BOOKSTEVE'S LIBRARY

Monday, June 30, 2008

Movies That Fell Through the Cracks Index

Batman and Superman on Sesame Street

The other day Mark Evanier mentioned that Frank Oz, the muppeteer who handled Cookie Monster, Grover, Yoda and Miss Piggy) had retired awhile back. Also in the news this past week was the passing of the man who designed Big Bird’s suit. All of this put me in mind of SESAME STREET. It’s ubiquitous now, of course, and whole generations have grown up with the show but the very first time I ever heard of it was from this ad right here.
I’m not sure the Man from Alphabet made the final cut. Don’t remember him at all. There’s no mention made of Susan, Gordon, Bert, Ernie, Big Bird, Bob, Grover or Cookie Monster, all of whom were there right from the beginning as I recall. Rather obviously—this WAS in a DC comic after all—strong emphasis is placed on the appearances of Superman and Batman. Now here’s the thing. I was 11 years old at that point but I watched SESAME STREET pretty regularly when it started. I enjoyed the infectious songs (particularly Bob McGrath’s Dennis Day vibe), the Muppets comedy and the little semi-psychedelic shorts starring Jim Henson but I never saw the superheroes. In fact, it was more than a year into the series when I finally saw a really short bit of animation with Superman counting and that was it! Was there some sort of problem or did their prominently advertised appearances go the way of the Man from Alphabet due to behind-the-scenes decisions? If they ever did turn up and I just missed them then why can't I find it all on Youtube now? Everything's on Youtube!

Somewhere here we have a marvelous book on the making of SESAME STREET but I don’t recall anything on the subject in it (and I’m not awake enough to go looking for it at the moment). Years later I met Gordon but it was Gordon number three (Roscoe Orman) who wasn’t there himself for a few years so I didn’t ask ‘cause I didn’t think he’d know. Besides, I had caught him sneaking a cigarette out by the trash dumpster at the mall where I was working and he was doing a three times a day "One of these things is not like the other" show. Timing seemed off, y’know.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Movies That Fell Through the Cracks # 40

There was a time in the late sixties-early seventies when I thought Gayle Hunnicutt was a big movie star. This probably had to do with the f

act that one of the very first movies I saw in a theater without my parents was EYE OF THE CAT, a pretty darn scary 1969 feature that also starred Michael Sarrazin. Turns out she made a pretty steady go of it but never quite made it all that big, bookending her career with TV guest roles. In the mid-seventies, however, she was working a lot in Europe and in 1975 this curious import turned up at a local theater.
Along with the lovely Ms. H, the ’74 French superthief caper film SHADOWMAN offers Charlie Chaplin’s (other) daughter, Josephine, Gert (GOLDFINGER) Froebe (as a policeman!) and Jacques Champreux as the title character. I remember that the film had something to do with a secret treasure of the Knights Templar (some thirty years before that became a trendy plot device!)

but that it all seemed very muddled. I assumed at the time that it had lost something in the translation but consulting IMDB, I note that the whole thing was compressed from an 8 episode TV series so no wonder it made no sense!
Jacques Champreux is also listed as the writer but as an actor it appears to be his final appearance. Interestingly, one of my wife’s favorite authors, Henry Lincoln (HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL) is credited with appearing as a Templar expert (naturally). Even more interestingly, backtracking Lincoln’s career I see that he wrote a DOCTOR WHO serial with Troughton’s second Doctor in the late sixties!
All of this makes me want to see L'HOMME SANS VISAGE, the series this was based on. I may not recall too much about it but, paired with an "Anthony Steffen" spaghetti western, I remember SHADOWMAN being a fairly enjoyable Saturday afternoon for my 16 year old self…and Gayle Hunnicutt didn’t hurt my eyes at all.

