» Comic Books and Magazines

JIM STERANKO’S HORROR COVERS FOR MARVEL COMICS

Uranium Willy — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 12:04:31 +0000

While I am working on my post for Black Tight Killers thought I would share these incredible Jim Steranko covers he did for some of Marvel’s horror themed comics. He actually redid his own covers here*. The pen and ink covers at the bottom came first for Supernatural Thrillers. Later when Marvel released a line of b/w titles under Curtis Publishing he reworked the covers in a more painterly fashion for the short lived Masters of Terror. Thought it would be nice to lay the covers out side by side and let you compare them. The design and layout stays basically the same with some slight changes from the pen and ink works to the painted covers. I really miss this style of rendering. I am not knocking the comic books artists of today who have fantastic technical prowess. The contemporary stuff I see can be as awesome in many cases and yet it lacks some simple magic that a man like Steranko possessed. Great works from one of the true legends of comic book history.

*IMPORTANT UPDATE: Tony from thedrawingsofsteranko.com cleared up the fact that the two magazines covers at the top were not in fact painted by Steranko but most likely by either Gray Marrow or Dan Adkins. I made the assumption they were drawn by Jim Steranko and I was wrong. Thanks Tony. They are still great covers as are the original comic books at the bottom that inspired them.

EXCELLENT EXAMPLE OF THE BRILLIANT PEN AND INK WORK OF BILL EVERETT: NAMORA

Uranium Willy — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:22:42 +0000

Found this beautiful story drawn by Bill Everett at Pappy’s Golden Age Blogzine. I was never a big fan of the Sub Mariner comics but collected them anyway as I loved anything Marvel as a young man. I liked the run when Gene Colan was drawing them and of course loved anytime Bill Everett made a guest appearance. Everett drew many of the early Sub Mariner stories and his finely detailed and painstakingly detailed pen and ink work set him off into a class by himself when everyone else was copying Jack Kirby. I sort of new something of Namora – Aquaria Nautica Neptunia – Prince Namor’s cousin and yet do not recall ever seeing one of her stories. Her own comic book only lasted three issues – way back in the late 40′s – and her character was killed off even in Sub Mariner # 50 of June 1972. I would have still been collecting almost every issue of Marvel comics that was being produced at the time, including Sub Mariner, and probably owned this at one time but do not really remember it. But anythng is possible in the Marvel Universe and namora was ‘resurrected’ as part of the Agents of Atlas and you get the info on that at this Wiki page (thanks to my old buddy Tony who I knew when we were both living in Seattle – a Phd. in comic book lore - for clearing up this issue). Here are some superb samples and a link to the entire story at Pappy’s Blogzine.

THE FANTASTIC PULP ART OF NORMAN SAUNDERS

Uranium Willy — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 14:01:31 +0000

Anyone who has seen any assortment of paperback or men’s magazine covers from the 40’s to 60’s has most certainly gawked in wonder at more than a few that were painted by one of the kings of the genre, Norman Saunders. Saunders was a prolific illustrator who was known for turning out high quality paintings within tight deadlines. He is most remembered for his lurid crime scene type paintings with gun totting tough guys and even tougher gals in dramatically lit poses. But he was able to handle most any design themes the magazine field including combat, westerns, science fiction and even sports illustrations. He also painted a famous series of trading cards for Topps in 1962 called Mars Attacks whose images later inspired Tim Burton to create his film of the same name. He was born Normand Blaine Sanders (he signed a lot of his work Blaine that he did outside his main job at Fawcett) in 1907. He would later drop the ‘d’ from Normand. At the age of three he suffered an accident that left him blind for six months. Luckily his sight was restored after several surgeries and he soon began drawing everything he saw, no doubt in appreciation for his restored vision. He was hired by Fawcett Publications and as the story goes he unknowingly hitched a ride with a couple bank robbers from North Dakota who had the young Saunders keep lookout for cops from the back of their Model-T. He was a hard working artist whose work did not seem to suffer from their rushed qualities. The colors are bright and lurid and the content is consistently exciting and dangerously erotic. It is the because of the work of men like Saunders that the artwork from the pulps now are treasured by collectors over what was produced in the ‘slicks’ of the same period. I could never tire of looking at stuff like this.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF NORMAN SAUNDERS

