Daily Scans Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Daily Scans" journal:

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November 11th, 2009
08:37 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

The unfortunate side of Plastic Man's powers
Looking over some of the great Jack Cole's work on Plastic Man in the 1940s, something occurred to me.We see Plas eating and drinking occasionally. So when he pulls a stunt like this:



Well, wouldn't the natural digestive gases found in the intestines be forced out through their logical exit? And wouldn't this be much like squeezing a whoopee cushion, with similar attention-drawing noises? ("Did youse mugs hear that? It means Plastic Man's here!" "No, boss-- that wuz me, I had chili for lunch.")

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November 8th, 2009
11:58 pm
[misterfedex]

[Link]

Hero High. Enrolling now!
I'm not sure if its ever been left here before, but I bring to you the earliest hero memory of mine. As a strapping young lad of three, my mom sat me down in front of the television and allowed me to gain a lifelong adoration. Super heroes. And villains. And somehow, it came from this lunacy... )

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November 5th, 2009
12:49 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

Brain Bats of Venus... I hate those things


*Ack!* Those things are just WRONG. This story appeared in MISTER MYSTERY# 7, September 1952. Basil Wolverton had a distinctive style like no other, it had texture and solidity that made it seem both unreal and convincing. He's mostly remembered for his twisted distorted portraits that appeared in MAD and DC's PLOP, as well as trading cards. Odd stuff. He also wrote and drew POWERHOUSE PEPPER, which used more alliteration per page than anything in history. Later in life, he did religious art that seems to concentrate on the coming apocalypse and it's as unsettling as you might expect.Earthmen Rod Crenshaw and Reese Bitner make a crashed landing on Venus, slamming down on the dense mysterious jungle. Not wearing any restraint belts (of course a 1950s comic), Bitner dies from a broken neck in the crash. Oh well, Crenshaw thinks and goes out to clear the encroaching fungus off the ship and make repairs. Then he notices some native life forms that are a bit unusual.

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October 27th, 2009
09:35 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

Oh, all right, I suppose I'll have a secret identity
For years, the official word on the original Flash was that he didn't need to wear a mask because he constantly kept up a state of vibration that blurred his features enough to make them unrecognizable. This never seemed plausible to me, anyway; depending on how automatic vibrating your face could be (would it be like constantly blinking fast every time you're in public?), the Flash was knocked unconscious or gassed or drugged plenty of times in those Golden Age stories, so crooks got a good long look at his mug. (Later, around 1978, Jay Garrick publicly announced his true identity, being semi-retired anyway.The funny part is that, in the early stories following his origin, Jay not only didn't try to conceal his powers as his civilian self, he went out of his way to flaunt them in front of crowds. This sure seems understandable; he was a college student, a young man suddenly given an astonishing gift and how many people of that age would not want to show it off? Actually, how many would think there would be any reason to hide their new abilities?


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October 16th, 2009
06:40 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

But just how DOES a wirepoon work?


I'm 90% sure that, before the 1989 movie, Batman did not use a launching device for his silken cord. Either he tied it to a batarang or threw a noose like a cowboy around any handy protrusion on a building. Then.. and here's the tricky part.. he often would swing up off the ground. What? How? Don't ask me. It never made any sense to me how someone standing on the street and holding a cord could swing up off the ground. The first Tim Burton movie introduced the idea that Batman would fire a line from a little pistol thingy which had a motor to reel him up like a hooked fish. And this has been featured prominently ever since.Yet Batman need not have waited fifty years to get hold of such a useful gizmo. His fellow Justice Society member the Sandman had been using a wirepoon since the early 1940s and it's exactly the same sort of device. Above is a panel from WORLD'S FINEST COMICS# 7, Fall 1942. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby helpfully provide a diagram of the wirepoon gun and (who knows?) if you were good in metal shop class, maybe you could make one for yourself.

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October 7th, 2009
12:56 pm
[strannik01]

[Link]

When romance comics were downright creepy.
Photobucket

As anybody who read romance comics scans in both versions of our fine community can attest, romance comics often featured romances between young girls and men that were (at least) a couple of years older then them. But none of them were quite as creepy as "The Man of My Dreams," a story that appeared in Love Problems and Advice Illustrated #2. Now, I know that age consent worked a bit differently back then (it didn't count if you were married), but still... The names of the artist and writer who created this are lost in the mist of time, which is probably just as well.



Dial-up link link (even if less and less people need it every day)

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September 27th, 2009
07:56 pm
[his_spiffyness]

[Link]

Cross Dressing for INJUSTICE!!!
A lovely Heiress, an ugly transvestite, and sea mines. All in a days work for the Harbor Patrol!

