Friday, April 29, 2016

Cést le Strange deja vue - encore une fois

Longtime readers may remember that I already did a post on french comic covers but since Terry Hooper over at COMIC BITS ONLINE has done a post on it I have decided to revisit the topic if this is what the public wants.


We can´t have those islanders show us up now can we ? Anyway, to get to a workable selection from the over 550 french comic covers I had I have decided to stick to the french magazine STRANGE. If my readers are interested in more of these posts I can do posts on NOVA and TITANS too.

To further narrow it down I have stuck to the painted covers because I didn´t want to post covers you already know from the original version only with a new logo. There are some covers which are not painted and which I believe are not original covers but I´ll leave that for an extra post. But I DO like the french comic covers with word balloons, though.


And I just have to include this cover because of Spidey´s black costume. I just recently read the Epic Collection : Sins of the Past Spider - Man trade and I have to say I miss the days when he was switching back and forth between the new black costume and the original and was married to MJ.


But before we come to the 18 covers I selected can anyone explain who in tarnation Prince Epsilon is ? I have never heard of this comic in my life.


Any information about this ( french ? ) comic will be much appreciated.


Today´s first birthday is Uma Thurman who turns 46 and you probably expected me to do a post on Power Girl in honor of Uma´s magical boob window worthy cleavage but I already did that in 2012 and there has not happened anything worthy since then that I haven´t already covered.


To prove that the photo above isn´t faked I wanted to add a video from the 2002 Oscars but since there is none where you can see much of Uma I made a GIF instead so I can add one more comic book related video.

The paparazzi and journalists have totally blown it on this one. How is it then can get footage of everything people DON´T want to see like celebs without make up or panties but when there is a sexy woman with big breasts and a huge cleavage - and we are not talking about an unknown starlet here - at a public event - and we are not talking about the opening of the local mall in some small town here - nobody is able to just point the camera at her and let it roll ? Even when they are interviewing Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman they don´t manage to get her in focus. The same with Denzel Washington´s acceptance speech for the Oscar as Best Actor ( here´s the longer version if you can stomach more Julia Roberts ) there is only a short moment where Uma is sitting down. The best you get is in this docu about Ethan Hawke and even there that part is a bit short.


One of Uma Thurman´s most famous movies is KILL BILL by Quentin Tarantion who was inspired to make the movie by LADY SNOWBLOOD.



The action thriller by Toshiya Fujita starring Meiko Kaji in the lead role in turn is based on the manga series LADY SNOWBLOOD ( Shurayuki - hime in japanese ) written by Kazuo Koike ( who wrote series like LONE WOLF AND CUB and CRYING FREEMAN ) and illustrated by Kazuo Kamimura.



Our next birthday is Michelle Pfeiffer who is probably the last legit Catwoman we got in movies. She celebrates her 58th anniversary and after two really bad Christopher Nolan Batmovies the old Tim Burton Batman movies with Michael Keaton look better and better to me.


Because as much as I like Halle Berry´s costume in CATWOMAN she didn´t really play the character from the comic books. This is what happens when the beancounters have control and don´t want to pay for the Bat connection and think they know better than dozens of comic book writers.


Speaking about train wrecks in pop culture, our next birthday is Kate Mulgrew ( 61 ), best known for her role of Captain Kathryn Janeway on the worst Star Trek series ever, STAR TREK VOYAGER. The series was only watchable for the holographic doctor, the hot half klingon B´Elanna Torresand the 36DD drone of borg Seven of Nine played by Jeri Ryan


Jeri´s boobs were so huge that they made her skintight suit darker and darker so you couldn´t see them as good but to no avail. Seven of Nine is THE cyborg sex machine every sci fi fanboy wants to assimilate and the only one who could hold a candle to her was Jolene Blalock as T´Pol, the sex massage specialist with the inbuilt Pon Farr automatic nympho mode.


One year older is comedian Jerry Seinfeld who created the cult show SEINFELD of which the best part was the funny and sexy Elaine Bennet.


Even though it was not shown to the general public in Germany ( they always aired it when most people were asleep ) I managed to catch a few with Elaine´s best scenes. SEINFELD has been in amazon´s bargain section a few times now but as always I didn´t have the money to spend.


To show you that there are more reasons why Julia Louis Dreyfus pulled off the sexiness than just some impressive cleavage here is a short clip.



Our music video of the day is in honor or Duke Ellington´s birthday.



Today´s post was about french comics so I wanted to add this video from ALIX based on the french BD series which I just discovered Yesterday.



Normally I have a " five videos per post " limit but since I count the LADY SNOWBLOOD videos as one I am adding this video. It´s in french - sorry - but it mentions the comics by french publisher LUG who also published STRANGE. And Terry Hooper would be cross with me if I didn´t post a video that talks about MYKROS or how it is called in french PHOTONIK.



