Now any fan of the Bronze Age is familiar with his name since he worked for both Marvel and DC during that period and among the many books he inked for DC is THE LEGION OF SUPER - HEROES. What´s even more strange is that the main reason why I wanted to do this post is that my love for the Legion of Super - Heroes has been reignited thanks to the recently released second volume of SUPERBOY AND THE LEGION OF SUPER - HEROES hardcover and a lot of the issues collected there are inked by Dave Hunt.
But not all art will be by Dave Hunt since as I said, I didn´t plan to make a special post for him. All I wanted to do was a special post on my birthday as kind of a little present for myself and maybe also my readers. At first I thought about posting the best black and white original art pages I have currently on the laptop that I don´t need for certain posts. Which I still may do at some point. But then I though about what was the last comic that really made me excited and that was beyond any doubt the Legion hardcover. The stories in this volume go - as is always the case with the Legion - into the far future but at the same time way back to my earliest childhood memories since I read a lot of them for the first time in the issues of SUPERBOY published by Ehapa. So you will see some german covers here but I think this might be interesting for my readers abroad.
I hope they continue with reprinting this period of the Legion because one of my favorite story lines is coming up. The second volume ends with a two part story that begins in SUPERBOY AND THE LEGION OF SUPER - HEROES 258 and ends in LEGION OF SUPER - HEROES 259 which was the first issue of the Legion´s own book. Up until this point they were always guest starring in other books and it may be a bit confusing that back then DC decided to continue the numbering from the Superboy title instead of re - starting with a new number 1 issue. Don´t worry though, there are enough number 1s with the Legion through all of their various volumes over the years and this way all the comic chique persons who are jumping on the bandwagon because comics are suddenly cool miss this Legion first.
Okay, you might ask yourself what this ominous story line for which I have hunted my whole comic collecting life may be ( okay, not really my whole comic collecting life but a very long part from when my mother threw out all my comics and inadvertently started my obsession with comics ) and it´s one you wont find on any best of lists. Looking back I am not sure if it holds up well but I remember that when what I fondly call THE REFLECTO SAGA came out I was very invested in the story and there were a few neat surprises and twist at every turn. Now I won´t go into more detail than that because I don´t want to spoiler myself. I am still hoping this will be in the next Legion volume and I hope to write a post about the story then.
As usual lately this post is about old comics but it is also about something that is trending - as the kids say - right now thanks to the appearance of various members of the Legion on the last season of the SUPERGIRL tv show and all the rumors about a possible Legion spin - off series. I am not up to date how near we are to getting this but I feel that with all the build up they have given us so far it would be stupid not to cash in on this opportunity. On the other side there are enough stupid people working on DC related super hero properties as the latest SHAZAM trailer showed. In any case, for this post I have selected the best of the best of Legion material I currently have so if there are any people out there who have doubts about if they should get involved with this - because you always hear these rumors that it is so difficult to get into the Legion universe - here are dozens of reasons why you should give the Legion a chance.
One last thing before we start, because finding the colored pages for the original art took quite some research I not only have finally some links to add on top of that I also found a lot of original Legion art from Alan Davis so there might be an all Alan Davis Legion art post in the not so distant future. But now let´s travel exactly one thousand years into the future !
Most of our links Today are from THE PENCIL INK BLOG which offers the usual cover and one page of interior art from Superboy 250 and Superboy 251 by master Jim Starlin and I especially wanted to include the links for Legion of Super - Heroes 272 and Legion of Super - Heroes 274 because with all the posts about the great late Steve Ditko people might get the impression that he only worked on Spider - Man and Doctor Strange when he did so much more. Also check out DC Comics Presents 54 with a team up of The Batman and Green Arrow masterfully rendered by Don Newton.
One of the best known Legion scribes is Paul Levitz who also wrote the giant - sized 75 Years Of DC Comics : The Art Of Modern Myth - Making. The book has been reissued in smaller, more affordable - and also more extensive - chapters with The Golden Age Of DC Comics, The Silver Age Of DC Comics and The Bronze Age Of DC Comics. The plan was to continue but so far the next book has not been announced yet. I was planning to save this interview on COMIC BOOK RESOURCES for a special post but since I have no idea when the next book will come out or when I will have the opportunity to write said post I am including it here and there is also an interesting review about the first two volumes by Phil Wheat on NERDLY .
