Now I am saying return to this topic and longtime readers may remember my interrupted series of posts back in 2008 ( part 1 / part 2 / a tangent about Batman´s utility belt / part 3.5 / another tangent about Deadman, Christmas issues and the new BRAVE AND THE BOLT cartoon show ) when Planeta DeAgostini published the entire Jim Aparo run in five new black and white pocket books long before DC started reprinting the issues in the SHOWCASE PRESENTS or LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT - JIM APARO.
I also posted the entire issue 173 of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD, including in house ads, the letters page and an eight pages NEMESIS back up story.
That´s one thing I noticed while going through the issues of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD in preparation for this post. There are a lot of back up stories, sometimes up to three or four in some issues. I guess back then DC Comics really cared about giving the customers their money´s worth.
As I said at the beginning this post includes some of my best original Jim Aparo art from THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD but like always I found some new pieces while doing the research for the accompanying color pages so it is not my initial selection. As always I was reliant on availability where original art was concerned and I tried to pick the best quality possible.
However content takes priority over quality so a page with something interesting going on in lower quality is chosen over a page that might have a much better quality but there is nothing interesting to see. Also I did pick some of my personal favorite guest stars like my favorite version of Supergirl, the one in the shirt with the puffy sleeves and the hot pants.
God, I miss her. What I wouldn´t give to see that costume on the CW.
Other super heroes who grace this post are Aquaman who is in two issues ( a series where Jim Aparo did an iconic run and I could have easily done a solo post about that but let´s see what we can come up with next year ), the Spectre ( another hero where Jim Aparo did some groundbreaking issues and you can check out the complete original art from ADVENTURE COMICS 431 in this post ), Green Lantern, Green Arrow, the Metal Men, the Creeper ( who for some strange reason was called Tarzino in Germany ), the Joker, the Penguin, Superman AND Superboy and last but not least the Teen Titans posing as a gang of street tough juvenile delinquents.
Which is one of the reasons why I still love those stories. Yes, a big part of that is nostalgia because those are the stories I read as a kid but it´s not that bad nostalgia where you return as an adult and think " God, those stories are awful and the art is terrible. How could I ever read this dreck ? " but more the good kind of nostalgia where you re - read them from a grown up perspective and go " Man, those were some great stories and the art is on a different level. Sigh ! Why can´t they make comic books like this anymore ? " In these stories literally everything could and did happen and this was my Batman. Not the unbeatable Grant Morrison Bat - God, not the grim and gritty driven inhuman Bat - Demon, no, a human Batman. Who could be surprised by thugs ( a lot of them sneak up on him ), was fallible and needed the help of his friends to solve some cases, who could have the occassional error in judgement, who could be sad but also ridicule his opponents and have a good laugh at their expense. In short : Jim Aparo´s Batman with the pointy bat ears and the yellow bat symbol.
Anyway, here are the pages I selected and I hope DC Comics gets its butt in gear and manages to publish the fourth volume of LEGENDS OF THE DARK KNIGHT - JIM APARO. I don´t think I have done a standalone post about the third volume but I have mentioned in a few posts why I think this is the worst and at the same time the best volume. I prefer Jim Aparo´s later work on this series to the issues he started out on which is also reflected in my selection for this post. But now without any further ado I give the mike to the maestro himself. Happy Jim Aparo Day, folks !
It´s the triumphant return of the link section with a few choice posts I have been saving for my next Jim Aparo post. One thing you may know is that starting in The Brave And The Bold 177 Jim Aparo hid little hints in the backgrounds to who the guest star of the next issues was and I plan to write a post about it somewhere along the way but you can find some of them on THE DORK REVIEW ( you can also find one of these clues in two of the pages in this post ) and other websites. I don´t know if I have already done my ranking of the three volumes of DC´s Jim Aparo Batman reprints ( am I the only one whose second volume was badly printed in half of the stories ? ) but there is a review of the first volume of Legends Of The Dark Knight - Jim Aparo by Kris Shaw on JUNK FOOD FOR THOUGHT.
For more Jim Aparo goodness my spanish readers can find an overview of Classicos DC : The Brave And The Bold on EL BLOG DEL COMIC CLUB DE GUAYAQUILwhich were the topic of some of my first Jim Aparo posts ( links can be found in the text above ), BRONZE AGE BABIES presents The Brave And The Bold 120 where Batman and Kamandi meet for the first time ( they cross paths again in another issue ) and you can read both of Supergirl´s guest appearances on The Brave And The Bold in issues 147 and 160 on SUPERGIRL : THE MAIDEN OF MIGHT. On a somewhat Jim Aparo related note the always reliable guys from THE PENCIL INK BLOG have the cover from The Brave And The Bold 102 by Neal Adams as well as one interior page - Neal helped Jim out on a few of the pages to finish the issue - and they also have some Neal Adams art from Teen Titans 21 .
