Flash Friday : Race Against Time - part 4

As you may have noticed there haven´t been many posts since last Sunday but I still want to continue with the next part from Race Against Time.

Now I know some of my readers might think that I have finally lost my marbles because on the blog the last post IS from Sunday. But as the readers who visit my blog more frequently know I have done a few posts since last Sunday but they all belonged to last month so they don´t show.

Just Yesterday I did a post where I had the necessary material all laid out and then somehow forgot to post it. There are a few other posts I had planned and didn´t get around to post but I´ll just have to cut my losses and post them in the future. The plan from here on is to post less because 24 posts in one month is a bit much if you calculate that I need at least two days to finish a post. Which means that last month I often did two posts on one day and very often back to back. So now I have to pull the brakes and clean up the laptop because of all the pictures and videos that accumulated while making the posts. When I have finally sorted all of this out we can return to a more regular posting schedule but at the moment I don´t even know where which stuff ended up. Anyway, if you liked the higher post quota last month let me know and if you didn´t likewise.

Okay, back to the best Flash of all times, Wally West. He´s not in this issue. As you saw in last week´s episode John Fox managed to disrupt Wally´s emotional connection to Linda Park so Wally got lost in the speedforce. But if you think that that´s the maximum extend to which John Fox is going to f - word up things you haven´t seen nothing yet, pilgrim. I don´t want to spoil too much but it seems in the future John Fox comes from they don´t teach you about about the time loop theory - or if they do he surely didn´t listen. Anyway, you got to love egocentric guys like that.

Didn´t I tell you ? Let´s make a quick recap on how bad John Fox screwed up things. Managed to get the real Flash lost in the speedforce ? Check.

Tried to take his place as a superhero which resulted in his hometown being overrun by super villains ? Check. Big parts of its citizenship turned into popsicles and the rest in danger of becoming likewise ? Check. Tried to steal his girlfriend ? Lied to her thus putting her in danger ? Got HER turned into a popsicle ? Check, check and check. So, it´s not just personal antipathy when I say that John Fox is probably the WORST Flash in history. Thankfully at least one of these things gets resolved next issue when Wally West DOES manage to return next issue in a story not called THANK YOU FOR TAKING SUCH GOOD CARE OF MY GIRLFRIEND, for obvious reasons.

Now I said that I wanted to take it easier with the celebrity birthdays which doesn´t mean I´m getting rid of them all together. I´m doing my best not to let them dictate what I post but I´m still going to mention them when I have something to say and post about them especially if this makes it easier to decide which videos to add. Today we start with Celeste Bonin a.k.a. Celeste Braun who celebrates her 30th birthday.

Now the name sure doesn´t sound familiar and that´s because she looked really different when she wrestled in the WWE under the name of Kaitlyn.

I know ! That´s what I said. What the heck ? It´s like we only got the kid´s version of this hot sexbomb. Leave it to Vince McMahon to screw you over without you even knowing it. I bet she would have had a lot more fans if she wrestled with her natural look. Anyway, as always the internet makes up for that. This is the video with the best quality I could find and if you don´t want to wait for the good part just skip the first minute.



David Mack turns 44, best known for his stint on Daredevil where he co - created Echo with Joe Quesada ( remember when Joe Quesada still made good comics like the brilliant The Man In The Iron Mask ? ) although his greatest accomplishment in the comics field is his creator owned Kabuki.

Longtime readers may remember me gushing over his art before and if you only know his Daredevil work you need to get Kabuki. I know that Today he is only known for his color work and his artfully crafted collages but although he didn´t use any of that in his first black and white series you HAVE to start with the first volume of Kabuki which you can easily find because the comic series has been reprinted by various publishers now.

The reason for that is that Circle Of Blood is a creative tour de force on how to achieve the greatest effect in comics with the simplest of tools. Sometimes black and white art looks deceptively easy - especially when done well - but when you delve deeper into the comic there are just layers upon layers or artfully interconnected relationships between the art and the words by repeatedly using the same images and symbols, going forward and backwards in time and taking us directly into the mind of the protagonist. So while it doesn´t look as slick as the following volumes of Kabuki it is the best part and all I can give as advice is to take it in slowly and enjoy every moment of it. This is what comic books can achieve.

