My wife is so awesome. I've been working a lot of overtime and she felt kinda bad for me so Mrs. SB bought me a couple of books to sooth my doldrums.


The first book is Yokai Attack! It's a nice guide to traditional Japanese monsters. I've always enjoyed creature tomes but this is the best one I've come across. It has the more famous yokai like the the onibaba, the Kappa and the Tengu but also contains weirder stuff like the woman with a mouth in the back of her head, the hand washing demon and the tree with human faced peaches. My personal favorite is the slash-mouthed woman. Yokai Attack is presented as a survival guide, but what really makes this work so well is that it concisely describes the various monsters while putting them in a cultural context that's easy for a westerner to understand. The readability of the test is due to the biracial husband and wife team that wrote the book. It's worth noting that the art is wonderful too. It's a nice cross of modern manga styles and traditional wood block printing. Highly recommended to creature fans and folks interested in Japanese culture.

Here is a video about the writers of Yokai Attack! (and uh Halloween in Japan)


Yokai Attack also makes a nice companion volume for fans of Japanese horror films.



The 2nd book Mrs. Swinebread got for me was a volume of Oishinbo (the Japanese Cuisine story). Oishinbo is one of the most popular manga series of all time. I was quite surprised that portions of it are now being adapted into english because, well, Oishinbo is about food. It had a huge affect on Japanese culture so I guess, now that I think about, it was just a matter of time for Viz to publish it. Now when I tell folks that comics can really tell any kind of story I'll have an edition of Oishinbo to prove it. One of the guys I work with is a Gourmet, and he's salivating to to borrow my this book once i'm done with it. here's copy from VIZ website:

Each volume of Oishinbo follows Yamaoka and his colleagues through another adventure on their quest for the Ultimate Menu. Now, the highlights from the hundred-plus volume series have been selected and compiled into A la Carte editions: bite-sized chunks of story arranged by subject that add up to a full-course manga meal!

Japanese Cuisine introduces us to the fundamental ingredients--rice, sashimi, green tea, and dashi (cooking stock)--that constitute the soul of the Japanese kitchen. In each story we learn about the proper preparation and presentation of different dishes, as well as their history and cultural significance. The result is a moveable feast of a book, as informative as it is engaging.

Now those of you that love food but say you don't like comics no longer have any excuse.


-Swinebread

My New Comics... From Last Week

Swinebread Jr's Grandma has been in town, so I've been busy but here is last week's list.



This last week’s best cover is The Age of Sentry #6.


Jonah Hex #41, Marvel Comics. I’m getting a latter-day Conan/Red Sonja vibe going on between Jonah and Tallulah Black. This comic hasn’t let me down yet.

Last Reign #4, Boom Studios. I wonder if they realize that the plot in this issue is stolen right out of TMNT RPG After the Bomb.

Doctor Who Classics Series 2 #4, IDW.

Army of Darkness #37, Dynamite Entertainment.

The Age of Sentry #6, Marvel. The End of another mini-series, and thus my box list gets smaller.

Trade Paperbacks:
Savage Sword of Conan Volume 5 Dark Horse. Yeah Baby!

Books:
With all the money I’ve been saving I went ahead and picked up the paperback of Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. I can’t wait to dive into this one, but I gotta’ finish the paperback version of The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America first. The Ten Cent Plague is must read for anybody that wants to understand how pop was culture negatively transformed and how the comic book medium’s potential was basically destroyed for the next 40 to 50 years. A chilling and sadly forgotten chapter (outside of comicdom) in US history... until now.


-Swinebread

My New Comics

This week’s best cover is The Dark Tower: Treachery #6.


She-Hulk #38, Marvel Comics. The last issue. I hope Peter David’s run on She-Hulk will finally convince folks that he’s actually not that great of writer after all. I never liked his Hulk run.

The Dark Tower: Treachery #6, Marvel Comics. This mini ends so the next one can begin… but I’m done with DT.

Sgt Rock #3, DC Comics.

The War That Time Forgot #10, DC Comics.

I dropped more titles before this week’s shipment came in. Of note is the fact that Conan is no longer part of my box. I’m getting the trades so what’s the point.