SAMPLES FROM RICK GRIFFIN’S TALES FROM THE TUBE

Uranium Willy — Tue, 18 May 2010 13:12:47 +0000

I thought I would balance my recent post on Dave Sheridan’s Tales from the Leather Nun with another remarkable underground comic from the early 70’s, Rick Griffin’s Tales From the Tube. Griffin is maybe best known for his Grateful Dead postsers and album covers as well as his posters for many San Francisco area music and surfing events. He helped to launch the underground comic movement with his contributions to ZAP. His style was highly detailed and a discernable cut above most of his underground peer’s work. Rick was a surfer himself and Tales from the Tube his intricately drawn tribute to the surfing world. The book is drawn with all the strange mystical symbols that most all of his work contained. Some parts of the book reflect Griffin’s recent conversion to Christianity. Like Leather Nun I once owned the original comic book for Tales from the Tube and it was an awesome thing to hold in your hand once in while and flip through. I would like to be able to find a complete version of the comic book online as well as his illustrations for The Book of John project for Marantha! Music from 1970. Truly one of the greats from the period.

SELECTIONS FROM DAVE SHERIDAN’S TALES FROM THE LEATHER NUN

Uranium Willy — Sun, 09 May 2010 10:10:01 +0000

Tales from the Leather Nun, along with Dealer McDope, is the comic book effort the late Dave Sheridan is best remembered for. I picked up a copy way back in 1978 or so while working at a sort of counter culture shop in Lexington Ky, around the University area. I had stopped buying Marvel and DC comics and the Warren titles were losing steam. This was my William S. Burroughs and High Times magazine period in life and it only seemed natural to start buying underground comics. Of course I loved the stuff by Robert Crumb and I picked up Tales from the Leather Nun chiefly because it featured a short four page story by Crumb in it. Sheridan did the excellent cover and the first story. All the stories were well drawn and a little over the top really even for me at the time. But it was one of the treasures of my old comic book collection and I am happy to present a few sample pages. I picked up a copy in a batch download of underground titles and really did not expect to get something like this in the assortment of titles. The stories are irreverent but in that sort of satirical, almost inoffensive 70’s style. Hope you enjoy this glimpse into one really unique and perverted comic book.

SAMPLE PAGES AND RAPIDSHARE LINKS FOR ROBERT CRUMB’S BOOK OF GENESIS

Uranium Willy — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 06:03:53 +0000

As a follow up to my last post I did find a file at Megalupload for the new Robert Crumb comic book called The Book of Genesis Illustrated. I broke the file up into three parts and put it up at my Rapidshare site. Those links are posted below and you can see some sample pages if you open the ‘More’ tag. I did not do the scans and left the credit page for Jojo the scanner. The book is a wonder to behold and anyone a little familiar with the Book of Genesis will see that Crumb kept pretty true to the story though he did take some graphic liberties with the illustrations. Not that that offends me. I am not a Christian but I do not loathe or detest the religion and find there to be many beautiful metaphors and ideas in the Bible. Of course there are some carnal and violent moments in the book as well and Crumb does not winch in his depictions of these events. A great comic book and the links are here. Of course if I were in the states I would go out and buy the book and recommend that you buy it as well. But it is impossible to get the book in China and I cannot afford the murderously high import shipping and handling charges China latches on places like Amazon. The S&H would probably be double the price of the book and the chances of it being stolen along the way are fairly high. So I snagged it for free and unless you are afraid of the wrath of Jehovah then you can do the same. However you do it just check out this artistic marvel that took four years to complete from the truly gifted Robert Crumb.

RAPIDSHARE LINKS

>Book of Genesis RS Link 01

>Book of Genesis RS Link 02

>Book of Genesis RS Link 03

SAMPLE PAGES FROMTHE BOOK OF GENESIS

These thumbnails look a little blurry

but the images are fine once you open them up.

THE CONFESSIONS OF ROBERT CRUMB BBC DOCUMENTARY

Uranium Willy — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 12:24:41 +0000

Most people are probably more aware of the excellent 1995 Robert Crumb documentary by Crumb’s friend and bandmate Terry Zwigoff. That is a film and I was lucky enough to get to see it in one of Seattle’s little art house cinema’s back when I lived there. Less well known but easier to watch than Zwigoff’s often depressing exploration of Crumb’s dissatisfaction with American culture (he is moving to France with wife Aline Kominsky in the film which he considers a nation “slightly less evil than America”) is the one hour documentary produced by the BBC’s Arena Films. Crumb wrote the script for Confessions and the film is full of historical footage and cynical insights but is also a lighter look at the cartoon legend. Like Zwigoff’s film Confessions explores Crumb’s dubious acceptance of his role as a comic book icon and looks at some of the minutiae of his daily life with Aline on a farm. If you’re a fan of the guy’s work then this is a documentary you will want to see. After I moved away from buying and reading the super hero stuff by Marvel decades ago it was the natural progression of events to get into the stuff by Crumb and his peers. I cannot go on enough about how the guy’s work thrills me in terms of his technique and his writing style. His most recent contribution to illustrated stories is a verse for verse comic book rendering of the book of Genesis which is causing a stir amongst religious fundamentalists for its adult themed interpretation of the Biblical book. He spent four years on the project and I have yet to see it but am trying to find a version of it online. A fascinating personality and talented artist.

