I realize that since these are 60s DC comics we're talking about, that marriage was a constant threat for these characters. Lois Lane got married to somebody every other issue, Superman was always getting married, Batman was always getting married, DC couldn't go two issues without somebody somewhere having a wedding to a space alien or a mermaid or a gangster in disguise or to Bruce Wayne disguised as Superman. But this story is particularly goofy, I found.



It's interesting not only in that it shows a marriage being broken up by crazy ex-girlfriends, but that just about every panel features women who are crazed with jealousy or, conversely, faking interest in Jimmy to spare his feelings. I guess when you're the star of your own comic the world really DOES revolve around you. Also, Jimmy has a time machine he just keeps casually in his closet.

It's all happening at the one hundred and ninetyeth installment of Stupid Comics!

In other links for your Friday timewasting:
Not Always Right is full of funny stories of customers who think they're always right but they really aren't.
The Big Picture has amazing photographs of Apollo 11, forty years ago this week!
And you can check the Apollo mission out in "real time" at We Choose The Moon.
I was reading "Coding Horror", the blog Dave Nelson pointed me at, and there is a fascinating and hilarious exploration of the increasing sleaze evident in the "Evony" ads you see on the side of your Livejournal - warning, contains boobies. Apparently it is a terrible game that, in fact, does not contain wenches or queens.

There, that ought to hold you for a while. We don't have a lot of plans for the weekend other than to clean the place up and get some stuff up off the floor, maybe see that Harry Potter movie, I dunno.

Tags: stupid comics

If you ever wanted to sit back in your easy chair and imagine you were sitting down in a mockup steamboat travelling down a simulated jungle river as the voice of Thurl Ravenscroft wafts over you helping you imagine you were actually on a real boat travelling on a real jungle river, then have we got some audio for you! It's the amazing world of the Adventureland Jungle Cruise!



Yes that's right, you could take this ride and listen to the recorded narration, and then you could walk to the gift shop and purchase this LP of the same exact recorded narration allowing you to re-live the simulated experience! This is all getting very Phil Dick. Anyway, Found Sound. Next week: no Disney, we promise.

Meanwhile over at THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE there's some two-fisted strangling action! Don't try this at home, kids!

And now I have to go pack. I mean, work on STUPID COMICS!!

Tags: found sound

In the comments of the last post Daryl Surat wisely opined:

Anime cons broaden to include tangentially-related interests so they can get more attendees, so the con can happen another year in perhaps a bigger venue which costs more, so they broaden to include tangentially-related interests, so they can get more attendees etc.

If you ever express dismay about this spiraling cycle of events, you're accused of being like those curmudgeons at the literary SF conventions who are fine and dandy with everything dying out for the sake of fandom purity or whatever those people are about. But surely there must be a reasonable midpoint. Unless you're trying to get rich by the power of running fan conventions (note: this is ill-advised) such that the main goal of running your event is to get ANYONE to buy a ticket, I think that it's more worthwhile to take measures to increase fan interest in your core fan activity [x] by promoting said activity instead of resigning oneself to the notion that "well, all the [x] fans are already here! May as well bring in the polyamorism/zombie apocalypse/Klingon vampire set, since some of them sorta like [x] too!"

This is something I've been thinking about for a while. ( Read more..... )

Tags: fandumb

The sacred ritual.

This weekend was the Molson 500 or whatever they call it when they close off Lakeshore and the CNE grounds and a bunch of cars drive around and around and around and around and traffic everywhere else gets screwed up as a result. We spent about a half hour jammed up on Friday trying to get around the block, but that's partially our fault trying to go somewhere at 4pm on a Friday.

