It´s the weekend so these must be the links

Yes, it is once again time for another of those link posts where I throw everything but the kitchen sink in that´s all the rage with the kids. Not what you might expect for my 499th post but the links have just been piling up and not all of them can be put in a specific topic. So let´s start.

Our pal Old Groove is still continuing his MASTER OF KUNG FU MONDAY posts and I don´t think I have posted the links to the latest posts about issue 80 " The Pride of Leopards " , issue 81 " Breathless " , issue 82 " Like a God Weeping Fire " and finally issue 83, the first chapter of the Warriors of The Golden Dawn Saga titled " The Phoenix and the Snake " .

Like all previous posts this is just a joy to read and it sadly reminds us how much ass Marvel kicked in the Bronze Age. To quote Old Groove :

As we thrill to Shang - Chi and company's ever deepening and deadly march toward all - out war with Fu Manchu, courtesy of Doug Moench, Mike Zeck, and Gene Day, natch, let's just put into context just how powerful Mighty Marvel was at the time Master of Kung Fu #82 was published. In August 1979, Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz were giving us new Moon Knight tales in the back of THE HULK ! magazine, Bill Mantlo and Michael Golden were at the helm of The Micronauts, Project Pegasus was winding down in Marvel Two - In - One, David Michelinie, John Romita Jr., and Bob Layton trapped Iron Man in The Devil in the Bottle storyline, Roger McKenzie and Frank Miller were transforming Daredevil, and Chris Claremont and John Byrne were gearing up for The Dark Phoenix Saga in X - Men. T'was a great time to be a Marvellite, baby!

 
Truer words were never spoken. In fact, I did some posts about that period myself : The PROJECT PEGASUS saga was covered in this post ( I just added some new material recently), these two posts pay homage to Chris Claremont´ and John Byrne´s UNCANNY X - MEN run in particular Phoenix : The Untold Story and Days of Future Pasts and this post is all about Sal Buscema´s and Ernie Chan´s Hulk. But what about Iron Man ?

Fear not, I started pimping the big IRON MAN by David Micheline, Bob Layton and John Romita JR Omnibus back in this post when it was still available at amazon for 57 EUROS and I continued with the topic on his birthday post that year . I also did one this year but we´ll come to that.

Now the purpose of this post is not to pimp my own posts, I just thought I should include them for the newer readers who want to read more about the Bronze Age and who might have missed these posts. But back to MASTERS OF KUNG FU : I had kind of a MASTERS OF KUNG FU MONDAY myself this week although I didn´t get to continue my series of posts. But I was at the comic shop and while one of the few series remaining on my pull list did make a comeback - USAGI YOJIMBO - there were not a lot of new issues in my box. Right now I have four regular series left so I decided to go down into the catacombs and look for some back issues. I had - of course - already checked out the Old Comics per Kilo section but apart from another ATALANTE comic that I already had there was nothing worthwhile there. So I ventured down below to look for issues of FLASH.

Being a big Flash fan I decided to put together a complete run from when the series was restarted after the events of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS ( the Death of Barry Allen is still planned for the continuation of my DEATH IN COMICS series ) which is not as delusional as it sounds since I already had some scattered issues and all the issues beginning with issue 76.

Right now I´m missing 13 issues to have a complete set from issue 1 to issue 172. It would have been uninterrupted until to issue 230 if Scott Kolins hadn´t taken over the book until issue 200. Maybe I will get the Scott Kolins FLASH issues just to complete the set if I find some of it in dollar bins but I doubt it since I already have some of the issues in the german translation and the excellent BLITZ storyline in trade. It´s also a money issue since I´m going to be unemployed soon ( I still have no news from the jobcenter ). I thought about getting one of the Omnibus since they are very cheap at amazon at the moment : number 1 and 2 just 54 EUROS and number 3 only 45 EUROS. That´s not very much for a 75 dollar hardcover with over 600 pages, okay, the first one only has 448 pages, but still a good bargain. Anyway, since I already have most of the issues and I don´t have that much money to spend right now - and we are talking about a lot of issues by Scott Kolins here - I decided against it.

Back to my visit to the comicshop, as I said I went to the basement to look for back issues of FLASH but they had none I was missing. I had found some in Erlangen and I got some with my last order from Andis Comic Express but I´ll have to rely on luck with the rest. With the Comic Börse in Stuttgart gone my biggest venue for finding back issues is gone and since I´m not going to other comic conventions like the Comic Action in Essen I´ll have to start looking on german comic messageboards. So I had no luck with back issues of FLASH and I didn´t even bother with back issues of Jim Aparo´s OUTSIDERS since I had already maxed out on them.

Also I skipped the back issues for TEEN TITANS since you need a score card to know which ones are missing from the Omnibus editions. And I still cling to the hope that DC will put them out in trade or at least in an upcoming SHOWCASE PRESENTS. So without any luck on that front I decided to get some issues of MASTERS OF KUNG FU by Mike Zeck - since Marvel is never going to reprint them as trades or ESSENTIALS - and I started with his last issue 101 and work my way backwards since I already had the some of the issues from WARRIORS OF THE GOLDEN DAWN and beyond. Yes, it´s the spanish version but since they are still in good condition and spanish translations are way better then the german ones I´ll hold off with the issues until I have all the issues I haven´t read.