Before we come to Today´s celebrity birthday / pop culture section there is something I want to do which I haven´t done in a long time. Because most comic book bargains are over before I get to write something about it but this time there are still a few items left. So without further ado here is some comic pimping exclusively - sorry - for my german readers.
This is something you wont find in amazon´s regular bargain books section and I would have missed it too if I hadn´t been looking for some birthday presents for my younger brother. I´m talking about the Just Imagine Stan Lee Creating The DC Universe omnibus hardcover. Granted it is not one of those quintessential books that has to be in every comic collection and the question remains if such projects that are done very much after the fact can really succeed. Aside from taking a trip with a time machine and changing the past ( which we learned in The Flash is something you should never ever do ) you can´t really know what Stan Lee would have done if he had to create the DC universe and you know that there was at least a subconscious effort to stray as far as possible from the original concepts.
On the other side you have an entertaining story illustrated by a literal Who´s Who of comic book artists and in some cases like John Buscema or Joe Kubert it was one of their last projects. And while this is not the best work of their career it´s also not their worst and besides the main stories by those two giants plus Jim Lee, Dave Gibbons, Kevin McGuire, Walter Simonson, Gary Frank, John Byrne, Scott McDaniel, Chris Bachalo, John Cassaday and Dan Jurgens you have back up stories by talent like Gene Colan, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Richard Corben, Darwyn Cooke, Michael Kaluta, John Severin, Ramona Fradon, Kyle Baker and Sergio Aragones.
You also have a lot of bonus pages and profile drawings by even more great artists and most of the back covers were drawn by Adam Hughes. Now the main reason why I am pimping this book is that the regular price is 75 US Dollars and around 72 EUROS at regular comic shops everywhere but you can get it at amazon Germany for the ridiculous low price of 23 EUROS including shipping and backing. I thought there had to be some catch 22 too but I ordered it and within a few days I got a brand new copy of the omnibus shrink wrapped and all. So you may have some of the issues ( I already had most of the issues ) but this opportunity is just too good to pass up. If you want to see more example pages there are posts on SCANS DAILY about Superman , Batman , Green Lantern and Wonder Woman and you can find the complete Flash issue in this special Flash Friday post .
As I said in the intro, this post should have been up at my birthday and since I like to slowly work my way through all of the celebrity birthdays of July the 30th I have included two anniversaries, I covered the first one in previous posts but always too short. I am talking about Monique Gabrielle, one of the biggest erotic movie stars of the 80s and 90s who turned 55.
Beautiful, buxom and shapely Monique Gabrielle added an ample, alluring and invigorating dose of smoldering sex appeal to a bunch of enjoyably down' n 'dirty horror and exploitation pictures made throughout the 80s and 90s. The 5' 6" natural brunette who was born in Kansas City, Missouri and raised in Denver, Colorado started modeling while still in high school, entering her first beauty pageant at seventeen ( she won the title of Miss American Legion and went on to participate in other pageants, modeling competitions and nightclub contests ), and moved to California in 1980 right after she graduated from high school. Monique then had small but still mam - orable roles in AIRPLANE II : THE SEQUEL, NIGHT SHIFT, YOUNG DOCTORS IN LOVE, FLASHDANCE, HARD TO HOLD, FEAR OF A BLACK HAT.
From there, Monique became one of the most in - demand and most gloriously often displayed naked babes in the movies and she achieved her greatest enduring popularity as the enticing young woman who tries to seduce Tom Hanks in the uproariously raucous' n' raunchy BACHELOR PARTY.
Speaking about BACHELOR PARTY, one of my pet pevees on this blog is celebrating all the brave actresses who turn insufferable dreck into bearable entertainment by taking their clothes off or at least show what their Mama gave them and who don´t get enough recognition for that.
