Unexpected Thorsday with Rich Buckler !

Like I mentioned in Yesterday´s WEBSLINGING WEDNESDAY post I know that technically speaking it is way past Thursday but there is nothing else important to do Today so since I have already prepared all the necessary pictures I might as well go ahead and do the post, late as it may be now.

The truth is I felt a bit bad that I didn´t do a post about Rich Buckler´s Marvel work on his birthday but it´s only possible for me to do 2 posts on one day under special circumstances so I had to leave it for another day.

But when I was just about to prepare the first part of Erik Larsen´s THOR issues for Marvel I thought : " Why not postpone it for another week and do a post with one of Rich Buckler´s THOR issues instead ? It´s not going to make that much of a difference to the Erik Larsen posts and I get to pay homage to Rich Buckler´s THOR issues. " Okay, as I mentioned in my birthday post on him Rich appears in a lot of series as he had the role of fireman at Marvel, where he would be called in when a regular artist was leaving a book and they did not have a replacement yet or they needed somebody to fill in for a few issues to give the regular artist time to catch up. I don´t know which was the case in THOR but the issues he did were 227 to 230. I picked issue 228 for this post because you have Hercules and Firelord in it but mainly because of a fantastic splash page with Galaktus. Only after I had already selected all the pages I found out that Rich Buckler was not the only artist in this issue, he had some help from Arvell Jones and Keith Pollard ( who did a long stint on THOR later on that includes an adaption of the Nibelungen tale and the reason why Thor is bound to the planet Earth - which a lot of subsequent writers just outright ignored ). 

That was a big dilemma since it would mean making a post about Rich Buckler´s THOR issues with an issue that also has other artists involved.

And the idea here was to showcase Rich Buckler. So I went over the other issues again but still I like issue 228 the best. So I decided to stick to my initial decision and in a way isn´t that the best way to show how things were done at Marvel ? If push came to shove they just brought in more artists to finish the issue on time. I wonder when that concept got lost and it became acceptable for issues to be up to one year late as long as a certain artist did it ? I´m not saying it became acceptable as long as the art was good because in some cases the art wasn´t even that good to begin with. In any case, before we get to the actual issue I guess I have to say something about the swiping Rich Buckler has been accused of. Which for me is not so much of an issue. Because all artists do it in some way if you think about it, the only difference is to which extent. Sometimes it even happens involuntarily and one of the sections of this blog is the DEJA VUE add ons because I´m a big fan of cover homages - which in a way could also be seen as swiping. I think the difference between swiping and an homage is the intention behind it and how good you can pull it off.

As for using swiping in regular comic work I don´t remember who said it, I think it was one of the comic veterans and his take on this was that when he was making comics you had to be fast if you wanted to earn enough money to eat. So if you could use a pose somebody else drew you did it, if you could use a panel somebody else drew you did it and if you could use an entire page all the better. I guess it´s all a question of making comics as a job versus making comics as art. There is the question of intellectual property involved - of course - but I guess in the old days that was not so important because it was all work for hire anyway so the ultimate owner of it was the publishing company. Okay, what´s my point in this ? I guess that I don´t care so much about the fact if Rich Buckler swiped from other artists as long as he manages to entertain me. Also bear in mind that he often came in at the eleventh hour so he might not have had the luxury to work on pages for days. With that said we are really coming to THOR 228.

Okay, I swear I had no hand in this but our first birthday is Tom Hiddleston who turns 36 and is of course best known for playing Loki in the Thor and Avengers movies. He also stars in the new Kong : Skull Island movie with Samuel L. Jackson. Originally I wanted to post the episode of The Graham Norton Show with him and Robert De Niro since so far I only posted a short clip from that show but here I have Tom together with his co - star.