Now while I don´t know how much of the decision to do the first story in black and white was out of necessity and how much was intentionally his color work is no less impressive. I know that he has gotten some criticism for his difficult compositions and there are even people who have called him lazy for using collages but as someone who went to school during the heyday of collages when art for most people meant taking a lot of trash and garbage and putting some clever words to it so they can call it art and who has studied art I can say that those people have no idea. Yes, it is challenging and you will undoubtedly make yourself look like a fool if you read these comics on the bus because you will have to turn the comic sideways or upside down and sometimes go back a few pages to read it right but even if I have cursed David Mack myself a few times because you keep spinning the comic around and around this will be one of the most satisfying reading experiences of your life. For more on the comic series check out HOUSE OF FLYING SCALPELS post on David Mack´s Kabuki : The Alchemy where you can find more brilliant pages like the one above.

From one of my favorite comic artists we´re coming to one of my favorite r & b artists with Toni Braxton who celebrates her 49th birthday. She was one of the biggest stars when I was still watching music television on a regular basis and she somehow fell into a deep hole a few years back but is seems she´s back on the good track. I don´t watch much reality tv but I know that she has been on Dancing With The Stars and she was on an episode of The Arsenio Hall Show promoting Braxton Family Values.

Speaking of music and reality tv : Simon Cowell turns 57 and I just had to use this opportunity to put another video with 4th Impact on the blog. There are some with better quality that have just their performances but since it´s Simon Cowell´s birthday here´s one with him actually in it.



Today´s cult siren is Judy Landers who celebrates her 58th birthday. She has been a cast member on Vegas and Madame´s Place but she also was on all the cult shows like Charlie´s Angels, Fantasy Island, A - Team, Knight Rider or Night Court. Speaking of shows with Markie Post, Judy was also on The Fall Guy in the episode Three For The Road but I couldn´t find it on YouTube. Judy Landers often co starred with her sister and while Audrey has the prettier face Judy always got her beat where the body is concerned. Since I usually just re - post the PLAYBOY picture of them I wanted to do something special for Judy´s birthday which was a huge mistake. Because it took me a few hours to download some clips from Club Fed and in the end I could not use any of them and had to go to YouTube. 

Now I was thinking about posting something from the movies or tv shows she´s best known for like Madame´s Place or Stewardess School but she also had a role in the tv pilot Remo Williams : The Prophecy which I mentioned just a few posts back and have been dying to post ever since.



Coming back to comics, french artist Enki Bilal turns 65 and I have to confess that I´m not up to date on his latest works. There was a movie called Immortal directed by Enki Bilal based on his Alexander Nikopol cycle which was a bit disappointing and I already posted a video about him. 

Another of the comic greats, Howard Chaykin celebrates his 66th birthday and if his anniversary hadn´t fallen on a Friday I might have done a post about him since the list of series he worked on is too long to include here.

I was struggling with which video to post when I came upon this vintage interview with Howard Chaykin where the talks about American Flagg.



Speaking about struggling, I was not sure if I should include Art Thibert in this section since it was impossible to find out his date of birth but he has worked as an artist or inker on a variety of titles at DC and Marvel Comics for decades - mostly notably his inks on the Whilce Portacio and Jim Lee x - books - which I enjoyed over the years so I want to give kudos for that.

As always I want to end the post with a Flash video and since the new season of The Flash has finally started here is the review of the 1990 tv series I had to postpone posting in my last two FLASH FRIDAY posts.



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

Starting the October with Richard Corben

Today Richard Corben celebrates his 76th birthday so I thought is there a better way to kick off the new month ? Of course I already had a few of his pictures in a special folder but there were some comics I wanted to feature for which I had to consult the internet so I´m running late.

I first saw Richard Corben´s art in my older brother´s issues of the german version of french cult comic magazine METAL HURLANT, SCHWERMETALL and what made me an instant fan - beyond his photorealistic art and incredible coloring - was the way he drew women. I always tended more to the kind of female body type Russ Meyer showed in his movies and it seems Richard Corben also likes his women more voluptuous. When doing a post about Richard Corben there are some pieces of art where nudity can not be avoided but I hope we are all mature enough to handle it.

As always I am not trying to cram all of Richard Corben´s work into one post - which would be impossible - but I hope I included some diversity to what I picked. I still haven´t read his latest specials for Dark Horse, not to mention RAT GOD which is still in my amazon shopping cart, so those may have gotten the short end of the stick. I HAVE done posts about Richard Corben before, about his Hellboy stories and his adaptions of such literary horror like Edgar Allen Poe or H. P. Lovecraft so just click the " richard corben " tag if you want to read those. And for more comics and essays about Richard Corben you can find those - as always - in the link section.

