Tarzan's Nature!

Got my eager mitts on the volume of Tarzan - The Complete Russ Manning Newspaper Strips Volume Two: 169-1971 a few days ago. It's simply astounding to look at and realize just how stinking good Russ Manning was. His Tarzan is a romanticized icon, the living perfection of man living among the brutish denizens of the wild confronted by bizarre and sometimes alluring creatures.

Part of the attraction of the Tarzan character is wish-fulfillment, the desire by most of us citizens of a modern world which demands our compliance in character and behavior to act out, to do the unthinkable and make our unfiltered will stick on the broader world. Tarzan does that.

Freed of the a civilized upbringing he is a feral creature who camouflages himself as one of us, but who despite his handsome demeanor is a beast, more than willing and more than capable of tearing out our throat if he fancied. Tarzan is uncontrollable, save when he allows himself to be controlled by Jane, the love of his life.

Burroughs always had Tarzan lose his memory, a convenient plot device, but also a story element which points back to Tarzan's fundamental essence as a creature merely posing as a man.

All of that is captured in these sleek, beautiful pages by Russ Manning for the Tarzan comic strip from the end of the sixties into the earliest seventies. These are awesome comics, well worth the price of admission.

Rip Off

Giving SHIELD A Shot!

The general consensus seems to be that Marvel Agents of SHIELD has been a bit underwhelming so far. I gathered up the episodes on the my DVR as they aired, and finally some days ago got around to watching most of them. I finished up last evening, completing the first half of this debut season. So far I've found this clutch of beautiful agents diverting and reasonably entertaining, but hardly compelling.

Joss Whedon's tried and true technique of glib dialogue among clever folks works well enough, though I generally grow tired of it by the end of an episode or two. Despite accents and quirks, all the characters end up sounding pretty much the same after a while.

Despite appearances there does seem to be some age variations in this one, with Agents Coulson, Ward, and May offering up experience of various levels to newbies Fitz, Simmons, and Skye. The latter is the real outsider in the group, a cyber-terrorist recruited out of the field by Coulson and an iconoclast who seeks a secret about her own origins, which (no surprise) have a lot to do with SHIELD.

Agent May, the ferocious fighter and resident enigma, is the agent who I find most fascinating so far. Damaged emotionally in previous missions, she is closed off from the others, often sitting alone piloting the totally awesome black VTOL plane which doubles as transport and headquarters for the team. She knows the costs of working as an agent, and it shows in everything she says and does.

Agent Ward is the handsome leading man type of the team, but despite some quirky moments here and there, I'd prefered he were blond and named Clay Quartermain. I miss that cheesy smile.

Fitz and Simmons are a duo, often referred to as "Fitz-Simmons" by the others, these twin geniuses supply the tech back up which any spy operation needs to operate effectively. They are often annoying, the most "Whedonseque" elements of the team. I don't find them credible yet as agents alas.

Coulson has proven to be the key mystery though. His apparent death and return were handled briskly at the beginning of the series, but recent developments suggest there was much more to Coulson's resurrection than we know at this time.

The show has been reasonable fun, and if it had been on a decade ago, I'm sure I'd be much more jazzed. But these days, my connections to the Marvel Universe have pretty much shriveled to catching the movies and reprints now and again. I don't even bother to see all of them in the theaters anymore (haven't yet seen Thor II, Iron Man III, or Amazing Spider-Man). But this TV show demonstrates if you feed it directly into my house and don't charge me more for it, I will spend some minutes engaged in it.

Some folks I guess are disappointed there's not more obvious Marvel touches in this series. I don't really miss that, but hope the series does develop its cast more, making them distinctive and more interesting as bad things keep happening to them. I don't want them untouched by events, but changed by them. That's good television and something only serial storytelling can do well. 

I'm not exactly looking forward to the second half of the season, but I'm not exactly dreading it either.

Rip Off

In The Zone!