Friday, June 27, 2008

Wonder Woman Short-1970

Anyone out there know the story behind this one? This is a two-page featurette from WONDER WOMAN 188 (1970). According to the Grand Comics Database, the uncredited writing and art is by Mike Sekowsky, at the time the guru behind the controversial "new" Wonder Woman. The inking is rather obviously by Dick Giordano who, imho, did the absolute best version of the Diana Rig...err...Diana Prince Wonder Woman. What's fascinating about this otherwise throwaway piece is that the villain is revealed to be one "Creepy Canigah." That's "Canigah," presumably pronounced as "Kanigher" as in WW's former editor/writer, Robert Kanigher (discussed here yesterday!).

Okay, so was this Sekowsky actually commenting on Kanigher who had reputation for being egotistical and not well-liked? Was he attempting to say he was literally or perhaps metaphorically (by writing WONDER WOMAN) a transvestite or was it all just a good-natured rib at a fellow creator? Anyone?

Thursday, June 26, 2008

To the Nth Degree

It's funny how one remembers trivial things for literally decades sometimes. Still reading me some Silver Age, I came across a story in FLASH # 197 entitled "To the Nth Degree" and I remembered very clearly that my original reading of that story back in 1970 was the very first time I had heard that term--"Nth degree." Confused the hell out of my eleven year old self! Did they mean "Ninth" degree? Was it a temperature reference? WTF?

Reading it today, it is a truly bad short story in which Barry Allen is accidentally sent an experimental telescope and uses it to "flash" across the universe to an exploding planet he sees 1800 trillion miles away. They say he's an amateur astronomer but he apparently doesn't realize that anything he's seeing now from that far away happened centuries ago! Also never occurs to him to maybe signal his JLA pals--can you say Superman?--he just somehow knows he can zap himself to this planet and does so. And what do you know--IT'S STILL THERE!! Upon arrival, he automatically figures out that his blood will boil in exactly one minute so he has to hurry in his goal to super-cool the planet (which is inhabited by Human Torch lookalikes). Of course he succeeds by simply using his speed to make really cold air and chilling out the exploding core. After that he has only milliseconds to find the beam he rode in on (which wife Iris was supposed to be maintaining through the telescope but apparently let slip) so he tosses grains of sand in the air and uses them as stepping stones to the beam which now mysteriously stops in mid-air. After an Adam Strange-like trip hom

e, the telescope accidentally gets destroyed.

The really sad part here is that FLASH (and Julie Schwartz-edited comics in general) had always had a reputation for offering little scientific nuggets along the way. I was a science wiz in school myself all because of Gardner Fox's little asides in the early to mid-sixties FLASH stories. THIS story, though, was written by Robert Kanigher. No stranger to the series (he wrote the character's debut!) but also no Gardner Fox, Kanigher never let facts, logic or continuity get in the way of a good story...or any story for that matter. This little back pages wonder was just filler after the issue's main story (in which the whole of the plot consisted of Flash performing all of the roles in a stage presentation of HAMLET) didn't take up the required number of pages. The classic years of FLASH were over by this point and, in fact, I only stuck with the book for another issue or two myself and was gone by issue 200. The art here is a pleasant but rushed-looking collaboration between Gil Kane and the much-maligned Vince Colletta. Here, Kane's always sharp, wonderful layouts are given a soft coating by Colletta's inks and the whole visual look of the book is very comfortable.

Oh and by the way, the "to the Nth degree" term means "to the ultimate point, as far as one can go." Thought I'd tell you as it never is explained in the story. Damn you, Kanigher!

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Eureka-1970

When I was a teenager in the early 1970’s, the folks at the Ohio Book Store in downtown Cincinnati were kind enough to take my name and call me whenever they got some Golden Age comics in stock. I would usually be able to get one or two even though they were horribly overpriced at about five dollars each! I don't get downtown very often anymore but when I do it’s always a pleasure to see that in spite of all the changes in the city, the same folks are still running the same store in the same location. They don’t get Golden Age comics anymore either but I can still find cool stuff there. Today a recently transplanted friend asked me to show her downtown and we walked across the bridge—my first time in about twenty years! Of course one of the places I showed her was…the Ohio Book Store. As usual, I found something to buy and, in spite of money being tight (again) I had to get it! The rule is, "If you’ve never seen it before get it now or you’ll never see it again." I got it.

