ADMIN05: aka "Admindoors"

.....[Written the first week of April] I mentioned in a correspondence to someone in comics retail recently that this has been the worst April Fools' joke ever. I pointed out to him that I had also walked about a mile the morning after the 1997 blizzard, so there's your context.

.....If you're reading this in later years, I'm referring to the COVID-19 epidemic that has made it prudent for businesses involving high personal traffic to close in order to help stop the virus from spreading. That includes the largest comics distributor in the U.S., Diamond, which has chosen the first of April to be the first week in decades that it has shut down normal operations. They'll still restock stores with back catalog trade books, although I don't know where stores will still be open to the public. Savvy retailers are offering to ship merchandise to customers, but without new titles it's going to hard to maintain interest. So, we're at the point where I remember that I have a blog I can dust off and where you're bored enough to read it. The best place to start would be with an item I had been preparing for a post last year when a family issue took precedence.

.....[Flash forward a month] There still hasn't been any announcement from Diamond about resuming distribution, although their website has bizarrely continued to issue shipping updates every week. This must be someone perfunctorily passing on information from publishers. Ordinarily a retailer's decisions to order, reorder or cancel are informed by date changes (in theory), so rather than take the time to parse out whether or not the unprecedented shipless month makes that information irrelevant it would be quicker, easier and cheaper to just key in a page of information once a week and post it.

.....Speaking of keying in a page of information once a week and posting it...
.....The first two paragraphs were meant to introduce a new post, #68, which involved more than transposing memos to the screen but should never have taken a month to complete. Every time I sat down I wondered how the entry would read years from now when someone finds it through a term search for the post's topic. I've been fortunate enough that I've yet to hear about anyone I knew personally dying in the epidemic. I doubt that it would change the cavalier tone used above; it's my default writing voice, as well as a mechanism for functioning through grief. I'm less certain that the hypothetical reader will be so served by it. Yet, I wasn't certain that scrapping it and not mentioning the biggest elephant in comics' room at the moment was best either. The answer I should have come up with at the time was to split them into two posts, this being the first. It's always obvious in retrospect.

.....In post #68 it's back to the ephemera in my collection, and by way of a hint I'll just say that I hope the post results in high numbers.

ADMIN04 A few notes on the death of Tom Wolfe

If the recent Royal Wedding and school shooting haven't driven you from news coverage, you may have heard that Tom Wolfe died last week (May 14), but it's worth noting here because of the unusual footnote he became in comics history.

Just when Marvel was going through a renaissance with the introduction of The Fantastic Four and subsequent stable of new characters, Wolfe was establishing himself as a journalist and Andy Warhol was gaining national attention for his ideas about how images work on the collective consciousness of a culture. While Roy Lichtenstein famously stole art from panels of comic books to pretend that they were his own ironic commentary, Warhol's paintings of known pop culture figures such as Popeye were about the shared experiences of the viewers. When he revealed his series of soup can paintings in the summer of 1962, Marvel introduced Thor, Ant-Man and Spider-Man, as well as Dr. Doom. In just the few previous years, Wolfe had moved from a newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts to writing for the New York Herald Tribune. By the end of 1962, three things happened to change each of their lives. Marvel's problems with introducing super-hero titles [ see The Post Anniversary ] went away; a gallery owner suggested that Warhol make art using serious subjects, resulting in his "Death and Disaster" series; and a newspaper strike in New York began (lasting until the end of March 1963), prompting Wolfe to seek freelance work for magazines, specifically Esquire.

To give some frame of reference for how these things were significant, let's start with Marvel. From the summer of 1957 on, their situation required them to cancel one title in order to introduce another onto the racks. In 1960, they cancelled two in order to revive two others cancelled in 1957. They also began playing with the frequency of publishing some titles and in 1961 cancelled two but added three new ones, including "Fantastic Four". In 1962, one was cancelled to introduce "The Hulk" and another was cancelled to bring back "Two-Gun Kid". During those three years, of the four new titles and three revivals only "Fantastic Four" and two revived westerns were still published by the end of 1963. Contrast that to the one year period beginning in December 1962. With four cancellations and four new titles, one of them, "Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos", lasted until 1981 and "Amazing Spider-man", "Avengers" and "X-Men" continued (with interruptions and re-numberings) into the present. That's a greatly improved track record, which continued when "Daredevil" was introduced the following year and soon all of their super-hero titles were being published monthly.