Gary Frank

Superman - Tales from the Phantom Zone is a 2009 collection of vintage Super-Family stories from the heyday of the Mort Weisinger era. Weisinger, an infamous and longtime DC editor was notorious for his almost always crusty and sometimes downright cruel interactions with his staff. He apparently knew what he was doing, or at least knew enough to keep folks around him who knew what they were doing, but his off-putting interpersonal skills have always cast a cloud over his long and highly successful tenure on the Man of Steel.

The Phantom Zone, the place where Kryptonian criminals were consigned to served their sentences after adjudication became a rich and vibrant source of many classic tales. One of the finest characters to inhabit the Zone was Mon-El the Daxamite who had powers nearly identical to Superboy, but who had to be put into the Zone to protect him from his sensitivity to commonplace lead.

Like all gimmicks dreamed up during the Weisinger era, once it was developed it appeared with a high degree of regularity and invaded all the Superman family books. Courtesy of the writing of Edmond Hamilton, Robert Bernstein, Jerry Seigel, Leo Dorfman, and others there was a lot of wrinkles in the rich Phantom Zone concept, and lots of criminals waiting their turn to sneak out and cause trouble. The artwork by Curt Swan, George Klein,  and George Papp codes these stories perfectly for their mostly early 60's era.

I've talked about this before here, but the main reason I picked this collection up was to get a good reading copy of my first Superman comic, issue number 205 (under an uber-exciting Neal Adams cover) which introduced the infamous Black Zero the villain who really blew up Krypton. It's a slam bang story by Otto Binder and the recently deceased Al Plastino, a memorable story which alas has disappeared like almost all the Weisinger innovations from the Superman mythology. But not from my own personal mythology by any means.

Here are the covers of the comics from which the stories in this collection are taken. Most are cover featured. As far as I can tell all the covers below are by Curt Swan and are inked by either Stan Kaye or George Klein, save for the last one by Neal Adams.

Rip Off

Miracle Marks!

Jack Kirby's most successful Fourth World book (by a handful of issues) was Mister Miracle. As much as Kirby was a one-man show on these books he didn't design the logos for the Forever People and Mister Miracle. (He did design the New Gods logo it seems, or at least choose it.) That noble and crucial task fell to master letterer Gaspar Saladino almost certainly.

And when I saw this 1940's comic titled Miracle Comics a few days ago, I feel reasonably certain that Gaspar might well have taken his inspiration from it. There might only a few effective ways to letter the word "Miracle" but this seems too close to be a simple coincidence.

Rip Off

The Case Of The Lonely Comic!

Walt Simonson

Here's a wonderful one-shot by some very strong talent. DC Comics produced exactly one Sherlock Holmes comic book in the 70's but it featured two of Arthur Conan Doyle's classic stories adapted in brisk fashion by Denny O'Neil and E.R. Cruz. To read those stores check out the links below.

But the real surprise of this issue is the cover, drawn by a still youthful Walt Simonson a year after his groundbreaking Manhunter stint in Detective Comics.

To read possibly the shortest adaptation of Doyle's "The Final Problem" go here.

And to enter "The Adventure of the Empty House" check out this link for the sequel to the first tale.

Rip Off

The Hound From Hell!

Ken Barr

How it is I have traveled this far and this long in the comic book collecting world and never gotten hold of these two Sherlock Holmes comic magazines from Mighty Marvel is beyond me. Nowadays they are hard to find and expensive to buy, but it was not always so. How it is with all the attention Sherlock Holmes has gotten in recent years that Marvel has not seen fit to reprint these two awesome issues of Marvel Preview in some format or other is beyond me. They seem downright eager to press as much of their Bronze Age material into trades as humanly possible. These black and white gems would find an audience, of that I'm certain.

If you'd like to read the first part of the adaptation by Doug Moench featuring artwork by Wally Wood graduates Val Mayerik and Dan Adkins check it out here.

Kenn Barr

Ken Barr really outdid himself on the two covers he produced. The first is one of the best images of the Hound I've ever seen, palpable but eerie and ghostly nonetheless. The cover above is less antic, but still plenty atmospheric.

