Savage Sword of Conan #32 - Marvel

Aug. 1978 - Another fine Conan adventure, behind a cover by Val Mayerik!

Like I've said before, it actually does a bit of disservice to try and explain these Conan adventures, especially the ones by the team of Roy Thomas and John Buscema (the Scorsese/DeNiro of Conan comics). Sure, they're formulaic, but that's part of the fun.

So instead of a tedious breakdown of the plot, I present mostly without comment some of finest moments in this issue, courtesy "Big" John Buscema and Tony DeZuniga:

Discussion Question: Who is more blindly optimistic, the random swordsman who thinks he'll be the one to kill Conan, or your standard Joe Henchman who signs up with the Joker thinking the Clown Prince of Crime won't kill him in a random act of pique?

Ok, anyway, back to Conan:

...every issue should end with Conan patting a girl on the behind. There, I said it.

Not only is this issue a classic of Conan-style debauchery, but it features this ad for the next issue:

Conan...drawn by Gene Colan?!? Off to eBay!

Bluebook - Q.M.G. Magazine Corp.

Dec. 1968 - My post three weeks ago on our first "men's magazine" ended up being the single most popular post I've ever had on the blog, and I got requests for more! Luckily, a lot of these magazines are found on eBay very cheaply, so here we are with--Bluebook!

Bluebook ran, under one title or another, from 1905 to 1975(!), published by different houses, featuring material relevant to the time.

As we'll see, Bluebook in 1968 had two things on its mind: war and sex, and not necessarily in that order.

First up is the letter's page, titled "Bluebook's Bull Session." The answers are fairly non-descript, but the questions are a trifle unsettling:

Fun Fact: That second letter mixing sex and suicide was written by the Zodiac Killer.

Anyway, the first article is one-page feature called "Men At Arms."

Pause.

Ok, is the Post Office looking the other way now, satisfied Bluebook has fulfilled the requirements of a First Class Mailing permit? Good! Now let's get to the main event: an article called "Super Sex: The Return of Prostitution's Golden Era" featuring behind-the-scenes info from prostitutes themselves, featuring photos like this one:

...this photo makes me sad.

Next is another war-related piece, but with the sex worked right in:

...I can't speak for author Hal D. Steward, but I think if I worked hard writing a several page article about the Enduring Commie Menace, I'd feel a bit let down by the photo they chose to ran to open it.

Next is a war-only article, "The Glory Trail of Marvin Shields--The Navy's Fightingest Seabee", which seems to be a pretty serious piece, and features some serious photos of strife in Vietnam (btw, Blogger Spell Check does not recognize the word "Fightingest").

"I Invaded The World's Wildest Sex Market" is next, featuring lots of little black bars, then another fightin' men piece, "The Fantastic 92-Day Escape Ordeal of Capt. Lawrence Fowler", and then "Night of the Long Knife" which re-uses the nice cover painting.

Next is "The Never-Ending Orgy", about the swinging lifestyle, featuring photos like this:

...I think that caption quote needs to be repeated, bigger:

You said it, bro.

There are some more articles, like "The Ghost Ship That Sailed to Hell", plus a centerfold featuring a cutie named Fran Purdy. She's credited as being a TV actress, but I can't find any listing for her on imdb. Make of that what you will.

Like the previous men's magazine we talked about, the most intriguing thing to me about these mags are the ads. They sell all kinds of bizarre stuff, like this:

...and this:

A man-girdle and fake head hair? For a magazine so obsessed with getting laid, they tried to sell you stuff guaranteeing that would never happen.

These two top-to-bottom ads also caught my eye:

Men's nigh-invisible underpants?....the hell?

As for the second ad...I honestly don't even understand what it is they're selling. I guess its some sort of illustrated porno book. It is written by "A master of description", so there's that.

Eerie #100 - Warren

April 1979 - I realized a while ago I haven't talked about any Warren mags recently, and they were the main reason I started this blog in the first place!

So while buying stuff on eBay, I saw someone selling this 100th issue of Eerie, which I had never read, so I snapped it up.

Unfortunately, Eerie's 100th issue happened right smack in the middle of the sci-fi craze that swept the Warren mags, in the wake of the massive success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

And since my...apathy for this material has been stated here many times, I don't see the need to belabor the point. Not that there's anything wrong with this stuff, its just that I could never really get over the idea of this kind of material being in a magazine named Eerie.

