jools&jim

Me too...especially since he's been stone dead for nearly a decade now!

So, obviously, it's not "worthless" at all: it's your Rosebud...a slice of time itself, preserved; the persistence of memory, beyond and above all mundane considerations of grade and commerce and price; a largely forgettable thing never forgotten, which now represents so much more than can be conveyed by its mere physical existence. Its meaning to you IS the money. And for my money at least, that's the only "value" that really matters. If you don't mind and feel like sharing, please tell us why it's priceless to you. I think there are quite a few of us around here who never grow weary of such tales...!

The early issues of DC's Tarzan run by Kubert are aces: more than the DC war comics (on which he was very, very good indeed), Tarzan was the title that Joe Kubert was born to draw... https://aeindex.org/reviews/joe-kuberts-tarzan-of-the-apes-artists-edition/

Great stuff, Zonk, combined with your insightful analysis, as always. I very much agree, as you suggest, that Kirby's "Fourth World" books tapped into the late '60s/early '70s zeitgeist, and are in some sense an intuitive or instinctive meditation on it from the position of age and wisdom. But his canvas, obviously, was bigger than the daily news, and his broad, mythological strokes cut deeper, and in more lasting ways, than, say, O'Neil and Adams did in their Green Lantern run, which farmed the same turf, but was merely topical, and now embarrassingly dated. Visionary artists (& poets/composers/etc.) aren't always able to easily articulate, in plain language, what their work makes us feel or think about (William Blake, whose letters to friends/colleagues/detractors are sometimes impenetrable, is a good example). This may be one reason why Kirby's somewhat clunky and meandering text pieces were omitted from the Omnibus. But the more essential quality in the main body of his work -- a vaulting and powerfully elegant imagination combined with an innate ability make us feel or think about something important in new or unexpected ways -- is what separates simple entertainment (which has its time and place) from true art (which is eternal). Jack was clearly at his best and most ambitious during the BA: he often did both simultaneously, and (while it lasted!) in the mainstream of popular culture, which is no small thing...

Awesome! I have the complete run of The Eternals in a bound volume that I got from a boardie years ago. I would LOVE to have Jack's '70s Cap run in that format...

TwoMorrows Publishing is calling this incredibly cool "new" '70s Kirby mag a "Facsimile Edition", but it's really more like an oxymoronic re-creation of a long-lost gem which never truly existed in the first place! Unlike the original "Speak-Out Series" mags conceptualized and produced by Kirby for DC in 1971 (Spirit World and In the Days of the Mob, released by Hampshire Distribution -- a "dummy" corporate name ginned up by the suits at National Periodical Publications), this modern version of "the one that got away" is printed in full color on glossy stock, and is only 32 pages (including covers), instead of the originals' 48 pp. And, despite what the cover states, it does not include a pull-put poster of a (Kirby-collaged?) Roberta Flack! But...the overall attention to detail, inside and out, is absolutely superb, especially the period ads & text pieces, period indicia, a full-color cover which has been beautifully and tastefully embellished from Kirby's original pencils by Alex Ross, and no internal references whatsoever to TwoMorrows or any modern signifiers like URLs or e-mail addresses for the modern publisher. It very much looks like the real thing. And of course the comics content is 100% Kirby: four unpublished and fully-rendered stories drawn by The King specifically for this mag...four stories, now augmented by traditional coloring techniques, which never saw the light of day in its creator's intended format until a very short time ago. My two copies arrived in the mail yesterday, and I am beyond thrilled with them! I found my current copy of In the Days of the Mob at a flea market in 1977, and Spirit World a year or two later at a comic book store in central PA -- they are both underrated and underappreciated cornerstones of Kirby's visionary approach to comics in (then) non-traditional formats, and TwoMorrows has VERY much done them justice in this lovingly and painstakingly well-produced and highly satisfying addition to the line, nearly 50 years after the fact. Bravo!!!

