WORLD OF MONSTERS: DINOSAURS

Showing posts with label DINOSAURS. Show all posts

Friday, March 14, 2025

ONE MILLION B.C. IN THE COMICS

Tucked away in a Golden Age comic book hardly noticed anymore is this two-part comic adaptation of the 1940 Hal Roach film, ONE MILLION B.C. If the title seems familiar, that's because Hammer produced the remake in 1966 titled ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. If I need to tell you who starred in that, I'll have to give you a lengthy time-out in the dungeon of the Mysterious Mansion.

The original starred Victor Mature as Tumak, Carol Landis as Loana and Lon Chaney, Jr. as Akhoba. While the story is actually pretty good, the special effects are marred for modern viewers with various live reptiles wearing prosthetics used as dinosaurs and a man slogging around in a rubber suit trying his best to act like a T-Rex!

The strip is written and drawn by an unknown scriptwriter and artist and appeared in CRACKAJACK FUNNIES #25-26 (July 1940-August 1940) published by Whitman, a subsidiary of Western Publishing Co. Another imprint of Western is the more familiar Gold Key Comics.

And believe me, the T-Rex looks much better in the comic!

Monday, January 20, 2025

NEW ARTICLE PUBLISHED!

Released just last week is the latest issue of PREHISTORIC TIMES (#152, Winter 2025) with a marvelous wrap-around cover by Luis Rey of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops ready to go head-to-head. You may notice that Rey has included feathers on T. Rex as in recent years paleontologists have discovered this distinct possibility from the fossil record.

Also included in this issue is my article, "Cavemen vs. Dinosaurs: Hammer Films' One Million Years

B.C." where I write about the behind-the-scenes making of the picture, as well as discuss the various live action and stop-motion dinosaurs that Ray Harryhausen created. Oh, yes, and Raquel Welch gets a bit of copy, too, including how her now-iconic fur bikini was made.

As of this writing, PT #152 is available from eBay HERE. It usually goes up on the website a little later and you can access that from "The Magazine Rack" section on the left sidebar of this blog's main page.

Thursday, July 18, 2024

CAVEWOMAN GETS INTO DEEP WATER

Inspired by the dinosaur artist Bill Stout and Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's LITTLE ANNIE FANNY strip (pun intended) in PLAYBOY, Budd Root's 19-year-old Meriem Cooper (aka Cavewoman) has been battling dinosaurs and other monsters from the Cretaceous period since 1993. One should also notice that King Kong was an inspiration as well, as Meriem Cooper sounds an awful lot like she could be the daughter of Kong filmmaker Merian C. Cooper!

Root explains her beginnings:

"Cavewoman was inspired by Little Annie Fanny and William Stout. I wanted something like "Little Annie Fanny in the Stone Age". Originally, it was going to be a T&A type of book, but it seemed like, as I was writing, it just kept on developing. Then my grandfather died after I wrote it. He had been diagnosed with some kind of inoperable tumor, and it made me think: "I'm not going to do a T&A book. Let's keep this respectable". I brought the pages (to the first issue) to show Gramp just about a week or so before he died."

That thought didn't seem to last long as gradually Meriem lost more and more of her leopard-skin bikini, especially when Devon Massey was drawing her (Root drew a lot of her series comics and Massey draws the lion's share of her one-shots).

With 300 different issues under her knife-belt, Cavewoman would be 39 now, but she hasn't seemed to have aged a day, especially taking into account gravity -- if you know what I mean and I think you do! This particular issue contains cover-to-cover Meriem sans bikini so I've elected to post it HERE instead of on the main page. You'll see what I'm talking about -- CAVEWOMAN: DEEP WATER gives new meaning to "Adult Swim"!