Pop Action At Its Best!

The page from Beware the Creeper by Steve Ditko and letterer Gaspar Saladino (perhaps)  above is a marker of a time and place when suddenly comic books and comic book characters were wildly popular. The iconography of the comic had filtered into the broader culture in a new way, it had quietly slipped into the salons and parlors of the intelligentsia, those blokes and dames who determine what is cool and what is not for the rest of us grunts. For a sweet moment in time comics were cool. (They've since become mainstream, but perhaps not as "cool".)

One of the reasons was Batman, a TV show that took the country by storm and filled our imaginations with all manner of new yet somehow vintage sights and sounds, translated tongue-in-cheek from the pages of decades of yellowing comics. 

The simple "Pow!" became the marker of a sound that never was save in the imagination along with its brothers and sisters like "Zap!" and "Crack!" and such. The sound effect "Foom" achieved such a charm that it became the title of one of Marvel's many fan clubs magazines. 

The museums became a repository to the stuff of the newsstands and celebrated for its potency in a culture which already felt that life was draining from it a bit. It's at once a celebration and an achievement, but also sad in one sense because the "trash" had become "treasure" and that makes it of significance to those who don't love it for its own sake. 

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Fear Itself!

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said it best in his first inaugural address after his election as United States President in 1933 - "We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.". He was attempting to calm a nation which had been ransacked by a near total collapse of an economy too insecurely strapped to markets which were very good at short term gain but lousy at long term prosperity. Sadly we have in many ways returned to those dangerous ways, but that's not my main point today.

I sometimes feel sorry for the folks who day in and day out only get their news from FOX "News". They certainly have a choice and broad assortment of other venues, but sadly all too often in these times folks like to get their updates on the daily proceedings digested and already filed into comfortable categories.  Without sampling from an array of sources one can very quickly imagine the whole of the universe fits neatly into a narrative which conveniently meets the needs of some political power seeker or other. It's true of both sides, but to be fair and balanced, it's really really true of FOX folks.

That said, I do sometimes feel a touch of pity because they must live lives absolutely filled with terror. For years now they've imagined their government (which they have a shaky and limited understanding of sadly) has been taken away and now serves the purposes of those disrespectful dusky folks who steadily fill in the spaces all around them in stores and parks and even at work. They imagine women have escaped the proper confines of Biblical heterodoxy and now gambol day and night with little regard to the men they trample on or the children they abort weekly. They think that the United States military is weak despite its budget which dwarfs any other single nation on the planet, and that reducing that budget a fraction puts the whole nation at risk of invasion from Cuba perhaps, or maybe even North Korea or some other tiny country with a population which is a fraction of that in the U.S.

But mostly they live in terror of terror, or as they clamber to call it "Muslin Extremism". Despite statistics which prove that most of the terrorism in the world is not committed by Muslims or that the chances that any single person will ever fall victim to it are miniscule, folks nonetheless are scared witless that some bearded malcontent is just around the corner waiting to drive a knife into their heart while they shop at the local mall.

As the mongers begin the terrible drumbeats to begin the next great war we have to be especially careful to make decisions not based on fear, it is fear itself which is our greatest enemy. 

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Football Follies!

Norman Saunders

Let just say that I am totally enthralled by the hullabaloo commonly referred to in the media as "Deflategate". I love it! Rarely have I beheld a story which so encapsulated so much of what is fundamentally lacking in the modern world.

First we have a story which is of absolutely zero true significance to practically anyone. It is the most purely pointless sports story to thunder across the media landscape since Janet Jackson's titty tumbled out at the Super Bowl a decade ago. The utter unimportance of all of it only makes the broad and deep fascination with the story more entertaining to watch as news agencies glom onto the story as they would something which actually mattered (Nigeria anyone?), showing starkly how little discretion is used in modern media to decide what constitutes "news". Like small puppies and tiny kittens we watch what is in front of us with no regard to its relative value.

And further, the way in which football has infused itself into the broader culture is crass and boorish. Once upon a time it was merely a seasonal sport like baseball, basketball, and hockey, but now it's something else, a cultural touchstone which in the past only baseball came close to matching. (And frankly baseball's a more elegant game and fit for that role.) Football has washed over the dykes of sports coverage and now occupies air space once reserved for significant decisions of domestic and foreign policy at both the state and federal levels. It's been an absolute hoot watching as "news" anchors rush to ditch the details of President's State of the Union address and rush to cover the latest tick in the "Deflategate" saga. Enough of Barrack Hussein Obama's divisive  and shadowy visage and on with Tom Brady's guileless homespun grin. (They both have great teeth I will stipulate.)

And frankly I prefer this pointless conversation to the sundry ones which inevitably burble during this interminable time before the "Super" Bowl, the endless spree of experts delving into every molecule of the competition as if any of it mattered beyond the momentary distraction such entertainment properly is.Most news these days is about nothing, most sports is elevated to a status which pretends to be significant, so the witting marriage of these two makes both additionally absurd.