There are plenty of links to mention and I should probably start with Pete Dorre´s THE BRONZE AGE OF BLOGS who has a plethora on posts about Richard Corben where you can read complete stories, COMIC ATTACK and its post on Hot Stuff 1 with plenty of original art, not only from Richard Corben, ( it´s where I found the page of Bug ) and MIFFED IN CLIFFTON has a megalong post on Richard Corben where I found one or two pictures.

Sean Witzke at COMICS ALLIANCE takes a very detailed look at Richard Corben´s great issue of Solo for DC, Alberto Garcia Marcos a.k.a. el tio berni over at ZONA NEGATIVA gives a pretty detailed overview of Richard Corben´s work in La Otra America : Richard Corben that provided the page of interior art from Epic Illustrated 2, 4TH LETTER has another post on Richard Corben and you can read about the influence Richard Corben´s Den had on Hal Hefner´s comic book Gates on HAL HEFNER`S WEBSITE .

We start Today´s birthdays with tv personality Daniela Katzenberger who turns 30 and at first I thought wikipedia had done a mistake when they translated her german entry but it turns out that a restaurateur is NOT somebody who restores paintings ( that would be a restorer ) but a person who opens and runs restaurants professionally. I guess that´s why they mostly use the term conservator instead of restorer in english to avoid any mistakes. Although it is not the same to just conserve things.

What wikipedia DID get right is that Daniela is also a model, tv presenter, singer and as of late actress and book author. I haven´t seen enough of her own tv show to really make a qualified assessment - there are other people who have done that in detail - but I don´t think she lacks any talent. I´ve seen an episode where she was booked as a model and when she finally started to listen to the photographer she did an excellent job and the photographer was blown away by her professionalism. The only model I ever was was for the local hair dresser because he said my hair was good to work with and grew back very quick ( I guess that´s gone now with my age ) but I don´t think being a model is as easy as people think.

Because then everybody would do it. And while people are already talking about the Katzenberger Effekt I think with Daniela we have something like Pamela Anderson because as I said numerous times there were a lot of good looking women on Baywatch and many people say also more talented but none of them managed to use their popularity to boost their career.

There are a few people who come out of the reality tv thing and in most cases it are the ones who stay true to themselves. Anyway, since she is so famous Daniela Katzenberger is naturally one of the women parodied by Martina Hill ( who does a version of Tatjana Ohm, Germany´s Jessica Rabbit of news tv that is even better than the real thing ) on Switch Reloaded for which she even won a german tv award in October 2012.



We are staying with hot women who started out as models but we are making the jump from Germany to Spain where Mar Saura celebrates her 41st birthday. In her case wikipedia needs to be updated because while it mentions her appearace in Los Mysterios De Laura it doesn´t acknowledge that she played a big role in season two of El Ministerio Del Tiempo one of Spain´s most successful series which I have mentioned a few times before. Since I try to pimp the series as much as I can I was looking for an episode with her or some good scenes but there are mostly interviews so I´m leaving you with Mar Saura´s biggest impact on spanish tv history : her sexy wardrobe malfunction on the show Verano Noche ( Summer Night ).

Speaking about great moments in tv history brings us to Sonia Monroy who turns 44. She became famous as a member of the aptly named all busty pop group Las Sex Bombs whose debut album sold 50,000 copies in Spain and went gold. She also was on the spanish version of Survivor and her best appearance was on a talk show where she wore a dress with the mother of all cleavages even rivaling Kylie minogue´s plunging mega cleavage in I Just Can´t Get You Out Of My Head and it´s a miracle she didn´t have a wardrobe malfunction although the dress didn´t leave anything to the imagination where her 38D airbags are concerned either.

Back when I spent my summer vacations in Spain I always tried to tape as much of spanish tv as I could because it had to help me survive german tv for the rest of the year. So one year I was very tired when I finally arrived home and decided to leave setting up the vcr for the next day and Sonia Monroy´s appearance was the first thing I saw on spanish tv. I set up the vcr the next day but of course the show was not repeated and it took me a few years to find even some small clip on the internet. From then on setting up the vcr was always one of the first things I did when I came back home. Anyway, I coudn´t find any clip from this on YouTube which may be for the best because I don´t want to have too many videos of the same kind in one post. I uploaded one of the videos I found on my old blog and if there is enough reader interest I will do the same here. Otherwise it takes too long and I want to keep the uploads for the important things.

