Sunday, February 17, 2019

It´s a Man of Steel Sunday with Curt Swan !

After working on all the spin off posts from my birthday tribute to Ron Frenz it´s good to be writing about comics again. I was already thinking about which DC character I should do the next post ( as I always like to alternate between Marvel, DC and independent comic book publishers ) when the anniversary of Curt Swan came along. And with a blog name like TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN doing a Curt Swan post is kind of obligatory.


Especially now that most people only know the warped versions of the Man of Steel that you get in comic books or movies it is important to remind the world what Superman is supposed to stand for, be all about.

Which is what Curt Swan brought to the table. He made Superman real, he grounded him in reality and made him human. And the writers back then didn´t feel the need to depower him to make him more relatable. They just said " Okay, here´s a guy who can do anything so let´s tell a story about a guy who can do anything. " Because even though he has all these super powers, Superman still thinks of himself as somewhat human. And while his body is indestructible he has feelings and can be hurt. He also is bound by the flow of time and there have been many excellent stories which have exploited that angle. Another weakness of Superman a lot of writers ignore is his mind. While he is basically Nietzsche´s Übermensch he still has a brain - even if it is a superbrain. So what happens when he can´t trust his brain ? What happens when what he thinks is real is not real and vice versa ? What happens when he starts experiencing time in different ways ? Those are all things that show how alike Superman is still to us. There are other weaknesses - like that Superman believes in laws and will not break them - a good writer can exploit but it seems that everybody has forgotten why Superman captured our imaginations.


It seems all writers have become lazy because they go for the cheap cop out. They always have to depower characters like Superman or Thor to make them more relatable. Which goes against the very definition of these characters. You are not SUPPOSED to relate to them in certain ways.

They are überpowerful beings, they are literally gods. How is any sane man supposed to relate to being a god ? You don´t have to relate to every character in a story to understand a story. And for the record I want to put it out there that Thor IS a god. Not a half god, not a demigod, not a part time god and not a job anybody can take ( and I´m talking about the awful Thor - Girl story with Jane Foster here which we have finally gotten over with ). He. Is. A. God. No ifs, butts, maybes or anythings about it.


I don´t know where that nonsense started but someone somewhere wrote that Thor is a half god and everybody just keeps repeating it as if it were true. It is not. As somebody who has read the german and norse mythology I can assure you that Thor - also named Donar in Germany - is the god of thunder and lightning, a god of war and strength, of fertility and oak trees and the protector of Earth. They named a day after him.


Anyway, back to Superman and Curt Swan, last year I managed to do two Curt Swan posts - one on his birthday and one a week later because as always I found the best Curt Swan art after I had finished the other post - but I don´t think I can do two this year. Not only because I probably will not have the time but also because I´m slowly running out of good material. In any case here are the original art pages I selected for this year.


Lately this section has gotten a bit out of control so I am trying to keep the birthdays I missed to an absolute minimum. For my longtime readers I have already covered a lot of those in past posts anyway and if my post quota should pick up next year I will be able to include more of them in the next merry go round. And for new readers there is always the option to check out older posts from this time period. So after the usual thanks to the guys from Heritage Auctions and Comicartfans - which is where I find most of the original art you see here - we get to the first birthday I missed since my last post which is Rich Buckler on the 6th of February.


Now I would not say that he has always been a favorite artist of me and that´s mostly because I had no idea how big his contribution to comics has been. I knew his name and a few of the comics he had provided art for but it was only through the research on this blog that I found out how many of my favorite stories he helped bring to life. So since it is one of my favorite things to bring attention to those artists who are underrated, underappreciated or even largely unknown I made a folder specifically for Rich Buckler´s art and did spotlight posts for him in 2017 and last year .


I also did a THORSDAY post for Rich Buckler but I´m not going to put the link up because there are a few others where I have art from Rich and as longtime readers know I have written a lot of THORSDAY posts and I don´t have the time to go through all of them. So far I have not had the time to go through my remaining Rich Buckler art but even if I don´t get to make a post for him this year there is more than enough material for future posts.



Another indispensable birthday is cult siren Dona Speir who turned 55 on February the 7th. Her exceptional talents include breasts as big as her head and just as visible. She also has the smooth, muscled legs and firm, ripped glutes of a person who makes her living with her physique. Her face is framed in a mane of brightly cast blondness. She is best known for her role of secret agent Donna Hamilton, the go - to gal in Andy Sidaris' flashy series of spy - chick erotic thrillers since 1987. The highly successful, often imitated, never duplicated Sidaris formula can be distilled to bombs and bullets and boobs and beaches and Bond gadgetry and hot tubs that double as think tanks. The intangible that pulls it all together ? Dona Speir.


The first time I mentioned Andy Sidaris was way back in 2013 but it took me until 2015 to do my first spotlight post on him and afterwards Dona got her own cult siren entry in 2016 with re - post in 2017 and again in 2018 .


Andy Sidaris was probably THE BEST director of action movies for adults and his cast read like a WHOS´S WHO of playmates : Roberta Vasquez , Ava Cadell , brunette Cynthia Brimhall, Carolyn Liu, Pandora Peaks, Julie Strain , Shae Marks, Samantha Phillips and Julie K. Smith to name just a few.