Again, since Warren kept doing this stuff, obviously it was fairly popular; its just that it never grabbed me as a kid, and it still doesn't, all these years later.

So I'm going to present without comment some of the material in this issue, featuring superb art jobs by Alfred Alcala, Leo Durnona, Jim Janes, Isidro Mones, and Jim Starlin:

...of course, like all Warrens, this issue ends with pages and pages of fun Captain Company material. By this point, most of it was also sci-fi related, except for the back issues you could buy, reminding one of the genuinely, well, eerie material that this mag used to run:

Masters of Terror #1 - Marvel

July 1975 - Are you ready to be scared?

Masters of Terror, sure, was an all-reprint title, collecting material from Marvel's myriad horror/suspense comics from the early 70s, but what material it was!

For one measly buck, you got a lot of good material, all of it wrapped up in a cover by Jim Steranko and Gray Morrow! Wow!

First up is the cover feature, an adaptation of Theodore Sturgeon's "It!", the predecessor to later swamp-laden comics stars like Swamp Thing and Man-Thing, by Roy Thomas, Marie Severin, and Frank Giacoia:

Running twenty pages, its a surprisingly gruesome story (I especially felt sorry for the dog), but very effective.

Next is "The Horror From The Mound!" which is not set in the world of Baseball, but rather West Texas:

...written by Gardner Fox, its a fairly routine vampire story, given extra oomph by a nice art job by Frank Brunner.

Next is "The Terrible Old Man", by Thomas and the art combo of Barry Smith (who was still in his Kirby phase at the time), Dan Adkins, and John Verpoorten; an H.P. Lovecraft tale about a creepy old man (as if Lovecraft would write a story about a not creepy old man).

Following that is, to me, the centerpiece of the book, "The Drifting Snow" by Tony Isabella Esteban Maroto:

Maroto turns in an absolutely fantastic art job, full of rich detail and startling compositions:

There's a text piece about the authors adapted in this issue, and then a Robert Bloch story, the uber-creepy "The Shambler From The Stars!":

...writer Rob Goulart and artists Jim Starlin and Tom Palmer (now there's an unusual combo!) do the story justice, and pull off an especially creepy finale.

The final story is the gripping "Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper!" by Ghoulart, Thomas, and the very spiffy art team of Gil Kane and Ralph Reese:

...Reese does a particularly nice job inking Kane; I'd love to see if they did more work together.

This story has one of the most downbeat, nasty endings I've ever seen, without any sort of moral uplift. And since this story ends the issue, without even any sort of text piece afterwards, its an especially nasty way to wrap up the book. Well done, Marvel!

Masters of Terror would only last two issues, sadly; maybe the all-reprints content turned off comics fans. Too bad, since they clearly pulled some of the best material they had together.

Cracked #175 - Major Magazines

January 1981 - It's way too long to only now get to Cracked magazine, the perennial also-ran to Mad.

Sure, Cracked lived in Mad's shadow during its entire, almost forty-year(!) run, but as a kid I didn't know that. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, Mad still had a bit of a reputation as being edgy, or at the very least something my parents probably wouldn't automatically approve of. So I went for Cracked, which seemed a little gentler or less edgy. I laugh now, reading that sentence back.

Anyway, I had a whole ton of Cracked, and for a long time never missed an issue. They disappeared from my life at some point along the way, and I always meant to get to it here, but never seemed to quite do it.

Then I saw a couple issues for sale (cheap!--er, sorry, that's Mad) from an eBay seller I was buying some other mags from, and picked one up.

I picked this issue, with its M*A*S*H cover, because I love the show, and wanted to see how they skewered it:

The thread of this parody--drawn by the peerless John Severin--is the M*A*S*H actors might want to try other roles after playing the memvbers of the 4077th for so long, and they get replaced by other TV stars, like Archie Bunker, Mork, and Fonzie.

Hardly an idea so funny you have to pick yourself up off the floor from laughing so hard, but I think that's because, for the most part, M*A*S*H was a massively popular and beloved series that it was hard to parody. Indeed, the cover says "We Salute M*A*S*H", not "We Destroy M*A*S*H."