Saturday we went down, or up, or over to Polaris in Richmond Hill and saw Eileen and Norm and Donald in the AN suite, and had snacks and chit-chatted a bit and watched "Hetalia". Polaris is the local media SF con and has a low-key Chattacon sort of vibe for those who know what I'm talking about. Lots of flyers for poly organizations on the freebie table, because if you like Stargate SG-1 or Battlestar Galactica you're obviously interested in nontraditional relationships, right? Well they hope you are. Apparently there's a crew dissatisfied with the way the local literary SF con is run and they are starting their own literary SF con. Good for them, I guess, but I dunno if it's something that Toronto really needs. What Toronto REALLY needs is a convention that doesn't charge $65 to get in. Oh wait, the Filking convention is only $50. The Rochester SF/Fantasy convention (the main fantasy theme is "being anywhere but Rochester") is holding a Steampunk Cotillion as their dance. I think if you can safely say a trend is over, it's when the beardo kilt-wearing middle-aged trekkies start doing it. Oh look, I'm wearing goggles! Suddenly I'm "steampunk"! Is this the first time a fashion trend has become a fandom "thing"? Because be honest, that's all there is to "steampunk". Oh sure, there are movies nobody watched (see: "Steam Boy") and books everybody name-drops but nobody read, but pound for pound it's all about the cosplay. And if you want to dress like a junkyard puked all over Abraham Lincoln, then have fun with that, but don't pretend you're doing anything more than dressing like a junkyard puked all over Abraham Lincoln.

Oh, I'm kidding. I KID! But seriously folks, you're beautiful. You're a beautiful audience. Tip your waitstaff. I wanna say that I'm very glad that Japanese cartoons became its own thing and I no longer have to go to general SF conventions to find anime. Of course judging from reports from recent one-day shows in Atlanta you can't even find anime at anime shows any more.

Sunday we went way out into the hinterlands of 'cottage country' and bought a great old promotional clock (this one actually works) and some old comics, and got lost driving amidst the fishing competitions and the cookouts and the road reconstruction that is always happening in Ontario when the weather is nice. Took lots of detours on the way back because the 401 is clogged with returning cottagers.

I have a weird feeling I'm coming down with something or already have some sort of illness; I got three big zits on my chin on Thursday - because I'm 40! - and either because I was jutting my chin out in the mirror to stare at their horror a lot, or because of some sort of glandular reaction, my adam's apple is painful and swollen a bit. It's the way your throat feels when you've been at a Sub-Genius Devival and you do that "Ei-ei-ei-ei-ei" thing with your throat a lot. Ask me know I know this. And I just feel kind of edgy and out-of-it in general. On the other hand we got up really early yesterday and I drank a lot of coffee and ate mostly donuts and Tim's coffee and inhaled god knows what kind of weirdo backwoods up-North mold particles. I think I'll be taking it kind of easy for the next few days.

At any rate, the crazy moon-man language dialog continues at ZERO FIGHTER and BEHIND THE BLUE DOOR's wild rollercoaster ride through the land of your nightmares shows no sign of slowing down! I swear to God that Zero Fighter will actually get to a point where there's some exposition; it won't always be enigmatic silhouettes. But first there's violence. I'm drawing the violent parts right now.

Tags: zero fighter

Last weekend we rented a bunch of movies and finished watching them last night. One was THE BLACK SLEEP, a 1956 horror movie starring Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr (as "Mongo"), Akim Tamiroff, Tor Johnson (seen in a photo with hair!!) and a cast of nobodies. It's a Victorian-era period piece about a doctor (Rathbone) who has a secret Indian drug that mimics death, and he's using it to gather warm bodies for his brain surgery experiments so he can get his wife out of a coma. He needs help so he frames a surgeon, fakes his death to cheat the gallows, and is undone when his zombie legion of failed experiments breaks free and wreaks vengenance led by John Carradine, who I believe never turned down a script in his life. Not a bad picture, just overwritten, especially the dialog. Tamiroff does a great Boris Badenov impression, which is a trick since this film came out before Rocky & Bullwinkle.

What really stands out about the DVD is that it was put out by ACC Comics. The trailers include one for their direct-to-video "Nightveil" movie, which is sub-Corn Pone Flicks levels of bad, starring two women in bathing suits who pretend to fight and hurl magical force beams at each other. Also, "The Black Sleep" is bookended by fake horror hosts in an attempt to get some kind of "Elvira" horror host show thing going on. It's embarrassing for everybody involved. Guys, the 1960s are over. The era of Ghoulardi and Zacherly... it was a wonderful time full of magic and wonder, and it's over, and it's not coming back. Come up with something new. Joel Hodgson did, worked out pretty well for him.