Back then they put the emphasis in screwball comedy on the screw part so there were a lot of hot massitas like this unknown blonde bombshell.
If anybody out there has any information about this uncredited busty sexbomb please let me know as I would really like to see more of her.
Now Toni Alessandrini is better known as she was in quite a few bikini competitions around the time the BIKINI OPEN were so popular and in some erotic tv series. Besides having 16 movie credits the stripper who says of herself : " My whole body is an erogenous zone. " won Miss World Burlesque 1980, Miss Exotic World 1991 and danced in a Playboy revue.
And yes, that really is a very young Michael Dudikoff in that scene.
Continuing with Monique Gabrielle, her most memorable roles include a pathetic junkie snitch in the terrifically trashy babes - behind - bars classic CHAINED HEAT, a sweet princess and her evil twin in DEATHSTALKER II, a nude model in the funny sketch comedy AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON, alongside - and on top of - dark haired sexbomb Rachel Vickers in ANGEL EYES, a gutsy lady cop in SILK 2, nerdy, repressed Megan in the delightfully dippy EVIL TOONS and there is even a comic book related role since she played feisty security chief Miss Poinsettia in the amusingly campy THE RETURN OF SWAMP THING with sexy Heather Locklear in the lead role.
Here in Europe she is of course best known for the steamy EMANUELLE 5 in which Monique Gabrielle played the woman she was born to bring to the big screen : the titular brazen and uninhibited sexual adventuress, the french soft sex kitten with the inexhaustible body of a Playmate of the Year ( or rather a Penthouse Pet Of The Month for December 1982 in Monique´s case ), the sex drive of a nymphomaniac and the morals of a hooker who always seems to have trouble keeping her clothes on and her long legs together. It is the pinnacle of her thespian career as well as the zenith of all the Emanuelle movies and the rest is as they say history.
After Monique Gabrielle the role went to german Sexbombe Natalie Uher who became famous as the youngest german playmate with sixteen and the youngest actress to play Emanuelle with twenty in EMANUELLE 6.
She tried her breast to fill out the role and had considerable sex appeal for a skinny chick not to mention that she is rather adept at removing her clothes whenever the script calls for it baring every square - inch of her spectacular boy ( here her model skills come in quite handy ) but she is no Monique Gabrielle who has a body to die for. Sadly this was her third and last movie since she could have made a fortune if she had continued but she left the showbiz and is now happily married with two children.
Before that I had only seen two movies with original sexbomb Sylvia Kristel who - at least according to her biography - worked as a secretary and quit to become a model because she was constantly used as a blow up sex doll by the entire male staff ( no pun intended ) due to her porn star body.
Besides that american audiences are probably most familiar with Krista Allen who played Emanuelle in eight made for tv movies . Because she did it when her incredible body was in prime condition she was able to believable portray the french sex machine with the high moan factor who merciless milks men dry until they can´t remember on which side the doorknob is. The show had some strange 3D effects - because that was the new thing at that time - and the stories were not that great but it was all worth it to see Miss Allen get her freak on. Whoa, did she ever.
Here it was shown on PRO7 but so far I haven´t seen the DVDs anywhere.
The bodacious Krista Allen played Clark Kent´s hot new teacher on SMALLVILLE, Jim Carey´s new neighbor with the big boobs in LIAR LIAR and the sexy oracle on CHARMED ( she was also in a series called Black Widow which had nothing to do with the Marvel character ) but she is probably best known for her role of Jenna Avid on BAYWATCH HAWAII.
To wrap up Monique Gabrielle, she did guest spots on DREAM ON, HUNTER and HARDBALL and was the onetime girlfriend of low - budget straight - to - video picture director Jim Wynorski. She popped up in a handful of his movies in both minor and more substantial parts alike. Monique cheerfully poked fun at her own b - flick queen persona in SCREAM QUEEN HOT TUB PARTY where she co - starred with happy handfuls of other nude firght - flick starlets like Michelle Bauer. Monique Gabrielle married adult film director Tony Angove in 2003. She now lives in South Florida and runs a porno movie production company called Monique's Purrfect Productions.