ROBERT CRUMB’S BBC DOCUMENTARY

FANZINES REMEMBERED: SAMPLE PAGES FROM VIDEO VOICE #11

Uranium Willy — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:47:10 +0000

Some people of a certain and more decrepit age bracket may remember a day not that long ago when there was no Internet. No blogs. No forums. It was actually a time that seems Medieval but was really not far into the past that our world existed in this primitive fashion. I remember when video games at the little pizza place run by George from Greece (later busted for selling LSD along with his excellent pepperoni pizzas) jumped from Atari ping pong and the slow moving cowboy shootout thing to Space Invaders and then to Gallaga. But even then when the whole technological world seemed to transforming at a ludicrous pace there was still no Internet or blogging and people had only one option for reading and learning: holding a book or magazine in their hands and looking at it. Many people now may not realize what a luxury being able to sign up to a place like WordPress or Blogger really is. You can sign up for an account and then have a film blog up and going in a matter of a few minutes. And you can reach some sort of reading audience. Here at the Uranium Café I am proud to get about 1500 to 2000 hits a day on average. At my other blog, Necrotic Cinema, I only get maybe 15 to 20. I cannot figure that out. The Café is hosted and WordPress based and I spent some considerable time figuring out sitemaps and SEO plug-ins for it. It gets promoted on Google, but my Google based Blogger blog does not really do much even though the same brilliant mind is behind both sites. Well what do these numbers matter to me when at one time my dream to self-publish a ‘zine’. Sometimes called fanzines, or zines for short, these were usually short little booklets that were basically the size of typing paper (maybe folded in half), Xeroxed off (sometimes on a Xerox machine at some one’s job) and hurriedly stapled together. They were almost always only black and white and full of hard to correct typos. You had to type it right the first time or use loads of white out. The themes were usually about off the wall films or bands no one had ever heard of and that did not get much coverage in the more mainstream music magazines of the day. Hit Parader or Circus just did not cover The Cramps or The Dead Kennedys.

Zines typically had an extremely limited readership. They may have even been given away free at local record stores or comic book shops rather than sold. While the appearance of the zines were often crude the material on the inside was as well researched as you could get at the time. Remember there was no Internet to do the research on. No IMDB. People had to try to find printed material on people Lucio Fulci or Barbara Steele any way they could. And getting a hold of images was tough too. I have no problems now either finding images on the net or capturing them from an AVI file. We can all create images from a film now that no one else has published if we want. In the days of the zine people relied on images already long published in magazines. Some images have now become rather iconographic in nature because of the sheer number of times they have been reproduced first in magazines and then in fanzines and fan styled poster art. The more successful of the zines were able to advertise in the back of some sort of near underground type magazine or comic book. You had to mail order them and I used to have a small collection of cool little fanzines I had ordered from the back of magazines. Magazines like Psychotronic Video Magazine had loads of cool ads. I think that is where I saw the ad for The Betty Pages (later the Bettie Pages) and managed to get every single copy at one time simply by ordering them and then waiting by the mail box for a couple weeks. Maybe some readers remember these days.

I have a small little collection of old zines in digital format and thought I might share some samples here once in a while. Here are some pages from a zine called Video Voice. Published by Tim Paxton and Dave Toderello out of Oberlin Ohio it is a little more polished looking than many fanzines and sported a, by then standards, hefty price of $3. It has a nice layout and even has some advertising. There are some pages here with small reviews of some horror/cult films and they are pretty good in my opinion. Mind you I love the net and that I have a couple movie blogs people actually check out and that I even belong to a sort of blogging community where I have some sort of reputation. I doubt that would have ever happened if I had created and published my own paper fanzine and tried to distribute it. I have now learned to manipulate the net and I can get all sorts of groovy things for free. But in the end they are all ‘digital things’. JPEGS. MP3s. PDFs. AVIs and MPEGs. And that is all cool too. But there was really something almost magic about ordering some grainy little pulp zine from the back of Film Threat Magazine or some of those Jim Steranko publications I forget the name of now and then having it arrive in your mailbox in a drab manila envelop and laying back with some chips and dip and reading it and smelling the paper as you turned the pages. I have enough material here to make this a regular category so expect more in the future.