For the comics I bought today… the total price was $13.99! Good grief… $13.99 for four comics, what an f-ing rip off. I’m finishing up current mini-series and I might be done for good in a few months but I’m not sure. I think the only regular titles that I’m still signed up for are: Jonah Hex, Red Sonja, Doctor Who Classic Series, Army of Darkness, Walking Dead, Brothers In Arms, and Back Issue (which is bimonthly). I also added the new Warlord series for look-see. This means for the first time in my life (while buying comics on a regular basis), I am not getting a regular Marvel book.

The mini-series that I’m finishing up are:
The War That Time Forgot, Jungle Girl, Age of the Sentry, Sgt. Rock, Ambush Bug, Kull, Last Reign, Fall of Cthulhu, Star Trek The Next Generation: The Last Generation, and The Twelve (which I hope finally finishes up soon).

A few books that I ordered before I dropped Previews are:
Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic-book Heroes (1939-1941). a collection of never-before-reprinted oddities from cartoonists working at the dawn of the comic-book format.

Essential Ambush Bug. Does my want for this really need to be explained?

Savage Sword of Conan Volume #5. SSoC is a gift that never stops giving.

You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation! More Fletcher Hanks goodness. I didn’t order this one but I gotta’ get it after the first volume, I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!

At some point I plan on getting The Boys in trade paperback too.

Well that's my forecast along with my new comics

-Swinebread

Portland Comics Part 1

This is part one of a short documentary about the comic book scene in Portland Oregon.

It was made in 2005 and shown at the 2nd annual Stumptown Comics Fest.




on Youtube you can watch it in High Quality


-Swinebread

Marvel House Ad: Christmas 1978

If you look closely, you can see How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way in there.



-Swinebread

New Adventures in Roleplaying

Well, the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons is out and the majority of reviews have been very positive. Wired Magazine’s take is quite good, here’ s a section:

In D&D 4th Edition, dungeon masters, or DMs, are freed from a good deal of the bookkeeping associated with the hobby in previous editions of the game, as the designers have streamlined the process for preparing adventures. Boxes of statistical information and extensive charts were once the norm, but now DMs can almost throw together an adventure on the fly. This philosophy has also lead to some radical changes in monster design. Just as players now have a fun trick or two up their sleeves, monsters now wield fantastic abilities that are wholly unique.

The possibilities these mechanical changes unlock are exciting in and of themselves. Nerds love to debate game mechanics, but what all this ultimately means for the player and the DM is more time focusing on more important things.

Combat moves so fluidly now, and the DM has so much less prep time to worry about, that the art of role-playing itself finally moves into the foreground of Dungeons & Dragons. Telling a compelling story, and having a ton of fun doing it, is ultimately the reason players sit down to game in the first place. What D&D 4th Edition represents is the chance to have fun with your friends without a ton of hassle, to immerse yourself in a fantasy world without working at it.

In fact, many of the mechanics are so easy to use that they remind players of what it feels like to play a massively multiplayer game. Wizards' Slavicsek has absolutely no problem with those comparisons, as all good games build on what has come before.

It seems that D&D has finally, finally shed most of its clunky rules but for me, it comes too late. The lawyering, number crunching, and game preparation were way out of hand. I've always stressed that Roleplaying games should just be that, about roleplaying and sadly the D&D folks never quite understood this until now. Most people don’t enjoy nor have the time to endlessly scourer the rules just to do the most basic tasks. Versatility and ease of story creation is the way to go and so it sounds like 4th edition would now finally provid that. It might actually attract new, non-geeky types… well probably not, but Wizards of the Coast can dream can’t they? It seems like 4th edition would be right up my alley.

The problem is I’m way too invested in 3.5 to upgrade. I bought tons of D&D and D20 books, looking for ideas and hoping the next volume would be the one to unlock the secret of easy and fun gameplay. Now I’ve got no one to blame but myself, but why would I do this? Well, I was sublimating my desire for a universal roleplaying game into the D20 system. It was the most prevalent RPG and I thought that it would provide more opportunities to actually sit down with somebody and game. I was wrong about that.

