February Update Highlights at Booksteve Rarities

As always, there are some real gems within this month's BOOKSTEVE RARITIES updates. A portion of each sale goes directly to us and helps maintain the booksteve blogs. Thanks!

Go here to order:  http://oldtimeradiotapes.homestead.com/StevenSiteHome.html

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO: The Complete Series

George Dolenz plays Edmond Dantes, alias The Count of Monte Cristo, in this joint US-UK version from 1956. The first twelve episodes were produced in Hollywood, then the remainder of the series produced in England. Al 39 episodes from the 1956-57 television program are in this 5-disc box set. Watch for such guests as Margaret Whiting, Walter Kingsford, Nancy Hale, John Loder, Ian Fleming and Patrick Troughton!  $25

SCREEN DIRECTOR'S PLAYHOUSE: The Complete Series

This eight-DVD set contains every episode of the TV series, based on the radio program of the same name. Includes "Tom and Jerry" with Peter Lawford and Marie Windsor, "Rookie of the Year" with John Wayne and Vera Miles, "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog" with Charles Bickford, "The Silent Partner" with Zasu Pitts and Buster Keaton, "Number Five Checked Out" with Peter Lorre, "Prima Donna" with Jeannette MacDonald, "The Sword of Villon" with Errol Flynn, "Markheim" with Rod Steiger and Ray Milland, "Claire" with Angela Lansbury, "High Air" with William Bendix and Dennis Hopper, "The Titanic Incident" with Barbara Morrison, "Hot Cargo" with Yvonne de Carlo and Rory Calhoun, "Cry Justice" with Dick Haymes and Macdonald Carey, "Affair at Sumatra" with Ralph Bellamy and Basil Rathbone, "Want Ad Wedding" with Jimmy Lydon, "The Brush Roper" with Chuck Connors and Walter Bennan, "Final Tribute" with Laraine Day and Thomas Mitchell, "The Life of Vernon Hathaway" with Alan Young and Cloris Leachman, "Meet the Governor" with Barbara Hale, "Day is Done" with Rory Calhoun, "A Midsummer Daydream" with Kim Hunter and Keenan Wynn, "Arroyo" with Jack Carson, "A Most Unusual Day" with Fred MacMurray, "The Dream" with Sal Mineo and George Sanders, "What Day Is It?" with Gower Champion, "Every Man Has Two Wives" with Barry Nelson and Janet Blair, "A Ticket for Thaddeus" with Edmond O'Brien, "The Carroll Formula" with Michael Wilding, "White Corridors" with Patricia Hitchcock, "One Against Many" with Lew Ayers, "Partners" with Brandon De Wilde, "Apples on Lilac Time" with Macdonald Carey and Joan Caufield, "The Day I Met Caruso" with Walter Coy, and "Bitter Waters" with George Sanders, Constance Cumming and Robert Vaughn. This is an eight-disc box set.  $40

THE COMPLETE JOHNNY MACK BROWN (Volume Four)

Here it is at last! The fourth and final volume completing all the Johnny Mack Brown Westerns! This ELEVEN disc set contains the following movies! Dead Man's Trail (1952), Silver Range (1946), The Gambling Terror (1937), Colorado Ambush (1951), Law of the Panhandle (1950), Texas City (1952), Range Justice (1949), Undercover Man (1936), Gentleman from Texas (1946), Desert Phantom (1936), Border Bandits (1946), Deep in the Heart of Texas (1942), Crossed Trails (1948), Frontier Feud (1945), Whistling Hills (1951), The Crooked Trail (1936), Trail of Vengeance (1937), Lone Star Trail (1943), A Lawman is Born (1937), Guns in the Dark (1937), Bar Z Bad Man (1937), Code of the Saddle (1947), Oklahoma Frontier (1939), Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie (1941), Boss of Hangtown Mesa (1942), Boothill Brigade (1937), Lawless Land (1937), Law Men (1944), Wells Fargo (1937), and Man from Sonora (1951).

Remember this is an eleven disc set! $50

JAMES DEAN: FIVE TV PROGRAMS

Before he became a celluloid icon, James Dean was an actor on television during the Golden Age of "live" telecasts. This 2-DVD set contains such classics as THE BELLS OF COCKAIGNE (1952), THE UNLIGHTED ROAD (1955), SOMETHING FOR AN EMPTY SUITCASE (1953), I'M A FOOL (1954 with Natalie Wood) and THE JAMES DEAN STORY (1957). Bonus shorts include movie trailers, a TV commercial with James Dean and more!

THELMA TODD: SIX FILM SHORTS

More comedy film shorts not available on DVD before! All starring Thelma Todd! Patsy Kelly and Zasu Pitts can be seen in these as well! WHISPERING WHOOPIE (1930), AT THE SEA SHORE (1936), HILL-BILLIES (1936), ASLEEP IN THE FEET (1933), BACKS TO NATURE (1933) and TOP FLAT (1935).

Naithom, Star Trek and Me

Congrats to my lovely wife for her success in writing STAR TREK fan-fic! Here's a link to download her latest short story (in PDF format), as seen above. Live long and prosper, sweetie!  

HFO PLogs-02x-Naithom-120126a.pdf

Archie-It's a Dame Shame

Odd to see Archie in a text story and even odder to have the title be a pun on an expression one would NEVER find in an Archie comic book!

Random Panels of Comic Book Weirdness # 96

If you've missed the frequency of these panels here, please note that we've got several photo albums full of them on Facebook. You can access the latest, RANDOM PANELS MAKIN' MERRY LIKE IT WAS CHRISTMAS at the following public link. 

