The Rocketeer - Hollywood Horror!

The Rocketeer - Hollywood Horror is from 2013 and features a rather bizarre tale written by Roger Landridge of Fred the Clown fame and drawn by Jay Bone who made his reputation at DC drawing the Super Friends and other features.  

Bone's approach is so much different than the traditional Stevens model for the characters that's a whole new world we enter. Bone has an animation style which is in my opinion appropriate for the Rocketeer genre, but it is sure a different approach. But maybe this wasn't the story to start Bone on. 

The story brings to the sunny Rocketeer universe echoes of the terrors of H.P. Lovecraft. The atmospheric approach for these kinds of stories seems perhaps a bit undermined by Bone's light frisky artwork. More in keeping with the tone of the material are the Walt Simonson covers which are seen below. I admit, I wish he'd drawn the series. 

The market for new Rocketeer is I would expect a robust one as we'll see in the coming days. 

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Frostbite Fridays - Rocky And Bullwinkle!

Thanks to the cartoon wisdom of Mark Evanier the IDW mini-series starring the Moose and Squirrel comes off pretty well. Evanier is a writer who is deft and clever but not always do I find his scripts as funny as I think they ought to be. But in the world of Frostbite Falls his love of puns and affection for the characters and the people who portrayed them is ideal. That doesn't at all minimize the work of Roger Landridge who as usual offers up a delicate and charming batch of imagery. 

If anything Landridge's artwork as embellished by Andrew Pepoy might be a little too elegant and refined. I've always associated a quick and dirty parade of images with these cartoons, well crafted but always showing around the edges the evidence of haste and deadline pressure. The art is what it is and pretty though it be, it's always going to be the writing which makes Rocky and Bullwinkle work or not. 

In these comics we only get one co-feature and that Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties. He's in fine fettle, though al of his escapades felt somewhat brief to me. Evanier does the smart thing and with two installments of R&B each issue gives the reader at least a hint of the continued storylines which made the vintage classics so robust. 

My favorite issue was the one in which Pottsylvania claims ownership of the Moon. That makes Rocky and Bullwinkle head to the Moon and that means we get some great Gidney and Cloyd action. I love the Moon Men and they are totally on point in this adventure and in another in which they play a lesser role. Boris and Natasha sound right also with Evanier getting the rhythms of their distinctive speech. 

This is a fun series and if you can them cheap I recommend them. They aren't as good as the cartoons, but that was never going to happen. The original Rocky and Bullwinkle are gems produced in their own time and reflecting that time but also speaking to audiences well beyond. 

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Frostbite Fridays - Vacational Therapy!

When IDW saw fit to reprint the Bullwinkle and Rocky comics from Dell and Gold Key, they opted to reprint the comics titled Bullwinkle and Rocky from Gold Key. But these issues are chock full of reprints from earlier versions of the book with titles such as Rocky and Friends, Bullwinkle, and Rocky and his Fiendish Friends. Some of the books appeared in the Dell Four Color series. Tracking down all the original occurrences of these stories is possible I guess using the Grand Comics Database but is made much more difficult because for whatever reason these IDW reprints have not been catalogued as yet for some reason. 

Which goes to suggest that Rocky and Bullwinkle is primarily an animation event and not so much a comic book success. The cover above is from an early Dell Four Color issue and you can tell it's early because it features Mr. Peabody. For whatever reason Mr. Peabody gets short shrift in these comics with Dudley Do-Right getting most of the attention. 

In fact Dudley is a co-star on all the subsequent covers in this volume which were produced (as far as I can tell) for these comics specifically. The typical Gold Key humor comic showcases a zany scene, not at all necessarily related to the material inside. The reference to surfing in the cover above does give the cover a feeling of timeliness that most lack, making them ripe for reprinting through the years. 

The artists for these later issues are not identified. Al Kilgore is credited with most of the work for the earliest stories and there is nothing at GCD to much contradict this. But IDW offers up the idea that the artists Fred Fredericks, Jerry Robinson, and Mel Crawford worked on these early efforts. Jack Mendelsohn and Dave Berg are mentioned as writers thought no specific attributions are made. For the record Roger Landridge did the cover for this tome as well as the cover for last week's volume. 

On a storytelling note, in these tales featuring the sundry characters of the TV shows, there is some effort or assumption made that Pottsylvania the imaginary "Commie" country from which Boris and Natasha come from is a place in other contexts. One Fractured Fairytale takes place there and in one instance Dudley Do-Right chases Snidely Whiplash when he goes there for sanctuary. This note of continuity between the features (not something the cartoons did) makes one imagine some sort of oddball comic event in which the denizens of this "Wardiverse" begin to stumble into our world. 

More next week. 

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