Usually I just copy / paste the part about Becky Mullen into the posts but I am trying to keep this one short so I will skip it. For those who haven´t read my previous Andy Sidaris posts there is the main post where I wrote a bit about one of my unsung heroes , the Casting the Justice League of America movie Andy Sidaris special with a lot of stuff about Dona Speir, Roberta Vazquez, Cynthia Brimhall and the Tutti Frutti girls, the Ava Cadell solo post , the Sybil Danning post and the Becky Mullen post ( which I reposted in 2016 ) where you can find tons of links to other cult sirens like Janet Jones Gretzky and real live Power Girl Leslie Easterbrook who had the most famous scene in which she emerges from a pool in a wet t - shirt , the annual re - posts of italian mega soccer MILF Simona Ventura , blonde sexsation Monique Sluyter and of course the obligatory Tutti Frutti girls.


We are staying with cult sirens making the transition from spy movies to horror classics and the stunning Hazel Court, whose anniversary was on the 10th of this month. I wrote a long post about her in 2016 which was mainly about The Curse Of Frankenstein or like I like to call it Frankenstein doesn´t socialize in reference to a GREEN LANTERN story by Alan Moore.


When I saw the movie for the first time Hazel Court just blew me away because I didn´t know about her status as a scream queen and that a lot of her roles hinged on her big pair of lung´s ability to scream in horror loudly and fill out a cleavage. She presents one of the most incredible cleavages in movie history in that film that is sure to blow your socks off as it doesn´t leave much to the imagination. Hazel Court is almost topless for most of the movie with her generous and deep plunging cleavages.


If that is not enough to make you check out The Curse Of Frankenstein I don´t know what is. Because besides one of the best performances by Hazel Court it is also a very good horror movie from the famous Hammer studios starring none other than Peter Cushing as Victor Frankenstein.


Speaking of the classic Hammer studio horror movies the only celebrity from Today that I want to include in this post despite the fact that I covered it previously is Yvonne Romain who celebrates her 81st birthday.


Since I wrote my cult siren post on her I have managed to watch The Brigand Of Khandahar and Captain Clegg a.k.a. Night Creatures and it really seems that The Curse Of The Werewolf is Yvonne´s best work.


It´s back to the Man of Tomorrow with the 5 Most Underused Superman Villains which is always subject to personal preferences. So your mileage may vary and the reason why I decided to post this is that it includes Terra - Man whom I remember from many Curt Swan issues of Superman Batman.


It would be cool to see a new version of DC´s space cowboy on the big screen but I am afraid into what Today´s SJW club would turn him into.



While this cosplay is not Superman - specific I wanted to include a video that is not about the usual suspects. Also I like to post these once in a while whenever the lamentations that you can´t translate the costumes from the comic books directly to the movies because they would look too ridiculous from certain people get to loud. Just to show that dozens of cosplay fanatics have no problem doing something that high paid costume designers from big budget Hollywood movies deem absolutely impossible.



With all the videos I need one about Curt Swan and what could be better than the classic Superman Sandman Saga ( which has nothing to do with Jack Kirby´s character of the same name, nor the one from the Justice Society of America or Neil Gaiman´s brilliant Sandman re - interpretation from the 1980s ) that started with Kryptonite No More ! which marked the transition from the Golden Age into the Silver Age for Superman stories.


Here in Germany it is kind of a unicorn because so far only the first story was published, first by the Ehapa Verlag and later as part of the FAZ library.


The version that is discussed here is a reprinting of the entire story as part of Eaglemoss´ DC Comics Graphic Novel Collection so you might think that is was not that difficult to find. Well, the thing is that after the first part of this collection came out Eaglemoss decided that they didn´t need the additional sales from comic shops anymore and went completely with the newsstands. Which means that if you missed certain books from this collection at the newsstands you could not get it from most comic shops.


There were a few where you could find some of them but not all. So at the moment my only option seems to be to buy the DC Comics Classic Library edition which goes from 35 bucks to 50 which is a bit pricey.



Now I thought about doing an all Superman entertainment section but that could become boring and I didn´t want to use up all my Superman videos as there are a few Superman posts coming up which includes another Curt Swan post with all the great original art I found while finishing up this section. And because I really don´t have a music video for the Man of Steel here is one I have been wanting to post for a long time.



Likewise I could not find any episodes from the Ruby Spears Superman cartoon - which is my favorite - so here is Space Ace which according to my research was based on a laserdisc video game produced by Don Bluth.



It´s been a while since I posted an episode of The Secrets of Isis. In fact it has been so long that I completely forgot about sexbomb Joanna Pang who plays teenage sidekick Cindy Lee and who ASSentially fills out those pants more than it might be appropriate on a tv show aimed at kids.


Well, in this episode she provides the short but sweet erotic highlight ASS she brings it next to the always stunning Joanna Cameron who plays Isis.


The juvenile delinquent in this episode is kind of a moron, not only for believing he can get out of doing his chores by going on a field trip and that it will have no consequences later. But mainly because his only reason to go on that field trip is to skip his chores when a better reason would be to get some alone time with sexy Cindy Lee and get to know her better. 



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Look ! Up in the sky ! It´s a bird ! It´s a plane ! It´s Superman !

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