Tony DeZuniga had to step in to finish off the Val Mayerik artwork in the second half of the famous saga. To read the finale of this almost-Doyle classic go here.

Someday I will own these books, or the reprint of same. They are just too good to let slide any longer. Marvel hear my pleas. Reprint this story for the good of all humanity.

Rip Off

Sherlock In The Asylum!

The 2010 Asylum flick Sherlock Holmes makes for one totally awesome poster, that I'll give it. There is in fact a sea monster, a dragon, and a dinosaur in the story, though all three are considerably less impressive in the actual movie.

Here's the plot, with mucho spoilers. 

The movie begins as London suffers under the Blitz, and an aging Dr.John Watson relates one final tale of his friend Sherlock Holmes to a willing young woman who appears to be a relative of Mrs.Hudson. The story begins at sea when a ship is attacked by what appears to be a sea monster of the giant squid variety. Sherlock Holmes is called in by an unusually interested Lestrade who shares some secret with Holmes about his brother. Then a rather small Tyranosaurus Rex turns up in London and kills a few folks at the same time a water pump goes missing. Watson is then visited by an odd pair, a beautiful but literally cold young woman named Miss Ivory, and her invalid uncle who press him for pain killers. It is soon revealed that the monster menacing London might be less real than rubber and Holmes and Watson confront a rubber manufacturer who ends up dead after meeting the oddly nimble dinosaur. Eventually we learn that Holmes and Watson have stumbled across a plot to terrorize London, kill the Queen, and blame the lot of it on Inspector Lestrade. It turns out Holmes has a brother named Thorpe who was once a cop alongside his partner Lestrade but was forced to leave the service when he was shot in the line of duty and who has now used his mechanical genius to make himself move by robotic means. It seems he's discovered it might've been Lestrade who mistakenly shot him yet he desires revenge, which he seeks by means of his mechanical creations, the sea monster, the dinosaur, and a dragon.One more mechanical menace turns out to be his supposed niece who is a walking bomb headed to intercept the Queen herself. It all unravels as Watson chases her and Holmes finds a convenient propeller-balloon combination which allows him to engage in an air battle with Thorpe's fire-breathing dragon. He succeeds, but barely and London and the Queen are saved. Cut back to the WWII setting and Watson has passed away. In a tag ending, Miss Hudson visits his grave and sees the oddly still functioning Miss Ivory in the graveyard tending Thorpe's grave. 

This is a wild and wacky flick, that actually sounds like it should be more fun than it is. The "action" scenes are overlong and tedious. The acting is perfectly adequate when it's not overripe, and the whole sense of the movie falls to tatters the more you ponder it. Why use a sea monster to get money to build a dinosaur to steal a water pump to operate a dragon when the original energy and money could've been used to build the dragon to begin with? Who is Thorpe and why have we not heard of him? Where is Mycroft? How could a cop get the know-how to construct these monstrosities? Why is Sherlock Holmes named "Robert"?

This seems frankly to be a movie that had an idea for a few scenes then concocted this claptrap of the story to string them together and after all that the scenes were overlong to boot. The energy in the movie is sapped by chase scenes that go nowhere and fail to connect. The classic Holmes touches are too few and far between and the actor Ben Snyder is too short for the part after it's all said and done. Watson is played by Gareth  David-Loyd for a buffoon often in the Nigel Bruce tradition. Thorpe played by Dominic Keating is properly villainous and chews the scenery with gusto if not much reason.

There's a good movie buried in all these parts. If they'd only used Miss Ivory, or if they'd only used the dragon. The dinosaur never made any damn sense and his stubby little arms seem to make him a particularly poor thief. The climactic scene when Miss Ivory is walking down the lane to kill the Queen is unintentionally hilarious as it takes her an impossible amount of time to walk as the "tension" is supposedly building.

This is one weird Sherlock Holmes movie and I cannot recommend it, but then I'd imagine anyone Holmes fan might want to get a glimpse for themselves to prove it exists. Beware.

Rip Off