This is the worst. Darwyn Cooke is gone.
The artist and writer, whose work was somehow nostalgic and innovative at the same time, has passed away after a battle with cancer.
Cooke wrote and drew comics and covers for characters like Catwoman and the Spirit, but my favorite of his work was “New Frontier,” his “retelling” of the origin of the Justice League in the 1940s and 1950s.
He was a huge talent and is greatly missed.
Dr. Strange and Baron Mordo.
Nuff said.
Jeez, Clark. Jealous much?
“Plug-ugly wrestler.”
From Lois Lane #8, newstand date April 1959.
So this is different.
This fall’s “Supergirl” TV series is introducing several comic book characters, including the at-times enigmatic android Red Tornado.
That’s him above, as seen in a photo released this week.
I dunno. I’m more accustomed to the way the character – at least the Silver Age version – looks.
I’m missing the yellow arrow. But I guess we’ll see.
Just released by the CW, a look at the helmet that Diggle, part of Team Arrow from “Arrow,” will wear this season.
The helmet makes me think of Magneto. And it looks like it would get knocked off easily.
There’s a danger in trying to turn a character created for a TV series into a comic hero.
Of course it worked for Harley Quinn, created for the Batman animated series.
I’ll always have a fond spot in my heart for Vincent Price as Egghead in the “Batman” series.
Maybe it’s because of all the egg puns in “An Egg Grows in Gotham,” the 1966 episode that introduced the character.
Nah. It’s because: Vincent Price!
There’s a subset out there of Batman villains and bad jokes and there’s a tiny subset of Batman villains and bad vegetable jokes.
And then there’s this DC house ad from mid-century.
Regular readers of this blog know I love old comic book ads. I grew up perusing them right along with the Marvel and DC comics stories wrapped around them.
So I’m somewhat surprised that I don’t remember – and haven’t run across before – the ad above that I found online.
Almost certainly from a comic book, this ad for “The Zombie Mask” did a nice job of selling its product.
“This fiendish, evil mask is terrifyingly lifelike in appearance,” the ad’s breathless copy maintains. “Made of top quality sanitary rubber … if your friends have bad hearts, don’t wear it.”
The mask includes a wig of “finely spun hair.”
All for $2.98. Or, for the same price, you could get a Frankenstein mask.
Hopefully some reader can fill in some details on these masks, including the manufacturer. A Google image search didn’t turn up much in the way of who made it.
There are a few interesting details to be had, however, in the company that was selling these masks.
The Magic Center – which billed itself as “the world’s largest magic store” – was a frequent advertiser in magazines like Popular Science and Google searches find their ads as far back as 1949.
These ads were usually for magic tricks, although a 1953 issue of Popular Mechanics found the Magic Center – still located at 741 Eighth Avenue in NYC – offering a “terrifying” ape man mask.
What happened to the Magic Center? I wish I knew. Google searches turn up, in recent years, a “dive bar” at the location. And it looks like the bar itself has closed.
I’m afraid there were few zombie or ape man masks to be found there in the past couple of decades.
“The Secret History of Marvel Comics” missed a great opportunity with its title alone.
“The Secret Origin of Marvel Comics” would have been a more accurate title for Blake Bell and Michael J. Vassallo’s book because it looks at the pre-history, in a way, of the artists and writers who shaped Marvel and its earliest incarnations but specifically focuses on publisher Martin Goodman, who published pulp magazines beginning in 1933 before riding the tide of reader interest into comic books in 1939.
You can tell the authors’ premise with the quote that begins the book. “Fans are not interested in quality,” Goodman is quoted as saying, and as much as that can be disputed – even a World War II-era kid knew the difference between a good Captain America comic and a bad one – it was a mantra that served Goodman well as he moved through the New York publishing world.
The book follows Goodman’s publishing enterprises through western and detective pulps and gives us some beautiful illustrations from covers and inside the magazines.
The text emphasizes, again and again, that Goodman was fairly ruthless in his dealings with artists and writers. Some of them were among the men and women who would go on to become the best in the comics field once it kicked into high gear in the 1950s and 1960s.
They’re all here, from Stan Lee (related to Goodman by marriage) and Jack Kirby – who would team to co-create classic comic characters for Goodman’s Marvel Comics – to Kirby’s Captain America co-creator Joe Simon to the likes of Dennis the Menace creator Hank Ketcham.
Everybody worked for Goodman, it seems, even if many of them came away not particularly enjoying the experience.
Although the first half of the book, with its assessment of Goodman’s character, feels repetitive, the second half is eye-opening, with reproductions of art by artist after artist. Here you’ll see Kirby’s art – raw and edgy – for detective pulps like “Detective Short Stories” and fantasy pulps like “Marvel Stories.”
Here’s a two-page spread by Kirby and Simon for “Queen of Venus,” from Marvel Stories 2 in November 1940.
The artists reproduced here gave readers an unending parade of gangsters and molls and tough guys and bad girls and aliens and murderers. That’s the best thing that “The Secret History of Marvel Comics” shows us.
I’ve always loved this page, the end of “Avengers” 57, from October 1968.
Along with “Fantastic Four,” “Avengers” was my favorite Marvel comic. I constantly found myself amazed at the ingenuity, the artistry and yes, the poetry.
Although Ultron was to return to plague the Avengers many times over the decades – and does so again in a couple of weeks in “Avengers: Age of Ultron” – this final page from the Roy Thomas-written comic, using Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” to show the mundane outcome of a mighty batlle, left me awed.
Still does.
keithroysdon 