But while this kerfluffle is singularly unimportant it is oddly simultaneously crucial to an aspect of our culture which has lost its way. Sports stars are not nor have they ever been nor will  they ever be "heroes". That word is bandied about much too much for my tastes, attached to all sorts of events and applied even to non-humans from time to time. But what sports stars are for sure are role models (despite what the often refreshingly frank Charles Barkley claims) and as such should be quite careful in how they conduct themselves in public. That Tom Brady has pretty much lied and been seen to have done so about this shenanigan is regrettable. The angst it has caused many a commentator who is alas forced to call it out is at once palpable and entertaining in a perverse way.

All quarterbacks, get too much glory and too much shame, but since they mostly often get giant checks, that's not something I worry too much about. But for kids it might not be so sanguine, and to see your favorite sports star telling a fib before the whole country might be a seminal moment. It actually might be important, if not so much for what it is in and of itself but for the way it has forced those with money on the line to equivocate on his behalf so as to either dismiss the matter as trivial  (which to my mind makes the lie even worse) or to suggest that the problem is actually elsewhere. As a teacher I run into this kind of addled logic all the time and these sports talk variations of "the dog ate my homework" and "this class is stupid anyway" really don't help us in the long run.

At least we haven't spent the week dissecting obscure defenses and speculating on hamstrings, the usual  blather that passes for conversation during this week. Thanks goodness "Deflategate" (I like that the name rhymes too) gave us something novel if fundamentally inane to focus on. After the game we can all go back to worrying overmuch about ISIS. Until then...play ball.

On that note here are some comic book covers (entertaining trash of another time) which showcases the game which is currently a plague on the land. To quote the late great Andy Griffith --"What it was, was football."

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Wacky Packages!

A few days ago my beloved wife ("She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed") had a few medical appointments all inside the local hospital. That left me with several hours on my hands to wander the streets, which almost always means I end up in a bookstore. I thought the store which would do me and my wallet the least harm was Half-Price Books (my new favorite bookstore) and I spent a few hours in there plumbing the depths of the collections.

Among what I found were two volumes from Abrams showcasing the Topps 70's card phenomenon called "Wacky Packages". These are exceedingly well-crafted spoofs of then-current products. The gags were designed by the likes of Art Spiegleman (yep, that Art Spiegleman) and Jay Lynch among others. In the spirit of the heights of MAD magazine, these send-ups were clever and crude and almost always funny. The art is supplied by longtime Topps artist Norm Saunders (yep, that Norm Saunders) who gives these garish little cards their convincing oomph.

When I stumbled across this image, a send up of Warren's Vampirella magazine I knew I had to have these two handsome little volumes. There's something so inside-baseball about this selection which speaks to the interests of the creators. I don't know anyone in the broader pop culture sufficiently aware of Vampirella to imagine a spoof.

More normally, the jokes are built around household products. But the one above would certainly light a candle under the right-wing constitution-spewing numbskulls who'd find some attempt to subvert the youth to devilish non-Christian ways. They'd blame Obama most likely.

Similarly the myopic goblins of the left would pounce on this ad gag, which not only promotes violence but even a kind of reverse bullying where the kid kicks the crap out of the adult. It's empowering in one way and threatening in another, at least that's what a Pinko might say. He or she also might just blame Obama.

And one and all might blanch at this one given the gun-mad microverse we Americans inhabit. With school shootings making the news every day, a Left-winger might say such a spoof was insensitive and might negatively impact a child's fragile psyche and a Right-winger might say the ad makes light of the a citizen's god-given and constitutionally-protected right to wander the civilized world armed like a gangster.

Thanks Obama!

But I also say these mildly transgressive little parodies are funny, evoking a smile if not a laugh each and every time. To get a look at many many more see this outstanding link dedicated to the Wacky Packages phenomenon.

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Frankenstein Woodcut!

Lynd Ward's woodcuts can be breathtaking. His illustrations for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein punch through the veneers of many who approach illustrating the text, and offer up an inner view of the struggle both within Frankenstein and the Creature.


My own interpretation of the novel suggests to me that the Creature is not real, as the evidence for his existence is only from the raving stories of his creator and presumably the eyewitness testimony of the Captain who ultimately tells the tell. But I maintain that the Captain, a man similar in mindset and unhealthy motivation to Frankenstein has been equally deluded, and so his testimony is tainted.


The task Mary Shelley (or her husband depending on who you believe really authored the text) was the create a ghost story, and I think it is a masterful one, so good that uncounted millions have seen the apparition over the many many years.


Ward gets at that sense of interior madness with his contorted images. For more of his work see this magnificent link.

And while I'm on the subject of Frankenstein, here's Edgar Winter's magnificent song of that name. Put that music behind Ward's images and you have something remarkable.



For a more prosaic rendition of the classic gothic horror, here's a link to the Classics Illustrated version of the story. Below is the magnificent Norman Saunders cover for one edition of that comic.


And here's the dramatic splash page by Robert Webb.


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