Warhol acquired his first Factory workspace in 1962 and in 1963 had it redone in silver and reflective surfaces, making it a notorious hangout for scenesters and creating a network that discussed his work in influential circles. His "Death and Disaster" images were mentioned everywhere, so that when the President was assassinated in November the series made Warhol seem eerily prescient. People who may have previously been amused or charmed by his work in the past would later actively seek to know what he'd work on next.

Tom Wolfe's work for Esquire took on a casual approach he wouldn't have used for newspaper journalism, and when its editor published a personal communication from Wolfe in the place of an article in late 1963, Esquire's readership could read Wolfe almost without a filter for the first time. The title of that letter-turned-magazine-piece was, believe it or not, "There goes (VAROOM! VAROOM!) that Kandy Kolored (THPHHHHHH!) tangerine-flake streamline baby (RAHGHHHH!) around the bend (BRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM......" The article he was supposed to be submitting at the time was meant to be about customizing cars and amateur racing enthusiasts. That explains the reference to "tangerine-flake"-- metal flake paint was not only sparkly and attention grabbing but at the time it was difficult to apply by spraying (technological advances since then have made it easier), so it was a sign among aficionados of a gear head willing to make the extra effort to carefully apply the temperamental substance by hand. Unfortunately for Wolfe and the Esquire editor, the November 1963 article came in the wake of Timothy Leary (and Richard Alpert) being dismissed from Harvard over their experimentation with LSD earlier that year. As information about the new substance gradually reached the general public through commercial mass media that didn't have the firmest understanding of psychopharmacology, there was a lot of talk about citrus and sugar cubes that left the average Joe Lunchpail thinking that anything colorful and sweet and therefore likely to appeal to children might be hiding a chemical that will melt their brains. Now go back and read that title again. You can begin to see how Tom Wolfe was going to be cast against type as the decade wore on.

Doctor Strange #180 (05/69), page 10

In the article itself, Wolfe profiled (and no doubt introduced to much of Esquire's readership) cartoonist Big Daddy Roth, whose Rat Fink character and others would appear in paid ads in comics during the 60's, and George Barris, who created the Batmobile for television a few years later.
It was collected with 20 other essays into the book "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby", published in 1965. The notoriety fueled a demand for more work written in its more personal "New Journalism" style and in less than two years he had written the pieces that would be compiled as "The Pump House Gang"(1968).

Perhaps giving in to the inevitable, he went on the road with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to document their antics and speculate on their motives, resulting in the book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (also 1968, same day in fact-- August 20).

Doctor Strange #180 (05/69), page 11

Both books came out about a month after the U.S. release of the Pink Floyd album "Saucerful Of Secrets" (July 23rd; June 28th in the U.K.) featuring Doctor Strange (and the Living Tribunal) on the cover using art from Strange Tales #158 (07/67). As of the spring of 1968, Strange Tales stopped devoting half its pages to S.H.I.E.L.D. stories when Nick Fury & company moved to their own new series and the old title was renamed after Doctor Strange. Roy Thomas was writing the series and had just completed a Dormammu story (#171-173) that returned Clea to the cast when the Floyd album came out in the U.S. That means that the next story, a multi-parter involving Asmodeus and the Sons Of Satannish (#174-178 and Avengers #61) had already been plotted and the first issue printed when Wolfe's two books were released. The next issue after that would be #179, due to ship in January with an April cover date if the series continued publishing monthly on time. Thomas had a lot on his plate in the late 60's and I'm not sure how far in advance his scripts were written, but the lead couldn't have been too long, since Marvel then seemed much more of the moment than DC, whose idea of counter culture figures at the time was more like beatniks from an episode of "Ozzie and Harriet" or "Dobie Gillis" (whose comics they published). In August of 1968, Warhol revealed his first works since being shot in June. One was a portrait of Happy Rockefeller, the wife of then-Governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller. Aside from the unnatural pink color scheme, there didn't seem to be anything ironic or metaphoric about the image at all. In every other sense it was a straightforward portrait of someone who didn't hold any office nor was known for any particular works-- she was famous for being famous, the kind of celebrity Warhol had and would always find fascinating. It was a glimpse into a direction Warhol's work would take in the next decade. Instead of familiar objects and icons or the manufactured celebrity of his Factory denizens, he would reproduce and alter the images of existing celebrities by the score. When Roy Thomas read passages in "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" describing Kesey and his cohorts reading Marvel comics on their bus, he knew he wanted to capitalize on being mentioned in a best selling book, regardless of the context. At any other time he might have given a cameo to the Pranksters (or some fictional proxy group created for that purpose) but the more innovative and up to the minute idea was that of the journalist as participant/celebrity. For the next story, Thomas worked Tom Wolfe himself into the script. It wasn't so far fetched; Wolfe lived and worked in New York, as did Doctor Strange. The two pages above show the extent of his cameo, with Strange mentioning to Clea that he hadn't seen Wolfe since 1964, which sent me scrambling through the first two years of "Strange Tales" to see if Doc interacted with anyone named "Tom", "Mr. Wolfe" or even a newspaper reporter, any disposable background character that Roy Thomas could slyly  imply had been Wolfe all along. I also checked out Doc's guest appearances that year in Fantastic Four #27, Journey Into Mystery #108 and a cameo in the first Spider-Man annual. I could have saved myself some time by reading the introduction Thomas wrote for Marvel Masterworks: Doctor Strange Vol. 4 (12/09).