Wow...great stuff from everyone -- thanks! Please keep it coming...i.e., more pics or stories or both re: stuff you loved or wanted or had as a kid but had completely forgotten about until (by accident or otherwise) it popped back into your memory as an adult...

...which (thanks to the inter-webs that all the kids are crazy about these days) suddenly jogged your memory to the point where you had to have it. Such is Batman #109 for me! Sometime during the summer of 1976, at the ripe old age of ten, my best friend and I once again found ourselves at our favorite flea market in south central Pennsylvania, courtesy of my mom and my friend's mother, both of whom were unabashed and inveterate bargain hunters. Ah...those were the days -- to be allowed to roam free and easy and unsupervised among the toys and junk and auto parts and baby clothes and snacks and hippies and bikers and carnies and weirdos! Our favorite vendor back then was a nondescript fellow who looked quite a bit like every dentist I have ever known, and his stout wife who looked very much like a red-faced fire hydrant. Their specialty was novelty items: joy buzzers, sneezing powder, squirting water-gun flowers, snapping mouse traps disguised as packs of gum, plastic mechanical figurines which took a p!ss when you dropped their pants, fake dog cr@p and vomit, etc. ... you get the idea. We almost never bought anything, and laughed our @sses off at all of it. It's hard to believe now that so much innocent fun could be had, for free and free of any meaningful consequences, before the advent of sex and booze and dope and rock & roll and heartbreak and everything else which, in one way or another, would eventually conspire to ruin our lives in some measure. Then there were the comic books. Old comic books, and plenty of them, in stacks on tables or in crummy old moving boxes or wooden crates. I mean REALLY old comic books, like from the 1950s! You can laugh now, but when you're a ten year-old kid in 1976, the 1950s might as well have been the Cretaceous period. That s--t was OLD! So, long story long, that's where and when I first saw Batman #109, in a crummy old brown fruit box. "The 1001 Inventions of Batman!" Batman flying over Gotham on the wings of Icarus! And a thousand other inventions I've never read of! This was surely the Ur Text which would unlock the secrets of...something, and it was nearly as old as the pyramids, too -- magic! It was, needless to say, "raw" and un-bagged, and I have no idea to this day what the vendor was asking for it, but I'd be surprised if it was more than 50-cents or maybe a dollar. Unfortunately, the day itself was also getting old, and the mothers were winding down, so the answer to that particular riddle of the sphinx is lost to the golden age of time. But so what anyway? Well, my long-winded point is this: I hadn't thought about ANY of this until a few weeks ago when a random and capricious search for '50s Batman comics on eBay returned an image of the cover for Bats #109, and then it all came flooding back. The book...the flea market...my mom...the era...the fun...the discovery...the innocence...and everything else -- all long gone. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the comic itself means nothing; but what it represents means everything. So, yeah: it ain't like the old days, but it'll do, and it's nice to finally recapture a small part of the world as it was, which I finally did when this arrived in the mail today...

Think of a number line: positive numbers are to the right, and negative numbers are to the left. • Fun, light-hearted, romantic (in the old sense of the word), and optimistic stories wherein heroes are heroes and villains are villains, and which are also devoid of any moral ambiguity, were (once upon a time) decoded as POSITIVE portrayals of humanity's highest aspirations. • Dark, brooding, angst-ridden, and gratuitously violent stories, wherein the heroes and villains are separated by the thinnest of lines (as in Film Noir), were (once upon a time) decoded as NEGATIVE portrayals of humanity at its worst. Up versus Down is not a matter of taste; one's reaction to it is...

The mid/late-'80s had its high points, no doubt (Miller on DD; Byrne on FF; Simonson on Thor; Wolfman & Pérez on Teen Titans; Moore & Bissette on Swamp Thing; etc.). But the general and trend-setting trajectory was downward: heroic optimism and goofy adventuring were replaced by grittier & ultra-violent "realism" (The Dark Knight Returns); deconstruction (Byrne's Superman; Giffen's Dr. Fate); dissolution (Claremont's convoluted and continuity-bloated X-Men); tortured and conflicted anti-heroes (Miller's Wolverine; Zeck's Punisher); and plenty of violence for its own sake. Again, whether or not this worked for you if you were there (and I was) ain't the point. The times they were a-changing...