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Thursday, April 28, 2016

Two times the fun - the Heavy Metal edition

No, this is not my 10 HEAVY METAL / SCHWERMETALL COVERS YAYA HAN SHOULD RE - ENACT post ( because I haven´t finished MY BIG YAYA HAN POST yet so my readers don´t know about it ) it´s the next best thing.


Because of one of Today´s celebrity birthdays I wanted to keep the sci fi theme of my latest Legion of Three Worlds post going and I´m also trying to switch up things so I don´t only have one Marvel post and then one DC post and then one Marvel post again to keep things interesting. There are lots of comics out there which are not Marvel or DC or super heroes at all.

So Yesterday I was going through all HEAVY METAL and SCHWERMETALL covers to find the right ones for the upcoming Yaya cover post. And to clarify, I was not only looking for covers where there is a naked woman on the cover so I could get Yaya to drop her clothes. As tempting as that may be I was rather looking for covers that fall into these three categories :

Firstly covers which are a personal favorite of mine. During the four plus decades of my comic reading history I have read SCHWERMETALL - and later when I could get it HEAVY METAL - since before I was old enough to read it, borrowing issues from my older brother´s collection as soon as he started reading it on a regular basis and although I probably have more issues of the german underground comic U - COMIX I have a huge stack of SCHWERMETALL and HEAVY METAL issues. Lately I haven´t kept up as much as I used to but I still buy an issue now and then like when there is a translation I did of  a comic ( which already has happened two times ).

So I can say that I have read quite a lot of issues and among them were some really phenomenal covers which I can instantly recall because the art was so mind - blowing. A lot of them are also fantastic ( no pun intended ) from an aesthetic perspective and offer more than just simple nudity for nudity´s sake. There´s nothing even remotely gratuitous to them. 


For the second category I went with covers that would be interesting from a cosplayers point of view, that could really interest Yaya Han to do them.

Don´t get me wrong, as much as I practically live in denial where Yaya is concerned and realize I have a full blown sexual obsession with her my perv attitude doesn´t prevent me from seeing the real world and keeping possible perks in mind. So while it is a great mental exercise and it helps me release some tension why not go all the way and find some covers that may really happen ? It would be totally cool to really inspire Yaya Han for a cosplay so it could not hurt to throw in a few of those among the others.


And last but least are those covers you would expect from a dirty old man like me which means Yaya would be showing as much skin as possible.

Which - again - doesn´t necessarily mean going full frontal nudity. Not that there would be anything wrong with that or that I would mind. Any excuse to get women naked is okay with me, especially hot asians. But sometimes showing not everything but much rather enough to arouse you and still keep you interested to see more can be more erotic than doing the full monty outright. And I can´t believe I really typed that neither.

By the way I didn´t put the cover below into my selection because while it falls into the first and third category it is too close to the War Goddess Enyo shooting Yaya Han did. So there would be no reason for her to do it.


Anyway, while going through all of the covers for the Yaya Han post  I thought Why not do a post about all the great covers from HEAVY METAL ?

Not everybody likes superheroes and that way I can get some readers interested in this blog that may not normally check it out. It´s not like I ONLY read superhero comics or american comics. I recently put some of the stuff on my laptop in order ( yes, I know that I´m saying that a lot on my posts but I AM constantly working on new post material ) and there was a lot of stuff on women from franco belgian comics like FRANKA, NATASCHA and YOKO TSUNO which are all series I read and enjoyed.

I haven´t read as much issues of FRANKA as from the other two series. I started when CARLSEN COMICS started publishing the series but after I while I stopped reading and soon afterwards they ceased publishing the series. As I learned when I was putting the stuff in order the german EPSILON VERLAG has continued where Carlsen left off and re - published the first adventures so there may be more FRANKA in my reading pile.

She also appeared in the new version of ZACK which I´m happy to report is still being published it´s latest issue being number 202. I know Terry Hooper from the great COMIC BITS ONLINE will be glad to know this.


NATASCHA on the other hand is already IN my reading pile. The series has been published by various comic companies in Germany over the years but now SALLECK PUBLICATIONS has released a collected edition that offers the series in four beautiful hardcovers that include a lot of extra material like articles, art by Francois Walthéry and unpublished stories.

I bought the third book the last time the comic fair in Stuttgart was held because it was the only one which did not include comics I already have but so far I haven´t read it because I still hope I can buy the other three volumes. Who knows ? The way superhero comics are going I may be able to afford them sooner as I think. In any case I plan on reading that so there WILL be a post on NATASCHA in the future, one way or the other.


As for YOKO TSUNO for some reason - maybe because of the art style - I thought this was a series from the 70s that was already done and over.

Well, imagine my surprise when I learned that while Roger Leloup started the series in 1970 it´s still going. I was blown away by all the new comics I didn´t know, in fact the 27th album was just released in 2015. There is also a collected edition of this series by Carlsen Comics with 8 volumes which collect the stories up to the album number 24. I think. They are not collecting them in chronological order but rather theme based like book one collects albums 2, 7 and 14 because they all take place in Germany so it makes sense to release them for the german readers first. But there are 8 volumes out, each volume collects three albums, so it´s a safe bet that they should be at number 24 now. I would love to get into this series again, especially since there must be at least 10 stories I don´t know. 