Naturally I can´t post anything from Emanuelle 5 - even if there was something on YouTube - but while that´s a shortcoming of the website there are still lots of interesting stuff you can find like USA Up All Night.
The second anniversary from July the 30th I want to include is of one of my favorite artists and I don´t know if the fact that we share a birthday has something to do with that. But every year I bookmark all the videos about Kate Bush I can find and each year I miss her birthday. It´s not like I haven´t posted any Kate Bush videos before but never on her birthday.
And now that I´m thinking about it I´m not posting it on her birthday this year either. Curses, foiled again. Be that as it may I have decided to finally do something with all the Kate Bush videos and the first one is this live performance of Babooshka. Thankfully I never saw this video as a teenager - this was way before I became a regular viewer of Mtv and Mtv´s Greatest Hits which was the only place where you could see these kind of videos - or I never could have concentrated on her great music. What a tomato !
You know, it´s weird through which strange circumstances we discover certain artists and how they become personal favorites. I´m not exactly sure what the first Kate Bush song I heard was but I know that the first and only record of her I bought was The Whole Story. Not because I didn´t like her music - quite the contrary - but back then there was no internet so I had to rely on the outlets that were available to me like music shops in Ludwigsburg and shopping malls. I could not find any older records of her so that whenever I found a CD of Kate Bush I bought it immediately.
CDs were still a new thing and I bought most of my music as either records or more often music cassettes because they were cheaper and with the walkman I could listen to it easier than with the records ( ask your parents to tell your grandparents to explain to you music cassettes and walkmans ). CDs were the most expensive so I didn´t buy a lot of them but I got a lot of Kate Bush CDS and I had to buy a discman to listen to them. Anyway, I could try to explain what is so special about Kate Bush and her music but since it has already been done by more elaborate people then me I am going to limit myself to personal anecdotes and leave you with this video.
Okay, not really leave you with this video because after all the talk about her music I have to include one where you get an earful. The picture quality is sadly not so good in this one but the important part here is the music. People say that she´s in semi - retirement now but she does the odd concert tour now and then and there is always an album of her that I still have not had the time to listen to properly like 50 Words For Snow.
There are also two birthdays from Today I want to mention even though I have covered them before. When you write a blog for 13 years ( god, I feel old now ) there are not a lot that you haven´t mentioned before but you also have the choice to skip some when you have nothing new to add.
So we start with Butch Patrick who turns 65 and is still best known around the world for his role of Eddie Munster on the cult show The Munsters. I bought the complete Munsters DVD set when it was offered at one of amazons bargain sales but so far I haven´t had time to watch it since I still haven´t finished season two of The Adams Family. I started to watch it but then I got distracted with the super hero shows and it got buried somewhere. I´m afraid if I can find the time I will have to start all over again with season two. Or I can get right to watching The Munsters first.
Betty Weider a.k.a. Betty Brosmer celebrates her 83rd birthday and while there is nothing new I have to add I wanted to mention her because it has been two years since I re - posted her original cult siren entry which I wrote in 2011 which is still the second most popular post on TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN. Betty was one of the most famous pin up models who was once described as a mixture between Jessica Rabbit and Traci Lords and she had what was later coined the hourglass figure ( in her heyday in the 1950s her measurements were somewhere around 38 - 18 - 36 ! ).
Before people forget that this post is about the Legion of Super - Heroes here are 10 of their greatest villains. For a long time it was difficult to find Legion content of YouTube but thanks to the aforementioned legionnaires in Supergirl and the Legion spin off things have improved considerably.
What hasn´t improved is that you still can´t find complete episodes from the Legion of Super - Heroes which is one of the best cartoons with the Legion. So instead here is an episode of the Superboy cartoon even if it says in the description that it´s Superman. They probably just called it Superman since he was better known here in Germany the same way they called a lot of Godzilla movies King Kong or Frankenstein movies to sell it.
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Within a few short weeks, Batman has become the biggest name in wrestling and still no one knows his real identity.
1 comment:
Just found out, the blonde with the huge knockers from BACHELOR PARTY is Angela Aames.
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