The world´s greatest artists : John Byrne

And there is no rest for the wicked as we go directly into the post with John Byrne´s Marvel work. It almost hurts to see all this great covers and think of what has become of this once great company under Disney. But let us not dwell of that and remember the greatness of John Byrne.

Since I am a bit tired I will add all the pictures and stuff I have already prepared but I have to do the rest - add the videos and finish the post - later. So this post may be put back in the draft folder after you have read it but don´t worry it will be back again as soon as I have had some sleep.

Okay, so the next covers are not from Marvel comics but I wanted to include them without having to start a new post. There will be more John Byrne posts since there a still a few of his books on my reading list.

As you might have noticed the post has not disappeared because I was working so long on the Jamie Lee Curtis GIF - among other things - that it´s much too late to go to sleep now. Maybe I´ll do that Tomorrow. We start the birthday with Kevin Hart who turns 37 and he is in every movie that comes out this year. Really. I have just watched the new STAR WARS movie that came out and the black guy in it ? That´s Kevin Hart with some make up. The same with the Black Panther. Anyway, since he´s in so many movies I can´t list them all but I want to mention two. The first one is Ride Along 2 - to which we will come in a moment - and Scary Movie 3. Now I have looked on every internet resources there is but can anyone tell me the name of the body double for Anna Faris in Scary Movie 3 ? She is not mentioned anywhere and I think she really deserves more credit !

Now the reason why I mentioned Ride Along 2 is that 50 Cent is on the soundtrack of the movie and he celebrates his 41st birthday Today. Even though I don´t have any of his albums I am a big fan of his work and his music videos even if they were only shown after midnight. I don´t watch much music television now but when I did it on a regular basis I waited for his videos with the hot Olivia and especially P.I.M.P. in the uncut version. I have mentioned a few times that hasians are my kryptonite and the oriental sexbomb with the big double airbags is right up my alley.

Now watching this reaction made me really feel old because it seems there is a generation that doesn´t know who 50 Cent is. How can they live without the videos to Candy Shop, the ass - shaking extravaganza Disco Inferno or the uncut P. I. M. P. ? Wait, does that mean less competition for my asian sex angel ? By the way I also don´t know her name but I know it´s nat Francine Dee like some internet sources claim. Francine Dee IS in the P. I. M. P. video but this is somebody else. As far as I know her name may be Angel Maya but so far I could not confirm it.



Speaking about busty dreams Geoffrey Rush turns 65 who was not only in The King´s Speech, Pirates Of The Caribbean and played super villain Casanova Frankenstein on Mystery Men he was also in The Tailor of Panama where Pierce Brosnan got to feel up mega MILF Jamie Lee Curtis.

Now Jamie Lee Curtis is the daughter of actress Janet Leigh best known as the lead role in Psycho she also would have celebrated a birthday Today.

Just if you´re wondering where Jamie got her good looks. By the way, she played Princess Aleta in the 1954 Prince Valiant movie with Robert Wagner.

But coming back to Geoffrey Rush he was also on Frida with Salma Hayek who .... no, she doesn´t have her birthday Today but it is Frida Kahlo´s anniversary. I haven´t seen the movie yet because despite the prospect of seeing Salma naked there is too much drama in the movie for my taste. At the moment my quota of " all evil in the world comes from men and that is why we women have to suffer " movies for the month is full.

Now I don´t have a video about Frida but when I was looking for Gina Lollobrigida videos Yesterday I cam across this version of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame from 1997 in which Salma plays the part of Esmeralda.



Speaking about erotic dancers Sylvester Stallone turns 70 this very day and besides the successful movie series of Rocky and Rambo he also starred in other movies like Tango & Cash where Teri Hatcher played erotic dancer Kiki. I would say stripper but a striptease implies taking off more clothes. By the way if you name your daughter Kiki you have already predestined her for a life on the pole. Aynway, I mentioned this movie because I thought I had a video with Teri Hatcher I hadn´t posted yet.

Which I don´t. Sorry. What I do have is this Rambo parody by Weird Al Yankovic from the movie U. H. F. - I think - and they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And nobody does it better than Weird Al.



On a much more comic related note is Burt Ward´s 71st birthday and I probably don´t have to mention that he played Robin on the campy 70s Batman tv show. Which was actually pretty close to the comics at that time because Denny O´Neil and Neal Adams back to the roots approach with the grim and gritty Dark Night Detective came afterwards. So far I haven´t seen much of the tv series because the DVD sets are always too expensive but maybe I can get them at some sale. And if it´s only to check out Batgirl Yvonne Craig. No wonder they couldn´t get a Batgirl in the comics fast enough after feasting their peepers on Yvonne´s curves.

Ned Beatty turns 79 and like John Byrne he worked on Superman AND Captain America. Yep, the infamous Captain America movie with Matt Salinger. But the video I selected is about the movie Deliverance.



Today´s music video doesn´t have anything to do with the topic of the post but I just wanted to put it on the blog as soon as possible. I don´t know what our last celebrity birthday, the 14th Dalai Lama with his 81 years thinks of Janet Jackson´s appearance on Jermaine Dupri´s music video Gotta Getcha thinks but she just gets my spirits rising again.

So just when I think I have said everything there is to say about this - I even put down my ideas how to incorporate this scene in my Justice League America movie in my JLA casting Redux post - I found this video with a making of. I have to say I´m not sure how I feel about the fact that originally Janet was supposed to play a nymphomanic dominatrix but they skipped that because it would hit too close to home. Say what ? So Janet is a nymphomanic dominatrix in the privacy of her own bedroom ? Man, how could Jermain Dupri ever loose a blow up sex doll like Janet ?



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Preparing for John Byrne´s 66th birthday !

