Number 226

Johnny Peril

Howard Purcell was a longtime artist at DC Comics, with a comic book career going back to 1940. He rarely signed his work. He drew this excellent cover of Showcase#30 in 1961, inked by Sheldon Moldoff.He also drew a strip I like, the Kirby-styled "Black Knight" feature from Marvel Super-Heroes #17 in 1968. He received credit for this one.
Purcell was a comic book journeymen who labored over a drawing board for many years and drew a lot of features. This is one of his back-up "Johnny Peril" strips for All-Star Comics. This particular episode appeared in #45, February-March 1949. The art is moody and effective, and the story, a variation on Aladdin's lamp from The Arabian Nights, sent me into a fantasy world for awhile. What would I wish for if I had a genie? Hey, I'm not greedy. For starters, I think 10 mint copies of Action Comics #1, which I'd auction off, one a year.

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Number 225

Bill Everett puts the bite on

Bill Everett drew great stories for the Atlas horror comics. He was also tapped to do some horror-comedy for Atlas' short-lived Mad imitations. "Drag-ula" came from Crazy #2, 1954.

The dialog is taken from old vaudeville and radio Yiddish-dialect comedians. There's some fake German, too. I have a low tolerance for this sort of dialect when it's written. It's hodd to ridd, dollink! The art is good, though. Enchoy, heppy Peppy's ridders!

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Number 224

The gold key

I want you to click on the picture of this cover of Twilight Zone #4 from August 1963, and tell me what's happening in this painting. Go ahead and look. I'll wait until you're finished.Back so soon? I was practicing the Twilight Zone theme music on my kazoo. You're puzzled, but you're right, there is nothing happening on the cover. What we see is a European street scene, and the silhouette of a figure on the wet cobblestones. I don't know how many covers there were that got away with this, but while the painting is mysterious, evoking a rainy night, this is not a typical cover of a comic book, even a Gold Key comic. I don't know who the cover artist is.

The story this cover illustrates--and we know that because the story is called "The Secret Of The Key," and there's a key in the cover painting--is drawn by master comic artist Alex Toth. This is a wonderful 10-pager by Toth, with great drawing. Among his other talents, Toth was excellent at period pieces. He also liked actor Errol Flynn, whose face adorns the lead character, a thief who steals the gold key. And yes, the object is a gold key, just like the name of the comic book company.

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#006. The top 100 books of all time

Full list of the 100 best works of fiction, alphabetically by author, as determined from a vote by 100 noted writers from 54 countries as released by the Norwegian Book Clubs. Don Quixote was named as the top book in history but otherwise no ranking was provided.

Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960), The Stranger

Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957), Berlin Alexanderplatz

Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904), Selected Stories

Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002), Pippi Longstocking

Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870), Great Expectations

Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930), Things Fall Apart

Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy

Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784), Jacques the Fatalist and His Master

DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930), Sons and Lovers

Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919), The Golden Notebook

Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849), The Complete Tales

Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985), History

Emily Bronte, England, (1818-1848), Wuthering Heights

Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961), The Old Man and the Sea

Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC), Medea

Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936), Gypsy Ballads

Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935), The Book of Disquiet

Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel

Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924), The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle Bohemia

Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Colombia, (b. 1928), One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera

Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400), Canterbury Tales

George Eliot, England, (1819-1880), Middlemarch

George Orwell, England, (1903-1950), 1984

Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837), Complete Poems

Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BC).

Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375), Decameron

Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927), The Tin Drum

Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880), Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education

Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998), Independent People

Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875), Fairy Tales and Stories

Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906), A Doll's House

Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891), Moby Dick

Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC), The Iliad and The Odyssey

Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850), Old Goriot

Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928), Confessions of Zeno

Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273), Mathnawi

James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941), Ulysses

Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice

Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967), The Devil to Pay in the Backlands

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832), Faust (English) (German)

Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels

Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986), Collected Fictions

Jose Saramago, Portugal, (b. 1922), Blindness

Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924), Nostromo

Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986), Pedro Paramo

Kalidasa, India, (c. 400), The Recognition of Sakuntala (Abhijnanasakuntalam)

Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952), Hunger (English) (Hebrew)

Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910), War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961), Journey to the End of the Night

Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936), Diary of a Madman and Other Stories

Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC).

Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past

Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987), Memoirs of Hadrian

Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592), Essays

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616), Don Quixote

Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911), Children of Gebelawi

Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852), Dead Souls

Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek

Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300).

Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC), Metamorphoses

Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970), Poems

Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994), Invisible Man

Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942), The Man Without Qualities

Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947), Midnight's Children

Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989), Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292), The Orchard

Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (N/A), The Tale of Genji Genji

Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC), Oedipus the King

Stendhal, France, (1783-1842), The Red and the Black

Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929), Season of Migration to the North

The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC).

Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955), Buddenbrook; The Magic Mountain

Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500).

Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931), Beloved

Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC), Ramayana (online-link)

Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC), The Aeneid

Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse

Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977), Lolita

Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass

William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962), Absalom, Absalom!; The Sound and the Fury

William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616), Hamlet; King Lear; Othello

Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972), The Sound of the Mountain

Source of the information: Guardian Unlimited

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Our Army At War #92

A buddy of mine scanned in this issue and I thought I'd do a solo issue review. Here's the cover:

(Cover art by Jerry Grandinetti)

This was the March, 1960 issue. The cover story features Sgt. Rock. Rock is a no-nonsense soldier presiding over a group of men known (ironically) as Easy Company. In this story, he's not only battling the Germans, but his own men who have become superstitious that a rabbit's foot owned by the squad's flame-thrower operator is responsible for their good fortune:

(Art by Joe Kubert, who created Sgt. Rock)

In the end, of course, the soldiers learn their lesson, that their trinkets and charms were not responsible for the luck of Easy Company. Unfortunately, they transfer their superstition:


Comments: Excellent Bob Kanigher story with terrific art as usual by Kubert. More than anything else, it's Kubert's inks that give his characters faces so much emotion.

There is a short feature on the Fighting 41st infantry division, known as the Jungleers for their fighting in the South Pacific, followed by "Bait for a Desert Hawk". A German pilot and an American pilot find their fates tied to a battle between a falcon and a sparrow hawk. The German and the falcon win the first battle, but the American copies a trick used by the sparrow hawk in a rematch and is successful as well.

Comments: Nice compact (6 pages) story with art by Russ Heath.

"D-Day Commandos" is the tale of a pre-invasion commando who is supposed to be guided to his target by three men of the Maquis. However, when he arrives at his first waypoint, he is startled to discover his guide is a boy. The lad turns out to be both brave and intelligent, saving the commando for the next waypoint. This time the person awaiting him is an old man, who again proves resourceful and courageous. Now it is up to the last guide, who is young and manly. And a Nazi intent on sabotaging the mission. The commando realizes that the young boy and the old man did their jobs, so he must do his by defeating the Nazi and blowing up the bridge to help the invasion forces.

Comments: Terrific story, in the compact style of the Silver Age; all the action described above (and more) comes in six pages and only 33 panels.

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Number 223

Talking out of his ass

This is a funny Sparky Watts story from Big Shot Comics #83, dated November 1947. When artist/writer Boody Rogers retired from comic books in 1952 he opened some art supply stores in Arizona. This strip may have been a precursor to life in the Southwest, amongst the Saguaro cacti, scorpions, lizards, and I'm sure, even some jackasses.

I've posted a couple of Sparky Watts strips in previous blogs, so click on the "Sparky Watts" or "Boody Rogers" links below to see more of the "World's Strongest Funnyman." If you're seeing a Boody Rogers strip for the first time, then you are discovering one of the most unique and interesting cartoonists of the golden age. Boody had a fertile and unusual comic imagination and his artwork is still fresh today.

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#005. Supremo-Adventures of Amitabh Bachchan

On the demand of Qaseem Abbasi and some more friends.

Supremo-Vol1 N11-The Hijack

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 Number 222


Beyonders Kill!


Happy Thanksgiving! For you beyonders beyond our borders, today in America we are celebrating our own abundance with a feast of gluttony, enough caloric intake per person to nourish a smaller nation for at least a year. We visit with family, then end our celebration in a stupor on the couch watching an American football game. Good eating, but pass the Pepto-Bismol. Our main course is turkey, a very stupid bird. When someone is pretty damn dumb we call them a turkey.

