The Savage Reprint!

I find it very weird indeed to have in my mitts a trade paperback reprint of Marvel's Bronze Age Doc Savage series (which I've reviewed in detail at this very blog). It's a natural thing to have happened, but licensing woes I guess have kept these stories in back issue limbo all this time. But what's most weird about it, is that this Marvel Comics material is published by DC Comics. It almost strikes me as strange as when the debut issue of Shazam hit the stands.

I've adapted to seeing Marvel material show up at Dark Horse and Dynamite (the REH license stuff of course) but seeing it as the "Distinguished Competition" makes this former Marvelite a wee bit woozy.

Nonetheless it is a handsome package, though I'd have love to have an introductory essay by say Steve Englehart or Roy Thomas. This is a bare bones production with an intro to Doc and his Fab Five, but that's it.

This volume is recommended, even if you own the originals. The reproduction is decent and it's neat to have it conveniently under one cover. I assume the B&W material will be collected eventually. But I suppose the team ups with Spidey and the Thing will just stay in limbo for now, perhaps forever.

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Bamf!

Of all the "new" X-Men introduced in the relaunch all those decades ago, Nightcrawler was always the one I liked the most. His look was really different, truly isolating unlike many of the others, and he had a great collection of powers. But most of all he tried to be a pleasant guy on a team filled with egos and I always identified with his plight. His religion also marked him as different in the comics community where such things were usually ignored.





Nightcrawler's origins are well documented it seems, though some of this was new to me. He was created as part of a team called "The Outsiders" by Dave Cockrum for inclusion in the sprawling Legion of Super-Heroes saga. But when Cockrum ended up with the mission to create new X-Men, Kurt Wagner was born.


I have no idea what Nightcrawler is up to these days, as I quit on the X-folk many years ago, but I did like his turn in the movies. And one of the great losses is that Dave Cockrum can never draw the character again, because I don't think anyone ever drew Nightcrawler as well as Dave. No other artist that I've seen has captured that blend of elegance and darkness, that special flair.

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Bonga Girl!?!

I was scanning the new covers over at the Grand Comic Book Database as I'm wont to do and I saw the cover of Bonga above. I don't anything about this comic, and there were no details at GCD on it. Just the cover.


It seems to be a King Kong knockoff clearly enough. But it's the girl in Bonga's giant mitt that got my attention. I've seen that girl before I thought. And I have.


She's a swipe from the late great Frank Frazetta's King Kong painting. There are two versions of this classic image, a 1979 one featuring a Kong who is much more bestial.


And a another earlier version featuring a much cuddlier (relatively speaking of course) Kong.


It's this latter painting that was used on the King Kong paperback which came out in the 70's about the time of the DeLaurentis remake.

But in both versions, the blonde is pretty much the same, and it's this blonde bombshell who shows up on the Bonga cover.


She also is the template for Frazetta's Kong spoof cover for Eerie magazine.


All fantastic images.

Now I have no idea what the contents of this Norwegian comic are. I suspect it's a reprint of Gold Key's King Kong adaptation.


But that's just speculation and is undercut by the fact the same company published a version of that Gold Key story the next year.

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Most Unusual Cover Ever?

You be the judge, but for me the "Woof! Woof!" sends this one right over the edge into beyond bizarre.

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"The Promise" by Sanho Kim!

Beautiful! What more is there to say.

Well there's this background for the story by Sanho Kim himself.


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Howie Post RIP

This is crummy news. Howie Post had one of the most lively lines in comics, his funny stuff for Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost and Hot Stuff is awesome, so vivid and powerful. The recent reprints from Dark Horse really show off his style.

He's most famous I guess for the short-lived but long-remembered Anthro, a story about a Cro-Magnon teenager.

Here's a link to Mark Evanier's comment on Post's passing. And here's a link to a longish interview with Post about his career.

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Jason Of Star Command!

I've wrapped up watching all of the Filmation live-action shows I found for tiny money a few months ago.

This latest one, Jason of Star Command is the series I actually do remember from all those Saturdays so very long ago. I'm older than Filmation's target audience, but as a sci-fi geek, I was interested in this old-fashioned adventure series still.

It's a throwback to the old serials starring Buster Crabbe and Crash Corrigan. The series is set in the same Space Academy that had aired the previous season, but this time the action if focused not on the Academy and the young cadets, but on a more military section of the base full of adults who are actively engaging the threats that are in space, specifically a villain in the classic Ming style named Dragos.


Jason (Craig Littler) and his partners Professor Parsafoot (Charlie Dell) and a beautiful chick named Captain Nicole Davidoff (Susan O'Hanlon/Pratt) detect and fight episode after episode, each ending in something of a cliffhanger in the classic fashion. They are led by Commander Canarvin played by Star Trek vet Jimmy Doohan. Sid Haig plays Dragos to the hilt with his booming laugh becoming almost the signature for the show.

The first season is a lot of fun and briskly paced as each episode is only ten or eleven minutes long. The second season offers up full half hour episodes and in place of Doohan gives us a blue-skinned alien named Commander Stone (John Russell). Davidoff is replaced by a statuesque black lady named Samantha (Tamara Dobson). Dragos and Jason and Parsafoot are still around and slugging out each week.


The has that Filmation look, being shot exclusively in a warehouse where Filmation had its sets and special effects sections. So they were able to really crank out these things quite quickly. That's the thing about Filmation that has really impressed me as I've been watching these, is the way they were able to accomplish so much in really small time frames with relatively small money. Looking at the some of the bloated movies of the last few years which have been dripping in costly special effects but bomb in the area of story and character, it's refreshing to get material that's rich on character and done for a relative song, but very effective.

These aren't perfect by any means, but they are fun and offer up more than a smidge of mystery if not actual suspense. Although I will say that Jason does seem to rely on his pocket robot "W1K1" a bit too much from episode to episode to save his bacon.
But that's a small cheat and still clearly within the traditions of the classic serials.

If you can find them cheaply, I'd heartily recommend these.

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