Apropos my summer vacations in Spain, that´s also when I got to see the uncensored version of late night movies of bad reputation and bad taste like Dr. Alien, Scream Queen Hot Tub Party, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers or Evil Toons with Michelle Bauer who celebrates her 58th birthday.

Speaking about cult sirens, Tara Buckman turns 60 who is best known for her role as one of the Lamborghini Babes in the Cannonball Run movie.

Readers may remember that I mentioned this video on Andrea Bocelli´s birthday and that I promised to post it on Andre Rieu´s next anniversary. Well, Today he celebrates his 67th birthday and I am a man of my word. 



We are staying with people who have a great voice as Julie Andrews turns 81 who is best known for her roles in Mary Poppins and The Sound Of Music and I have to admit that the only pieces of the latter one I know are those I have seen in compilations of various musicals at the Oscar Awards.

Now I didn´t find The Sound Of Music on You'Tube but you never know what you might stumble upon instead while looking for other stuff.



Our Dearly Departed section starts with Phillipe Noiret who has appeared in over 150 movies during his illustrious career so I might be forgiven for only mentioning two. The first one is Revenge Of The Musketeers about which I have written before since Sophie Marceau plays the daughter of D´Artagnan ( played by Phillipe Noiret ) and shows her breasts in a scene. The movie is finally available on amazon although at a very steep price.

Another great movie with Phillipe Noiret is Il Postino called The Postman in english which always gets it mixed up with Kevin Costner´s Postman. Which is also a great movie. As some readers might know I worked almost a year at the post office where my brother is still employed and I told him if I was still actively delivering mail I would watch the Kevin Costner movie at least one a week. Back to the Postman movie with Phillipe Noiret he plays world famous poet Pablo Neruda who lived in exile on Salina Island near Sicily during the 1950s. He befriends the local postman and decides to help him to win the heart of his love Beatrice played by Maria Grazia Cucinotta whom I cast as Big Barda in the first part of my Hollywood Edition of Casting The Justice League Of America Movie. Which also has Sophie Marceau as Justice League Europe liaison Catherine Colbert. 

Next up we have Richard Harris who for me is always the guy from A Man Called Horse which was a horror movie for me with the native american ritual ( people who have seen the movie know what I´m talking about ). When I see such scenes my skin begins to crawl even if it´s only depicted in graphic form like in Mike Grell´s Shaman´s Tears. There are two german versions of the movie available, one for ages 12 and up which is identical with the american r - rated version and one for ages 16 and up and you can see the differences and what was cut here . Coming back to Richard Harris, when he was not hanging around as a native american he appeared in such movies like Cassandra Crossing with Sophia Loren, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame with Salma Hayek ( which I already posted ) and The Wild Geese with Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Stewart Granger and Hardy Krüger. That movie was also heavily censored in the german version . 

Speaking of Sophia Loren, she co starred with Walter Matthau, our last celebrity birthday in the Grumpy Old Men movies where he teamed up once again with Jack Lemmon his partner in his most famous movie The Odd Couple. The movie was so successful that it spawned a tv series with Quincy M. E.´s Jack Klugman playing the part of Walter Matthau and Tony Randall substituting for Jack Lemmon. This was must see tv during my generation but there is a whole new generation who are oblivious to that which I realized in an episode of 21 Jump Street my younger brother was watching. One of the characters was evicted and while he was wandering the city looking for a new place to stay they were playing the famous music from The Odd Couple and he had no clue whatsoever what that was about. Coming back to Walter Matthau he also starred in a comic related movie as the grumpy neighbour George Wilson in Dennis The Menace and he was the uncredited drunk in Earthquake with Victoria Principal. 

Since a lot of Richard Corben´s early work was published in the Warren publications Eerie and Creepy here is a video with Esteban Maroto who contributed to many issues of those and also the Vampirella magazine.



I´m ending the post with Richard Corben video although I would have preferred one where you see him drawing or at least some art. But since I already posted the video with the Richard Corben art in an earlier post I looked around and I found this low budget movie adaption of Neverwhere.



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