Oh, Man - 95!

So, while i've been in retreat from the outer world, Stan "The Man" had his 95th birthday. Amazing that he still manages to find the energy for self promotion and all those fun cameos while nearing 100 years old. Joan must either be amazing or terrifying. (that's a joke, son. I done my time)

So, still crawling out of the cave, but such an occasion needs must be marked, no? But how does one choose among the many, many, books he's written over the decades?
We don't! Instead, we'll look at Stan writing about writing comics. That makes sense, right?
So, let's go way back - 70 years back, to 1947, to get a glimpse at early Stan teasing hints of the master promoter to come with an odd and amazing little booklet -

This was only a half decade after Stan Lee's first writing job (the text page for Captain America #3), but he was in a singular position at Timely/Atlas/Etc that allowed a perfect view to create this look behind the scenes of comics. While indeed a "little booklet", it does weigh in at 100 pages, but i want to run it in its entirety, so we'll break it up into 3 parts. Settle in and take a look behind the scenes in the early days of the comic industry as Stan Lee shows you the "secrets" of the craft - though much is common knowledge these many years later. Of course, what makes this book truly Odd can be seen on page 6 and the back cover - a facial hair free Stan Lee!

Join us later today for the second part, in which you get to try your hand at writing, drawing, and lettering comics!  (I checked - the TOC indicates we need exclamation points)

pages from Secrets Behind The Comics (1947)

Friday Fun & Games - Computer Edition v.01

I'm still running off kilter, and today's post will reflect that by more than mere lateness. It's not too late to go visit Friday Night Fights instead. (Though it might be too early to vote as yet)

I'm still just tossing messages in bottles out of the cave currently, but i'll be venturing out soon. Meanwhile, it is and it isn't time for

Let's journey back 33 years to 1984 and take a look at how we used to do fun & games on our computers. It was 4 years after i built my first Sinclair Z80 system, and home computers were becoming a thing. But it was still a very hands-on DIY affair in many respects, as we'll see in the second Marvel Super Heroes Computer Fun Book:

If you wanted to have fun and play games on your computer, this was how it was done in those ancient days:

That might be semi-incomprehensible to modern gamers, so let us flip back a few pages and take a look at the instructional reference...

Y'know, looking back - I don't want to hear any more whining (or even whinging) about having to set up modern games to run properly on the system. We used to have to customize the code by hand!

Here's a couple more programs from the book:

For the truly curious, Basic (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) emulators still exist, and you can run the programs for yourself to see what was considered "fun" on the computer in the early days. It would be a few more years before i got involved in the industry. By that time Floppy Disks had arrived - a huge game changer, along with internal hard drives.
Imagine that - in the early days, there was no internal memory beyond the OS. You had to load whatever you wanted to do onto the system via a modem like system with the data stored as sound on a cassette tape, or type it in by hand. If you had mainframe access, you could dump a stack of punch cards.

30 years ago, computer graphics consisted of 4 colours with resolution of 300x200. One might note that means the pixels were rectangular, not square. Somehow, the original programmers didn't think that might affect simple things, like drawing a circle.

3 decades later, we live in our games, and there are people forming personal (and sexual) relations with computer generated imagery.
Damn.

How long before our game characters can look out at the player and ask "Do You Bleed?"

pages from the Marvel Super Heroes Computer Fun Book 2 (1984)