What I really wanted was a universal gamming system from Chaosium. I've always loved how their mechanics work in a simple but appropriate manner for their various games like Call of Cthulhu, and Stormbringer. Their core mechanic has a name, it’s called Basic Roleplaying or BRP but Chaosium hadn’t really pushed it as a universal gamming platform before except for a halfhearted attempt with Worlds of Wonder. So in my desire to fill the void, that Chaosium seemed unwilling to satisfy, I self medicated with 3.5 and D20.

It’s ironic that D&D 4th edition is being released at about the same time as Chaosium’s new Basic Roleplaying game. Finally, I’m getting the game I really want, and it’s not from Wizards of the Coast. Of course, Chaosium should have done this years ago but at least it’s happening at a time when I’m feeling particularly left out of the next big jump in RPG industry.

Basic Roleplaying the Chaosium System is rolling out to a store near you as I type this. But if you’re more of a PDF type of person, downloads are now available for purchase on the website. Dungeons & Dragons and Chaosuim have changed with the times even if both were very late to do so.

See basicroleplaying.net and basicroleplaying.com for info on BRP outside of Chaosium’s website.

-Swinbread

Robert E. Howard Days

Cross Plains Texas celebrates its native son, Robert E. Howard, with two days of events in the 2nd weekend of June. Hey, that starts today! The cimmerian blog has some nice shots of the town and here’s a list of events.

He gave us so many wonderful characters and stories in such a short time.

I couldn't find a good video about Howard so here's Renee Zellweger as Novalyne Price and Vincent D'Onofrio as Robert E. Howard kissing in the movie "The Whole Wide World"


-Swinebread

Randomness

Spring over here to get the scoop on the pics from the Wolverine movie set. Looks interesting especially since I didn’t even know they were in production with this thing. It’s funny because I bailed on Wolverine and X-men comics back in 1991, and back then Logan was still this guy with a mysterious past. Later, Marvel started filling in his back-story. Those comics look interesting but I never felt the urge to read them. X-men burnout I guess (and the undoing of the Dark Phoenix saga). As it stands now, the Wolverine movie could be extra entertaining for me

_________________________________________________



MSNBC conducted an interview with David Hajdu, author of the new book, “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America,” see here

Here’s a section by Hajdu:

The interesting thing about comics, and why comics were early to be a source of economic and social power for young people was because they were affordable. I mention this in the book, but these were things that were made by young people, for young people, marketed directly to young people and priced for young people. And they’re the only work of expression, of art, that qualified as such. Kids could buy candy bars … but not much else, for a dime. There were no other forms of art or creative expression within their reach….

Comics and the late,’40s and ’50s were more popular than any form of popular entertainment. The way to fully absorb the power that comics had was to understand not just the reach, which was extraordinary, which was huge, but also that the content of those comics and the point of view of those comics and the sensibility of those comics was so radically different from that of anything else that young people can see. If kids are going to the movies, they’re not seeing anything like this in the movies. Movies were geared toward families. There was nothing like this.

We lost a lot when comic books were practically destroyed in the 1950s by small-minded people. Comics most likely would have been as big here as Manga is in Japan had this purge not happened. Many of the readers of these 50s comics were boomers; I wonder if this is was their first rebellion? …a rebellion that was crushed.

_________________________________________________



The Sci-Fi channel has started airing a “new show” last week about a man that morphs between three alternate universes called Charlie Jade. It’s not really new as it’s been out in Canada and South Africa for a few years.

Filmed gorgeously in and around Cape Town, this Canadian-South African co-production (2005, 20 episodes, plus one "recap" episode) centers on the adventures of the eponymous Charlie (Jeffrey Pierce), a private detective who, in the course of investigating a mysterious girl’s murder, gets catapulted into an alternative universe. Our universe. There he must unravel the machinations of the nefarious megacorporation, Vexcor, before... well, to say any more would spoil the surprise.

