Now I don´t have the original art to all of the stories in this post and not all stories are complete. There will be however some links later where you can check out the full stories. The story which was the genesis for this post is WOMAN WONDER from issue 10 and as the title says, it´s a parody of Wonder Woman. You will notice that the story is much more daring than what Todays comic reading audience is accustomed to and most of what was printed in MAD Magazine during those days would never see the light of day in Today´s prude industry since it is not deemed political correct.
Now besides being a master at cartooning and bringing slapstick humor to the printed page Will Elder was also very adept at depicting the female form which probably was a very big factor in MAD´s rise in popularity.
Will Elder´s faible for drawing sexy women was also the reason why Harvey Kutzman chose him to bring one of his most famous creations to life : PLAYBOY´s LITTLE ANNIE FANNY, a spoof on Harold Gray´s LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE - which we will cover in a separate post since I can´t squeeze all the beautifully painted original art pages from the series into this one.
Back to the topic of this post there are two stories, the aforementioned WOMAN WONDER with the original art pages and STARCHIE, which is of course a spoof on the ARCHIE comic book which is the source material for the current RIVERDALE show on tv. I am not sure how many people who watch the series are aware of that but so far I haven´t seen an episode so I cannot comment on the quality of the show. Anyway, let´s get going !
There was a time when each post would have a link section but nowadays that´s rather the exception than the rule so a quick explanation may be in order for the newcomers to this blog. Yes, I´m still deluding myself that I get rather more readers than less. In any case all the art you see in these posts were found online, I don´t scan anything in and I don´t own the copyright to any of it - except for the art from Power Freaks and my new comic Versaute Bettgeschichten. Additionally I like to verify what I write first and sometimes I have to do a lot of research to write these posts ( which seems to be completely unheard of in big parts of the internet ).
Because as unbelievable as it may sound even I don´t know everything. And so I like to insert a little section - in most cases before all the pop culture and cult siren trivia which I like to call the entertainment block - where I give kudos to all the hard working people out there who made this post possible and to include some links for those visitors who want to delve deeper into the topic of question, find some great art or just a few interesting, funny or weird websites. So in that spirit we start with the original pages for the Woman Wonder story which I found on INSIDE JEFF OVERTURF´S HEAD ( they also have the full STARCHIE story but I used the version I found on FOUR - COLOR SHADOWS 2.0 ). You can also find Elder´s takes on The Shadow , Mandrake the Magician , King Kong , Frankenstein and Dragnet there plus Wally Wood´s Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant .
As usual we have a few days of celebrity birthday´s worth to cover but since including them all would blow up the post beyond measure I am only including a few favorites and some where I actually have something new to add or post. My initial idea was to have all the comic related ones in this post and all the cult siren related ones in Today´s other post but since that didn´t work out too well and I don´t want to split all the birthdays from one day into two posts I have put some of the cult sirens into this.
That said we start the litany of awesomeness with a giant in the field of graphic literature since the 18th of September was the birth date of the great late Joe Kubert, one of the greatest artists who ever lived. I wrote about my personal meeting with him in a post I wrote back in 2016 which naturally includes a lot of his great art. I should not have to mention this but besides working on such classic super hero books like Hawkman or Ragman ( whom some of my readers may know from his appearance on the Arrow tv show ) he excelled in depicting real life war stories which he did in such series like G. I. Combat, Our Army At War, Weird War Tales, The Unknown Soldier, The Losers and Sgt. Rock, the book he´s best known for.
You know, for the second issue of my new comic book I am working on the cover and what I have to improve is that I need a cover that draws the readers in and besides make them look at the cover make them interested enough to actually want to know what is going on and buy it. Covers used to be that way. Instead of meaningless pin ups like Today where you can put twelve covers of any given title next to another and you have no idea what happens inside the comic covers were designed to sell the comic.
Anyway, I am wrecking my brain trying to come up with a good idea and as I was going through all the Joe Kubert covers I have ( man, I could easily do a few Joe Kubert posts if I only could find the time ) every one of them is fantastic. There are so many where you just have to know what´s going on and I feel that the comic book industry lost a lot of its readers when they went for the flashy covers instead of the story driven ones.
Up next we have Jada Pinkett Smith who turned 47. She met her husband Will on The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air though she was never on the show.
Now maybe you have heard of the Mandela Effect - which is in short when people think things happened a certain way when in reality it is not true or never happened at all but because so many people think it is true it is considered fact by most people - but the truth is that Will´s wife Jada Pinkett Smith was never on The Fresh Price of Bel Air. But they did meet on set. Okay, most people think that Jada then only Pinkett played Will´s girlfriend who tamed him and got him to give up his womanizing ways but while it is true that she auditioned for the role she was considered too short and so the role was given to Nia Long. Personally I would have given the part to Nia in the first place since I think she´s way hotter than Jada.
Anyway, Jada WAS on the set of The Fresh Price of Bel Air because she auditioned for the role of Will´s girlfriend and that´s when she met him.
Of course a big part of that show´s success and continued appeal around the world ( there are probably only a few people on the face of the planet who can´t recite the lyrics to the title song in their sleep ) is Tatyana Ali who grew from a cute little girl into an incredible sexbomb over the course of that series and who got to show her musical skills.
