that time, Snell's 10th Anniversary over at Slay, Monstrobot Of The Deep! was coming up. In the '90s and early in this century, i sometimes existed more in cyberspace than the physical realm. Now (then) both had deteriorated to near non-existence. While a large part is happy with the Being that comes with that Nothingness, i was raised, in part, as a mystic.

Oddly enough, in his comics Dr. Strange (probably Englehardt) once verbalized the first rule for mystics:
For the Physician, he said, it's Heal Thyself. For the Mystic, it's Know Thyself.
(Yeah, that's not the first rule of the physician - that's not what i said, don't get sidetracked)

To Know Thyself. That's not something easily done from within.
Sitting in your living room and looking out the window, all might look fine. But from there, one can't see the shingles pulling loose on the roof, the roots growing through the cement, or any of the myriad of problems which exist. So, one needs must get outside of the house to see and understand it, and one learns to do so. When stepping outside myself to take in the view, i found some very disturbing fractures in the foundation and supports. We often tend to focus on what we're doing and building now, without thought of what we're building upon. Things are going great - everything's looking good as we progress up here without realizing it's crumbling way down there. With the view came the understanding that i needed to establish some ongoing connection with the outside world.

That realization timed with a favorite comic blog's anniversary impelled one hand to create this blog while the other reached out to those with whom i'd connected, and informed them of the blog as well. One hand was largely successful, the other ... not so much. If no one is there when i need them, no need to bother them.

So focus shifted more to the blog. While the connection is more one-way, the mental/spiritual benefits are still quite real and, over time, evidently manifest. While i may often seem rather misanthropic from my comments, that's not really the case. I may disdain herd mentality, and be unable to twist and blinker myself to conform/comply with social expectations, but at the core i have a deep love for Humans. It's spackled over at times with hurt and anger that comes with watching an adolescent society acting as adolescents will. One is always left wondering if they'll survive to adulthood.

If one wanted to be cynical, we could even apply what's often called Sturgeon's Law - 98% of Everything is crap.
Oh, but that remaining 2% can be glorious.

Aa-a-and - I might be rambling...
Where was this going?

Hmm... Comments and feedback? That's good social contact, and i do quite enjoy that. (Hi, Everybody!) But the connection i'm referring to is more internal. A sense of connection to the outer world rather than ongoing interaction. With the blog, i find myself writing not just to today, but to the visitors from the future who may find the blog years from now. The biggest single source of traffic to the site is search engines; people out there looking for one odd thing who stumble in and find this place. That's good. That sense of connection is perceivable into the future - connecting now with those yet to come.

That internal sense of connection is global as well. About 2/3 of the site's visitors come from the USA. The other third is wide-spread. Looking at the top posts over at the right, one was pushed to the top by visitors from the Ukraine, one by visitors from Spain, and one by visitors from Facebook. (That's a more foreign land to me than the other two). Top sources of traffic to this site are Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, and Vietnam. There have been others in the top, but the site data only records top ten for the day, week, month, and all time. Others were lost to fluctuations and time. I had thought about including a traffic map at the bottom showing locations of visitors, but i'm loathe to add another tracker to the site merely for personal curiosity.

Anyway, that internal sense of connection proved a good thing for my own mental/emotional/spiritual stability, and so we have Will to drive the Method and Means. Who knew there would be a third crucial reason to continue?

For a long time, i've dealt with mental deterioration - a couple of decades now. It picked up earlier in this decade after incidents with pulmonary embolisms left me running at savagely reduced oxygen levels in my system, complicating already present issues with breakdowns of already atypical neural structures. The  left/right interconnections that served so well over my life were burning up. While i still function at a high level, generally speaking, the deterioration is very evident to me. Even little things, like typing and how many corrections i must make now compared to only a few years back. Not to mention the long breaks as my mind wanders away from what i'm doing at the time.

The work on this blog has become a healthy exercise to maintain neural function. It forces me to focus and to keep things working up in the attic which might otherwise fall into disuse and decay. It would be so terribly easy to just slide into viewer zombie state and let those rooms go dark. So let's not do that.

That being the case, this time i suspect The Voice Of ODD! might actually hang around a while, rather than be abandoned within weeks, as seemed likely last year. I'll probably be going back to review my original goals, and perhaps tweaking a few things along the way. The original plan was for less comics, but after a month of Jack Kirby, comics became deeply ingrained in the site's DNA and they're likely to stay the major focus.