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September 25th, 2009
09:22 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

Captain "Skinny Dipper" Marvel
Yep, busted. WHIZ COMICS# 50. If he turns back, will Billy be nekkid too or will he have on that red sweater and blue pants outfit?



It's often a jolt to read old books and realize how society has changed in ways that we hardly notice anymore. Boys and girls up into their teens used to go swimming naked in the summer (not together), usually in secluded swimming holes and ponds on someone's property or in some semi-hidden bend of the river. No one thought twice about it. Kids used to shower after gym class as a routine, too, and I imagine that has been long dropped. Something happened in the late 1950s or so that made people more apprehensive than before about their children. Walking a mile or so to catch the school bus or to get home after school was normal, kids used to disappear all day on Saturday or in the summer to play, and parents trusted them not to get in too much trouble (and they didn't). At the beginning of POLLYANNA, we see a bunch of young boys jumping into the old swimming hole, bare as when they were born and that was a Disney film. Maybe that still goes on deep in the backwoods of the South or the Midwest today, but I doubt it.

era: golden age, char: captain marvel/billy batson

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September 15th, 2009
01:52 pm
[strannik01]

[Link]

Archie Comics' other romances
After Joe Simon and Jack Kirby pioneered romance comics in the late 1940s, every other publisher quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Archie Comics was no exception. Ultimately, it didn't catch on and Archie Comics decided to stick to publishing adventures Archie Andrews, his supporting cast and the variety of "teen-age" imitators that tried to replicate the formula that made the original so successful.

Now, when it comes to finding romance comics with objectionable undertones, you really can't go wrong. At best, you'll find something mildly cringe-inducing. At worst, you'll find something like "Cottage of Love." It's hardly the most cringe-inducing romance comic ever published, but good God...

The story originally appeared in Darling Love #8. Writer and artist unknown.

Where a woman discovers that having a career will ruin your life and will make your man have implied sex with loose women (11 Pages under the cut) )

And, as a bonus, an advice column and a celebrity gossip column from the same issue.

Suprisingly sensible advice under the cut )

For the few readers who still have dial-up (or are reading this from a wireless hot stop), here is a link.

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September 12th, 2009
07:22 pm
[mysteryfan]

[Link]

Robin's Oath


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September 7th, 2009
05:30 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

Where the stuff you lose really goes


This story is ironic in a metatextual way, as in a few years Captain Marvel (and his family) would really go to Limbo, when the Fawcett comics closed up shop. There they would chill in the timeless void of fictional characters without a home, until the same company that had caused their titles to be dropped would buy up rights to them and bring them back as secondary characters. (Cap never showed it on the page but he must have been bitter.

Be that as it may, this is a typically charming little tale. Captain Marvel discovers that recent thefts of valuables are the work of the Collector, a wizened old coot who is assigned to take worthless inventions, badly written books, crummy art and such away. (From what I see on sale everyday, he hasn't kept up.) Limbo is a gigantic junkyard. The Collector decides to start confiscating something nice once in a while, just to brighten up his metaphysical realm. This is where Cap takes notice.

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02:29 am
[superfan1]

[Link]

Horror Week: Even the devil hate critics.
Cut )

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September 3rd, 2009
10:37 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

How about a little mongoose blood?


From the January 1940 issue of AMAZING STORIES, "Dr Varsag's Experiment" is a neat little science fiction thriller by "Craig Ellis" (actually Lee Rogow). While no classic every fan should rush out and track down, it is a brisk story with some impressive action and creepy atmosphere, reminding me very much of a Universal "B" monster movie of that time. Superhero fans should also note that here apparently is a source that Timely Comics drew on to create the Whizzer. A second-rate hero of the Golden Age, the Whizzer was basically an imitation of the Flash, dressed in a singularly unappealing yellow costume* with small wings on his helmet (and what looks like a pigeon beak, for some reason). He is best remembered for appearing in two stories of the All-Winners Squad with heavyweights Captain America, Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch.The Whizzer's origin has understandably come in for a good deal of ridicule. He was injected with mongoose blood by his father. Rather than promptly sending him into fatal shock, this somehow gave him the blurring speed of a mongose. Well, all right, it's time to make a costume and find an arch-foe. The Whizzer (surely there must have been a better name available, guys) first appeared in USA COMICS# 1 (August 1941). But his pulp forerunner had already seen print in AMAZING STORIES over a year earlier. (Comics, pulps, old time radio.... all those guys swiped ideas from each other shamelessly.)

