Diabolik

I’m finally getting around to watching this DVD. A cult film based on the Italian fumetto (comicbook) it was made in 1967 and received limited showings in the UK around 1968. At the time I suppose it was quite a novelty that the hero was actually a villain.

Diabolik was a leather-suited, athletic master criminal and, as played by John Phillip Law, a rather intense character with a haunted look. At first it was just the authorities who persued him. Once other criminals decided to deal with him (for upsetting the status quo) his days were numbered. Until then he enjoyed a fab “hideout” cavern that was like something out of a James Bond film. He drove a black E Type Jaguar and his gorgeous girlfriend Eva drove a matching white one.

PS: The audio soundtrack with sounds like this (which doesn’t seem to be currently available) was an early work of Ennio Morricone who would later be involved in the music for spaghetti westerns like “The good,the bad and the ugly” and many many more films in Italy and the USA.

Captain Al Cohol

He’s an alien ex-alcoholic fighting crime and booze in the furthest reaches of Canada. Having accidentally caused the death of his family whilst on a drunken bender he rocketed to Earth to forget. But was he really the ideal role model to extol the dangers of alcoholism to the Inuit/Eskimos in 1973 ?

Eek

To celebrate reaching issue 600 Archie is about to marry Veronica.  Or is he?  Will Betty stop the wedding?  I always thought Betty and Archie were the most compatible. Veronica seems to be a high-maintenance kind of girl. We’ll find out over the next 6 issues.

Anyway it’s all an “imaginary” story set in the future. But time is an illusion in the Archie universe. They’ve been teenagers for sixty years now !! Betty and Veronica have certainly changed over the years though.

Elson’s Presents Comics

Beginning in 1967, Edward E.Elson built up a large chain of prime location gift shop/newsagents/convenience stores within Hotels, airports and large office buildings in the USA. By 1985, when he sold his company to our own W.H.Smiths there were over 200 shops.

In the early 1980s Elsons produced a few of their “own” comics. They actually consisted of 3 (remaindered?) coverless DC comics glued into a new cover. Now where have I seen that done before? (See the item on Thorpe and Porters Double Double comics on the left !!). Presumably in 1980 the practice of ripping covers off of unsold comics to return them for credit was still happening. There must have been mountains of coverless comics to pulp in the 1950s to 1980s. What a shame. And yet how surprising that no one in the USA had thought of repackaging them before……
Of course once the direct market began in force the systems of distribution/returns would change forever.

PS: Out of interest this particular comic contained the odd mixture of coverless copies of The New Teen Titans 3, Secrets of Haunted House 32 and Wonder Woman 275. As they are all dated January 1981 they would have been reasonably current. Perhaps they weren’t remaindered comics and may possibly have been “assembled” into their new covers as they were newly printed ??

PPS: There were six different issues produced. Oddly the covers for all six comics were identical with only the “series” numbers on the front of each issue to show they contained different comics !!

PPPS: And the apostrophe in “Elson’s” may well be grammatically correct but it does LOOK odd, just like those signs in Markets and Greengrocer shops where they sell “potato’s” and “carrot’s” !!! (I’ve just been reading that book about incorrect punctuation called “Eats shoots and leaves”…………..)

Deluxe Comics

Deluxe Comics managed just 5 irregular issues of “Wally Wood’s Thunder Agents” between 1984 and 1986. No Wally Wood art was to be seen. He had died in 1981 at a mere 54 years of age. He had however overseen the original run of T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents from Tower Comics in the 1960s. Deluxe Comics were involved in legal action over the rights to these characters with JC Productions who had also tried to revive Thunder Agents in 1983. The case hinged on had Wally Wood owned the characters rather than Tower Comics.

In legal cases over ownership of title the main winners seem to be the lawyers. Until the 1970s it was assumed that any new character invented by a comic book writer or artist immediately became the property of the comic book publisher thanks to the small print that accompanied their payment for script/artwork. This was finally contested in the 1970s and eventually creator-owned characters became the norm. Steve Gerber was unfortunately caught up in these problems with “Howard the Duck”. Although he had devised Howard it was Marvel Comics who owned the character and who could sell the Movie rights. The fascinating account of Mr Gerber’s predicament is here.

PS: Its getting hard to keep track of who owns what these days. Marvel Comics has recently been bought by Disney. Its not for me to say if that is a good or a bad thing…although I wouldn’t be interested in any team-ups between Howard and Donald Duck….or Spiderman and Mickey Mouse………

PPS: And I believe Marvel Comics had recently acquired the rights to our own Marvelman. Which means Disney owns Marvelman. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in some Alternate Universe where everything is the same but different/worse……………

And talking of Alternate Universes…………….if you’ve never ever visited www.dialbforblog.com then now is the time. Here you can see hundreds of comics that never were but might have been……..

Nuff Said 16

Captain Britain

Not exactly the cheapest book I’ve ever bought (£60 !!!) but probably the most enjoyable. Captain Britain began in the mid 1970s as another identikit hero. His origin escapes me. Was he bitten by a radioactive hedgehog or did he find the sword Excalibur leaning against a tree?? I remember being underwhelmed by his pedestrian adventures in the first run of his title (overseen from the USA).