In the obligatory missed birthday section we first have a callback to an earlier post because I already mentioned Bob McLeod whose birthday was on August the 10th. Well, as usual I found a post about him on DIVERSIONS OF THE GROOVY KIND and I don´t want to wait until his next birthday or whenever I might mention him next. But let´s get on to the birthdays I missed since my last post but which I have already covered previously.
On August the 21st french cult siren ( quite literally since she has a captivating singing voice ) Alizée celebrated her 34th birthday and I already made a post with her best animated GIFs, videos and some info.
At the moment I have nothing new to add so unless I happen upon some new high quality Alizée GIFs don´t hold your breath for another re - post. And because an animated GIF - as good as it may be - can never give you the same experience as seeing the live version here is Alizée performing Jén Ai Marre or like they said on spanish tv el baile del pescadito or the fish dance in english. For a long time I didn´t know what they mean but the main focus of her performance is her butt which she wiggles very expertly and there is a small red fish right above her right butt cheek.
It´s back to comics on August the 22nd which is the anniversary of Ray Bradbury´s birth and while I haven´t done a proper solo post about him I posted The Black Ferris from The Haunt Of Fear 18 in this Jack Davis EC Comics double feature . They adapted a few of his stories in comic form.
Longtime readers of the blog know that I always paid attention to the inkers but while I think that a good inker can make or break a comic ( which is one of the reasons why I don´t like comics that take the art directly from the pencils or are inked digitally ) I haven´t folders for any of them in my blog art archive except for Joe Sinnott. Which is the reason why Alfredo Alcala and Terry Austin had to share a post in 2016 since they both were born on August the 23rd. While Alfredo was an accomplished artist in his own rights - who could ever forget his famous Masters Of The Universe mini comics ? - he is best known to comic readers as the inker on such titles like The Savage Sword Of Conan and he also inked a lot of the Batman issues during Gene Colan´s run and many Bat - books in the 1980s.
Inker Terry Austin also has worked with a plethora of talented artists like Marshall Rogers on a very beloved run on Doctor Strange or John Byrne on the 1980s revamp of Superman or his iconic run on Uncanny X - Men with Chris Claremont so you can at least find his work on the plethora of posts I made about that era in X - Men history and there is still more to come.
As this is not the first Jim Aparo post on this date we also have a few familiar faces - and where the ladies are concerned also other parts of the female anatomy - in Todays celebrity birthday list starting with the often mentioned Alex O´Loughlin who turns 42. He is of course best known as Commander Steve McGarret on Hawaii Five O where he starred alongside korean knockout Grace Park. She also played the toaster every guy would love to use for breakfast in bed on the new Battlestar Galactica tv series.
One thing I never understood on Battlestar Galactica was why the cylons fought such a long war with the humans when they could have just mass produced such hot sexbombs like Grace Park and Tricia Helfer and drown humanity with them. In a few weeks they would have made all men their obedient sex slaves and they could have taken over without casualties.
At the moment my daily schedule changes constantly but for the past three weeks I have started watching Hawaii Five - O again after I learned that neither Grace Park nor Daniel Dae Kim will be on the new seasons.
Of course now that I have a daily routine around that show they hanged the schedule and instead of being on after MacGyver they showed two new episodes from MacGyver followed by Seal Team and while I am a big fan of David Boreananz from such shows like Buffy, Angel or Bones it meant that I didn´t get to see the latest episode of Hawaii Five O before midnight. And now that I have adjusted to that they trow the newest season of Celebrity Big Brother into the mix so you don´t know what is on when. Thankfully I started working on my comic while watching those shows ( otherwise I never finish ) so it doesn´t have such a big impact.
Another thing that detracts from my enjoyment is that I know Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park will leave the show but because I do not want to get spoilered I haven´t looked up how they are written out. Don´t tell me.
So every time I see one of them I wonder if that is the episode in which they will kick the bucket or at least ride into the sunset never to be seen. Or in the case of Grace Park wiggle her perfect whatsit into the sunset.
I have to use every opportunity to mention Leslie Easterbrook on the blog so I have to include Steve Guttenberg´s 60th birthday. He is best known to Today´s audience for playing corrupt town mayor Woody Goodman on Veronica Mars with bikini cult siren Charisma Carpenter who turned 48 on the 23rd of July. Charisma had her big break as Cordelia Chase on Buffy and the spin off Angel although Today´s kids probably only know her from her recurring role on Veronica Mars which means they missed a whole lot of scorching bikini scenes from the shows with Charisma´s huge 34D boobs.
One of these days I´ll have to get the first season of Veronica Mars to find out how it all started since I came in at the tailend of that season - as usual. Besides Veronica Mars Charisma Carpenter was also in episode 11 of season 5 of Burn Notice where she showed she still delivers the goods .
