"It's just my lips are dry. Got any balm?"
Mr. America #11
Boys love gossip, overwrought emotion, love and loss as much as any girl – they just prefer it with monsters and fights and things like that. Hence, superhero comics. If the dawn of the Marvel Age of comics meant anything – and by Marvel Age I mean “The Stan Lee Age” not “The Jack Kirby Age” – it was that the qualities of girlie comics were melded onto boys’ interests completely. At first, this might seem like an action to bring in the girls to the market, but it really wasn’t – it was to keep the boys fraught with interest. Stan Lee knew something about what keeps a man’s attention after boyhood is long gone – drama, just like the girls. Superheroes had already come to pass once, and it was an age without any significant depth to the action behind the crime stopping. Lee changed all that.
Hence, Mr. America #11.
Nothing much happens here physically of any importance – what’s at the center of the conflict is the guilt Mr. America seems to feel, the level to which he misses his friend and old partner, the bad father/son relationship between The Panther and The Skull … this is the glue that holds together the heists, the explosions, the battles. Even my 8-year-old developing creative brain got that – so much so that I could craft a half issue psychodrama and call it complete.
Let’s be blunt here – no one really loved Star Wars until their was a real love triangle and Darth Vader was Luke’s father. Until, that is, it became a soap opera with technical window dressing. People can obsess about light sabers all they want, but it’s the weepy stuff that keeps them paying attention. And so it became with superheroes. Even mine.
The Musical Thingarium for 06.25.10
The Musical Thingarium is a clever and fantastical machine into which I pour over 65,000 songs and watch in amazement as it spits out 10 of them at random and create a podcast for me to put on my blog. It’s a little something for people who aren’t looking to music for safety, but rather for adventure.
This edition features: Angelo Badalamenti, Frankie Newton, The Shaggs, The Wannadies, The Fall, Thelonious Monk and Gerry Mulligan, Duke Ellington, Bobby Leecan and Robert Cooksey, David Bowie, Kate Bush
Tiny People
"I remember a piercing sting in the back of my head and then nothing for what seemed like an eternity. Do you have the time?"
5 Songs for 06.16.10
Featuring Codeine Velvet Club, Shakespear’s Sister with Terry Hall, Sweet Electra, The Pipettes, Johnny Cash
5 Songs for 06.15.10
Featuring Candle Thieves, Apples in Stereo, Club 8, The Boy Least Likely To, The Riverdales
Mr. America and Panther #10
There is a story here, but I’ll be damned if I can tell you what it is.
I can tell you that it seems to involve a bomb and a Golden Age superhero team that has been revived by DC Comics. Back when I was a kid, I encountered the Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy in a back-up feature in Adventure Comics – I believe the run that had the cool Aquaman stories in the 1970s – as part of a Seven Soldiers of Victory comic serial. As I recall, it was an unrealized script written in the ’40s and then drawn in the ’70s. That was my major intro to the team and speaks to one of my fascinations back then. I used to scour the two-volume History of Comics – Jim Steranko’s version, which was filled with old covers and descriptions of long-forgotten Golden Age heroes – and I ‘d lift names and even powers for my own use in my own comics – so it’s no wonder what happened here.
Observation – the scene where Stripesy gets his costume is sort of like a weird seduction scene, isn’t it? Like the Star Spangled Kid is going to say “Hey, baby” after Stripesy does exactly what he says. The first openly gay comic heroes of my universe? Who knows.