However once he was being handled by writers and artists with imagination this great run of 47 stories from various 1980s UK titles are perhaps the equal of any superheroic antics before or since, including the late/great (soon to be resurrected) Marvelman. Perhaps if I’d got a week or so to spare I could have dug out all my original copies of these magazines featuring Captain Britain. They’ll still be around here somewhere. But it’s nice to have them all collected together in this one volume…and now in colour too……. Highly recommended.

Oh, and if you click on the above image it might enlarge enough for you to make out the original comic covers in more detail.

Sandwich (?) Comics

This summer I’ve been reading a few French Panini Marvel and DC comics. I’m puzzled as to why they are different/better than the Panini comics available in the UK. The majority of the French-produced Panini comics are printed on glossy paper with card squarebound covers which make them ideal for your bookcase. The UK comics published by the same company may have card covers but the interior pages aren’t of as good quality paper and they are still held together by two staples. To complicate matters Panini in France has a licence for Marvel and DC material. In the UK the DC franchise is licenced to Titan magazines, (who don’t seem to be making the most of it, only printing two bi-monthly DC titles).

As the demand for monthly “floppy” comics in the USA continues to decline, and as Panini sell comics in Italy, the UK, France, Spain, Brazil etc, Germany and many other countries in Europe, I’m pretty sure we must have reached the point where the number of Marvel reprints around the world published each month far exceeds the number of new Marvel comics produced in the USA !!!

This week I have been reading my usual combination of new magazines and old comics……………..

Stuff

ITEM:   The question is….is this really a “Monolith on Mars” filmed from an orbiting satellite or is it a close-up of something protruding from a McVities Digestive Biscuit ??

ITEM:   I often hear (at work as well as spouted by Politicians of all hues) the irritating phrase “Going forward”. I think the country is going backwards fast. For example, last saturday I was prevented from making my usual trip to the local comic shop by riot police and road blocks due to an anti-BNP demonstration. Why do I still go to the comic shop you ask ??  Because I can I suppose. I recall those days of yore when I would clutch a  1/- coin and have to make that momentous decision of which one comic I bought from a spinner rack heaving with goodies. Now I am in a position to buy as many comics as I wish (within reason). So this story written by  Brian Augustyn which appeared inside the front cover of a Trollords comic (the September 1987 issue in case anyone cares…) has always amused me.

ITEM:    20 years ago I used to regularly exchange mix-tapes with a friend in the USA. She favoured singer-songwriters whilst I favoured the bonkers sounds I still like today. But I still loved getting her cassettes with the oh so neatly hand-written liner cards. I was messing about with my Bond Equipe (a new battery and it fired up first time after 9 years in storage) and found some of her (and my) mix-tapes in the glove compartment, last played circa 1989. I was in music heaven for the next hour. I re-discovered stuff like The Blue Rondos’ “Little Baby” which was a Joe Meek production from 1966 and a Jukebox favourite of mine for years . One of the tapes also included Jesus’ Blood by Gavin Bryars. Now this legendary 25 minute plus UK instrumental with haunting looped vocal has an amazing effect on people. They either love it or it drives them so mad that they start throwing things at wherever the music is coming from !!! It is certainly hypnotic. (The later remix with Tom Waits performing a duet with the original recording was less successful). And there were more odd sounds like this tune. The artist and title have long-since faded from my brain but I  think it was from a  single on UA records circa 1974 with backing vocals by The Maggie Stredder Singers …..  any ideas anyone…..

ITEM:   I have followed the work of Brian Bolland right from his days of unpaid artwork in UK Fanzines and his early underground comix like this…

On to whatever it is he’s currently doing..mostly covers for DC comics……But I particularly enjoyed this hardback…..as the Actress said to the Bishop………..

I’m sure Tony Bennett (yes, the famous one…not the singer..) will still have copies of this and much other graphical goodness available at the legendary Knockabout Comics of London.

More Nasty Tales

Perhaps they were inviting trouble by heading this magazine with the phrase “The one you’ve all been waiting for kids”. Despite an “Adults only” on the cover Mick Farren and the gang ended up in court for “Obscenity” and “Corrupting a minor”. How a copy of Nasty Tales came to be on sale in a Newsagents in 1971, and why an 8 year old would buy it rather than The Beano or The Dandy is lost in the mists of time. But I suppose, thinking back to when I was 8 years old I would be sent to buy cigarettes for my father (taking the opportunity to purchase the odd Mad magazine or Alan Class comic at the same time…) and the Newsagent never turned a hair. Now you hear tales of pensioners being asked to produce ID to buy alcohol in the Supermarket !!

I see from the letters page that readers were commenting on the different quality of art between the more accomplished artwork of the American reprints of Mr Natural, The Fabulous Freak Brothers etc and the (mostly) rough-and-ready original UK material. The “punch line” of this strip drawn by Edward only make sense if you know who Lobby Ludd (Lobby Lud ??) is/was. There were many Lobby Ludds over the years (representing a variety of tabloid newspapers and handing out fivers) lurking around various seaside resorts throughout much of the C20th.

So what better subject matter for a Nasty Tales comic the following year than the trial itself.