Charlie Jade breathes new life into the standard SF trope of the parallel universe. The show moves among three “present-day” universes: the Alphaverse, Betaverse, and Gammaverse. You won’t find Spock-with-a-Beard here; in fact, very few characters have alter egos. This—to invoke Spock again—is logical: given different life circumstances, most people’s parents wouldn’t have gotten together. Charlie comes from the Alphaverse, a Blade Runner-esque dystopia where Vexcor rules a totalitarian state of near-universal surveillance and corporate corruption. But Vexcor has a problem: the Alphaverse is running out of natural resources. Luckily for Vexcor, it has developed a universe-hopping technology that will allow the company to plunder the Gammaverse, a seeming utopian idyll of ecologically sustainable living. To reach the Gammaverse, however, Vexcor’s machine must punch a line through the Betaverse, our universe. And when Gammaverse terrorists blow up the Vexcor’s Gammaverse base, Charlie finds himself caught in the shock wave and stuck in Beta.

From Here

Trailer:


_________________________________________________

Stephen Colbert's Make McCain Exciting Challenge! The first entries are in.



Also youtube has ton. Including one that used Dr. Zaius’ mini-me Bush here.


-Swinebread

Pics from the Road

Here are some shots from the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's Stars Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy. It will be released this November.








I think Viggo is a good choice for the the father and the images look appropriately grim enough. The Road is about love, and it's about survival, but don't call it post-apocalyptic sci-fi because the masses would never enjoy anything like that.


-Swinebread

Favorite Martians

Last Sunday, I watched coverage of the Phoenix land on Mars. I’m happy that it landed safely and that the mission has been such a success so far. It was fun to see the crew get so excited by the whole process. The Phoenix also made me think that if we’re going to waste billions of tax dollars, it should be “wasted” on exploring our solar system not on a stupid war like the Iraq debacle.

All this info about the new Mars mission also got me thinking about my favorite Martians from fiction, comics, and film. Too bad Mars is a dead planet.


Marvin the Martian

This soft-spoken alien packs a big disintegrating punch. He’s the first Martian I remember and he’s one of the funniest Looney Tunes ever IMO. What’s even more fantabulous is that he’s on the official mission patch for the Mars Rovers.
This is Marvin's best appearance in the famous cartoon Duck Doddgers in the 24th and ½ Century:


And just because Marvin is so cool here’s his first appearance in Haredevil Hare from 1948:



War of the Worlds Martians

H.G. Wells created something both exciting and shocking with his WotW Martians. Every alien invasion and sci-fi horror story ever written owes so much to these grotesque blobs that pilot tripod death machines. Regardless of whether they’re plausible or not they’re still very scary and have shown up and been reinvented numerous times. You just gotta’ love ‘em.

The High Overlord and Skar

In 1973, Marvel Comics published a post-apocalyptic series in the pages Amazing Adventures. In this title, the Martians from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds came rushing back to earth and conquered our planet in the year 2001 and this time they inoculated themselves against the our planet's microbes. Almost two decades later, the earth is much transformed by the invaders into an almost Barsoom-like place and a hero, Killraven, rises to battle these Martian conquers. His most fearsome reoccurring enemies were Skar, a cyborg assassin, and the High Overlord, a Martian that had his alien body modified to fit inside bipedal suit of armor. They’re wild and wacky, but these two sci-fi evildoers are great pulpy villains none-the-less.

Mars Attacks Martians

I’m much too young to remember the Trading Cards but the movie was a real hoot. These gross looking Martians almost conquered the world using every trick known to the atomic horror genre. These little nasties are a great antidote to “serious” invasion monsters from films like Independence Day. It was almost a relief when they blew up the federal government. Too bad they couldn’t withstand Slim Whitman.



Dejah Thoris

This Red Martian hottie hails from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom and makes the grade because of her wild adventures with John Carter, her regal rule of the city state of Helium, and her lack of clothes. Sword and Planet has never seen anything better.