My interpretation is that anomalous "brilliance" does not make nor define an "Age"; that commonplace similarities between so-called "ages" are essentially banal; and that a tendency towards ever-increasing levels of solipsism, nihilism, and licentiousness are endemic to art and to culture in general over time. Whether or not that works for any given reader or fan is a matter of personal taste. But that does not invalidate the idea that things inevitably change, and not always for the better...

Golden Age: DISCOVERY. Silver Age: INNOCENCE. Bronze Age: EXPERIENCE. Copper Age: DECLINE. Modern Age: DARKNESS.

Gerber discontinued them years ago, and now Bill Cole has done the same. Is there another supplier for these, or am I out of luck?

On December 7, 1941, my dad hopped onto a bus to visit his girlfriend (later to be my mom) across town. He was 18 years old. On his way back home, the bus driver said to him: "Hey Frank, didja hear that the J@ps bombed Pearl Harbor?" My dad said: "Where the hell is Pearl Harbor...?" A year or so later, he was working for the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington, DC; and a year or so after that, he shipped out to the South Pacific, where he and his shipmates fought at Peleliu, Leyte Gulf, Mindoro, Lingayen Gulf, and eventually at Okinawa, where he was nearly killed during a kamikaze attack. He witnessed (through binoculars) the surrender of the Empire of Japan on the deck of the USS Missouri, and escorted his ship's photographer around Hiroshima (just a few months after the bomb was dropped) during the post-war occupation. He died on December 8, 2010, nearly 69 years to the day after he heard the fateful news that would change his life forever. He was buried in the presence of a USN honor guard, and there wasn't a dry eye among even one of those strapping young lads from Annapolis when they laid the old man to rest. My dad had his faults, and his war service (along with the Great Depression) scarred him forever...but he was still the toughest and kindest man I have ever known. I miss him every day, and dearly wish, fool that I was, I'd have appreciated him more while he was still alive. So, yes...thanks very much to the OP for honoring this day and, by extension, all those who served during WWII.

Also note that ASM 129 isn't broken out at all, and Conan 1 outperforms them all. The listing for Marvel Super Special 7 (Sgt. Pepper's) for $2.00 is also interesting, given that it was never published/distributed here in the US...

Going to hell? No...not for that. But, in general, you are a cheap, opportunistic m - - - - - - - - - - r ... just like most everyone else around here!!! Anyway and seriously -- I missed seeing you and the usual suspects at Baltimore this year. What can I say? I'm a reclusive drunk. Stage a show across the street from me and I probably still wouldn't show up. But that doesn't mean I'm not eternally fond of you all... -Mikey

Long Halloween PA/western MD weekend road-trip finds... A big stack of cool SA/BA DC readers: And a very cheap diamond in the coal:

Outstanding! Talk about a cat who was wayyyy ahead of his time -- TV star, MAD reader, and an accomplished...er, "amateur filmmaker". "HOGANNNNNN...!!!!!"

'Tis goofy fun indeed! Grant Morrison and his legion of post-postmodern imitators only wish that they could be this authentically silly and weird and serious all at the same time, and still get it all done in eight pages for 12-cents! A little nonsense now and then is valued by the wisest men...and by kids, too, who were gleefully enjoying this stuff as fantasy (not science!) on a fleeting and carefree summer afternoon during a lost but not entirely forgotten age when the world was not as it is today. So I say celebrate this kind of whimsical and harmless hogwash for what it is, and mourn its passing, rather than faulting it for what it is not...

Given all the different comics eras represented in these marvelous photos, this thread really should be in the General section for all to see...