RIP-Tony Curtis

Both his life and career had missteps and misfires aplenty but Tony Curtis was a survivor, reinventing himself in later years as an artist. At the end of the day, though, it's his winking charm, his unlikely swashbuckling and his long list of memorable movie and TV performances of every stripe that place his legacy with the greats of Hollywood.

Betty and Veronica???

I posted the splash page from this highly atypical 1947 story featuring Archie's girls. BETTY & VERONICA, on Facebook the other day to wild acclaim and interest due to its amazingly different art style. Dan DeCarlo's classic B&V style has been used for decades and, in fact, was a variation on the Archie "house style" that came even before DeCarlo! Thus, there is a certain level of shock in seeing our 16 year old heroines out of context in an Archie-less story (but for the wall picture on page one) and looking more like WWII pin-up models! The jury is still out on who did the art here but Steven Rowe, an expert on these sorts of things, speculates that it may be future Batman artist Irv Novick who had been drawing superheroes for the MLJ line (Archie's precursor if you will) or perhaps Harry Sahle. It's very GOOD art...it just isn't Betty and Veronica as we know and love them!

You're Only As Good As Your Last Picture-Revamped

Coming Soon! Watch for the new, streamlined version of YOU'RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR LAST PICTURE which should allow for more than one post every six or seven months!

Terriers

I don't watch very much US television anymore. Some documentaries here and there, the odd PBS special, ancient films on TCM and a good cartoon when I can find one. As far as regular series, I'm hooked on TRUE BLOOD and BOARDWALK EMPIRE but I have to depend on others to see them as I don't have HBO. The only sitcoms I watch regularly are THE BIG BANG THEORY and 30 ROCK and quite frankly I wasn't thrilled with the season premieres of either of those.

Which brings me to TERRIERS...my new favorite thing. I used to love FX when it was a new and unique channel but I can't even tell you where it is on the channel lineup anymore. One of my Facebook friends has been plugging their new series, TERRIERS, however as he's one of the writers and a supervising producer. So, today as I worked on a computer project, I ran the pilot of TERRIERS from HULU up in the corner and got hooked. Big time. The pilot was immediately followed by episode two and then I had to go looking for episode three!

No, it is not a dog show...although there are dogs in it. In fact, I'm not sure why it's called TERRIERS. What it is a standard TV buddy show featuring two actors with a lot of macho chemistry and a hip, clever script with a continuing backstory.

Actor Donal Logue stars as a divorced, disgraced ex-cop and recovering alcoholic working as an unlicensed private detective. His partner is Michael Raymond-James, TRUE BLOOD's season one "Big Bad." Here, he plays a former small time burglar, pickpocket and all-around hood who has hooked up with the cop who once busted him.

One of the things I like best about the show is that the episodes are not self-contained in the time-honored manner but that plots, subplots and continuing backstories overlap, cross over and even disappear for awhile at times...just like in real life. Yes, I know a lot of non-serialized detective/action series have done this sort of thing in recent years but few have done it as well and with such remarkable characters. They are not heroes. In some perceptions they might even be bad guys. Certainly low-life types that most would not want o associate with in the real world. But really, they're just trying to use the skills they have to get along in this world in today's tough economy...much like the rest of us. We see their flaws, their imperfections, their outlandish, even stupid ideas and the plots, although cleverly contrived, become incidental to the characters and the performances. I don't watch a lot of TV anymore...but after today, I watch one more show than I had BEEN watching!

Walt Disney-Magician of the Movies

Thanks to author/animation historian Jim Korkis for helping me to identify, after forty years, my favorite library book as a child. After all these years, all I could remember was that it was a biography of Disney with a black and white picture of Uncle Walt smiling on the cover. Published as a kids' biography, it was nonetheless the first book I ever checked out from the grown up section of the Public Library. And I checked it out a lot. Maybe that's why they blamed me when it went missing eventually--I lost it, I stole it, I...But I didn't. I don't know what happened to it. My parents were upset enough over the implication, however, to forbid me to go back to the Public Library for many years, until long after they'd moved to a new location. That decision led to my discovery of bookstores and the beginning of Booksteve's Library.

Strips-1992

If ever there was an idea whose time had come...and gone, it was STRIPS. I have no idea how long it lasted but the only copy I saved is dated July of 1992. STRIPS was a tabloid newspaper published by the folks who published THE NATIONAL FORUM and sold wherever one would find such things in those pre-(for most of us, anyway) Interwebs days of not-so-long-ago. In a way, it was almost like a revival of the late, much lamented MENOMONEE FALLS GAZETTE (and GUARDIAN) of two decades earlier. Literally every issue would run 40 pages of comic strips good and bad, all at a nice size and most with a full week's worth of dailies per page! These days, of course, one can pick and choose on the Net which comics they want to read daily. You can subscribe to just the strips even! But in 1992, as the local newspapers continued to shrink their comics to unreadable proportions, this was, at least briefly, like a dream come true for strip fans!

What strips were in it? I was hoping you'd ask. The classic titles included the ethen-current versions of ALLEY OOP, DICK TRACY, DENNIS THE MENACE, SNUFFY SMITH, REX MORGAN MD, APT 3-G, RIP KIRBY, TARZAN, POGO, POPEYE, BLONDIE, THE FAR SIDE, DOONESBURY, BEETLE BAILEY, TUMBLEWEEDS, THE PHANTOM, ANNIE, FLASH GORDON, HAGAR and more!

Lesser known strips and panels included here included AGATHA CRUMM, BIG NATE, DUNAGIN'S PEOPLE, WHEN I WAS SHORT, ERNIE, ANIMAL CRACKERS and PICKLES.

STRIPS came out every Monday and contained all of the strips from the previous week. It was great but the timing was off. By that point the classic strips were all past their classic period, the newer ones either weren't that good or weren't as good as they'd eventually get. And then there was the Internet, lurking right around the corner and making instant comic strip gratification possible. Sigh. STRIPS, we hardly knew ye.

Time For Some Big Red Cheese

This 1948 ad for the **Official** Captain Marvel wristwatch has to be the wordiest one page ad I have ever seen! Looks cool, though. Wonder if it lived up to all this hype?