Blue Monday Calendar 2018 Week 26

This week's Gil Elvgren painting is a NAPA Advertisement from 1971 -

painting by Gil Elvgren (1971)

3 Day Matinee - Return Of The King

Today's main feature for our 3 Day Matinee is...

That there is pure distilled essence of comic book, is it not?

Of course, first up we have our ongoing serial - Twin Earths, by Oskar Lebeck and Alden McWilliams.

Previously on Twin Earths: Terra is an advanced human inhabited world existing in an opposite orbital position from Earth, each perpetually hidden by our sun from the other. Vana, a defector from Terra, is now believed dead by her home world, thanks to the efforts of her Earth allies in the FBI. As she and agent Garry Verth finally relax after ending the threat on her life, they begin to discover a clash of cultures along with their budding romance -

Twin Earths - Chapter 9:

Since last we saw the Boy King, he had his Giant tow the population of Swisslakia to the United States of America. (Fortunately, the ocean between Europe and North America is never greater than thigh deep to the giant) They capture a Nazi ship along the way as a peace offering to their new homeland while the giant puts the make on Lady Liberty's statue.

In the USA, David encounters a master Nazi spy named The Crane for his mechanical extending arms. I suspect we'll come back later and see the incredibly clever ruse by which he manages to seize control of the giant, forcing the Boy King to earn his right to control the automaton. But today, we have their most epic confrontation - Nostradamus's Giant Robot vs. Nazi Giant Robot Dinosaur!
This time the art is solely Dan Barry. (Al Mandel took over art on Nightmare & Sleepy, which had previously been drawn by both)

Some might argue this is the very reason comics exist. Therefore, we present the two-part 30-page tale in its entirety -

pages from Twin Earths (1952) and Clue Comics #s 4 & 5 (1943)

Sunday Morning Super Funnies

This morning we'll be continuing to poke around in the source of last night's feature. It was 30 years ago - 1988 - and Marvel was trying to fly an old style parody book. Since pretty much every term for mental illness had already been taken by other magazines, they called it What The--?!

They tested the waters with a four issue series, and they put a fair bit of effort into those issues. The series was picked up a half year later and continued numbering from 5, but those first four stand apart from the rest - despite some very fine efforts over the following one score and two issues.

Let's take a little look -

You might have already noted one thing that set those first four issues apart from later efforts - parody by big name series creators who weren't generally known for doing comedic parody. The above piece by Peter David, Todd MacFarlane and Jim Salicrup is a good example.

A better example still - getting the big name guys to parody their own works - like this team up of John Byrne and Jerry Ordway with their parody of Superman and the Fantastic Four (& friends) -

What The--?! featured silly little bits of fun...

...and quietly brilliant slams that none dare sign...

And every now and then, they slipped in some tasty oddity that i didn't know i needed to see until they showed it to me - like one of my favorite characters, Doctor Strange, as filtered through the wonderfully warped lens of another old fave - Phil Foglio* -

pages from What The--?! #s 2 & 4 (1988)

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*(Really? We haven't done anything on Phil Foglio yet? Not even on Blue Monday? 
Damn. So much yet...
Dear Odd, so much...)