Wednesday, March 22, 2017

It´s that Williams feeling of DEJA VUE again

There have been no posts the last few days because I seriously needed to take a break from blogging to get some sleep and I also had to clean up the laptop because I had too much stuff on it. And while I´m not finished with that I thought I could let my readers reap the fruits of all my hard work.


Because I spent the entire day Yesterday getting all the cult siren clips I needed for the posts and the episodes of Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, Legends Of Tomorrow and all the other stuff that´s clogging the laptop on DVDs. And while the laptop is burning the files I like to do something else which was getting rid of all the doubles in my folder with all the material from the old Williams Verlag Marvel comics. The funny thing is that while I was going through the files I was hit by the realization how epic Marvel comics used to be. So I wanted to put some of them on the blog which should provide my german readers with some flashbacks from their childhood while my readers from outside of Germany might enjoy this peek at how Marvel comics were presented in another country. I have tried not too put too many pages of the same kind into the post so that is well balanced and if readers like it maybe it can turn into a regular thing.

By the way, I was so busy the last few days that I didn´t even notice that I broke the 2,000,000 hits mark. Yay, me ! And of course all the visitors who have helped make that happen. I will try not to let you down and it looks like you are enjoying this content so I must be doing something right.


We are keeping it german as Today´s first celebrity birthday is Hugo Egon Balder who turns 67. He is of course best known as the presenter of Tutti Frutti and I just love wikipedia because I have never heard it be described anywhere else as a soft - porn tits - out show but I guess it kind of was.


Now usually I would go into a tangent to explain the show to my foreign readers with lots of animated GIFs of dancing bare chested sex bombs and whatnots but since I made a separate post for Monique Sluyter and the Tutti Frutti Girls I can just put that link on the blog and you can click it. 


Hugo also had a music career although he´s known to Today´s audiences as the receiver of ten tv and entertainment awards and a producer and host on various successful tv shows which means you get your video from Genial Daneben with Bernhard Hoecker and sexy Verona Pooth after all.



Since I posted a video of Hubert Kah last year I want to switch it up this year with Roger Whittaker who celebrates his 81st birthday. Although he was born in Kenya and lived in Britain for great parts of his life I always thought of him as german but the truth is that when he recorded his first songs in german he had to sing them phonetically because he didn´t speak the language. By the time I became aware of him he had of course learned to speak german quite well and he had a big following. He released 25 albums in Germany and is also known for his trademark whistling ability.



William Shatner turns 86 and since I don´t want to repeat myself too much in this section he only gets a short mention but you can check out last year´s post for a TekWar video and I specifically chose the picture below.


Because that´s my not so subtle segueway to artist Mort Drucker who celebrates his 88th birthday. He has contributed to the world famous MAD magazine for over five decades and some sources list him as being born on the 29th of March so don´t be mad if that´s the date you have listed.


Mort Drucker is of course famous for his movie parodies and when I was in school my allowance was so low that it was almost non existent so I did not have the money to watch all the latest movies. The only thing I could afford was MAD so instead of seeing the movie I read the spoofs and had to imagine the plot of the movie by the jokes they made about it. And even now I sometimes get the movie scenes mixed up with what I read.


The picture above is one example since I´m pretty sure that dialogue was not in the movie ( although the cleavage was ). If you want to check out some of Mort Drucker´s work THE BRONZE AGE OF BLOGS has three posts on Mort Drucker, The Milking Of The Planet That Went Ape , The Six Million Dollars, Man & Neuronic Woman and Mad Revisionist Westerns .

As a video I chose this animated version of Mort Drucker´s The Oddfather even though the quality of the picture and sound is really beyond abysmal.



We start the Dearly Depated section of the post with Steve Dillon who passed away rather recently. He is of course best known for his work on Punisher and Preacher ( hmm, both start with p ) of which the last one has just been finally adapted as a tv series - which I still haven´t seen.