Now you may ask yourself : Why is Subzero making this long intro and what does it have to do with HEAVY METAL covers ? I´m glad you asked.

You see I had already prepared the material for a post on the back covers of HEAVY METAL. In comics the back cover is usually used for ads but in a few rare instances they put some art on it. But while going through the covers I noticed that over the years they have done a few wraparound covers for the series. And since that is something I like to showcase on the blog I went for that option. The only drawback to that is that if I just post those covers I either have to make them very small or they go over to the right side of the blog where the links and other stuff is placed. So in order for me to avoid that I had to come up with something to bridge the gap until we reach the end of those gadgets. Also there is not much to add to the covers so I wanted to put in a little something for the readers.

But without any further ado here are the covers, I hope you enjoy them.


No links for Today so we start with the appendix and our first celebrity birthday is Jessica Alba who turns 35. She has been in a lot of movies although her best known roles are Susan Storm in the GOOD Fantastic Four movies and Nancy Callahan in the Sin City movies. Where she didn´t go topless although she plays a stripper. I don´t know if we will see a third movie with the same cast because Rosario Dawson already told director Robert Rodriguez not too wait too much between movies ( it took him nine years to do the sequel ) because her boobs won´t stay firm forever.


And I could probably never return to Spain ( as unlikely as that is at the moment ) if I neglected to mention Penelope Cruz´ 42nd birthday. She´s in Zoolander 2 with Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson and Will Ferrell and I have to admit that I enjoyed the first movie much more than I had expected to.



Now the main reason for picking Today´s topic is that one of the hottest women in sci fi entertainment Kari Wuhrer celebrates her 49th birthday. She is best know for her role of Maggie Beckett on the sci fi cult show SLIDERS. She was put on the cast as the boner guarantee for the male audience and they got more than their money´s worth in the Wild West episode where she´s almost spilling out of her snug saloon girl corsage.


She also was in HOT BLOODED, a really bad movie that doesn`t even have full frontal nudity. Nevertheless it´s one of my favorite movies with Kari because she looks really hot in this one. You get to see a lot of cleavage and boobs and in the first sex scene on the bed you can see her sexy ass.

And because one scene where she´s at a gas station and pulls down her leather top to make the desk clerck horny. She´s really pulling it in all directions so you get to see her full boobs. I have no evidence but I swear I can see some nipple. I bet Kari had to do this scene a hundred times as the crew was sabotaging all takes just to see her boobs again and again.

In any case, I had this scene on a video tape on a loop and I must have heard the words " This material just doesn´t breathe ! " a hundred times.


Like I said there is no full frontal nudity in this cineastic masterpiece but you get a bit of sideboob in a scene that was heavily cut on german tv.

They cut parts from when she´s using a whip to get into the mood and pours hot wax on his body. They also cut some parts from where she´s on top of him which I didn´t know until I found the movie on the internet.

Damn you, german tv for keeping Kari Wuhrer´s sideboob away from me !


Our next birthday is Tonight Show ex host Jay Leno who turns 66 Today. He has had all the hottest women in showbiz in his show and the hot appearances of Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Halle Berry, Mariah Carey or Janet Jackson are legendary moments of television history.


A rather sad anniversary is what would have been Terry Pratchett´s 68th birthday if he was still among us. While I could never finish his books I enjoyed the film adaptions like Hogfather or Going Postal very much so here is Wyrd Sisters which to my knowledge hasn´t been on german tv.



Another cult siren who celebrates her 75th birthday is Ann - Margret who has worked with all the greats of Hollywood like the king Elvis Presley.


Here is everyone's favourite hyphenated red - headed swedish - american dancing like a complete maniac in the 1966 film Made in Paris. The film itself is average, which makes this more or less the standout moment.



Another actress who worked with Elvis is Carolyn Jones who would be 86 years old Today. She co starred in what is considered to be the best Elvis movie of all time King Creole but is of course best known for playing goth vamp Morticia Adams on the cult television show The Addams Family


The show has become a big part of pop culture but what many people don´t know is that it was based on the cartoons of Charles Addams.


To learn more about The Addams Family you can go to THE UNOFFICIALLY ADDAMS FAMILY WORLD WIDE WEB SITE but first read Adrian J Smiths article The Addams Family : The Cartoons, Tv Series, Movies, Musical And Merchandise on HORRORPEDIA. As for Carolyn Jones she also played Queen Hippolyta on Wonder Woman and Marsha, Queen of Diamonds on Batman. Here is a docu about the ups and downs of her long career.



I just have to include a comic related video. So since this post was about HEAVY METAL, the american version of METAL HURLANT and the most influential artist of that comic was Moebius here is a video adaption of his comic The Long Tomorrow which was the inspiration for Blade Runner.



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