After that, there's a piece on mail-order catalogs ("what-order whats?" says a younger generation) featuring some nice cartoony art by Charlton mainstay Warren Sattler:

...I love the stereo guy's laid-back, keep-on-truckin' posture.

There's a piece on different pictures on U.S. currency, a one-page strip called "Ye Hang Ups" drawn by Catherine Severin, who I couldn't find much info on. Since John has a famous sister, the awesome colorist Marie, I assume Catherine is John's wife or daughter.

In any case, she has a nice style, similar to John's, but more cartoony, and she acquits herself well on several features, like this one:

There's also "The Cracked Lens", which is a cost-effective feature putting funny captions on movie stills, "Cracked Headlines", "How to Be A Salesman", "When the U.S. Adopts the Metric System", and "Profile of a Coward."

That last strip is drawn by Cracked mainstay Bill Ward, who also drew the regularly-featured character Nanny Dickering, who was the magazine's roving reporter:

...as a kid, I never really wondered why Nanny was built the way she was. I mean, jeez! If my parents had seen this maybe they woulda been happier with Mad!

(A few years later, when I got interested in, um, other kinds of publications, it was deeply disturbing to see Bill Ward drawing a hardcore, XXX-rated comic strip for the porno magazine Club. It was basically a strip of women that looked a lot like Nanny Dickering doing things involving...well, you can guess. It was odd to have something from my childhood crash so directly into my mid-teenage years)

The issue ends with "Cracked Shut-Ups", which is what it sounds like.

I hope I don't sound too critical here. Sure, the humor now is mostly lame in the extreme, but Cracked was meant to entertain your average 11 to 12 year old, and it did its job.

In fact, when Cracked returned in 2006, I was a little disappointed to see it was brought back as a pseudo Onion-style humor magazine (which folded after a measly two issues!). I woulda been more than happy to see Sylvester the janitor again.

Marvel Super Special #29: Tarzan of the Apes

Spring 1983 - I thought we'd talk about another, more famous, jungle hero who starred in their own Marvel Super Special--Tarzan of the Apes!

This particular choice of subject confuses me a bit--not why they chose Tarzan, one of the most famous fictional characters in history, but what exactly was the purpose of this story appearing in this book.

By Marvel Super Special #14, the series devoted itself entirely to movie adaptations good (Raiders of the Lost Ark), bad (Xanadu), and ugly (Howard the Duck). This particular Tarzan story was obviously tied to the then-bold idea behind Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan movie (sort of a Tarzan Begins for those who have never seen it).

But its not a straight adaptation of the movie--this is Tarzan's origin story, no more, and it never goes near any of the other events in the movie. Maybe Marvel figured all the talk talk talk of the second half of the movie wouldn't work as a comic, so they just went for the action and excitement-filled origin story.

In any case, they couldn't have picked a better team--they got Mark Evanier and Sharman DiVono to adapt Edgar Rice Burroughs' story, and Evanier's frequent collaborator Dan Spiegle to do the art. They also hired another frequent Evanier partner, Jo Meugniot, to do the color, which as we'll see in a moment, made for a gorgeous-looking book.

Most everyone knows the basic elements of Tarzan's origin story, so there's no real need to hit every detail here. But the story opens aboard the sailing vessel the Fuwalda, with the aristocrats Lord and Lady Greystoke aboard, along with some classic scurvy pirates.

Spielgle renders these guys perfectly, with deep, creviced faces, so they all look like woodcuts:

"...arr, me hearties!"

Anyway, there's a mutiny, a fight, some gunshots, and the Greystokes are left stranded on a remote island, all alone. Or are they?:

The Greystokes try and survive on the island, scrounging around for food and shelter. They're pretty good at it, and eventually have a son.

Two deaths then occur simultaneously--Lord Alice passes away, and a tragic accident claims the life of the great ape Kala's baby, leaving her heartbroken.

Kala hears the young baby's cries for food, and the apes investigate, and Lord Greystoke is killed. Kala takes the baby in her arms, and begins to care for it, even giving it a name:

Tarzan grows up, learning to survive in the jungle, never realizing he isn't one of them. When he discovers his parents' cabin, he begins to attempt to read their books and learn of these strange beings.