SPICY SPANISH HORROR MAGAZINE COVERS: HEMBRAS PELIGROSAS

Uranium Willy — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:53:55 +0000

Found out about this magazine called Hembras Peligrosas (Dangerous Women) online somewhere and cannot find out much information on it other than it is in Spanish and well drawn. I even found a PDF of an entire issues and the interior drawings are nice b/w pen and ink drawings. There seems to to be four female characters and the stories are built up around them from issue to issue. One is a vampire and another is a werewolf and i am not sure what is up with the other two. The couple fan sites I found were in Spanish and the few English posts on the magazines were not very informative. In fact sometimes I sort of like to not know too much about a new thing like this. I like the element of mystery about it, the unknown. One thing that seems apparent is the the cover illustrator certainly has a fanny fetish. And there is nothing wrong with that. The magazine was printed in Spain and these books were printed in the early 80′s as far as I can gather from the information on the PDF issue I have. I will probably put up some samples of the inside artwork another day. There is a sister magazine called Sukia and I will probably finds some covers scans of that magazine one day and get them up as well. I think Sukia was an Italian magazine but had a Spanish translated version.

Here is a link to a site that contains little information about the magazine’s history but what it does contain are the covers to every issue of Hembras Peligrosas and a rapidshare link in most posts to a PDF of the inside artwork. When I do my post on Sukia I will provide a similar link. Thank you to whoever runs that site. (As of 15 Apr 10 the site no longer exists. Too bad).

THE ‘OLD AND ORIGINAL’ URANIUM CAFE GETS LINKED ON WIKIPEDIA FOR MY BILL WARD POST

Uranium Willy — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:30:52 +0000

The Uranium Cafe existed in a couple forms before the current incarnation came into being. One version was under the URL http://uranium-cafe.com. That address is defunct and it is a long story I would rather not remember right now. That URL still pops up on Google for some reason. The URL http://uraniumcafe.com belongs to a retro gift store that, I assume, also named itself after the legendary diner outside Los Alamos NM, home of the first atom bomb tests. That site will show up on the first page of Google as well though this site, http://uraniumcafe-the.com, has come to dominate searches with the term. I am proud of that. Another site however that will also appear on Google, though the term Uranium Cafe does not appear in the URL, is the original Uranium Cafe at Opera.com. That site was abandoned after My Opera got blocked in china and I did not have the proxy savvy back then to maintain it. I was able one day to get back into the site using a proxy (that no longer works in China) and make a redirect notice for http://uranium-cafe.com but that site, as I said, is long gone and ain’t comin’ back. By the time I started this version I had actually forgotten my username and password for My Opera and I canceled the email it was connected to for spam reasons.

Where is this going you ask? Well, I think it is interesting that my My Opera site still gets hits and receives comments which i cannot reply to. And I was searching for info on the cartoonist Bill Ward and was led to Wikipedia where I saw my old site listed in the external links. I had actually forgotten I had done a post on the guy over there. I copied and pasted the article here and if you want you can visit the old site and see the Cafe in an early experimental form.

Anyone who ever glanced at an old girlie magazine from the 60’s or 70’s (and 50’s too but I never saw any of those) had to have seen the cartoons of Bill Ward at one time or another. There is a new collection out of his work from Seattle’s Fantagraphic Books. I found some samples of his earlier work with Torchy and then a later character called Pussycat. The inks on the Pussycat comic book panels is by Bill Everette and his pens and brush washes enhanch Ward’s pencils beautifully. Ward had a classic near pin-up style of illustrating glamour girls that degenerated, in my opinion, into a crude, hurried style of blatant pornography by the 70’s. In later works the women’s boobs were so exaggerated as to be beyond belief. The men were always weak and powerless towards the physical charms of Ward’s women. He did a lot of work in bondage and S&M as well but none of the samples I found were suitable for the Café. They were simply hardcore. I did not care for where his work went later simply because I liked his early work so much and the change was pronounced and probably done for nothing other than money. His later stuff is not in anyway bad as far as porno cartoons go, what do you expect, but his early work, like Torchy, showed real talent.

Also included here at the bottom are some of his great war propaganda cartoons. I know we are supposed to be ashamed of this stuff as Americans but something about confusing Imperial-psycho-Japanese soldiers with monkeys or seeing a couple Nazis about to get their swastikas splattered just makes me snicker.