Coming back to Steve Guttenberg, while he has starred in a plethora of comedies in the 80s and 90s for people from my generation he is Officer Mahoney in the Police Academy movies ( link for Joel Stice´s 10 things you might not know about Police Academy on it´s 30th anniversary ).
After the second part the films became worse with every sequel but were still worth watching for some hot sexbombs like real life Power Girl Leslie Easterbrook who had the most famous scene in Police Academy 4 - Citizens on Patrol in which she emerges from a pool in a wet t - shirt .
She also has a spin - off post that is re - posted most years that used to be in one post together with Janet Jones Gretzky who starred alongside her in Police Academy 5 and Becky Mullen but I had to put it in three separate post because I upgraded it with a lot of animated GIFs. I also wanted to do a new version of Leslie´s post as well as Becky Mullen´s repost from 2016 .
The post also included 80s cult siren Monique Sluyter and the Tutti Frutti girls but that part got too long and I had to give it a post of its own which I re - posted in 2016 in a new and better version . She was a candidate from my JLA movie casting series - as Fire a.k.a. Beatriz da Costa in the Andy Sidaris Special - and before getting her solo post she was regularly in all the annual re - posts of italian mega soccer MILF Simona Ventura .
Besides appearing as Sally, the farmer´s daughter on the first season of GORGEOUS LADIES OF WRESTLING and various guest appearances on every major tv show ( of which her most memorable is an episode of Married with Children opposite Pamela Anderson - see GIF below ) Becky starred in various erotic midnight movies including SINFUL INTRIGUE. With all that said german audiences know her best from taking her clothes off on TUTTI FRUTTI . Her biggest contribution to american culture however is HARD HUNTED and there are two other actresses from Andy Sidaris movies who appeared on TUTTI FRUTTI, Sandra Wild and Carolyn Liu. I wrote more on this in my special Andy Sidaris edition of Casting the JLA movie post .
Andy 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, Dona Speir , Pandora Peaks, Julie Strain , Shae Marks, Samantha Phillips and Julie K. Smith to name just a few of them.
For those who haven´t read any of my previous Andy Sidaris posts besides those I already mentioned there is the Ava Cadell solo post , the Dona Speir post ( with reposts in 2017 and this year ) and a Sybil Danning post .
It´s not such a big leap from cult director Andy Sidaris who worked mostly with playmates to the king of big breast movies, Russ Meyer as one of his greatest muses Raven De La Croix - the big star of UP ! ( which in Germany is called Drüber, Drunter und Drauf which means Over It, Under It And On Top Of It. I guess this was meant in relation to the sexual positions the actors took throughout the movie ) is celebrating her 71st birthday Today.
Meyer’s 1976 comedy thriller UP ! was was co - written by Roger Ebert and contains Nazis, lesbianism, rape, buggery, a backwoods sheriff, piranha, kinky sex - and that’s just the first 10 minutes ! The movie offers a lot of very graphic sex scenes which are highly erotic, well photographed and stunningly edited. The female cast members all engage with the outdoor, sunny California countryside, but under a spell of kinetic blankness like sex machines gone wild especially Janet Wood who not only has a name made for porn movies if I ever heard one but also one of the best scenes with her on - screen partner Robert McLane who was a homosexual in real life.
I have read that homosexual actors are often used in straight porn movies because they can pound a woman for hours without risking to climax but Janet Wood doesn´t look like a woman who cares if her sex partner will squirt as long as she can milk him dry. So either she rode him like a woman possessed because she could vent all her pent up sexual frustration or she worked herself into a frenzy trying to put him on the straight path again.
In any case with a name like Janet Wood she was predestined for explicit sex scenes and her nymphomaniac urges got the better of Janet because she has never acknowledged her nude work in this film over the decades.
Now besides possibly being the first Russ Meyer movie I saw in a cinema another reasons why it´s my favorite - besides the bevy of hot sexbombs like Kitten Natividad or Marianne Marks in the cast - is the lead actress.
The gorgeous Raven De La Croix with an exotic name and a body which can only be a true gift from the gods, stars as Margo Winchester, one of Meyer’s strongest female characters. Constantly victimized by most men, yet refusing to play the victim, spitting out her lines in a Mae West - type drawl, Raven De La Croix and her bountiful figure totally steal the movie.
Totally nude and usually running around outdoors for most of the film, De La Croix is incredibly sexy and funny. She had done lots of modeling by 1976 and appeared in UP! after coming to terms with the fact that she had to perform nude scenes and graphic sex scenes. According to De La Croix, she really went all out for this film, destroying her feet while running through the desert, almost sacrificing her life during the drowning / rape scene, and unknowingly being body doubled during some of the more questionable sex scenes ( I wonder where they found that body double ).
