Thursday, May 28, 2015

Listen to our Podcast and Help With Disaster Relief

Some of you may not know that my wife Kat and I do a movie podcast called Married With Clickers. Every May we focus exclusively on disaster movies for what we call ArMAYgeddon. To help relieve our guilt about laughing at people's cinematic misfortunate, we have decided to give 25 cents to the Red Cross's relief efforts in Nepal for every ArMAYgeddon episode downloaded this month.


There are five episodes this month, covering The Swarm, Titanic (1943), Meteor, The Day the Earth Caught Fire and San Francisco. If you download them all, you've help add $1.25 to the fund. We can be found by search for Married With Clickers on iTunes, as well as Stitcher radio. Episodes can be downloaded directly from our Libsyn site at the link below.

http://marriedwithclickers.libsyn.com/

Steve Ditko Cover of the Week: Journey Into Mystery #58

Here is an interesting one. I really love this cover as it has the  amazing mixture of bright colours and stark grey that I have come to love about Atlas covers. I think this is a fairly early entry as far as Ditko cover assignments for Atlas are concerned, as this is early 1960.What makes it even more interesting is that Jack Kirby was the go-to cover artist on Journey Into Mystery and he even contributed the splash page for the RRO! story. In fact, that splash page as used as the cover for the UK reprint title Zombie. As I said, I really love this one, and I'm happy they chose Ditko for the job. There must be a number of covers out here with monsters clutching subway trains. Time for me to start looking around!

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Add It To My Want List: Batman - Mask of the Phantasm

How have I never bought this one? I'm a big fan of the movie, and even got the chance to take my son to see it on the big screen at the TIFF Lightbox a couple of years ago. I don't recall ever seeing this comic book on the racks but I was a poor undergrad student at the time so I may have passed on it for budgetary reasons. I've been buying everything touched by the great Mike Parobeck but somehow missed this one. I love his work on the Batman: The Animated Series comics so I have got to think that this one will be great, too. Now the trick is to keep my eyes open. Sometimes you can never find what you're actually looking for in those back issue bins. The search begins.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Happy Birthday Lee Elias

Today would have been Lee Elias' 95th birthday. My love for his work has grown by leaps and bounds over the years. I know that some folks do not share my views, but maybe they've only seen some rush jobs for Marvel in the mid-70s. I think that those stood out to readers of my generation because they were the exact opposite of Neal Adams. Take another look at those Human Fly comics. They are actually pretty fun, with a great sense of movement throughout. His horror covers are iconic and it is still difficult to this of a heroine as cool as The Black Cat. We miss you, sir!

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Charlton Notebook: Just Married #81

Here's a good example of the kind of entertaining romance book Charlton was able to produce in the early 70s. The cover is simply a collection of interior images, but it does a good job selling the reader on the contents. If you're like me, you think "I Married a Monster" is likely a story about an abusive husband. Nope, nothing that dramatic. It's a simple tale of a wife who is embarrassed by the fact that her husband's big acting gig is as a creature on a kids' TV show. "You Don't Own Me" had me scratching my head. It's the tale of a possessive husband who only acts in that way because he knows that the new man on the scene is 'bad news' as far as women, including his wife, are concerned. I'm still not clear on why he pushed his wife into the swimming pool at a party, though. The final story is a bit dull as it's nothing more than a couple eloping in Mexico. I did like the fact that the woman's name is Beatrice as that's my daughter's name. The artwork is serviceable but unspectacular. Don Perlin's work on the lead story is the strongest. If you see this one in a bargain bin, it's worth grabbing!