When a fight for dominance breaks out between Kala and another ape named Tublat, Tarzan takes him on and kills him, declaring to all that can hear that he is a great killer and to be respected, breaking out first famous Tarzan yell, the first of many.

Jo Meugniot's coloring is on the mark--sometimes we lush, beautiful greens and reds, other times using moody softer tones that mesh perfectly with Spiegle's art:

I particularly love this sequence, too; Spiegle's layout and Meugniot's coloring are perfect. I love the abstract white tree used as a way to frame the various actions:

Tarzan meets another like him, and sees that he is more like this tribesman than his ape brethren, and starts to learn to read and talk English.

Tarzan then fights and kills the mighty lion Sabor, who has preyed upon the apes for a long time. Using a bow and arrow stolen from the tribe, he kills Sabor, and declares himself mightiest of all.

The ape Kerchak challenges that claim, but Tarzan kills him, making him the Lord of the Apes:

...that's how the book ends, a fine a spot as any.

The whole package is really quite good, writers Evanier and DiVono hitting all the significant moments in the story, and like I said the art and coloring are top-notch (and I haven't even mentioned the gorgeous cover by Charles Ren!).

A fine addition to the canon of Tarzan comics.

Marvel Super Special #34 - Sheena

Summer 1984 - Another fine addition to the line of ill-conceived Marvel movie adaptations comes Sheena!

Yes, Sheena, one of the more notorious bombs in summer movie history. I guess Columbia Pictures figured they couldn't miss--a beautiful leading lady (Tanya Roberts), an experienced director at the helm (John Guillermin, who directed the 1976 King Kong and The Towering Inferno), and a fun, comic book-y premise.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. When all the receipts were added up at the end of the Summer, I bet Columbia thanked its lucky stars it had also released Ghostbusters around the same time.

Anyway, Marvel went full steam ahead, hiring comic book pros Cary Burkett and Gray Morrow (Gray Morrow!) to do the comic book version. And like a lot of these adaptations, turns out the comic book is better than the movie.

The movie opens with the "origin" of Sheena, as her missionary parents are killed in a cave in, and she is taken in by the local tribe and raised as one of their own.

Over time, Sheena grows up and learns the ways of the jungle:

"...as the years pass, the girl grows in beauty, and wisdom, and in skill." Mostly beauty.

We meet the other characters in the story, like TV sportscaster Vic Casey (played by...Ted Wass?), King Jabalani, and his intended bride, Countess Zanda.

Countess Zanda runs around in a sheer nightie, the king is assassinated by a mysteriously-fired arrow, and a local shaman is imprisoned by some government thugs. The shaman calls out for help from Sheena, who arrives with her animal friends in tow:

...there's more jungle derring-do with Sheena, she meets Vic, who she falls for almost immediately (how could you not? it's Ted Wass!).

Sheena gets caught in a power struggle between two rival factions now that the king is dead, she gets arrested, some animals get shot, and Sheena gets taken away in a helicopter. She then calls out a flock of really angry flamingos to save her:

...Gray Morrow had the ability to make flamingos look really mean. They end up causing the chopper to crash, killing the people who kidnapped Sheena. Hardcore!

During an explosion, Vic Casey is hit and dies in Sheena arms, but she turns to her tribe who use their voodoo powers and revive him by burying him up to his neck in dirt. Sure, why not?

Vic tells Sheena she can't come home with him, because then the world would discover the little slice o' heaven they've made for themselves in the jungle, and he just can't do that to her. They part ways, and Sheena rides off on a zebra.

Is there something missing here? Yes, there is--probably the most famous scene in the movie, the one that makes people wonder how the hell this movie got rated PG:

...I guess if you're gonna hire Tanya Roberts to star in your movie, you're going to write a scene like this into it. But it seems like an odd inclusion for a movie presumably meant for families.

The issue has its usual assortment of text features about the making of the movie, including interviews with cast and crew:

...here's a shot of director John Guillermin, working through the realization he was making a giant turkey of a movie.

Before we go, let's look at the back cover, featuring a still from the movie:

...sure, the movie was lame, but this specific image is well-composed, nicely lit, and looks dynamic to my eye. I remember Sheena as a film being way over-lit, with virtually no memorable shots.

But I think if the whole movie had looked like this, it might've been a lot more compelling. Visually, at least.