I'd planned regular soapbox columns when starting out. Basically just venting opportunities for the old geezer, y'know? Maybe we'll add a regular Hermit/Old Man  Rant  Cultural Observations feature this year. Maybe we'll get around to that piece on what went wrong to cause the dark Elseworld in which the DC movies exist. (The Kents - it was the Kents) I'd definitely like to get to talking about more movies, old and new (Accion Mutante, Zotz!, Black Lightning, The Power, Endhiran, House On Bare Mountain, Zeiram, Buba-Hotep, Kung Fury... and endless adaptations of Journey To The West (Including the most epic use of Buddha's Palm ever) are all sitting in the blog pile, along with dozens of others.)

Who knows? If i'm feeling particularly inspired and insane (it'll take both), we might even think about starting a running comic on the blog. (Perhaps returning to Mad Science! with Dr. Nick?) Or perhaps an ongoing artwork feature, just to force myself to do some. (You'll have to suffer, but it might be good for me)

Beyond every reason meandered through above, i simply like sharing the odd things i find in my digging through the past. Whatever happens in the times ahead, it's been good this year, and amazing that it's been a year. I hope you've enjoyed bits here and there, and thanks for visiting!

That sounded Human, did it not?

Dancing Anniversary Monkeys by -3- (2018)

Friday Fun & Games - 20 July Commemorative Crossword

It's Friday! That means, of course, it's once again time for Friday Fun & Games -

Today is a special Friday, with a special puzzle to commemorate the occasion. 33 clues all pertaining to things that happened on 20 July:

Across

1. Today in 1822, this monk with a thing for plants was born. (two words)
3. Today in 1930, the temperature peaked at 106°F in this capital. (Today's predicted high: 86°F) (three words)
7. Today in 1977, the CIA was forced to release documents regarding the infamous ______ mind control program. (three words)
8. Today in 1864, in Atlanta the battle of this famous creek was fought.
9. Today in 2003, ______ doing commercial work in India by new law began wearing night reflectors to avoid auto accidents.
10. Today in 1947, ______ was born down south and started looking for a guitar. (two words)
12. Today in 1932, comics creator Richard Joseph ______ was born.
13. Today in 1994, ______ publicly offered a half million dollars for an alibi. (three words)
17. Today in 2005, ______ became the 4th country to legalize same-sex marriage.
18. Today in 1973, ______ died and a thousand conspiracies and legends were born. (two words)
21. Today in 1847, Comet Brorsen-Metcalf was discovered by the German astronomer, ______.
23. Today in 1969, ______ Jr. was the second man to walk on the moon. (two words)
25. Today in 2017, ______ went live with the first meandering ramble and a painting of the Composite Stan Lee. (four words)
27. Today in 1983, the French government detonated an atomic bomb at ______ Atoll.
29. Today in 1921, US Congresswoman ______ becomes the first female to preside over the floor of the House Of Representatives. (three words)
30. Today in 1968, ______ became the first Heavy Metal band to have a song on the charts. (two words)
31. Today in 1940, Billboard Magazine published their first Singles Record Chart, with this singer in the #1 position. ( two words)
32. Today in 1942, the first detachment of the Women's Army Auxilary Corps entered basic training at ______. (three words)
33. Today in 1968, Jane Asher broke up with him on live television. (two words)

Down

2. Today in 1917, #258 was the first drawn for the ______. (two words)
4. Today in 1940, California opened its first freeway, the ______. (three words)
5. Today in 1938, this Dame most famous for her M. Appeal was born. (two words)
6. Today in 1923, _____ was assassinated in Chihuahua. (two words)
11. Today in 1911, Pioneering Filipino comic artist ______, affectionately known as 'Mang Pepe', was born.
14. Today in 1985, treasure hunters struck a $400 million payday from the sunken Spanish galleon ______. (four words)
15. Today at 10:10am, Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog reunion is scheduled at the San Diego Comic Con in this room. (two words)
16. Today in 1712, Great Britain was read ______. (three words)
19. Today in 1976, ______ landed on Mars (two words)
20. Today in 1935, NBC premiered the G-Men radio program, later renamed ______.
22. Today in 1977, i attended my first San Diego Comic Con at the ______. (three words)
24. Today in 1973, Congress reaffirmed their Constitutionally exclusive power to declare war by re-limiting the President's ability to do so with the ______. (three words)
26. Today in 1810, ______ declared independence from Spain.
28. Today in 1878, the first ______ in Hawaii commenced operation.

 As usual, the puzzle answers will be provided in tomorrow's Saturday Solutions.
The reason for today's puzzle is hidden within the puzzle, and we'll elaborate later. See you then.

all art & puzzle by -3- (2013-2018)