Did you catch that? Thomas confused Wolfe's first book of essays, "The Kandy-Kolored...", with his book on Kesey, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". That's probably, as I had suggested above, because in the context of the time in which it came out its title subliminally suggested a connection to LSD and therefore to Doc (by virtue of the psychedelic LP jacket).

By the time the Asmodeus story had played itself out, the sales of "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D." and "Doctor Strange" were starting to dwindle. The New Year's Eve story planned for #179 was replaced by a reprint and instead ran in #180, released in February with a May cover date, as was S.H.I.E.L.D. #12. Both titles would get used to skipping a month from that point on. Marvel's other two-feature anthologies, "Tales Of Suspense" and "Tales To Astonish", had each been successfully split into two separate titles but "Strange Tales" hadn't been so lucky. With a price increase looming, a decision was made to reduce each title to bi-monthly status rather than cancel them immediately. The next issue of each came out in April with a July cover date, mere weeks before both Marvel and DC raised their cover prices to 15¢. Each lasted two more issues.

Incredible Hulk #142 (08/71), page 10

A year later, in the spring of 1970, New York Magazine published Tom Wolfe's article "Radical Chic", which by the end of the year was combined with a second piece as the book "Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers". The focus of "Radical Chic" was that after a decade of social problems previously hidden being exposed and targeted both by government and grass roots organizations, Wolfe believed he was witnessing a wealthy leisure class affecting postures of the radical left, not because they had any understanding of or empathy for their causes, but because they found the drama entertaining.

Roy Thomas had taken over scripting "Incredible Hulk" as "Doctor Strange" was winding down. He was still writing it two years later and apparently saw it as the perfect vehicle for a second nod to Wolfe. After all, the one situation the Hulk hadn't yet been in was having a group of socialites making a pet cause out of him. The single issue story from #142 involves a couple named Reggie and Malicia Parrington who throw a fund-raiser for the Hulk's legal defense (which--spoiler-- he completely fails to grasp) in order to one-up Leonard Bernstein's support for the Black Panthers the previous year, which was the basis for Wolfe's article. Their daughter Samantha hates the fact that her parents ignore serious issues impacting more people, such as women's rights, and leaves the party. Meanwhile, the Enchantress (prevented by Odin from leaving Asgard) sees this as an opportunity to get revenge on the Hulk (for issue #101) and imbues Samantha with the identity of a Valkyrie she had previously stolen as a disguise to attack the Avengers [in Avengers #83(12/70), also written by Roy Thomas].
There's several contemporary references going on here. Let's start with the first panel. The stage play "The Effect Of Gamma Rays On Man In The Moon Marigolds" was already five years old when it came to New York (off Broadway) in 1970, but won the 1971 Pulitzer for Drama (probably announced in April when this story should have been already scripted). I'm not sure who "Harold" is supposed to be, but Paul Newman produced and directed the film version, which came out at the end of 1972. Without the Hulk, by the way. The mention of "I Am Furious (Green)" is obviously a take on "I Am Curious (Yellow)"(1967) and lesser known companion film "I Am Curious (Blue)"(1968) by Swedish director Vilgot Sjöman. It wasn't even the most outrageous abuse of the title; that would be Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane #106 (11/70) with its own radical chic cover story, "I Am Curious (Black)", in which Kryptonian technology turns Lois black for a day or so.