She looks like a real life Wonder Woman and it´s a shame there never was a Bronze Age Wonder Woman movie with Raven. She practically played the role of busty amazonian princess in The Lost Empire by Jim Wynorsky who might be the illegitimate love child of Russ Meyer and the aforementioned Andy Sidaris. He celebrated his 68th birthday on August the 14th and I may be forgiven for not mentioning him earlier but I was too busy with finishing four Halle Berry birthday posts ( post 1 / post 2 / post 3 / bonus round ) that day. Among Jim Wynorski´s cineastic oeuvre are such classics like Dinosaur Island, Not Of This Earth with Traci Lords and The Lost Empire with Raven De La Croix. I wrote a bit more about the last one ( and posted two videos ) in my first Justice League Casting Alternates .
As a last word on Russ Meyer I want to mention my entries into the Boob Hall of Fame for Haji and Tura Satana which I re - posted in 2016 which is mostly about Faster Pussycat ! Kill ! Kill ! ( The Devil Women of Tittfield in german ) although it touches on her other movies and has her full bio.
Someone once accused me of using this section to put my favorite pop culture related stuff on the internet and I can only say guilty as charged.
In fact that´s the whole purpose of this blog - and entertain my readers.
And since I know that there are a lot of Masters Of The Universe fans out there here is an animation based on the art of the mini comics that came with each action figure ( sadly it´s not by Alfredo Alcala, that would have been too cool ) and as I understand it these videos are very hard to find.
What I try to do with this section is include a little something something for everyone so for my german readers - if I still have any left - here is another great video by Craydon about his first encounters with Batman courtesy of one of my favorite childhood comics : Batman Superband 3 which includes Batmurderer by Len Wein, Jim Aparo and Ernie Chan.
The story still holds up - not to mention the art by Jim Aparo - and for me you get the quintessential Batman in this storyline. I know I keep saying this but there are also plans for a special Batmurderer post since I have found many of the original art pages from this iconic Batman adventure.
From the iconic we come back to personal taste and regular readers of the blog have probably noticed that I like the hidden gems that are shunned by the general public and I sometimes prefer a bad but entertaining movie especially when it has some hot babes strutting their stuff. I don´t know if Creepshow ever gained much critical or public acclaim but I like it ( at least the first one, the second one was not as good and they tried to compensate that with goryness and the third one was the worst from that series ) and there seems to be a kind of renaissance of the movie since there are a lot of videos about it on YouTube which are going to pop up in my next posts. I thought I had already written at length about the movie but apart from one mention I could not find much about it on the blog so I guess my memory played tricks on me again. In any case, seeing as this post has already turned into another marathon I will try to keep things short but even if you don´t want to ever watch the movie check out the comic adaption which is by Bernie Wrightson for Pete´s sake !
You can see some pages on COMIC IS ART which has a post in homage to George Romero and you can read the complete story Father´s Day - which is the first story of the movie - on SECRET SANCTUM OF CAPTAIN VIDEO .
Aside from Hal Holbrook, Fritz Weaver, E. G. Marshall, Ed Harris, Leslie Nielsen and Ed Harris the movie also features cult siren Adrienne Barbeau who has been in such cult movies like John Carpenter´s Escape From New York and The Fog and the first Swamp Thing movie which I prefer to the second one. I know that there are people who like the second one better because of the campy atmosphere and the better special effects but give me Adrienne Barbeau over Heather Locklear any day. Granted, they had Penthouse Pet of the Month Monique Gabrielle in the second one who catapulted herself into the top ranks of cult sirens with her performance in Emanuelle 5 but they didn´t give her much to do. Would it have hurt so much to have a scene where the two annoying boys we have to stand the whole movie peek at her naked ? Or at least let her wander around in her underwear or a bikini. What a blatant misuse of grade - a babe material.
Speaking of which, while Adrienne Barbeau appears in Creepshow her performance is sadly not as sexy as in Cannonball Run where she played one of the Lamborghini Babes and her main function was to show her deep cleavage as often as possible. Now that director knows his job.
Since I am not going into detail about Creepshow here is a video that tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the movie and then some.
With Craydon´s video we already have one about a Batman comic by Jim Aparo but I also wanted to include one where you see a bit more of his art so here is a team up with one of my favorite supernatural DC characters.
In Second Chance For Deadman we see Batman using a gun, or a rifle to be more precise but like it was so often in the Bronze Age it was one of the cases where the writer fools the reader because the rifle was only firing blanks so there was never any danger of Batman actually killing anyone.
Somehow it is kind of cheesy but on the other side it is refreshing to remember a time when life was so valuable to the Dark Knight that even unwillingly harming a criminal was totally out of the question for him.
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Next time Skeletor does something wrong, we´ll send him to your room.
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