"Dr Varsag's Experiment" takes the human mongoose concept but goes about much more plausibly, develops the character into an awesome and unsettling creature and builds toward an inevitably grim finale. Our narrator tells us of his long friendship with his two college chums. One was the brilliant but erratic Arnold Varsag, who has gone deep into esoteric research. The other friend is Dexter Montrex, who started off as a scientist but met some setbacks and instead became a prizefighter. (Quite a change in careers there, Dex.)Varsag has become fascinated with the (admittedly impressive in real life) mongoose, that weasel-like animal that does indeed fight cobras. It might be interesting to give a human being the speed and reflexes of a mongoose, he reasons. All it would take is a few completely illegal advanced surgical operations, like transplanting parts of a mongoose's cornea and nervous system into a person. (Ow, my suspension of disbelief just pulled a muscle) Oh, and a diet supplement of brown paste made from vital organs of mongooses (mongeese?)Recovering quickly, Montrex goes back in the ring and promptly becomes a huge sensation. He seems to knock out an opponent with a single punch, but a high speed camera filming the bout reveals the truth. "The camera showed nine lightning blows and behind those blows was the perfect timing and muscular coordination of the fastest animal on earth!" In six weeks, Montrex downs seven increasingly tough fighters with startling ease.He becomes known as the Human Cobra, a case of genuine irony considering the mongoose is the legendary ememy of the cobra.

Unfortunately for everyone concerned, this is not a superhero comic but a horror story. Rather than finding a noble calling in a crusade against criminals or saboteurs, Dexter starts drifting away from human concerns altogether. As he continues to mutate physically (his hair bristles now when he's angry and his eyes are starting to look pretty scary), he also begins acting more and more sullen and uncommunicative. The animal instincts are taking over. Dexter develops an unhealthy obssession with a large cobra in the city zoo and steals out at night to break into the reptile house.There, for no good reason except the call of the wild, he teases the snake face to face (Kids! Don't try this at home!), irritating the serpent no end until it's exhausted. Eventually, he makes a bad judgement call in not realizing that one night there is another cobra in the enclosure. Considering that the opening sentence of this story describes the narrator attending the funerals of both Dexter and Dr Varsag, it's not giving much away to say that they wouldn't be back for "Revenge of the Mongoose Man" in a later issue of ASTONISHING TALES.

_______
*A yellow costume for "the Whizzer"...!

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September 2nd, 2009
09:29 am
[strannik01]

[Link]

Weird Golden Age Patriotism - USA, The Spirit of Old Glory
MLJ's the Shield was the first patriotic superhero in American comics, but it wasn't until Captain America came around that the trend really took off. Every publisher rushed to jump on the bandwagon and get their own patriotic hero (or several) out on the shelves. Some were fairly mundane, but others... Others were just plain weird.

In this series, I am taking a look at some of the odder, more unique examples of the trend. Members of the original scans_daily will probably remember some of them, but others will be brand new.

This post focus on one of the later. It was one of the many patriotic superheroes that appeared in Quality Comics over the years (the most famous and popular of which was, of course, the company's version of Uncle Sam). This particular character only lasted a few issues of Feature Comics. As far as I know, she was very revived by DC, or anyone else, for that matter, which I think is kind of a shame. The concept is just too odd not to be used somehow.

The following story was originally published in Feature Comics #42. Writer unknown, art by Maurice Gutwirth

What if the Spectre was a patriotic girl? (5 pages under the cut) )

Note: I apologize for the quality of the scans. The originals were rather poor, and while I tried to clean them up the best I could, there was only so much I could do with what little photo editing software I have.

Current Mood: okay
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August 30th, 2009
08:55 am
[his_spiffyness]

[Link]

Frank, what have they done to you?
Didn't we already go through this nonsense in the 90's?

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August 29th, 2009
09:31 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

A visit with Merlin
Some of these classic strips can't be over-praised. Hal Foster's PRINCE VALIANT is a good example, a perfect blend of great art and great storytelling. Imagine waking up Sunday morning to see this page in your newspaper. Here's an example from 1938.




At this point in the saga, Prince Valiant is still a youth, maybe in his late teens, trying to prove himself to Arthur by deeds of valor (while also tumbling headlong in love as youths do). Val has managed to escape from Dolorous Garde, where Morgan Le Fey (HER again!) is holding Sir Gawain. Merlin promises to free Gawain if he can obtain a personal possession prized by Morgan, and Val returns with her falcon. (I've seen hunting falcons up close and to be honest, stealing one in flight agaiinst its will would not occur to me. I'd bring Merlin one of Morgan's slippers or something..)