What I got was EUREKA, a 1970 Italia

n comics annual ( actually dated October of 1969) tying in to the recent moon landings by reprinting American and English sci-fi comic strips! Unfortunately for me I don’t speak Italian so unless I type the whole thing into BabelFish, all I can do is enjoy the great artwork on some rarely reprinted strips. What we have here is Frank

Bellamy’s classic GARTH (albeit here by someone called Steve Dowling), a couple of the Wally Wood/Will Eisner OUTER SPACE SPIRIT sections, George Tuska’s 1963 version of BUCK ROGERS, BRICK BRADFORD by Paul Norris and DRIFT MARLOW (a neatly drawn 1964 strip by Tom Cooke that I confess to being totally unfamiliar with until today). There’s even a few MR. MUM strips, another silent strip apparently called PERKINS and an Italian language article on Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11. About all that's missing is JEFF HAWKE and FLASH GORDON! What's here is a great collection, however, that's easy to enjoy in any language...especially for $3.25 American nearly forty years later!

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Schlomo Raven

The late Byron Preiss (bless him) was always trying to find new ways to package and repackage comics, pulps and other pop related phenomena. In 1976, around the same time he was bringing out his WEIRD HEROES new pulps, Preiss also unleashed FICTION ILLUSTRATED, a brief but memorable series of near-comics done as digest-sized (at first anyway) full color graphic novels. Unfortunately, the audience wasn’t there for these one-off wonders at the time. If one reme

mbers them at all, it’s only for Steranko’s CHANDLER, repackaged a couple of times over the years. Quite frankly though, in spite of the most new artwork we’d seen from Jim in several years at that point, I never actually cared for CHANDLER. Nor was I all that thrilled with Ralph Reese’s SON OF SHERLOCK HOLMES or Stephen Fabian’s badly reproduced STARFAWN. No, for me the winner in FICTION ILLUSTRATED’s brief run was right at the beginning—SCHLOMO RAVEN.
If there’s any doubt right from the beginning that writer Preiss and illustrator Tom Sutton were doing an "homage" to early MAD comics and Kurtzman and Elder in particular, the fact that Harvey contributed an introduction drives that home. The book is even dedicated to both of them along with their fellow EC cohorts Jack Davis, Wally Wood, John Severin and the man now termed the father of the American graphic novel, Will Eisner.
Our hero is a tiny and rather obviously Elder-esque parody of the typical tough-guy Hollywood private eye. In a series of short stories under the umbrella title, THE SHOW-BIZ JOBS, we get a Marx Brothers parody, a Karloff and Lugosi parod

y, a Carmen Miranda parody, a Bogart parody and finally a most delightful Orson Welles parody that plays on the actor’s radio role of the Shadow. Preiss’s skill was not really as a writer so much of the non-visual humor falls flat. For Sutton, though, this was one of his finest hours. Known for his humor work for NOT BRAND ECHH, the early VAMPIRELLA stories and a long run of sci-fi stories for Charlton, Tom Sutton was rarely given a showcase better than this and his pleasure shows in the MAD-ish gags he stuffs into the pages a’la Elder’s "chicken fat."
For me the most annoying thing about the book is the lettering, looking amateurish and sometimes hard to read in spite of being done by Kenneth Smith, known at the time for his fanzine, PHANTASMAGORIA and his amazing color work. Smith also colors SCHLOMO RAVEN but for the most part the colors are so dull and muted

you’d never know it.
The miniature format (smaller than a READER’S DIGEST but wider than a mass market paperback) was hard for stores to display so many simply chose not to do so. The anthology format was not necessarily conducive to bringing in repeat readers every month and quite frankly, the material was probably a little too experimental. With CHANDLER an oversized trade paperback edition was also offered and, if I recall correctly, that was the ONLY format for the final, Sherlock volume.
As the industry slowly caught up with his visions, Byron Preiss spent the rest of his life being new and innovative (if rarely really successful) and his untimely death a few years back brought a host of tributes from friends and co-workers.