Last night we watched LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH, a moody horror flick from 1971 about a recovering mental patient who moves to the country with her husband and their friend and becomes immersed in a mysterious web of horror. It's deliberately paced and not a lot gets explained, but it's a pretty effective creepy flick which manages to evoke that "nameless dread" sensation we all like so much. Plus Zohra Lampert, whom you have never heard of and yet who has an impressive body of stage, film, and TV work, does a great job as nervous, twitchy Jessica. You will spend the entire film wondering where you've seen Barton Heyman from, and now I know it's from "The Exorcist".

From the title you're expecting the movie to be about some kind of elaborate prank or hoax, but no. And that's good, because if they'd tacked on a "Scooby-Doo" ending to wrap everything up nicely, it would have been horrible. It's from 1971 but doesn't have that cheesy hippy-sploitation vibe so many contemporary films have; it's mostly shot on location in a great old house in Connecticut that's still standing, apparently.

HOW YOU KNOW I'M STILL 16 INSIDE: We got a new TV and we watched a bunch of stuff to "try it out" and we put in the Macross movie and wound up watching the whole thing. Anybody want an old TV?

First off, thank you, eeeper!

Did Jack Kirby work on Thor before the Marvel Age Of Comics even existed? You bet he did!



Vintage Kirby stuff from a 1957 issue of "Tales of The Unexpected" that proves he knew when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em! Also Stan Lee talks like a rapper. It's all in this week's STUPID COMICS!!

Don't have any big plans for the weekend. Anime North is holding court in a suite down at the Polaris convention so we might drop in there Saturday evening to socialize for a bit and wander around the convention until we get thrown out. I think this is race week so there might be a bit of traffic in our neighborhood to look out for. As near as I can tell there aren't any crazy movies being shown or giant yard sales to get to, and I don't think it's ever going to get warm enough to go swimming anywhere up here. It's been a pretty cool and wet summer so far.

Tags: stupid comics

and without the powerful drinks. This week Mister Kitty takes a listen to an LP of the recorded sounds used to make you believe that Walt Disney trained birds to talk, tell jokes, and sing! Yes, it's the ENCHANTED TIKI ROOM, Disneyland's wonderland of mechanical birds who live in what was at one time one of the few air-conditioned buildings in Disneyland.



Starring, among others, the voice of Thurl Ravenscroft, the hardest working man in show business. We picked this LP up a few weeks back and I don't believe it had ever been listened to, which isn't surprising. Hey gang, we just got back from Disneyland, want to hear this record? Worse than vacation slides.

This week Shain also updates ELEMENT OF SURPRISE with what's known in the business as "the crowd pleaser"! Go check it out!

Tags: found sound

I did actually get a Let's Anime column up and it's all about a Go-Bot toy that was actually a Space Cobra toy.

We are bending the envelope of meaninglessness here. If I get any more inconsequential, you'll need a microscope to read these columns. Still, I get to make fun of the Go-Bots, a pasttime I've enjoyed for nigh onto a quarter century now, by cracky.



I think the only way that robot is impressive or fearsome is in the "afraid it's going to topple over on top of me" sense.

Tags: let's anime

John Keel, dead at 79.

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/keel-obit

In a field dominated by mush and wishful thinking, his writing on UFOs, unexplained phenomena, and cryptozoology was the least mushy around (it got pretty speculative at points, but never failed to entertain.) He will be missed.

In other, non-celebrity-dying news, updates for BEHIND THE BLUE DOOR and ZERO FIGHTER made it up Sunday while we were eating turkey and watching Vifam and Xabungle with Donald and David. The BEHIND THE BLUE DOOR is especially goofy and I like it a lot. Earlier in the day we went out and whacked the tennis ball around and I can still feel it in my knees. Not as young as I used to be!

I might get a Let's Anime out this week... but then again I might not. I'm feeling all lazy from the tryptophan in the turkey. I might just lie around and read bad old SF novels for the rest of the summer.

Tags: ufos, zero fighter