Saturday, August 25, 2018

It´s Sword and Sorcery Saturday with Conan

I hadn´t planned to do another post so quick after the last one but while putting the finishing touches - and probably one too many links - on this year´s Jim Aparo birthday post I came upon the original art pages for an entire CONAN issue by Barry Windsor Smith. And since I didn´t get to do a post for his birthday this year and because usually I follow up a DC post - like say Jim Aparo on THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD - with a Marvel post - like Barry Windsor Smith on CONAN - and because you can´t put these things on the blog quick enough here´s some cimmerian coolness for your eyes.


Now so far there have been a few posts about Marvel´s excellent CONAN, THE BARBARIAN series on TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN but not about Barry Windsor Smith. Longtime readers know what a huge fan I am of John Buscema´s rendition of the character and while his version became the definite one for me ( I know, blasphemy ) I read my share of Barry Windsor Smith´s Conan - probably in the form of those Condor pocket books who fell apart after the first few readings. At least in the beginnings. So while Barry Windsor Smith did not draw my favorite Conan I can appreciate his work and there are a few issues that are still my favorites, among them the issue where Conan meets Michael J. Moorcock´s Elric from Melnibone. Another of my favorite fantasy characters. Some years ago - before Dark Horse started with reprinting the recolored issues of CONAN - and back issues were hard to come by in good quality if you didn´t have a gazillion bucks to spend I bought some of the spanish reprint issues and all of them were by John Buscema EXCEPT the two issues with the Elric crossover.


With all the mind blowing work Barry Windsor Smith did in his later career someone often forgets how brilliant his early work already was so let´s take a sip of sweet wine with Conan in one of the many seedy bars in shadizar but beware, they do not call the town " the wicked " for nothing.


As a bonus here is the letters page from CONAN 6 and an article about Roy The Boy Thomas from the pages of DIE RUHMREICHEN RÄCHER 34, the german edition of THE MIGHTY AVENGERS from the Williams Verlag.


Whenever I have to look for color pages of comics I come across THE PENCIL INK BLOG who specializes in classic comic artists so it´s no surprise that I found posts about Conan issue 3 , issue 5 , issue 6 , issue 8 , issue 14 , issue 15 , issue 16 , issue 19 , issue 23 and issue 24 there which all have art by Barry Windsor Smith. I am sure they cover all of his issues but I am only posting those I came across while doing the research for this post.

Speaking of which, THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES has a post on Barry Windsor Smith´s Ka - Zar issues with some rare original art pages to boot.

As we have already had a few posts on this day I have covered some of Today´s celebrity birthdays before so I am only including some where I have something new to add or which I haven´t covered before. I want to start with Tim Burton´s 60th anniversary and Batman Returns, the Batman movie that was criminally underrated. In my opinion it is the better movie out of Tim Burton´s Batman films : Danny De Vito plays the most horrific Penguin of all time, no actress has surpassed Michelle Pfeiffer´s Catwoman ( although I liked Halle Berry´s costume ) and Christopher Walken is in it.



When Bob Kane created Batman one of his inspirations was The Shadow so it is kind of fitting that Mike Kaluta turns 71 on this day since he has done iconic work not only on the famous pulp caracter but also on the Batman.


So far I have only done a short art showcase post in 2016 but I hope I can write something more extensive once I have the proper material.

Tom Skerritt celebrates his 85th birthday and you may have seen him in one of his guest appearances on dozens of tv shows including Kolchak, The Night Stalker or the many movies he starred in like Alien, The Dead Zone, Top Gun, Poltergeist III or The Rookie. He also played the main character Sheriff Jim Brock in Picket Fences which is still very expensive mainly because of the episode in which Lauren Holly sports a black bikini.


And while Lauren has had other iconic roles in NCIS, Dumb & Dumber or Down Periscope when you are looking for animated GIFs of her the bikini ones from Picket Fences are predominant since her body was at its prime.

The kid in episode 14 of season 1 called Bad Moon Rising is experiencing his first wet sex dreams and his chosen subject is sheriff depute Officer Maxine Stewart who appears in lingerie, said black bikini and hockey gear.


 Now on one side you wonder why he picked the town´s sheriff depute as the object of his sex dreams ( which oddly doesn´t involve handcuffs, ah, he´s probably still too young for the kinky stuff ) since that may lead to trouble once she finds out ( she does use a gun in her job ). On the other side there seems to be an episode where she posed nude for a magazine ( I don´t think they show the actual shooting )  which isn´t too far fetched keeping in mind that Lauren Holly had an incredible hardbody back then.


Most of the males in town were probably fantasizing about giving her a full cavity search and the number of juvenile delinquents shot up since all horny teenagers hoped to get strip searched by Maxine. With that in mind her three ( !!! ) sex dream sequences make more sense and surely Lauren Holly made entire generations of teenagers reach puberty ahead of time.


Now with these cult sirens I like to include animated GIFs as well as videos because the videos tend to vanish after a while. But this time I didn´t even find the full bikini scene on YouTube and had to go elsewhere. So you can at least watch this scene but there are two more hot scenes with Lauren Holly in that episode which I haven´t been able to find anywhere.


If somebody out there has seen them on YouTube or the likes please let me know and the only alternative is to cough up 23 bucks for season one.

But don´t despair, for all the poor wretches like me there is still the 2010 drama The Final Storm where Holly shows she still has a banging body.


After this long tangent you probably expected a video with Lauren Holly but at the moment I haven´t any with her ( and I don´t have the time to look since this post should already be finished and I should be working on my comic ) plus I can´t pass up an opportunity to post another episode from Kolchak or Der Nachtjäger how it apparently was called in Germany. I didn´t know they showed the series here. There are quite a few german episodes on YouTube but of course I picked the one with Tom Skerritt.



This was actually the first video that I knew was going to be in this post. If you haven´t gotten the trade yet - and it should not be that expensive in good comic shops - get the True Believers issue. It only costs 1 Dollar.



With the obligatory music video I didn´t have to think twice about which to include since I literally came across this video while writing the post.



Finding the appropriate cartoon video for the posts can be a challenge - especially since I have already posted all the videos I could find from the Conan cartoon shows - since I try not to have too many videos of just people talking which can become pretty old pretty fast. To keep the balance I like to include longer ones so here is one that I think not too many people are familiar with, the russian version of The Jungle Book.



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


The weed of crime bears bitter fruit.

No comments: