The Adventures Of B-69-0

Okay - made it back with a short bit of amusement. Here's a quick dose of Odd to brighten up your day, Dogpatch style -

...and so it goes...

page art by Al Capp from Sparkle Comics #10 (1950)

(repackaging newspaper comics from Dec1948-Jan1949) 

Trump Flu Blues

One thing about a Crisis - it gives the worst elements in power a chance to strut their stuff and get even worse. In our government, crisis is seen as opportunity, and they're grabbing it left and right.

One glaring example is using the health crisis to force through an agenda that could never pass in normal times. Such is the EARN IT bill attached to the relief package. Not only is it evil in nature, allowing tyrants to be tyrants and giving the government Still More power to see everything everywhere, it also breaks security on everything from your love life to your credit cards to corporate finances.

But that's okay, because Fuck You - we're the government and you exist merely to serve us.

And to show how disgustingly evil it, and the framers of this bill are, they spew lies about it not being about encryption at all.
The Word Encryption Never Appears, they bloviate. 

That's right, it doesn't. They knew that their evils would never be tolerated if they spoke it's name directly, so they Voldemorted it.

You might think that some would be fighting against including non-related power-grabs into the relief bill. No, it's supported by both sides. They're only arguing over how little they can get away with spending, not how much power they can steal. But such is usually the way of the two-party "Freedom Lite" system. 

And, as usual, our government continues to operate in this century under the premise that the USA was always wrong; that the Nazis and Soviets got it right on how to do things. The government belongs to the people? What a stupid, foolish idea. People belong to the government, didn't you know that?

Unless things change dramatically, you'd better get real damned used to that idea because we've been at a tipping point and now they're really started to push things over the edge.

Good luck.

While we brood, picture in your head and ears Will Smith and Martin Lawrence singing their song...

Trump Flu! Trump Flu!
Whatcha Gonna Do?
Whatcha Gonna Do To Avoid Trump Flu?

I'll try to be back later with a real post.
(And we won't even talk about all the military troop and equipment movements going on in this country while everyone is hunkered down. I'm hearing that from truckers on the road, not voices in my head like the rump.)

But it was nice to see our president admit that he's not man enough to accept any blame.

Bad Times For Good Cats

I'm a bit too depressed from watching how evil our government can get when they have a good crisis to exploit. Not surprised that the scum also rises, but depressed.
So no words just now.

Here's the continuation of yesterday's post and the ongoing tale of Xal-Kor, The Human Cat from Grass Green -

That's all for now.

Do try to watch what they're doing while you're hunkered down, eh? And remember that they spend many millions of dollars on what to say to get you to go along with their evils. 
Forrest Gump it - Evil Is As Evil Does. 

The rest is all excuses to cover guilt, shame, prying-eyes, profits, and prosecution.

page art by Richard 'Grass' Green from Star Studded Comics #s 7 & 8 (1965, 1966)

The Grass Cat

If i've managed to get through the week without losing complete track of time (again), then we've reached Saturday. This weekend, let's return to an old favorite once more - This Guy:

You may recall Grass Green's early work in fandom on strips like the Bestest League of America, the Frantic Four, and the Scavengers. Or perhaps from those Far-Out Fairy Tales he drew for Charlton. Or maybe from The Shape, Superella, or his Super Soul Comix with Eric Private, The Black Eye and Soul Brother American. Not to mention his library of Blue Works.

Somehow along the way, i don't believe we've talked about arguably his greatest creation - Xal-Kor, The Human Cat. Like the photo above, Xal-Kor comes out of a semi-mythical fan publication from Texas - Star Studded Comics. Between 1963 and 1972, the Texas Trio published 18 issues (the final three under the truncated Star Studded title). The semi-mythical status derives from some of the people who worked on it and the low distribution. 

Contributors included folks like Dave Cockrum, Jim Starlin, Ronn Foss, Rich Buckler, Biljo White, George R.R. Martin, Al Milgrom, Bill Dubay, Alan Weiss, D. Bruce Berry, and Dennis Fujitake. (How have we not looked at Fujitake's lovely works yet?)

Originally only 250 copies were printed. By the end of the run, circulation had doubled. But that's still not a lot of copies out there, so the book was rarely seen even among collectors.

Add to the scarcity the fact that the early issues were mimeographed...

...and that's what it looks like after major clean-ups & restoration on the scan of the severely faded original. Even when copies survive, reprinting from faded mimeos is not often contemplated. Some are so faded that text cannot be read - it must be laboriously deciphered. Large areas of some pages are faded to pure white. Some pages, however, are still quite readable. 

I thought about doing a black&white conversion for this story, but let's stick with the original purple mimeo. Note that the other colours were usually added by hand - another reason for those low copy counts per issue.

Fortunately for us, with issue #4 they upgraded to offset printing and black ink. Later Grass Green stories are much easier to read -

And the switch to better printing was just in time. With issue #5, Green's Xal-Kor crashed onto the scene -

Here's his debut tale from that issue -

Xal-Kor appeared in another half dozen issues of Star Studded Comics. Fortunately, they're all sitting here, so we'll be diving in deeper this weekend.

page art by Richard 'Grass' Green from Star Studded Comics #s 1, 2, 5, & 15 (1963, 1964, 1969)

A Brief Aside

I've got to leave the cave and head out into the plagueworld to forage supplies. So just a quickie for now -
 

I get my main propeller-head fix from the Arrowverse tv shows. How far we've come from ol' Jeff asking to put the Flash in a jogging suit instead of that weird costume.

But, i've given up on Supergirl. 

And that's sad, because not only does the show sometimes feature my lifetime favorite superhero group (the Legion Of Super-Heroes), but Jon Cryer has been giving us the best live-action Lex Luthor the world has seen in a Long time.

But, i just can't watch the stumbling stupids any longer. For a year and more we've watched a silly soap opera storyline about how Lena Luthor is going to the dark side because she feels betrayed by Kara and friends over Supergirl's secret identity. Soap Opera dreck has always been the Berlanti shows' weakest point, but this whole thing has just been too moronic. It all hinges on nobody bothering to mention that Lena did know Kara's identity but had to have it wiped out for security reasons, by her own request. We were warned that just flat telling them that they're memories were purged could be damaging, but each recovered the knowledge over time until only Lena was still in Forget mode.

One stupid sentence and the entire year is mooted. But nobody can bother to mention it, and now they don't seem to remember either. By the time they hit their "It's A Wonderful Life" episode i couldn't watch past 5 minutes. The alert on the stupidometer was ringing too loud to pay attention to anything else.

If the writers have to dig that deep into frelling stupid, they obviously don't want anyone with intelligence to be watching.

I'll honor their wishes.

So long, Kara. 
See you next Crisis.