Flex Mentallo

your FACE is marketable! at halloween. I'm feeling sooo excluded. Uh oh, I'm so going to pay for that moment of glory.

your FACE is marketable! at halloween. I'm feeling sooo excluded.

I especially love the coloring on this one. It looks almost painted.

Thanks for putting me on to this Richard! To extend your description, Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University. He is the author of six books, including Esalen: America and The Religion of No Religion and Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred. After a little digging I found the following excerpt from Mutants and Mystics Chapter 2 - "Alienation: Superman is a Crashed Alien". On this occasion I make no apology for the wall of text! [font:Book Antiqua]"It was also Superman who gave the superhero comic its archetypal form, that is, a costumed man or woman with a secret identity and superpowers. "The occult and sci-fi backgrounds of the Man of Tomorrow are well worth teasing out. Before Siegel and Schuster created Superman, for example, the same two young men created "Dr. Mystic: The Occult Detective." As we have it in this single two-page strip, Mystic, as he was called for short, joins his ally Zator, and together they flash along through the spirit world "at a speed greater than that of light itself" toward India and "the Seven." Dr. Mystic's face and build look more or less exactly like the later Superman. These same two pages also contain what Greg Sadowski has described as "comic books' first flying caped figure," that is, Zator.[ii] These, then, are some of the roots of the superhero genre: a mystic flying to India in the astral plane to do occult work. "This earlier explicit occultism was gently suppressed by Siegel and Schuster until it could only be gleaned from coded details like the notion that Superman was eventually said be an exile from another planet called Krypton (first introduced on January 16, 1939), which translates, if it were Greek (which it is), as the Hidden or the Occult. Put simply, Superman is a crashed Alien from the Occult. The accent, though, had clearly shifted from the Occult to the Alien, that is, from the mysticism to the science fiction, which is all to say from the mytheme of Orientation to that of Alienation. "Superman has attracted a great deal of criticism, some of it quite thoughtful, some of it grossly exaggerated. It is often claimed, for example, that the trope of the Superman was originally Nietzschean. It is then pointed out, correctly, that the Nazis loved Nietzsche's dream of the Übermensch—the Overman, Superman or, perhaps most literally, the Superhuman. This assumed conflation of the Superman and Nazism is then extended to the entire genre of superheroes, as if being a superhero is the same thing as being a fascist. The psychoanalyst Frederic Wertham, for example, consistently conflated Superman and fascism in his famous 1950s rant against comics, The Seduction of the Innocent. Numerous writers—from Frank Miller's The Dark Night Returns to Alan Moore's Watchmen—have since exposed the genre to similar withering critiques from within. "But equating the Superman, much less the superhero, in toto with fascism or any other political ideology is, at best, a half truth and, at worst, a gross misrepresentation. To begin with, Nietzsche was not a Nazi, and he despised the anti-Semitism, racism, and nationalism that he saw around him: he would have hated Hitler. It was his sister who later misrepresented him to the Führer and the Nazis. His concept of the Superman, moreover, is complex, undeveloped, and by no means clear. What is clear is that the men who created Superman were Jews, as were most of the movers and shakers in the early comic-book industry. And key superheroes, like Captain America, were explicitly and consciously created to fight Hitler, not sing his praises. Finally, the roaring success of the earliest American superhero comics is intimately connected to the GI's who fought the Nazis on the European front and took their comics, Superman and all, with them, too often to their own gruesome deaths. When the moral courage of World War II was no longer needed on the European front, the superheroes simply went away. To equate Superman and the superheroes with fascism, then, is a precise reversal of the truth. "There is also the deeper historical fact that the idea of a superhuman is finally an ancient religious trope, not a political, American, or even especially Western one. Indeed, we could easily trace the notion back to what many believe to be the "first" and most primordial figure of the history of religions: the shaman. The shaman's mystical calling through an initiatory crisis, often around puberty (mental illness, anomalous sexuality, near-death experience via visionary dismemberment or descent into the underworld, lightning strike), and subsequent magical powers (clairvoyance, soul flight, luminous energies, the acquisition of animal languages, magical battle with demons and black magicians) look a lot like our modern superhero myths. Numerous other examples, moreover, could easily be found in the history of Western mystical literature, where notions of the Divine Man abound, from Christianity's famous man-god and the Divine Intellect (nous) of the philosopher-mystic Plotinus through Goethe's figure of Faust to Ralph Waldo Emerson's Oversoul and hymn to humanity as "a god in ruins." "Similar notions of humanity's secret identity can easily be found in Asia as well. In ancient and medieval India, for example, we encounter the lore around the Siddhas or "perfected ones" of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions and the literally towering figures of Jainism (portrayed still today in immense multistory-tall standing stone figures), whose supercosmic conception of the human form and its siddhis or "perfected powers" make almost anything in the superhero comics look downright banal. Indeed, one such founding Jain teacher is known as Mahavira, literally, the "Great Hero," or, with just a little spinning, the "Superhero." "Closer to the present, an Indian freedom fighter turned spiritual teacher by the name of Aurobindo Ghose taught an "integral yoga" that combined evolution and Indian philosophy. Aurobindo believed that such a yoga would eventually conjure a superconsciousness that would "descend" into this world in order to integrate the upper and lower worlds and finally enable humanity to realize its own inherent divinity. He named this the Supermind and suggested that it would descend to help evolve a new "supernormal" species of "gnostic beings" that he collectively called the Superman. Yes, that's right: the Superman. Aurobindo, of course, was well aware of Nietzsche's earlier expression, and he meant something entirely different by his own: he meant a humanity that has taken full possession of its spiritual nature, a supernature that includes all sorts of psychical powers (the siddhis again), with which Aurobindo personally experimented and then classified and cataloged with incredible precision in his yoga journals. Aurobindo, in short, was writing out and practicing the Superman a good two decades before Siegel and Schuster came on the scene in 1938. "And on and on we could go through culture after culture. So, no, the general idea of a superman is not new, and no, it has no necessary connection to Nazism, or any other political or religious system. Of course, the American Superman displays his own nationalist dimensions. All that red, white, and blue works on many levels, including the obvious and repeatedly stated one of representing "truth, justice, and the American way." I am not denying the obvious. I am simply suggesting that there is also a "secret life" to Superman that extends far, far beyond his latest incarnation and "descent" (or crash landing) into American pop culture. "And there is more. In a pattern that is seldom fully appreciated, Siegel and Schuster's Superman is closely linked to the mytheme of Mutation. Hence Superman's early epithet as "The Man of Tomorrow," which, of course, suggests that Superman is functioning as a model for the future evolution of human nature: basically, Superman is us from the future. Hence on the very first page of Action Comics #1, we read that the alien child's "physical structure was millions of years advanced." We are also treated to "A Scientific Explanation of Clark Kent's Amazing Strength." The latter two frames employ the examples of the ant, which "can support weights hundreds of times its own," and the grasshopper, which "leaps what to man would be the space of several city blocks," to make its case (the early Superman could not literally fly; he leapt, like a grasshopper). To extend our reading now, we might say that the genre of the modern superhero begins with the trope of the Alien from the Occult, who is compared to a super-evolved Mutant Insect as a sign of the Future Human. "I am highlighting such themes because they are weirdly resonant with the phenomenon of the alien in twentieth-century America. As the ufologist knows, the alien experience is suffused with an insectoid pattern that is in turn linked to an evolutionary schema. Hence the spaceships or the aliens themselves are often described as "buzzing" like bees or large flies, and they often appear to share a hivelike communal mind, two features emphasized as early as 1950 by British American writer Gerald Heard, who also, by the way, wrote extensively about psychical powers, was inspired by Indian philosophy, and was committed to an evolutionary mysticism. "Moreover, in countless cases, the aliens are described as either super-evolved humanoids or as instectoid, or, combining these two themes now, as humanlike insects. Hence the last century's most famous and eloquent abductee, Whitley Streiber, who consistently described the "visitors" whom he encountered as insectlike, hivelike, or, in one scene, a "terrible insect" that "rose up beside the bed like some huge, predatory spider". When another abductee, this one interviewed by Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack, drew what she had encountered, she sketched what amounted to a humanoid bug." [/font]

