CAUTION: Kunoichi Chaos Coming!

One may be in strange new places, but the Past ever lurks behind us. (I really thought the "Past" was lurking closer, though. It's been over a year since the last update? I kind of meant for every 6 months or so to keep it "alive" and avoid deletion.)

Here, the Past arrives in the form of Misaki Miki, TK-8's former partner. One might think that this bodes ill for Michiko, who has been bonded with TK-8 since re-awakening his human emotions within his RoboSapien shell. It actually bodes ill for the entire Colony. 

Yep. Still off in my own strange world of The Third Colony. 

But i'd really rather not see this one fade away just because it's no longer habitable to me.

Go Around Back To Peek In T3C's Window

I've mentioned my new home on the web a couple times, but haven't gone much into things as the game is very adult oriented and not suited to this blog. So i've put up a collection of pics from the past year in the back room on The Other Voice Of ODD! And now i must go - the interface keeps spinning an animated icon to update everything damn thing i type. That's not distracting at all. After uploading images i thought the interface might be usable for me these days. Then i started typing. NOPE. I'm even further out than before. Much as i miss The Voice Of ODD!, i can't stand being near it for long these days. Here's a direct link to the Peeking In T3C's Window post.

Please, Mr. Google - Please Don't Kill My Blog...

 Okay. Too late on that front. The hostile-to-users interface and the announcement that anything we do will get erased soon after we're gone already killed things here.

But, let's not get eager and kill all memory of me and the site too soon, eh? So here's a bit of the silly things i'm doing these days with The Third Colony to ping the system and maybe keep the archive alive a while longer.

And maybe i'll even remember later to post something NSFW in the back room to keep it alive, too.

It Yet Lives and Seasoned Greetings

 Just an "I'm Alive!" and a "Don't delete my blog" with a side of "Happy Holidays!"

Oops. It's been a while and i'm not in SFW mode these days. I forgot this site is Safe For Work, and put a greeting with nudity here. It's been moved to the back room.

Carry on...

EDIT: I'm told i should let folks know where i hang my pixels these days - The Third Colony.

Maybe soon

 No promises, but it looks like The Voice Of ODD! will return next month in a new location.

I'll let you know more when things are confirmed.

That Time Frank Borth Drew Spider-Man

Yeesh.
I even leave threads dangling when i'm picking up dangling threads.

As you may recall, a few months back we went back to see when Frank Borth had the Spider Widow meet the Spider-Man. I was supposed to follow that up with that time, decades later, when Borth drew our more familiar Spider-Dude...

Yet, not quite The End.
In that same issue, Frank also did this two-page spread -

We leave you with this lovely piece done for Monsters Attack (obviously, since they spammed it) the previous year, in 1990 -

Again, The Bear Begins...

As we saw yesterday, The Bear's star began its ascent in the text pages of Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact. We noted how very rare it was to see a "filler" text feature take the cover of the book.

Perhaps i should have mentioned that he did it more than once...?

That was the cover for The Honest Bear (header shown yesterday).
Four issues later, the Bear was on the cover again...
 

...but this time it was to mark his start in comic formatted tales -
 

Viewed through a modern lens, Wong Fu can be viewed as a racist stereotype. But that's obviously not the intent. Instead of mocking as an outsider, the strip seeks to normalize the differences of a culture existing within a larger foreign society. After all - have you ever seen anyone pointing out that Pidgin was a Chinese word for Business to explain the term? Or did they leave you thinking it had to do with birds that many view as winged rats?
It's much more inclusive representation than one might typically find in 1953.

And now i'm feeling guilty for not having provided Chinese Translation panels for Mad Science with Dr. Nick! as they did here.

On a side note - the Bear's language abilities here compared to elsewhere is a good example of why i was so coy originally about whether or not the Bear was an ongoing character. He's really more like a regular actor appearing in multiple stories.

And another odd little note - I believe this was the only story in which the creator goes uncredited. Previous tales were from Ray St. Clair, and subsequent stories came from Eric St. Clair. I guess he was still making up his mind on the change at this point? (Probably not the actual reason why we see no credits here) The art appears to be from Paul Eismann, but there's no confirmation of that.

page art by Paul Eismann (?) from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v8 #s 18-20 (1953)

Fuck Blogger

 Well - they forced the new interface upon all users, and it is truly TERRIBLE. I mean viciously, ass-raping terrible. I cannot find a single thing that is an improvement, but i can find dozens of things ranging from Bad to WTF Stupid.

Terrible enough that i'm not sure i'll be continuing here any longer. 

There are two posts in the queue currently. After that...?

Finally, The Bear Begins (No, Really)

Okay, let's try this once again, eh? 
We're talking about the odd origins of The Bear as a feature in Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact.

One of the things that was quite unusual about the beginnings of the Bear is that he started as a text feature. And that's how he appeared for his first few years. The Grand Comics Database will tell you that The Bear first appeared in the latter half of volume 5, but that's not accurate. He had his premiere tale late in v.4 -

As you may have noticed, though Postal Regulations only require two pages of text, TC0F&F actually used those pages for more than mere filler and decided they needed three pages every issue.
 
The Bear had several tales in text form before he graduated to comics...
 

The most indicative of his popularity was El Vaquero -
 

This one would seem to show that these stories were quite popular indeed. And not simply because they promoted him from required filler text to comic stories.
After all - when's the last time you saw a comic's text pages take the cover of the book?

That's pretty freakin' amazing, as the saying goes.

Another odd little note - While the comics stories are written by Eric St. Clair, he used the name Ray St. Clair while doing the text stories. 

pages from Treasure Chest Of Fun & Fact v4 #18, v5 #s 12 & 18, v6 #s 10 & 17, v7 #12, v8 #s 7 & 14, and v9 #1 (1946-1951)