A year ago I celebrated this day with the first annual Comic Book Turkey Award for dumbest comic book story. The recipient is chosen by me, Pappy, the judgment on said story is all mine, and it's purely subjective. Last year's winner was in Pappy's #57, "The Flat Man," from Superior's Journey Into Fear #19. You can read it by following the link.

This year's story can't top "The Flat Man," but "The Day The World Died" from ACG's Forbidden Worlds #5, March-April 1952, comes at least a close second in stupidity. I won't describe the story to you. You'll have to experience it, and the Beyonders, for yourselves. The Grand Comics Database credits the artwork to George Wilhelms. The story earns three turkeys out of a possible four.



While reading it, have another piece of pumpkin pie, with a double shot of whipped cream. Ummmm, good, isn't it? But not nearly as good as the treat you'll get from "The Day The World Died!" And best of all, no calories!

Note: I made new scans of the pages in August, 2012.

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#004. Some Authors

Check the link of following Authors (collection)

Agatha Christie

Arthur Hailey

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Leo Nikolayevitch Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
 

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#003. Premchand and some more Hindi links.

This one for my friend Rakesh. Earlier planned to add it later. My favorite Hindi writer since 1978.

Premchand (1880-1936)

the man...

His real name was Dhanpat Rai but he is famous with his pen name of Premchand or Munshi Premchand. He was born in Pandepur, a village near Banaras (now Varanasi). His father Munshi Ajaib Lal was a clerk in the Postal Department. Premchand was just eight years old when his mother died. His grand-mother took the responsibility of raising him, but she died soon after that. Meanwhile his father married again and Premchand was left without the love of his father too.
He was married when he was 15 and was in the 9th grade. His father also died and after passing the intermediate he had to stop his study. He got a job as a teacher in the Primary School, after a series of promotion he became Deputy Inspectors of Schools. In response to Mahatma Gandhi call of non-cooperation with the British he quit his job. After that he devoted his full attention to writing. His first story appeared in the magazine Zamana published from Kanpur.

his novels...
Before Premchand; Nazeer Ahmad, Sarshar and Mirza Hadi Ruswa have written novels in Urdu. But Premchand has a unique place when it comes to Urdu novels and short stories. He emphasized in presenting the realities of life and he made Indian Villages his center of writing. His novels describe the problems faced by the villagers and poor and what could be the solutions. How the priests, local business folks (mahajan) and the landlords were exploiting the villagers. He also emphasized on the Hindu-Muslim unity. His famous works include Gau-daan, Maidan-e-Amal, Bay-waH, Chaugaan etc.

short stories...
It would not be wrong to say Premchand as the Father of Urdu Short- Stories. Short stories or afsana was started by Premchand. As with his novels, his afsanas, also mirrors the society that he lived in. With a break from the past his characters are not all good or bad but somewhere in between. His characters are based on real life people and as in real life sometime we see a good side or the bad side of the person.
Premchand's style of writing is simple and flowing some of his works shows very good use of satire and humor. His later works used very simple words and he started including Hindi words too to honestly portray his characters. In the later stages of his life He turned his attention to Hindi and now Premchand is claimed by both Urdu and Hindi literature as their own. His famous afsanas are qaatil ki maaN, zewar ka DibbaH, gilli DanDa, eidgaah, namak ka darogHaaH, kafan. His collected stories have been published as prem pachisi, prem battisi, wardaat, zaad-e-raah etc.

[Based on Urdu Adab ki Tareekh by Azeem-ul-haq Junaidi published by Educational Book House, Muslim University Market, Aligarh 200202 INDIA]

Premchand's Short Stories & Novels

Check other Hindi Links, add today for all Hindi lovers.

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The Marvel Girlfriends

This is not the first time I have remarked on this, but when you look at the Silver Age DC they were miles ahead of Marvel in terms of their treatment of women.