Judith Light celebrates her 68 birthday and everybody knows her as Tony Danza´s boss Angela Bower from Who´s The Boss ? where Alyssa Milano grew up - very nicely - in front of the whole world. As coincidence would have it both of them were on episodes of Spin City but not together. And Alyssa Milano was in more than one episode as far as I know. I did a re - post of Alyssa Milano´s cult siren entry on her birthday last December which you might want to check out ( I also did another post with Alyssa´s best outfits from Charmed since I couldn´t fit it all into one post ). 

Don´t worry we also have comic related birthdays firstly with Danny Bulanadi who turns 71. He also is a penciler but I mostly know him from when he inked Captain America right before Steve Rogers had to give up the uniform and become just the Captain while Johnny Walker ... or was it Jack Daniels ... or Jim Beam ? Somebody at Marvel must have had writers block and used his lunch for these secret identities. Anyway, that guy became the new Captain America who used to be the Superpatriot and later became the U.S. Agent. He even inherited Cap´s black costume. And I think he appears in a story in the Tombstone trade I ordered where he is ordered by a government goon to team up with Tarantula against Spidey.

Even with all the trouble Steve Rogers had and all the changes you still knew what was what while nowadays you just can´t keep up. Steve is Captain America. No. He´s dead and Bucky is now Captain America. No, he´s back. No, he´s old and Sam Wilson is now Captain America. No, he´s young, he´s back as Captain America but he´s Hydra. Is there any editorial direction in all of this ? Forget it. I´m only joking. We all know that there hasn´t been a real editor at Marvel for more than a decade now. Okay, back to Danny Bulanadi, you can expect to see much more of his work on this blog because he also inked a hefty chunk of the epic Fantastic Four run by Tom DeFalco and Paul Ryan and here is the link for his website .

Our second comic related birthday is the first in our Dearly Departed section and it´s none other than the great Frank Frazetta. Not only did he produce some of the best comics, his art inspired and keeps inspiring generations of creators in the field of comics, pop culture and beyond. 

Since I already posted the Fire And Ice cartoon elsewhere I was looking for clips where you could see him work or an interview but all I found were videos about a documentary that were only fakes to get you to download it elsewhere. So here is one of the few good videos with Frazetta art.



Our last birthday shoutout to the great beyond goes out to Heinz Drache who I remember very well growing up since he was the most in vogue on screen cop of post war Germany. His first movie role was the charismatic Inspector Yates in Francis Durbridge´s miniseries Das Halstuch in 1962 which hit an impressive 80 percent in tv ratings. It was just one of the many Straßenfeger ( street sweepers ) Heinz Drache appeared in, and somebody came up with that name because when they aired everybody was in front of a tv screen and the streets were completely empty as if somebody had swept them with a big broom. He continued in the same vein with a plethora of Edgar Wallace movies - one of them was even called The Avenger - and beside his face his voice was also well known since he did the german voice for actors like Sean Connery, Christopher Lee, Kirk Douglas or Richard Widmark. Oliver Kalkofe tried to ruin the Edgar Wallace movies for germans with his Der Wixxer movies but for people from my generation he is much too late since Otto Waalkes did it much better in his Die Otto Show more than twenty years earlier. Burn.



As there are no music related birthdays Today I decided to post another react video since I already wanted to post this a week ago plus I have had various requests for the video ever since I posted that GIF of Sydney.

Another reason for finally putting this video on the blog is that the incredibly hot Brooklin is also in it who looks even nicer than Sydney.

As for the music selection it is only natural that there are some songs people out there might know while our torrid teens never heard of them and it didn´t surprise me that everybody recognized the Eminem song right from the start while nobody knew the Jennifer Lopez tune. It are always the artists that generate the most media scandals who are best known while being a good artist / performer is not as headline prone.



Speaking about things teens of Today might not know as I recently learned there was cartoon series called Return To The Planet Of The Apesin 1975.



So far I have only found the first english episode as a complete episode ( the rest are cut up ) but you can watch the following twelve episodes in spanish although the storyline ends rather abruptly and is not resolved.



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I can´t help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man.