« Charlie Brown’s bad luck trick-or-treating earned him a lot of sympathy amongst young viewers, to the extent that some mailed candy for Charlie Brown to the TV channels that aired the special. In recent years, many fans have viewed the gag as disturbing, viewing it as a conspiracy among the adults to torture Charlie Brown by denying him candy. »
Interestingly, the gag about Charlie Brown’s inadvertent rock collection was introduced here, not in the strip, though it was alluded to in the November 1st, 1975 strip, a whole nine years down the line. Found it in my copy of « Think Thinner, Snoopy » As a bonus, here’s a clever modern update on the classic sequence, from the long-defunct ifyouseesomething.net.
« Give men an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves. » (William Moulton Marston, co-creator of Wonder Woman)
We might all happily to submit to Princess Diana of Themyscira, but *she* occasionally has to submit to tentacles, although of course she always manages to fend them off. Might this be a metaphor for unnecessarily grabby male hands? I’m not here to psychoanalyze (that was Marston’s job!), just to celebrate Tentacle Tuesday. Lots of versions of Wonder Woman have grappled with tentacles… but no adventures are more entertaining than the ones depicted by the formidable Harry Peter!
Without further ado, today’s roster of tentacles – whether they’re attached to a Neptunian fish or sprout out of a mad doctor’s ectoplasm.
Page from “The Tigeapes of Neptunia“, scripted by Joye Murchison (the first female writer of superhero comics) and drawn by Harry Peter, published in Wonder Woman no. 15 (Winter 1945). Read the issue here.Page from “The Drugged WAC”, scripted by Joye Murchison and drawn by Harry Peter, published in Wonder Woman no. 18 (July-August 1946). Read the issue here.
The following panels are from from “Three Secret Wishes!“, written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Harry Peter. The story was published in Wonder Woman #81 (April 1956). The whole issue is fun, actually, largely thanks to the gorgeous art – read it here.
« When the dark mists rise up from the graveyard, and shutters bang in the windows of old abandoned houses, and the lights burn late in the back rooms of funeral parlors, the hour has struck for the Autumn People. » — anonymous back cover blurb
Frank Frazetta‘s cover for Ballantine Books’ October 1965 collection of EC adaptations of Ray Bradbury short stories (such a string of possessives!), namely « There Was an Old Woman » (art by Graham Ingels) « The Screaming Woman » (Jack Kamen), « Touch and Go », aka « The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl » (Johnny Craig), « The Small Assassin » (George Evans), « The Handler » (Ingels), « The Lake » (Joe Orlando, some of the finest, most sensitive work of his incredibly-brief peak, which he would coast on for the rest of his career), « The Coffin » and « Let’s Play Poison » (Both Jack Davis).
I’m feeling foolishly generous, so here’s a panel from each story. Owing to personal bias, Mr. Craig is the only one who gets a full page to show off. Seriously, though, scripting his own stuff afforded him greater latitude in storyboarding his work… and how it shows!
« Ghastly » Graham Ingels.Jack Kamen.Johnny Craig.Mr. Ingels again.George Evans.Joe Orlando.Jack Davis once…… and Jack Davis twice.
I first encountered Bradbury through « The October Country » (1955), which turned out, I was to discover later, to be a heavily-revised version of his initial, Arkham House-issued collection, « Dark Carnival ».
« When given the chance to rerelease the out-of-print collection in 1955, Bradbury seized the opportunity to revisit his first book and correct the things he deemed inadequate. (Ever the perfectionist, Bradbury was, throughout his career, often discontent with calling a book done, even after its publication.) He rewrote a number of stories, made light revisions on others, cut twelve tales altogether, and added four new ones to round out the collection. The stories Bradbury discarded he thought too weak, too violent, or too primitive, and not representative of where he was as a writer at that moment. »
As it happens, several of the stories that caught Gaines & Feldstein’s fancy were the very ones that Bradbury was in the process of disowning. Ditching « The Coffin » or « Let’s Play Poison » or, for different reasons, « The Black Ferris » (as he was to expand it into « Something Wicked This Way Comes » a few years down the line) I can understand, but losing the incredible « The October Game »? Especially since he was making (lots of) room for his most plodding story, the seemingly-interminable (at 44 pages) « The Next in Line ».
There was a companion volume devoted to EC’s adaptations of Bradbury science-fiction tales, « Tomorrow Midnight », also boasting a Frazetta cover.
« Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the very act of hurling his head at him. » — Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
And here’s a peek at one of Freas’ preliminary versions of the cover. I daresay it’s lovely, but the final rendition is the clear winner. Sometimes the editorial process works just fine!
Some of you may recall Freas’ classic cover art for Queen’s News of the World album, back in 1977. That, in fact, was a case of Freas recasting his painting from the October 1953 issue of pulp mag Astounding Science Fiction. Look familiar?
« In medical practice it is inevitable to observe the details. »
– Dr. Joseph Bell
From France, then, we have the now-whimsical, now-terrifying exploits of Professeur Bell, somewhat loosely based on Joseph Bell, a lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh, who was Arthur Conan Doyle‘s teacher and the alleged real-life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.
The good (actual) Dr. Bell. He’s only pretending to read.
Joan Sfar wrote and drew the first two entries in the series, but struggled to achieve the more realistic and detailed style he’d set for himself. With the third volume, he was joined by the skillful and versatile Hervé Tanquerelle, who handled the art chores from then on. A smooth transition.
Sfar has been invoking a marvellously complex and nefarious universe surrounding a « hero » with an increasingly slippery grasp on morality and reality. Heck, even Frank Belknap Long‘s Hounds of Tindalos got a surprise look-in. Recommended.
Published so far in French, Italian, German and Polish…
« L’Irlande à bicyclette » is the fifth and latest in the series, published in 2006. Ahem, fellas… it’s been *quite* a while. La suite, s’il vous plaît?
Intrigued, as you should be (you do have a pulse, right?)… care for a few furtive glances between the covers?
I’m not going to waste my breath trying to explain. Just dig that mood.
« In many ways, I thought, the perfect night would be a string of unanswered doors. » Dan Clowes, Immortal, Invisible
For our lucky thirteenth check on October’s calendar, we’ll stalk the neighbourhood through Dan Clowes’ eyes with his bittersweet and appropriately haunting Hallowe’en memoir, from the 16th issue of Eightball (Nov. 1995, Fantagraphics). It’s also available in their excellent “Caricature” collection.
In the mid-90s, Clowes was going from strength to strength, having gradually evolved past the vastly entertaining but immature snarkiness of his early work… he’s certainly earned full marks for being true to his muse, instead of cranking out routine variations on Zubrick and Pogeybait or Needledick the Bug-Fucker.
As an draftsman, Clowes clearly isn’t a « natural »… he had, and has to work at it. But that’s fine, because his special gift rests in his storytelling. Yet it wouldn’t be the same if he merely wrote scenarios for others to illustrate, since his writing and artwork mesh wholly and perfectly.
As a chronicle of a certain early adolescent mindset, full of turmoil and intense, unpredictable emotions, « Immortal, Invisible » is nearly without peer, matched only by its companion and issue-mate, « Like a Weed, Joe ». I figure that just about any sensitive and perceptive person who’s suffered through the stages of a somewhat solitary and awkward late childhood and adolescence can find a bit of themselves in this tale. I know I can relate to its sense of bittersweetness and longing for the fast-receding innocence of childhood.
The full story is ten pages long, and if you aren’t already familiar with it, I couldn’t recommend it more fervently.
« Having a shrunken head is like having Halloween all year ’round! »
A classic, fondly-remembered ad from the back of comics published in the fall of 1975.
How cool is it that even the box art is hand-drawn? One of these will set you back a pretty penny on eBay these days.
The artwork is by Mad Magazine pillar (and arguably their artist most adept at capturing celebrity likenesses) Mort Drucker (b. 1929). Check out that fabulous signature!
Of course, I’d always longed to snag my own kit, and a few years ago, I succeeded.« Each apple will be different from any other; no two will be exactly alike. This is due to variations in many factors, but mostly in the moisture content of the apple. »« Caution: Do not use in excess of 40 watt bulb. »
Should you find yourself with some extra apples after a productive head-shrinking session, why not make the most of your leftovers with Vincent’s recipe for æblekage, which is to say Danish Apple Cake? Waste not, want not.
« It’s astonishing how terrible people can be. » – Gahan Wilson
Chez Gahan Wilson (as with his esteemed colleagues Charles Addams and Edward Gorey, for instance), it’s always Hallowe’en! Here’s a trio of particularly fitting cartoons published over the years in Playboy magazine, always one of the finest homes for wayward cartoonists. Gahan was pretty much the only guy Hugh Hefner didn’t encourage to draw buxom females.