Look at the Silver Age DC girlfriends/love interests and their occupations:

Flash: Iris West, newspaper reporter
Green Lantern: Carol Ferris, aircraft plant executive
The Atom: Jean Loring, defense attorney
Hawkman: Hawkgirl (Shayera Hol), policewoman

Now let's try the comparison with Marvel:

Hulk: Betty Ross, daughter of a general
Spiderman: Betty Brant, secretary
Thor: Jane Foster, nurse
Iron Man: Pepper Potts, secretary
Daredevil: Karen Page, secretary

Are we seeing a trend here? I don't even know if Betty Ross had a job in the old Hulk stories; wasn't she more or less a housekeeper for her father? I left Aquaman out of the mix because for some odd reason his Silver Age adventures did not start with a romantic interest; it was not until Aquaman #11 that Mera appeared on the scene. And you can make a case for talking about Sue Storm being a scientist, although it might help if Stan and Jack had shown her mixing up some chemicals in her spare time instead of trying on new clothes and hairstyles.

All the Marvel heroines performed one valuable function; they made excellent hostages. Let's consider Jane Foster, for example:







Now it is not entirely fair to criticize this as sexist; it's also provides strong motivation for the hero. Hostages help balance out the power differences between superheroes and the (often non-super) villains. And it's not as if only women were used in this way; Jimmy Olsen and Robin often found themselves kidnapped as well.

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Number 221

The Green Turtle

This story is by request. It's the first Green Turtle story from Blazing Comics #1* from 1944.

Rural Home was the publisher, and as far as I can tell, ultimately not a successful one. Since it was set up during the war when paper was rationed, they probably had ties to an established publisher with access to paper. About any comic printed sold in those days. There's another reason for calling it the golden age: Publishing comic books during the war was a golden opportunity to bring in the gold! After the war a peripheral publisher like Rural Home fell apart.

What I know about the creation of the character Green Turtle is hearsay, unless I missed some confirmation somewhere: The story is that a Chinese-American named Chu Hing created Green Turtle as a Chinese superhero, fighting the Japanese in China. Stories of Japanese atrocities in China were well documented. The publisher felt that a Chinese superhero wouldn't go over with American--read, white--readers. The creator came up with the idea of turning his hero's face from view, substituting that odd shadow with eyes. It makes for a striking visual, but could have confused the readers.

The Green Turtle was interesting enough for a cartoonist named Gary Terry. who revived the character for his digest-sized, black-and-white comic book, Atom, Robot Adventurer, in 1975. Here's the splash page for the strip, done up with some kinky gals, and signed with the pseudonym, Stag Fury.I think The Green Turtle is a bad name for a hero. I can't imagine kids of that era going for a hero with that name when comics starring Captain America, Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, The Flash, to name just a few, were around to compete for their dimes.

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*"Jun-Gal," another story from Blazing Comics #1, was posted in Pappy's #179.

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#002. Asterix & Tintin (Comics & Books)

UPDATE:

31/01/2008: 3 more Tintin files added today.


Total 76 comics and books in English. In fact there are 75 books, but one in two parts.



Asterix and Tintin (download links)

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Number 220

The most beautiful thing in the galaxy

No matter what Russ Heath drew, he drew it well. His work ran the gamut of genres, all of the subjects handled with as much skill as any comic book artist who ever set a Number 2 pencil to bristol board. He could also draw pretty girls, or ugly monsters, like he does in this Stan Lee strip from Atlas Comics' Menace #7.

When you read the introduction you'll notice that even in 1954 Stan Lee was personalizing his work. In the story itself you have to wonder how the cowardly, alcoholic crewman, Derk Collin, was able to keep liquor aboard the ship. You also have to wonder how he passed a psychological exam in order to be able to be part of a spaceship crew, and wonder how a rocket ship under the pressure of 34 g's would allow the crewmen to move around like they do. Oh well…it's a horror comic book, and we only care about how rotten and unredeemable the liquor swilling, sexual harassing main character is, and the ending that writer Lee claims in his intro not to have known until it was written. Sure, Stan. We believe you.

And of course we care about the artwork, which is typical Heath. In other words, typically great.

*******

For those of you who've read this far, here's a Russ Heath treat. Less than a decade after he drew "The Planet Of Living Death," Heath was working on a series I remember fondly. Here's a 7-pager from that series. Here's also a hope that someday the publisher will consider putting these stories into one of those phonebook-sized volumes, reprinting their books from the era of the 1960s.

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