Incredible Hulk #142 (08/71), page 16

The second panel shows someone looking to benefit the X-Men "if I can find them". This refers to the fact that Roy Thomas returned to writing the X-Men for it's final year of new stories. The last one, #66 (03/70), guest-starred the Hulk. Marvel wanted to cancel the title. Thomas convinced the owners to remove the X-Men reprints from "Marvel Super-Heroes" (which they shared with Daredevil reprints) and replace them with Iron Man reprints from "Tales Of Suspense" and return to publishing X-Men as a reprint book with #67 (12/70). Thomas would eventually bring back the team as guest stars in various titles he either wrote or edited beginning in 1972. Finally,  Wolfe himself appears in panels 3 and 5.
Wolfe comes back a few pages later after the Enchantress has transformed Samantha and compels her to return to the party to attack the Hulk.
The Valkyrie persona was used once more by the Enchantress in an early Defenders issue, #4 (02/73), this time written by Steve Englehart but edited by Thomas. In that case, the Valkyrie identity completely overwrote that of a woman named Barbara Norris who had been driven insane by one of Doctor Strange's enemies. The Defenders objected, since Norris was unable to consent to the transformation and much of the next ten years of the series was spent trying to reconcile the new Valkyrie character's split identity. Parrington was brought back as the Valkyrie for a 12-issue Defenders series in 2001 and was joined by her parents for the sequel "The Order" in 2002.
Tom Wolfe, however, would only revisit Marvel as a trivia question or in a veiled allusion from mischievous writers to nostalgic fans. Of course, I haven't bothered to reread 40 years of letters pages to see if he wrote in to them. Tell you what; if you find such a letter, let me know in the comments.

ADMIN03: Silver Age Marvel Recap

I noticed that I'm approaching the 50th post (or past it if you count the previous two administrative notes). While that's a little early to be patting myself on the back to celebrate, it's a good excuse to reflect and assess. Checking the dashboard, it tells me that seven of the ten most viewed posts involved Marvel and that six of those are from the ongoing Silver Age reprint history I started. However, it also tells me that everyday for the last few weeks there have been one  'view' each for many of the posts, sometimes going back a few weeks. What I can't get from pure stats is a definite explanation for that. It can't tell the difference between one person (a different person every day) discovering the blog and reading backwards or jumping around by using the labels/tags, or, possibly, several people being referred to the blog by a search engine or other link not acknowledged under "traffic sources". For whatever reason, "traffic sources" only accounts for a fraction of readers. Since I rarely link to this blog outside of the G+ Comic Book Community, and I think it's improbable that multiple people are scrolling down past dozens of other CBC posts and each selecting a different post of mine every day, then I think the two best explanations are either different people just 'taking a me hour' or else the blog is turning up in searches which Google/Blogger isn't tracking for some reason.

I haven't forgotten about the Mister X trades. The short verdict is that the volume that shipped in paperback this spring is the best of the bunch, but there is still some apocrypha and other non-essential extras it left out. I'm going to give myself a few more months to dig out some contemporary Vortex comics and see what kind of unique material may have been used for promotional purposes and when.

After spending a week detailing the Beatles chart action looming over the rest of pop culture in 1964 I started to worry about readers burning out on the topic, which is why I wanted to restore a sense of variety since then. Now that I know that I haven't lost the capacity to write about anything but 1960's release schedules I think it's safe to continue the series as one more item in a larger mix of things. To that end, I must be honest with myself about the fact that my inclination to work puns and other gags into the titles of the posts might make it difficult for casual readers to trace the series from its beginnings. Simply clicking on the labels "Publication history" or "Marvel" or "1960's" would call up all of the posts, but in reverse order. As a mea culpa, I'm going to list the links chronologically below.

