Category — WEIRD PANELS

Yes, it’s been a strange week!  But thanks to the Mr. Door Tree and his nice posting of Basil Wolverton classics, I think I’ve got my brain back in place.

Happy New Year, and welcome to the same old story…   At least in the comic pages sixty years ago, the standards of line art were fantastic, such as the panel above in Alex Raymond’s Rip Kirby.    Nowadays, not only do we have to put up with degrading and meaningless searches, but the comics that are “fit to print” look about as sophisticated as Cathy Guisewite.  Yuck!

Anyway, let’s enjoy this incredible profile from Alex Raymond’s incomparable brush, and aspire to something better!

If only we could… but the beach is either thousands of miles, or many months away right now.    Pretending the subway is a beach just doesn’t do it for me.   In Japan, maybe this subway maneuver works, but in Boston all we have these days are a bunch of  Homeland Security workers blowing “perfectly safe” gases and particulates through the tunnels.    No need to be alarmed, says the Boston Globe.   Which is enough to make me worry that this testing will “go live,”   and then I’ll be diving to get out of the train…

This “sample page” appears on Golden Age Comics blog, and makes me wonder if the wolfbane is blooming yet!    The artist, Howard Norstrand, was a prolific inker of horror comics in the 50s.  Thanks, Mr. Door Tree!

“Another drink…  I’m already sloshed!” While searching for old Rarotonga comics with Antonio Gutiérrez art, I happened across this strange gem from 1951, which apparently is the first appearance of Rarotonga.   I’m sure there must be other examples, but so far I can only find a single cover of Rarotonga from the early series.

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You don’t suppose any dialog like this will be overheard in the mansions of Connecticut, do you?   “Ugh, that pig of a hedge fund manager gave it to me! If you want it…”  But no, that would require some sort of awareness of the present catastrophe that the oligarchic class obviously lacks.  Oh well, at least we can enjoy this bizarre tale of revenge among greed heads, which appeared in Eeerie Publications’ Terror Tales #7, March 1969.   This cheesy publication from the brain trust of Myron Fass and Countrywide Publications, appealed to aficionados of gore, as you can tell from browsing their cover gallery.   Thanks to Pappy again, for this weird panel!

Money saving tips are very useful these days, so take a word from the pros:  when your beard gets too weird know how to mow it! This and other great advice is currently available in a series of 50 scans of Basil Wolverton’s “Culture Corner,” which appeared in Whiz Comics between 1945 - 1952.

Thanks Dinosaur Gardens, for posting this incredible series!

Also thanks to Drawn! twitter feed.

Despite the corny Nazi theme, I couldn’t resist this Fred Gaurdineer panel of Fraulein Halunke, the clever German Amazon!   Sort of sums up the heartless femme fatale, along with the usual dialog.  You have to wonder if there are not a few of these sadistic blonde madchen hanging around in underground bunkers out in Wyoming.

From Smash Comics, number 48, November 1943.

From a series of socially provocative cartoons by Tom Gauld, it was really hard to choose one to represent the lot.  They remind me vaguely of Ron Cobb (who was incidentally the author of the very first poltical cartoon book that I bought, Raw Sewage), except that Gauld’s cartoons  have a more distant, metaphorical humor.   I found the image above,  “evolution of the poetry receptacle,” to be irresistable.   With a few simple lines, Gauld has captured our trajectory perfectly:  tablet > scroll > bound volume > chapbook > laptop > potato viewer > potato mutant > wireframe.   Presumably when we get beyond the wireframe of the poem, we can just zap consciousness around by telepathy… either that or we will be eating termites out of dust-heaps, or both probably.

Ran over to Mass Art Paine Gallery (how apropos!) to see the R. Crumb Underground exhibit, which was written up recently in the Phoenix and the Globe.   This exhibit kicked off two years ago at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, and has been making the rounds from city to city, and finally seems to have drifted into Boston on a Greyhound bus, clutching an old leather bag of 78s and sinsemilla buds.

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Let’s see if the traitors fleeing the pirate ship run by Bush and Cheney have as many tricks as my personal hero, Felix the Cat.  Hopefully not!  They deserve whatever is coming to them!  Meanwhile, we can enjoy this strange journey across the Universe by our feline friend, drawn by Otto Messmer, and originally featured in Felix the Cat Winter Annual #2, 1954.  [Courtesy of Comicrazy's]

Agree or disagree, it’s still a fun list of the 50 things you really must have in your comic book collection.

Now where have I heard a similar story before? Where was it again? Give me a minute! It’ll come to me, if I think about it. Hmmm… something to do with crime. Something to do with politics. Yes, yes… Something to do with the President of the United States. But what was that example that I was thinking of? Hmmm… Okay, think about evil, think about some perverted rotters who would turn the Presidency into a criminal operation. Think of traitors. They would stoop to nothing. They would tear up the Constitution itself, even torture random people off the street in order to pillage and steal from the U.S. treasury. They would not even hesitate to kill and destroy their own people, for what?! To get their hands on stinking money, covered in blood… That’s it! I remember now! This is exactly the story called “Woody Woodpecker, the Evil Genius,” by John Stanley, which appeared in Four Color Comics #169 (1947). Whew! For a minute there, I though I was losing my memory.

Amusing story from Airboy Comics vol 4 # 9 (1947), by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.   Kirby’s aggressive and yet fluid brushwork fills the panels of this comic, which also features a series of aircraft rendered in flawless perspective.  Although the flying machines bring to mind the work of Milton Caniff in Steve Canyon, they begin to have Kirby’s generalized bodies and a hint of the circuitry patterns that were to explode from the pages of Fantastic Four (in the 60s) and the New Gods (in the 70s).

While cleaning up a shelf, I discovered a folder full of freebie cards that I picked up at the Alternate Press Expo (APE) in 2006. It was a fun time that year, with Keef Knight as one of six GoH, and a fine cast of erstwhile comix artists and DIY crafters filling the concourse. There is no point in just stashing these away in a box, so let’s look at some eye candy!

First up, Doug Sirois and Steamcrow :

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The caption for this image is:

a) Douglas Feith  still defending his wretched lying treason in the year 2025

b) Beaver Cleaver (reincarnated in 2025 with the brain of Tom Cruise) is asked to hold the e-meter

c) Joe Sixpack is told how much he *actually* owes the bank in the year 2025

Actually it’s an illustration by Alex Ebel for James Gunn’s Breaking Point.