Spanish comics from my misspent youth !

You probably didn´t expect a post so soon after the last one but as longtime readers know I don´t like to have to similar posts in a row and since Tomorrow´s post will also be about Spider - Man I have decided to do a quick post in - between. At least it´s supposed to be a short post.

While I was looking for a page from Vazquez´ ANACLETO, AGENTE SECRETO for my last post I went through my spanish comic pages and I remembered that ages ago I began collecting these pages for a special post I never did.

So to bring a bit of variety to the blog here are some pages from all the comic books I used to read as a kid which was much more than just super hero stuff. I am not sure if it´s 100 percent accurate but I tried to have as many different strips here as possible and I also went more for one page strips instead of longer ones. Anyway, my spanish readers will probably remember a few of these so I hope they will bring back some pleasant memories. And all my other readers are in for a journey of discovery.

Even though this is a quick post in - between there are some birthdays I have to address, starting with Comicbookgirl19 who turns 33. So maybe she could call herself Comicbookgirl33 now. Or maybe not. Women are always so touchy about their age so having it in the name would probably not fly. Anyway, if you haven´t caught on to how much I appreciate her work - especially after A Comicbook Orange closed down - you have either been living under a rock or this is your first time on this blog. I want a lot of people to support her so we can get more great videos like her Epic History X - Men and more awesome cosplays like WildC.A.T.S.´  Zealot.



Speaking of which, since this is a special occassion I´m re - posting the Making Of video of that for all those poor fellas who have missed it.



I thought quite a bit about which video I should include but finally I decided on this one because I found it too late to include it in the post that I wrote at Frank Frazetta´s birthday and I have already tried to include it in a post two times. But as they say : three time´s the charm.



Comic writer Geoff Johns celebrates his 45th birthday and I wasn´t sure if I should include him because I used to have a love / hate relationship with his work which has now turned into this love / hate / love relationship.

Because on one side he has written some of my favorite comics like Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. and the Justice Society of America books that followed. As longtime readers know anything which gives us more Power Girl is okay in my book and Thy Kingdom Come is one of my all - time Justice Society of America stories . He also had a great run on Flash - which had most of its momentum stolen when Scott Kolins took over the art - his Teen Titans restart not only brought a lagging comic series back from limbo but also cemented Mike McKone´s cult status and for the longest time he steadily churned out instant Green Lantern classics like the Siniestro Corps War.

Not to mention his force de work Final Crisis : Legion of Three Worlds where George Perezwent totally nuts and drew every frigging person who was ever a member which is so awesome that I had to post all five issues ?

On the other side his Green Lantern stories got more convoluted and dark and negative until I left the title and apart from such short glimpses of his former glory as on the Aquaman restart I´m not a big fan of what he has written for the New 52 or the general direction in which he has lead the DC universe since becoming the new President and Chief Creative Officer.

And then there are shows like Smallville, Arrow and The Flash on which he has worked and which I absolutely love. I don´t know, I watch these shows and I ask myself if I am seeing the genuine love he has for these characters or if it´s only because there are also other writers involved who balance him out. Because every time I look at his recent comic book I see none of that love. It´s just full of disdain and negativity. Like being a hero is a bad thing and he´s trying to persuade us to not think positive, not to care about things and not to get involved or try to help others.

In any case, he has written some of my favorite stuff and everything else is not that important. Like somebody said : in comics you get to decide what is part of the continuity and what not and in a few years we won´t even have to pretend that the New 52 never happened because DC will find a way to explain that it was some parallel world or just a bad dream. 

Speaking about dreams, french actress Florence Geanty turns 52 and she´s best known for her role on the tv soap called Sous Le Soleil ( Under the Sun ) or simply St. Tropez in german and one of the few episodes in which she appeared was La Fin D´Un Réve which means The End Of A Dream.

Florence Geanty was perfectly cast as she plays the ex - stripper Marie ( Marion in german which made it a bit difficult to find infos on her ) whom the ex - cop of the series tries to reform. It´s not hard to see why and he even ends up marrying her but like in all soaps it has to end in tragedy.

Now very often women in soaps don´t look like they could really do the job they have on these shows - like Kyra Sedwick who in real life couldn´t scare a mouse - but Florence Geanty really has a porn star body that could have launched her into a very successful career as a striptease super star. 

So far I have only bought half a season of ST. TROPEZ - for some reason they have divided all the seasons into two parts - because the other one with the best episodes of Florence Geanty is going for an obscene amount of money at amazon right now for obvious reasons. But I´m not getting any younger and I really don´t know what exactly I am waiting for here. 

We stay with busty babes although we make the jump from french tv to US comics with Chuck Wojtkiewicz who celebrates his 59th birthday. He has drawn such titles like Southern Knights, Voltron, Nexus, Dreadstar or DC´s iMPACT line that was another failed attempt to revive The Mighty Crusader where he penciled Jaguar, Crusaders and Crucible. But most comic readers know him from his work on Justice League International issues 59 to 68 and 93 to 113 and while this includes the story with Power Girl´s infamous magic pregnancy his most sought after issue is the final issue of this because of this famous scene with Power Girl and Blue Devil. 

Speaking of Blue Devil, comic writer Gary Cohn turns 66 who not only co - created the character with artists Paris Cullins and Pablo Marcos but also Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld with artist Ernie Colon. While I have only read a few comics with Blue Devil the DC Showcase Presents : Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld has been on my comic wish list for a few years now.

I remember that when it came out I appreciated neither Ernie Colon´s art nor the type of stories it had. Now that I´m older I would like to read it to see if there is more of a connection. And there´s also the fact that it was later revealed that Gemworld will be known in a thousand years as the Sorcerer´s World which makes it part of the Legion of Super - Heroes universe. Now those comic readers who wonder what Ernie Colon´s art looks like can either buy the Damage Control series which Disney has reprinted in all kind of collections like the Acts Of Vengeance Crossovers omnibus or a much cheaper possibility is presented by our trusty pal Old Groove at DIVERSIONS OF THE GROOVY KIND with a post on Speed Demon, a story written and drawn by Ernie Colon that appeared in Weird Tales of the Macabre 1. And you can find anything else you ever wanted to know about the great Ernie Colon and then some at ERNIE COLON UNLIMITED .

Today´s entertainment section is really international and our next stop is Japan as Leiji Matsumoto celebrates his 80th birthday who has worked on Galaxy Express 999, Space Battleship Yamato and Captain Harlock. Even if you never watched an anime you have seen his art in the Daft Punk videos which were issued end to end on DVD as a full length animated movie called Interstella 5555 : The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem.



Since Today´s topic was spanish comics from my youth here´s a report from the news program Informe Semanal about comics from 1970.



Now I don´t know exactly from when this song is but it was on one of the few spanish rock / pop disc records my Dad had that I listened to as a kid.



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If I were a normal man I´d be dead. But I´m neither.

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.