1. #0016: The Lost Anniversary
2. #0018: The Post Anniversary
3. #0023: "From The Glorious Past..."?
4. #0027: It must be a collectors'item; it says so on the cover
5. #0031: Three Shots, Four Victims

Those first five post include a quick explanation of Marvel's Golden Age and a detailed examination of their development during 1957-1963, giving particular attention to the extra-length format comics from both Marvel and DC during that time. The scans include unique material from the earliest issues of Marvel's three main reprint titles from 1964-early 1966.

These next five posts put changes at Marvel in the first half of 1964 into the chronological context of Beatlemania. I've decided to do a condensed, non-Beatles distillation of these as a single post to start the rest of the series. If you like, you can consider that #6. If you want the full versions, they're still here:

1. #0035: Paar For The Course
2. #0036: Lancer Corporeal Part 1
3. #0037: Lancer Corporeal Part 2
4. #0038: Lancer Corporeal Part 3
5. #0039: Lancer Corporeal Part 4

The scans include the unique parts of MCIC #2 (which I'll reproduce) and four of the six Lancer mass market paperbacks (which I won't).

See you soon.

ADMIN02: Happy Fourth

It's a holiday where I am, so there isn't a normal post prepared. The Fourth of July was the date when the U.S.A. officially began declaring independence. I say "began" because it was when the first signatures were put to the Declaration. People were still adding signatures to it about four years later. And it didn't genuinely became a united country until the Constitution was drawn up and ratified years after that. Still, it was easier than dealing with a condo association.

It's been a month since the first administrative post asking if cosmetic changes to the blog have caused anyone tech problems for people reading on mobile devices. Despite dozens of views there have been no responses, which either means (a) there are no problems, or (b) widening the screen has prevented them from reading the blog altogether. Either way, I'm going to live with it.

Fresher business involves a minor problem I had steering G+ announcements about the blog towards the G+ Comic Book Community. If enough time lapses between G+ posts, the audience to whom the post gets directed defaults to"Public", which means a (theoretically) larger potential audience, except for the fact it does not literally get delivered to every G+ user's feed, just that it can be. In reality, it gets sent to a random mixture, only some of whom are comics fans. The practical result is that a much smaller percentage of a larger number of readers means that the blog actually gets a smaller audience. Having learned that the target audience can be changed by software instead of me, I now know to manually direct it before composing the G+ post by clicking on the word "Public". I went back and made sure that everything posted to "Public" was also reposted to the CBC. Apologies to anybody who got duplicate notices.

Other than that, the blog will be more of the same for a little while. More yard-long ramblings about the minutiae of Silver Age Marvel reprints, the search for Mr.X continues and in between I hope to provide some more random surprises to prevent things from getting in a rut. For instance, I've noticed that I haven't done much involving DC lately, or many things less than 20 years old either. Recalling that the only previous Administrative post ended with a hastily thrown in scan of an Alf trading card (since I didn't have enough to say about it to make a post out of it), I'm thinking that I can kill two birds with one stone using the scans below:

The card fronts above correspond to the backs directly below each one.

These were three promotional cards issued by a comics distributor to remind retailers when the new Batman movie would be in theaters. The distributor wasn't selling tickets, but they were selling comics, books, toys and other merchandise tying into the movie. All of the art on the fronts of the cards were also used in movie posters. There were even more poster designs, but any retailer who needs more than three reminders that there's going to be a Batman feature film and should stock up before the release date is not running a business worth saving.

There'll be something new before the end of the week.

ADMIN01: Here Comes Summer

Sorry, no scans this time. This is the first time I've done an administrative post because, with summer coming I thought I'd add a little green to the background. Then, while I was at it I widened the main text area. Then I added a few gadgets and removed things that were redundant. I was almost feeling like a responsible adult until I realized that many more people are probably reading the posts on mobile devices now than when I worked on different blogs years ago. Since I don't use a mobile/smart phone, I have no idea if the changes have had a negative effect on the experience of readers who do.

So, are you a mobile device user who can't get the gadgets to work? Has your loading/response time worsened? Does the text cut off in the middle of words? Are you a PC user who doesn't have any of those problems, but the green color makes you nauseous? Any feedback in the comments below or on G+ will be seen.

Siiiiggggghhhh.... Ok, I know I said no scans and then asked for help with something, and now I feel guilty.
Since you've been accommodating enough to read this far, how about something that wouldn't have justified an entire post on its own? No need for it to go to waste. This is a chase card from a set of ALF trading cards (Topps, 1987).

You're welcome. I think.