Pleased to get this one in thanks to my buddy comixcroz. Locks up the very end of the title for me with these two: Which together with these two forms a nice little group of hard-to-find Whitman covers.

Very nice (thumbs u thank you sir, great compliment from a collector like yourself! this is indeed a cool cover; i especially like how both edges are already bloodied. Thanks Straw-Man. Again, always appreciate when the big dogs give a thumbs up! Oh, he's a big dog alright. But at last he's a pedigree.

Why is the world we created not the one we dreamed of? Why does it feel as if we live in an alternate world? If we lived in a golden age, we would not need to ask. Next: Lost Horizon

I like that a lot (thumbs u Me too! You almost never see these late issues in such nice shape.

I need my 3D specs for that one!

Nice colors on that copy.

nice Planet 26. Hard one to get. I am still looking, the only copies I seem to find are VG or worse... I have no idea why but it does seem to be a scarcer issue than those around it, like #34 and #65.

Knew you would!

skullerific!

Thanks quicksilver!

Punch #12 would be most people's top skull cover. The Mysterious Adventures is tough in grade because of the purple cover of course.

I dunno... the cover looks kinda Kamenish, to me. It could be another Iger Shop jam session, in which case Baker may have contributed. But which elements did he contribute, your guess is as good as the next guy's... (Cue next guy) Batter! Batter! Batter! Does the treatment of water compare with Seven Seas #5 - anyone? The girl's profile is faintly baker-ish, the guy's not IMHO. But I love the cover - due respect, what difference who it's by? What?! I'm speechless ... partly because I'm not sure I have a good answer. Oh, yeah, now I remember. Figuring out artist attributions is one of the fun things we spend waaay too much time on! I agree - and I wasnt meaning to sound snarky. If it's Baker, more than likely the composition is a one off, and the key elements are perfectly positioned. Kamen is more awkward with his compositions, Webb less graceful with his figures.

Looks like the same model as in Young Love 27, so if you are confident of that one .... Doesn't the male model look like Peter Lawford? In a general sort of way, sure. (In a general sort of way, like the other guy's resemblance to Jude Law.) Ah, come on. He reaalllly looks like Lawford. If Lawford wasn't way too far along in his career to be working as a model, I would say it actually was him. Or maybe it was a really old photo! It's harder to make a comparison on the basis of a straight profile. And that angle is slightly less than a straight profile. (Where's our facial recognition expert?) Not Lawford - recognize the face as a bit part actor but darned if I could say where I'd seen him before.

That's a truly great cover.

I dunno... the cover looks kinda Kamenish, to me. It could be another Iger Shop jam session, in which case Baker may have contributed. But which elements did he contribute, your guess is as good as the next guy's... (Cue next guy) Batter! Batter! Batter! Does the treatment of water compare with Seven Seas #5 - anyone? The girl's profile is faintly baker-ish, the guy's not IMHO. But I love the cover - due respect, what difference who it's by?

This looks so much better in hand than the scan suggests.

My latest

Many thanks to Mr Bedrock for this little supercluster.

You're always doing that! But you always find them again.

Wonderful copy of - I think - Whitman's best Fight cover.

It's my favorite Anderson cover and my favorite mermaid cover.