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151084237685076.778733.859435075&type=3&l=0c38edef09 

Happy Hembeck Day!

A birthday shoutout to Fred Hembeck, he of the swirly knees. I first discovered Fred way back in the seventies in fanzines and followed his cartoon self through a long series of completely drawn and hand-lettered "columns" in TBG/CBG and on into mainstream acceptance with various specials and strips at Marvel and DC.

Fred was one of my earliest supporters when I started this blog and my wife and son and I got to hang out briefly with Mr. H and his lovely wife Lynn (herself a longtime cartoon character in Fred's strips!) a couple of years back at Mid-Ohio Con.

Check out his multi-faceted site here: http://www.hembeck.com/index2.htm

You can order a copy of his telephone book sized strip collection from 2008 at the link below.

Here We Go Again...

Skipping Sub-Mariner Saturdays with the need to come to our readers yet again with a special request for donations if you like our blogs.

At this point, if I can hold out until the last paperwork arrives that I can do our taxes we should be able to get caught up on things pretty quickly.

That's if we don't lose our Internet connection and phone completely come February 1st and right now that's looking like a very real possibility.

So head over to BOOKSTEVE'S BOOKSTORE PLUS and see if there's anything you'd like to purchase or, if not, please consider a small donation to keep us bringing you my 1974 Journal, the Wally Wood and Gray Morrow blogs, the history of ADVENTURE COMICS, reprinted comics at Four Color Shadows and all the great pop stuff from 1966!

Any and all proceeeds received over the next few days go to keep us bringing you the most entertaining and informative blogs possible.

Many thanks to all who have donated or purchased from us in the past and thanks to any and all who choose to do so now. You ARE appreciated. The DONATIONS button is at top right. The Bookstore link is above.

The above cat, btw, is Magellan Thompson, now known as Jelly or Jellybaby (as in DR WHO). We still think of him as a kitten as he's only 9 months old but he has turned into a big ol' CAT!

UPDATE: Thanks to those who have purchased or donated over the weekend! As of Monday morning, we have achieved our goal! Wow! You guys are great.

Wally Wood's Strange Worlds

To celebrate today's 700th post at HOORAY FOR WALLY WOOD, we're "simulcasting" my review of Vanguard Publishing's new collection of Woody's early sci-fi comics. Thanks to J. David Spurlock, the Keeper of the Wood Flame, for a review copy!

From out of deepest space and via time warp from the far-flung fifties comes STRANGE WORLDS, the ultimate collection of Wallace Wood’s early, non-EC science fiction and fantasy stories.

This is not a book to introduce one’s self to Wood, arguably the greatest sci-fi illustrator of the 20^th Century. No, STRANGE WORLDS is a book for Wood fans who want the big picture. What we have here is the chance to watch the artist’s astonishingly rapid development from almost crude beginnings to his fabled mastery of storytelling, composition and shadows, all in just the few short years featured herein. Between black and white reprints and online scans, the true connoisseur has seen most of this work before but oh, to have it now in such a nice chronological presentation with lovingly restored color from the original issues of SPACE DETECTIVE, CAPTAIN SCIENCE, AMAZING ADVENTURES and other long-forgotten four-color treasures! Words fail.

To be honest, the stories themselves aren’t much, many being clichéd space opera of the most antiquated sort. But this isn’t a book about stories. It’s a book about art. Wood’s early collaborations with Joe Orlando are present as well as work done with Al Williamson, Frank Frazetta and even Jack Kirby. And every one is a revelation to Wood fans, showing off his enthusiasm for outer space stories and his experimentations as he became the genius he would so quickly become.

So exactly what is in STRANGE WORLDS? To start with, there’s THE FLYING SAUCERS, a fairly serious full-length tale exploiting UFO’s when they were in the news almost daily. Then there’s AN EARTHMAN ON VENUS, inexplicably appearing in black and white. There are a number of series entries with characters including  the aforementioned Captain Science and Space Detective as well as Kenton of the Star Patrol and Rocky X of the Rocketeers. Dotted around these are one-off stories from various publishers with the book finishing up with a post-EC tale from Atlas and some beautifully colored continuity from the SKY MASTERS OF THE SPACE FORCE  newspaper strip in which Wood inked Jack Kirby in what many have called the best work of either artist! In between many of the stories are original art panels and pages from some of the artist’s best-known EC classics which can be used to compare his development.

All of this is wrapped up in David Spurlock’s beautiful packaging. The front cover of the regular edition is a “new” piece of Wally Wood art produced by the great designer and artist, Jim Steranko, utilizing bits and pieces from various Wood illustrations. In this manner, Jim has created Woodwork that highlights Wood’s trademark spaceman, a sexy woman and a sleek rocket all amidst a screen-laden planetscape.

In case anyone hasn’t been paying attention, let me say it plainly—This is a gorgeous volume!

The limited slipcase edition flops the new cover to the back and spotlights on its front the amazing Wood/Adkins cover for a 1964 record album of H.G. Wells’ WAR OF THE WORLDS. It also offers an additional portfolio of the little-seen inside front cover art that Wood did for many of the Avon titles on which he worked in the 1950’s.

   

Wallace Wood took his own life in 1981, more than 30 years ago now. And yet 2012 looks to be Wood’s best year ever with forthcoming Wood projects from Fantagraphics and IDW (and a couple more rumored but as yet officially unannounced!). It all starts, just like Woody did, with Vanguard’s STRANGE WORLDS. You should start there, too!

The hardcover and the limited edition are out now and the softcover is coming soon. You can order your copy today at:  http://www.vanguardproductions.net/Wood3/index