Kickstarter: Batton Lash's Zombie Wife and Other Tales of Supernatural Law

Longtime readers know that the modern comic book left my tastes behind almost completely sometime back in the 1990s. It's rare that I find myself looking at current comics and even rarer that I find myself following a certain comics creator like I did back in my youth with Neal, Jack, Wally and Steranko! There is, however, one person whose work I will still go out of my way to see and that's Batton Lash.

Batton Lash writes for Archie and he writes for Bongo. He writes genuinely funny stories with real plots and a sense of comics history like nobody else today except for maybe Mark Waid. For a few decades now, though, he's also chronicled the adventures of Alanna Wolff and Jeff Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre, in a brilliant strip called SUPERNATURAL LAW.

Recently, Batton has been turning to Kickstarter to produce the paperback collections of SUPERNATURAL LAW. The campaigns thus far have all been very successful and here's the latest, ZOMBIE WIFE AND OTHER TALES OF SUPERNATURAL LAW.

If you're a monster fan, a comics fan, a humor fan or just a fan of plain old good storytelling, sending a few bucks Batton's way to make this book a reality and get a copy for yourself would be a bright idea. And wait until you see all the incentives you can pick up at different levels. Check out the ZOMBIE WIFE campaign here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1379875462/zombie-wife-and-other-tales-of-supernatural-law 

Hellzapoppin-1938

Still perusing the LIFE archives online, here's a collection of photos from the mag's 1938 piece on the original stage production of Olsen and Johnson's HELLZAPOPPIN. I have always thought the plant gag seen on the page below was one of the funniest things I'd ever heard of!

Flashback-Wally Wood

Alan Light's Dynapubs put out this thin, title-less 'zine in the early days of TBG circa 1971-72. It did actually have a title. FLASHBACK. Hard to believe now but this was my very first exposure to Wally Wood at EC! Seen above is the cover--yes, it was in murky black and white. In those days we were happy to get anything! The insides consisted of a handful of similarly scanned science-fiction stories. By that point, I was very familiar with the Wood from MAD, the Wood from Marvel and DC, the Wood from Tower and the Wood from Topps! But my first views of the stories that got him named THE great sci-fi artist of comics just blew my 13 or 14 year old mind!

If you're a fan of Wallace Wood, please check out our companion blog, HOORAY FOR WALLY WOOD! 

Comic Strips and Cereal Ads

Karloff Shaving Cream Ads-1942

Siegel and Shuster Clippings-1970s-1990s

 

 

Rice Krispies Ads

Don Adams Ad-1970

Monsanto certainly isn't very popular these days but here's Don Adams capitalizing on his GET SMART character in an ad for them from 1970.

Milton Bradley-1955

Slightly before my time here but many of these games survived into my childhood and beyond. I never actually had any, though, until we ended up buying CANDY LAND for David in the 1990s!

Country Stars

Although I was never a big country music fan, this 1950s picture features a number of performers I liked growing up. 

Country comedienne Minnie Pearl was a TV favorite who I actually got to see in person at a Bob Hope charity show in the 1970s.

Ferlin Husky starred in HILLBILLYS IN A HAUNTED HOUSE which I saw in a theater with my parents when it opened. We later met a man at a Greyhound station down south who claimed to BE Ferlin Husky after a night of drinking and my Dad bought him breakfast. Was it him? Kind of looked like him but we'll never know.

In 1969, Johnny Cash had somehow become one of the hippest dudes on TV and his wife June Carter began to be prominently featured on his TV series. I loved their duets.

Stringbean was a revered country comic by the time he appeared as an original regular on HEE HAW. It hit me hard when he was murdered while the show was still on the air.

Booksteve Reviews: Ro-Busters-The Disaster Squad of Distinction

Back in the 1980s, when I was reading Britain's 2000AD as regularly as possible, one of my favorite series was ABC WARRIORS which, in time, I found out was a spin-off of another series called RO-BUSTERS.

RO-BUSTERS began not in 2000AD but in a mag I never saw called STARLORD. It was originally created and written by the prolific Pat Mills and featured art from, amongst others, future superstar comics artists on both sides of the Atlantic, Dave Gibbons, Steve Dillon, Bryan Talbot and Kev O'Neill.

The series was set in a future where sentient robots were used for everything from war to housecleaning and, in fact, its protagonists were a retired garbage droid, "Ro-Jaws" and a retired military droid, Hammerstein. It was the adventures of Hammerstein, with his original head, that made up ABC WARRIORS. Here we saw the musically named duo "in retirement" and yet recruited to head up a special task force for handling disasters.

This volume has all of the serialized original stories from the first few years, up to and including a couple of one-off tales from Alan Moore! The adventures are exciting and well-told but never without a sharp satirical bent. Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein at times make up a comedy duo on the level of Laurel and Hardy.

If you're a fan of JUDGE DREDD or the 2000AD classics, I can't recommend this title enough.

Thanks to Net Galley for getting me a review copy!

The Funniest Person Who Ever Lived? # 18-Phil Hartman

 

What Makes Jerry Lewis Go?-1957

This past week as I write this, the one and only Jerry Lewis did a live, controversial Q &A onstage. Love him or hate him, now, as then, Jerry Lewis is a force to be reckoned with in the entertainment world. Here's a vintage article I found buried inside a PD 1957 girly mag available at RETROSPACE   It's from just after the breakup with Dean and is much more interesting with the benefit of hindsight than it was even at the time.