Much to the chagrin of the show´s producers she really bOObed all out in later movie appearances like The Clown at Midnight or Fall Into Darkness .
While The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air still aired Jada had her first big role in A Low Down Dirty Shame, written and directed by Keenan Ivory Wayans.
What´s more important is that she was in Tales From The Crypt : Demon Knight, the first movie where they went away from the anthology format of earlier films and told an autonomous story. The movie also featured Baywatch babe Traci Bingham ( or like I like to call her Traci Banghim ) and her big 36D floating devices as well as sexbomb Brenda Bakke whom you might have seen strut her hot stuff in Hot Shots 2 or American Gothic.
Jada then appeared in the Eddie Murphy vehicle The Nutty Professor, which also featured Athena Massey famous for her role in the skin flick classic Undercover Heat and Lisa Boyle who also regularly took her clothes off in erotic movies besides starring in episodes of Married With Children.
Jada Pinkett Smith also starred in Set It Off, Scream 2, Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolution and she´s currently on Gotham where her character Fish Mooney is the only good thing about that train wreck of a show.
We continue with the pop culture related birthdays from September the 19th and we stay with cult tv shows as David McCallum celebrated his 85th anniversary. He is best known to Today´s audiences as the anecdote encyclopedia Dr. Donald " Duckie " Mallard on NCIS but in his youth he played Illya Kurakin / Maximilian Nexor in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Today would also have been the birthday of Adam West who is best known for the campy Batman tv show and hottie Yvonne Craig was on both shows.
Initially I wanted to split the videos for this - the one with Adam West in this post and the one with Yvonne Craig in the post about Little Annie Fanny - but I have too many videos in the other post anyway and the one with Yvonne Craig is not so raunchy that I can´t put it into this post.
The video with Adam West - although technically it also includes Yvonne Craig - is another episode of Family Feud in which the cast of Batman goes up against the cast of Gilligan´s Island. This is a bit of self indulgence for me since I have never seen that many episodes from any of these shows.
We´re coming back to the horror theme ( and when I say horror that includes Gotham ) with Veronica Carlson who celebrates her 74th birthday and is best known for her appearance in many Hammer Studio movies like The Horror Of Frankenstein which also could have been the topic of Today´s post. Because I already had prepared all the necessary GIFs for a post years ago but as always I don´t have the necessary time to write it. Which is one reason why it is so important to write this section. Not only for my readers but also to remind myself of the things I still wanted to do and might forget otherwise. But don´t fear the post is not scratched, only postponed so you won´t be deprived of Miss Carlson´s charms forever.
You can find the rest of Today´s birthdays in our next post but I wanted to keep E. Nelson Bridwell´s anniversary here because he wrote for Mad. As a comic book reader he had always been fascinated by continuity and one of the things that set him off was when things didn´t fit. At DC he soon became the go - to person for character backgrounds and trivia and if you read some DC stories that contradict each other you can bet that they were written before Bridwell joined DC. His interest in continuity shows clearly in the older reprints he selected for the 100 - page collections of the early 1970s of which he oversaw quite a few. But his legacy is more far reaching than you think because he also came up with the 118 character kryptonian alphabet that was in use until John Byrne´s 1986 revamp of Superman, he edited DC´s first limited series The World Of Krypton, he wrote The Krypton Chronicles and various issues of Shazam ! and The Legion of Super - Heroes, co - wrote Secrets of the Legion of Super - Heroes with Paul Kupperberg, co - created The Secret Six with artist Frank Springer, co - created the Justice League members Fire and Ice who would come to greater popularity during the post - Crisis Keith Giffen / J. M. DeMatteis League, introduced the Global Guardians, co - created the Inferior Five with Joe Orlando and launched the Super Friends series together with Ric Estrada based on the cartoon show and he also wrote for Warren Publishing´s Creepy and Eerie. Wow, that´s quite a career.
For the cartoon video I could not choose any other because - as I wrote above - E. Nelson Bridwell launched the comic book based on the Super Friends cartoon show and Joe Kubert worked on Rima, the Jungle Girl.
With more people coming to comics from movies or other paraphernalia nowadays you can´t expect them to know about classic mags like Mad. So here is another essay from Der Phantastische Adventskalender going into detail about how it came to be. Sorry, only for my german readers but I have to give them something from time to time to keep them interested.
Well, I could have spent a few hours looking for a music video that fits the topic of Today´s post but why bother when there is a new one by one of my top three sex fantasies Mariah Carey which I haven´t posted yet.
To close things out I selected another video about Creepshow ( I promised to keep posting them but as always other things like working on my new comic book project kept me busy ) since even if we don´t have any horror comic stuff in this post there are various ties to that genre. E. Nelson Bridwell wrote for several horror mags, Mad Magazine was founded by EC Comics after they were forced to cease publication of their famous horror comics Tales From The Crypt, The Haunt Of Fear and The Vault of Horror by the Comics Code because they were outselling the competition, we also have Veronica Carlson who appeared in a few of the famous Hammer Production movies and last but not least Tatyana Ali appeared in a few horror flicks. You can probably also find some on the rap sheet of the other cult sirens in this post so I want to cover all the bases here since we have all the genres little boys love in their comic books : satire, war and horror.
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