Steve started his career with the title story of Hulk Weekly for Marvel UK and later worked on the Nick Fury strip before becaming one of the artists on british cult comic magazines Warrior and 2000 AD. What is really weird is that I´m about to read something from Steve Dillon from those days as Today my latest comic order from the guys at Comic Express arrived which includes all issues of Eclipse Comics Axel Pressbutton series that reprints some classic UK comic material by the likes of Brian Bolland or Alan Davis.


In fact I found out about this comic while looking for issues of Alan Davis to add to my order ( I also got rare Gene Colan issues of DC´s Silverblade and Eclipse Comics Ragamuffins ) and after doing a bit of online research I ordered all the issues. At first I was afraid the inside would be in black and white but it´s full color. If - like me - you have no idea what the heck Axel Pressbutton is there is a post on LOOKIT ME I THINK PEOPLE CARE ABOUT MY OPINIONS and you can find the Zirk short story by Brian Bolland that is mentioned there on COMICS A - GO - GO ! ( god, Brian Bolland draws some beautiful females ). Also check out SAVAGE TALES for the story Cold War, Cold Warrior by Alan Moore and Gary Leach and the FORBIDDENPLANET blog has some Steve Dillon pages from Laser Eraser And Pressbutton.


Like most british artists Steve Dillon had worked on the Doctor Who comics which brings us to Mary Tamm, the first actress to play the part of Romana on the tv show. She only accepted the role of companion when the producers told her that she would also be a timelord and the Doctor´s equal and she left the show when the writers returned Romana to the old stereotypes. She was much sexier than Lalla Ward who came in after her.


Originally I wanted to post a trailer from the Doctor Who series with Mary Tamm but then I found this little nugget. Since she left during Tom Baker´s tenure she never got to interact with Sylvester McCoy on the show but after she left and before Sylvester landed the role of gallifreyan time traveller both appeared in the 80s action movie Three Kinds Of Heat.



If you are anything like me you want to see more so here is the full movie with Robert Ginty, Victoria Barrett and Shakti Chen for your enjoyment.



Another shoutout goes to Karl Malden whom I always watched in The Streets Of San Francisco and although I have no video for him - at least this year - here is Mort Drucker´s rendition of him from the movie Patton.


There is also no video for Bud Sagendorf, the artist I always associate with Popeye ( and who for some reason was NOT the main artist on the FAZ´s edition of classic comics ) because - again - I had a Popeye video in last year´s post and there already is a cartoon video in this post. Still I wanted to mention him so I could post this wonderful strip I found since last year.


Since I didn´t prepare this post I was caught a bit by surprise that Today is Bernard Krigstein´s anniversary or otherwise I would have done a post on him. As it is I´m posting the only work of him I have - the complete story The Bath from Tales From The Crypt issue 42 - and while Bernie is best known as EC Comic artist he also had done work in early issues of MAD.


Our last anniversary is Chico Marx which fits right in with the tone of this section as I can imagine him feeling right at home playing the piano with all the Tutti Frutti babes around him. And I´m sure the kind of anarchistic humor the Marx Brothers displayed in their movies had as much influence on the makers of the EC comics, 2000 AD or MAD as they had on me. Even at a very young age I got that there was something special and at the same time inappropriate about their jokes and I watched their movies at any chance I got. Here is one of my favorite scenes ( which is sadly not the complete scene ) where they show the basics of the sales pitch.  



New to the blog ? Everything you need to know about TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN : top ten posts / more posts of interest / best of the best


Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes ?

2 comments:

Terry Hooper-Scharf said...

Damn wish I still had all my Williams comics. Even miscoloured I loved them. Lovely post!

SUBZERO said...

Sorry it took me so long to answer but I wanted to finish the post first.

I get what you are saying about the Williams comics. I still have some issues of DIE RUHMREICHEN RÄCHER and I wish they had done hardcover editions back then. But I guess the MARVEL MASTERWORK editions are passable substitutes.