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August 24th, 2009
10:05 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

That Al Pratt, what a nut
The Atom was not one of the oddest heroes of the Golden Age (I mean, compared to Madame Fatal or the Heap or Plastic Man) but he was odd enough. He had no super-powers. Al Pratt was a college sophomore who stood 5'1" and, after a youth spent being teased and ridiculed, had built himself up through obsessive bodybuilding to the point where he could whip the snot out of four husky bruisers at the same time. He did this regularly, with obvious relish. I can't help but think of the obvuious over-compensation going on here. You can imagine every time the Atom punched a Nazi spy or threw a bank robber through a window, he was really getting back at the boys and girls who had made his life miserable in school.He was a founding member of the Justice Society and only missed two or three cases (only the Hawkman had a perfect attendance record). I just love this guy's cockiness. He's what, 19 years old and just over five feet tall but he feels perfectly at home sitting at a table with the Spectre or Green Lantern as a peer. (Just let them make a crack about his height, that's all...he'd show 'em.) The Atom had his own back-up strip in ALL-AMERICAN COMICS, but his own stories were mediocre in both writing and art. Once in a while in ALL-STAR, he would enjoy some decent art (this sample is by Mort Meskin).

Then there's his bizarre outfit.

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August 23rd, 2009
05:43 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

Fine work by Leslie Turner
[This was posted last year but I thought it would be rewarding to study it next to the Roy Crane sample I put up yesterday. Even if your area of interest is mainly super-hero comics, it's worth taking a few minutes to check out the skill shown in this page. Look at the third tier, where they're on the bridge.]


 

"Leslie Who?" I hear the chorus. Okay, he was Roy Crane's assistant on the strip WASH TUBBS, which was retitled CAPTAIN EASY after a supporting character who took over. Crane left this strip to create BUZ SAWYER, which he would own outright. This was why Milton Caniff dropped TERRY AND THE PIRATES to come up with STEVE CANYON, which  would be entirely his. $$$ These comic strip artists were no saps. Anyway, Captain Easy was a globetrotting, two-fisted soldier of misfortune. Not all his stories involved overthrowing small Balkan governments or recovering lost pirate swag. Here, he spends a few months trying to help an alcoholic straighten up enough to feel worthy to meet his little daughter.  The main thing I want to point out is the panel in the third tier. Turner was working without color, just black and white and some gray wash. Also, he was drawing for newsprint which is particularly shoddy and porous. Yet he managed some very neat techniques. His use of gray backgrounds without sharp outlines suggests depth and makes his foreground characters stand out more. I love this level of worksmanship and Leslie Turner isn't even considered one of the better newspaper strip artists of his day. You usually don't hear him mentioned with Alex Raymond or Milton Caniff or Noel Sickles or Harold Foster... but take a minute to study this 1949 page.

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August 22nd, 2009
10:34 pm
[dr_hermes]

[Link]

Black, white and gray with Roy Crane


Posts like these may not be for everyone, but if you're interested in art technique and storytelling, Roy Crane was a master. He wrote and drew an amazing strip blending screwball comedy and high adventure, WASH TUBBS (later titled CAPTAIN EASY). Like Milton Caniff, he gave his famous strip to an assistant and went to create a new strip, which he would own himself (these newspaper artists were no fools and almost always made much more money than comic book artists). This was BUZ SAWYER. This sample is from 1949. Accompanied by his wife Christy and a local oil company representative, Buz is in Central America trying to forestall a revolution by swiping a load of guns and ammo.

Crane got astonishing results without color. Just black ink on white paper, for the most part. He used Benday and Craftint doubletone paper to get shades of gray, letting him show depth, foreground and background. His style is just cartoony enough to allow the exaggeration needed for newspaper reproduction, realistic enough to be convincing.

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02:45 am
[jlroberson]

[Link]

Golden Age Predecessor to BLACKEST NIGHT...
This week--or rather, last week--at Mister Kitty's Stupid Comics, we see one of Hitler's many dastardly plans to destroy America. But unlike Nekron in Blackest Night, he goes for something much simpler and cost-effective than reviving superheroes: reviving the homeless.
Remember that hobo you shot last week? Here he is, back again!

Ah, the old days, when a cop could shoot an unarmed bum dead just for shouting. But as you see, Officer Friendly has a nasty surprise.
More here.

Current Location: Seattle
Current Mood: crappy
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