Playboy, October 1959.Playboy, November 1967.Playboy, October 2005.
Early in the magazine’s existence, Hef was looking for a Chas. Addams to call his own (the man himself was under exclusive contract with The New Yorker), and he found him. Yet, as Hefner said in his introduction to Fantagraphics’ extraordinary collection, Gahan Wilson: Fifty Years of Playboy Cartoons: « I don’t think I could have imagined before the fact how Gahan was going to grow. What one saw in the beginning was only the promise. »
« I don’t like mushrooms! We’ll find a way out yet! » – John Agar as Dr. Roger Bentley
Fumetti: from the italian, it means « little smoke », describing the word balloons as they emanate from characters’ mouths. It’s comics, in other words. In English, it has come to denote comics created using photos instead of illustrations, also known as Fotonovela or, in French, photo-roman. Confused? No need to be. Here’s a rare American specimen of the beast, issued by Warren Publications, home of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, in MCMLXIV (hey, that’s what the indicia says!).
The back cover image, featuring the film’s wacky poster art.
We’re dealing with the familiar (but welcome) scenario, in the worthy tradition of Herbert George Wells‘ The Time Machine… of the Normals turning out to be evil pricks and the presumed Monsters really being sweet if you treat them with any kind of basic decency.The human prisoners are treated to an exclusive semi-musical number by a young Björk Guðmundsdóttir.This Captain Company ad from the 1970s always made these titles seem so mysterious and enticing. The Mole People are first in the middle row. Dan Clowes was a big fan of that first Screen Thrills cover.The far scarier real-life version.
We have just come back from a lovely vacation in Nova Scotia, one of Canada’s maritime provinces. In the honour of this all-too-short getaway, this Tentacle Tuesday is about Canadian artist Randolph Holton Holmes, who was born in Nova Scotia in 1942 and passed away in British Columbia in 2002, completely at the other end of this big country.
« Rand Holmes was Canada’s most revolutionary artist in his heyday, the star cartoonist at the Georgia Straight newspaper in British Columbia during the 1970s. His hippie hero, Harold Hedd, became the spokesman of the emerging counterculture as he avoided work, explored free love, and flouted drug laws. The Adventures of Harold Hedd spread across the globe in the wave of underground comix and newspapers of the era and Holmes became famous or at least notorious. While his comic character was bold and blatant, the artist was shy and quiet, well on his way to becoming a complete hermit. » (excerpt from Fantagraphics’ The Artist Himself: A Rand Holmes Retrospective)
Glimpsing through Holmes’ body of work, one quickly becomes aware that he displays a special affinity for drawing busty women… and (of more interest to this current post) that he loves to insert tentacles at the drop of a hat, especially if ETs of some kind are involved. A lot of artists use tentacles as a short-hand for aliens, and he’s not alone in that… much to my personal satisfaction.
Slow Death no. 6 (Last Gasp, January 1974). Colonel “Saunders”?Fog City Comics no. 2 (Stampart, October 1978). “Science fantasy at its finest” may be an unfulfilled promise; by all accounts, Rand Holmes’ Killer Planet is the best story of the issue. Fog City Comics was an all-Canadian underground comix anthology and lasted a mere 3 issues.
As I mentioned Holmes’ story Killer Planet, here’s a peek at its manifold tentacles:
A panel from Killer Planet, both written and illustrated by Rand Holmes, originally published in the aforementioned Fog City Comics no. 2, coloured by Bill Poplaski and reprinted in Death Rattle no. 1 (2nd series, Kitchen Sink Press, Oct. 1985).What kind of idiot eats fruit growing on an obviously life-threatening planet? Panels from Killer Planet, both written and illustrated by Rand Holmes, published in Death Rattle no. 1 (Kitchen Sink Press, October 1985).Panels from Killer Planet, both written and illustrated by Rand Holmes, published in Death Rattle no. 1 (Kitchen Sink Press, October 1985). Note the cute mushrooms in the bottom left corner.
And lastly, for contrast with the cover of Slow Death and its throes-of-ecstasy coupling scene, there’s this:
Vagina Dentata! A page from “Junkyard Dog“, written by Mike Baron. It was published in Death Rattle no. 5 (Kitchen Sink Press, June 1986). The (telepathic) alien female wasn’t unjustified in, erm, chewing up her rapist (the intercourse wasn’t consensual) – he was an unapologetic asshole.
Who's Out There? 