I haven´t posted much the last few days because I had to rest from doing posts on an almost daily basis but Today I spent most of the day preparing the material for Tomorrow´s post for John Byrne´s 66th anniversary.

Normally when I do these posts the problem is finding enough material but with one of my favorite writers / artists and the plethora of books he has done the problem here was that I had too much material. I mean I could make dozens of posts about John Byrne and I have already written about him ad nausea so my readers probably know all I have to say about his comic books. Okay, how can we bring it down to a manageable number ?

First off I thought about all the special John Byrne art pieces that I set apart from the main John Byrne folder and which I always plan to post.

So I went through all my folders and at the end I had more than a dozen pictures which is not enough for a post and most of them were in black and white. I thought about doing one of my popular black and white posts but since I prefer to include the color versions that limits the amount of pictures to ten which would have been impossible. If you think choosing something between 20 and 30 pictures of everything John Byrne has ever done try to pick just ten of them. So then I went through all of the John Byrne stuff I already had in a special folder looking for art from his series. Since this is a birthday post I thought I should include his best series - which is totally subjective. And I also tried to use as many foreign versions of covers so that I would not use art I would need later on. 

With that I got more art pieces but the selection was a bit arbitrary. Plus the black and white art and the splash pages didn´t really go well with the covers so that I decided to go with just putting covers in the post. Also since I had to get it down to a manageable number - and since it is my post about John Byrne - I decided to concentrate on the series I have read and enjoyed. So I picked some covers of iconic issues but most often than not issues that were special to me. So for instance you will not see the cover of the most iconic issue of ALPHA FLIGHT or the one which has the best story but rather the issue which was the first american issue I ever bought at a railway station newsstand. Before that I never knew that you could get american comics from there and it opened a whole new world of reading comics to me. So that one issue will always be special for me.

So to make it short - since I have to do another post in a few hours - I managed to narrow it down to 40 covers which I am splitting into two post, this one which is mainly DC covers with a few from other companies like IDW. One reason is that with 40 covers it would have been one hell of a long post, the other is that by doing two posts I can do entertainment sections since I have a few to catch up to from the last few days. Anyway, here are some of John Byrne´s comic series which have brought me much joy over the years. Maybe you will find a few that you want to check out.

Oh, since I only included covers by John Byrne there are none from books where he did the interior art but had covers by somebody else like his ALL NEW ATOM. Which doesn´t mean I didn´t like it. Also his LEGENDS mini series is just celebrating it´s 30th anniversary with a new edition.

As promised we start Today´s entertainment block with the birthdays from last Sunday and the ungodly hot Olivia Munn who turned 36. She is one of the celebrities that make no secret of being a comic geek and as unbelievable as it sounds I have heard she´s even prettier in real life.

Another incredibly sexy woman celebrated her birthday, spanish tv host Berta Collado who is just one year older with 37. I thought I had a video bookmarked from her appearances on Se Lo Que Hicistes but I guess I was to distracted by her sex appeal. Since it will undoubtly take me some time to find some good ones here´s an animated GIF of Berta in various outfits I made since I didn´t like any I found online. Can you believe it ?

And we stay in Spain. Tom Cruise had his 54th birthday on Sunday and while I already posted the video with him squaring off against Jimmy Fallon in a lip synch battle ( read where Tom wiped the floor with Jimmy ) here is a video from the spanish show El Hormiguero ( the ant hill ).



The last anniversary from last Sunday was Franz Kafka´s birthday. His books have been adapted into all kind of media and quite a few interesting comics by artists like Robert Crumb or Peter Kuper.

It´s been a while since I posted a video about comics in german - auf deutsch - but here is one from german tv on the occasion of an exhibition of various graphic novel adaptions of Franz Kafka´s work in 2014.



There were only two anniversaries Yesterday I want to mention. The first is Ute Lemper who turns 53 and I guess she is not very popular anymore since it was extremely difficult to find any pictures of her at all.

There are on the other hand too many videos of her on YouTube to look through them all so because I´m keeping the music video for another candidate here is an episode of one of the best talk shows on german tv.



And I just have to mention Gina Lollobrigida´s 89th birthday. She really deserves the title cult siren. I spend a few hours looking through a website for GIFs but in the end I decided that I like this picture better.

I thought I could add one of her classic movies but neither Fanfan La Tulipe nor Solomon and Sheba are to be found and even her dance as Esmeralda on The Hunchback Of Notre Dame is almost impossible to find. Which by the way must be the book of Victor Hugot that´s been adapted the most times. But just when I thought I had to settle between Guillermo Del Toro´s musings on The Hunchback and Hollywood remembers Gina Lollobrigida I found something from a tv show I actually watched. And watching the series actually paid off as I got to see douche Lorenzo Lamas getting his ass whupped by the butler. That´s for all the episodes of Renegade I had to suffer through to see Kathleen Kinmont´s booty.



Which brings us finally to the present day with only two important dates the first being Bill Waterson, the genius behind Calvin and Hobbes who turns 58. You know excellence when everybody agrees how great it is.

If you haven´t tried this you´re missing out on a wonderful comic with a lot of fun and adventures as only an over imaginative child can have it. No matter if it´s about turning a cloning machine into a time machine by changing the label on a cardboard box, fighting off evil aliens as space adventurer biff or getting the cool hairdo for the school photograph with the right amount of biskin. I remember my brother tried to write one of this typical hardboiled detective stories and despaired when he read how easily Bill did it in just one page. Anyway, Bill ended the strip in 1995 but we still have the collections to re - read. I was looking for a video but all I found was either 3d animation that didn´t really look like the comic strip or minimalistic ones. Maybe there will be a movie in the near future.  

Our second birthday of the day is Huey Lewis who turns 66. Since I could not decide for one of his songs here´s a concert with his best tunes.



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