Speaking about issues I haven´t read, I´m not sure issue 100 qualifies for that because I have the distinct feeling that this one may already be in my collection. Or I have just seen it somewhere. Right now I can´t check that because they are in the back of my work desk and there is too much stuff on it - and inside of it - to move it. So I´m not exactly sure which issues of the original american version of MASTERS OF KUNG FU I have right now. As I said, I had enough money for 10 issues ( my comicshop has priced them at 2.50 EUROS which is still cheaper than any issue of a current comic sold by the big two ) so I got issues 101 to 98 ( issue 97 was just in too bad shape to shill out 2.50 EUROS ), 96 to 93, 91 which is the GANG WAR story, one of the best written issues of the run and 89 THE DRAGONS the big finale of the WARRIORS OF THE GOLDEN DAWN saga.

In a way it´s funny that one post on my blog started another blog going with a series of posts and has now in turn made me seek out those old back issues. I know it´s too much to hope that we can shame Disney into reprinting these but it´s nice to see how popular the series has become again with mentions on ComicGeekSpeak and other websites. One of the most underrated Bronze Age books finally gets the attention it deserves.

And to think that it all started here. No, I´m not kidding. Here at TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN we don´t follow the trends - we make them. And when I say we I mean me, SUBZERO. Don´t believe me ? Just take my latest post about Bob Layton´s Iron Man which was mostly about the superb ARMOR WARS storyline ( I told you we would come back to it ).

Only 11 days after it went online Andrew Porwitzky over at SIDEKICKCAST started a series on the story where you can read about it in more detail than on my post ( so far he did issues 225 , 226 and 227 ) and now even Disney is going to do a new comic version of it as a big event in 2015 .

And I´m not really surprised about that since Marvel has copied ideas from this blog for a long time now. You might think me crazy but I do not believe in coincidences and it is just too convenient that Marvel brought out new trade collections of the Roger Stern / John Buscema AVENGERS run after I mentioned in this post that not putting out the issues in trade form or even hardcover is passing up a chance for making some money.

And it also cannot be a simple coincidence that the BRIDE OF ULTRON hardcover was released after I wrote in my blog that I would pay good money to have it as a hardcover even if I already had it in one of those nice pocketbooks by Panini UK. One of these days I really have to make a post on them. But you can see that all kind of things start right here.

 
And they also end like this post right here since it´s again time to wrap things up. I wanted to include much more links but I guess I´ll have to put them into another post Tomorrow or whenever I can do a new post this weekend. Which is highly unlikely since I have just so much stuff to do like catching up on Doctor Who new and old. Because my brother doesn´t seem so interested in New Who at the moment I´m two episodes behind and I just finished watching the Sylvester McCoy episodes of Classic Who.

I wanted to start with the reconstructed episodes Yesterday ( Marco Polo is the first one of those stories ) but the picture frame is just too tiny to watch it on the television. So I´ll have to watch it on the laptop instead.

Now this is the point where I usually put up the links that helped me make this post but since this is a link post anyway I want to include a few more posts of interest from DIVERSIONS OF THE GROOVY KIND since we started this post with them. Another Marvel series that will never be reprinted is ROM, SPACEKNIGHT so it´s brilliant that issue 3 can now be read here .

You can also revel in the black and white adventures of Morbius the Living Vampire from Marvel´s Vampire Tales 1 and 2 , Marvel Two - In - One 34 features a team up with The Thing and Nighthawk that asks the question what makes a monster and this collection of splash pages from 35 years ago illustrates the point how much ass Marvel kicked in the Bronze Age.

And for Terry Hooper and all other fans of the old ATLAS COMICS ( and I´m not talking about old Marvel comics ) here´s TARANTULA 1 and 2 .

I don´t know what my next post will be about but I thought it´s about time I started on the big Yaya Han post since I can probably not fit it into one single post. And what would be better for the 500th post ? I just have to be careful to keep it Safe for Work. Anyway, it seems that the blog is going well since I have finally passed the one million views mark and the daily view rate has also been going up :  3.014 last Saturday, 3.149 this Tuesday and 3.359 last Sunday. Now this may be because I worked on some posts or because my readership has gone up. In any case I want to thank my loyal readers and I´m eager to see what post 500 will be about.

My last post ended with Fredl Fesl, one of Germany´s best known entertainers ( at least for my generation ) so I want to continue the kabaret theme with the promised Insterburg & Co video. It´s a mix of different shows but the thing you can clearly see is the difference between a musician and an artist : a musician dominates one instrument or more while for a true artist everything can be used as an instrument.



And for more of Germany´s finest entertainment here´s Antonia aus Tirol who´s famous for her big .... talents and her trademark bouncing action.



And to close things out with something comic related here´s a scary fan film called SPAWN : THE RECALL which you should not watch after dark.



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