Martian Manhunter

I’d never been particularly interested in J’onn J’onzz until I read The New Frontier and watched Justice League: The New Frontier animated movie. I’m finding his desire to understand humanity and his alien nature fascinating. He’s kinda’ like half Spock and half Klaatu with superpowers.
J’onn J’onzz with the Kents at Xmas:



Martian Chronicles Martians


The introspective and telepathic aliens of Ray Bradbury’s Martians Chronicles are eerie and haunting. They turn the invasion scenario on its head by being the victims of Human colonization (in a metaphor of western frontier migration). They are not particularly malevolent like other Martians and are unable to deal with the threat the Human setters represent. Ultimately, they pass away except for a few ghosts and their cities are the ruins that the humans build a new Mars based culture upon.

Here's a scene from the 1979 TV adatption of The Martian Chronicles. (The TV show was OK but it is dated)



-Swinebread

Book Meme

Rob! has tagged me. It’s the Book meme. I have to grab the nearest book, turn to page 123, locate the fifth sentence, and then post the next three sentences on my blog, and then tag five other people.

The nearest book: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Sentences: The Water was so clear. He held it to the light. A single bit of sediment coiling in the jar on some slow hydraulic axis.

Food and water are very important in The Road.

Was there more to this meme at some point?

Now I have to "tag" five other people whose blogs:

(if you already done this sorry)

ladybug

sanbulus

Dean Wormer

Heidi Meeley

Eaglewing


-Swinebread

Free Comic Book Day and Other Strangeness

Don’t forget Free Comic Book Day is tomorrow at a comic book store near you. It’s gonna be a wild ride around here as the festivities will also include Iron Man and Dim Sum. I’m looking forward to it as I’ll be spending the day with Dean Wormer and his unruly Deltas.

On another note, a fellow coworker’s son lucked into a comic book windfall. Apparently he was looking around on Craig’s List and found an ad for a box of comics for 50 bucks. See, some poor sap was being sent off to Iraq and he told his mom to sell his stuff. Well, when my coworker’s son got the box home, he discovered it had a bunch of old comics. He didn’t have all the details but my coworker said that there was a superman from the forties or fifties and a lot of Spidermans from the sixties. If that soldier makes it back, I wonder if he’ll be pissed his collection went for so little. More info to come if I can get it.

I just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a wonderful post apocalyptic novel, and a great work of literature. The simplicity of the book is its strength IMO. The father and son relationship is the core of the story (it’s that relationship that helps them endure the gristliest of horrors) but I also really enjoyed the survival aspect. Adventure can be found in the purest things, an old house, a rusty truck, or a destroyed forest. It’s my understanding that The Road is being made into a movie and it’s shooting right now. I heard on the local news that the studio is looking for a pregnant body double for Charlize Theron here. Yup, a quick check of IMDB revels that some of The Road is being shot in Oregon. That seems a little strange as the book is set in the South but Oregon does have a varied environment. Also, some of the scenes will be shot at Mt. St. Helens, which makes perfect sense at it has a blasted landscape, of ash and downed trees.

Remember Free Comic Book Day tomorrow!


-Swinebread


P.S. I swear I'll get to your comments soon, thanks for checking in.

Random Comic info

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu is getting some good buzz. It deals with the censorship of comic books in the McCarthy era and the creation of the Comics Code Authority that ruined many a good story, many a good genre and many a good creator. Despite the vileness of the topic, I find this period in the history of comics incredibly fascinating and I intend to pick up this book at some point.



I bought the Justice League: the New Frontier video, but grabbed the single disk version. So, I don’t have any of the bonus material. As it turns out that’s the real treat of this release as reviews have been mixed. I haven’t broken the seal yet so I may take it back for a 2-disk set. Apparently there is a pretty good doc on the history of the Justice League.



Some interesting responses to my Men are from Marvel, Women are from DC and DC’s Super Feminine Mystique posts:

Leftarrow here

Brainfreeze here

Brainfreeze here part 2


New Pic from Watchmen.

After production wrapped a while back on the Watchmen movie a frame was released.


One more hint that this could be a really great film.

-Swinebread

What Book Are You?

You're Watership Down!

by Richard Adams

Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you're
actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their
assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they
build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You'd
be recognized as such if you weren't always talking about talking rabbits.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Maybe it's all those Captain Carrot, Bugs Bunny, and Usagi Yojimbo stories I've been into.

Thanks to BAC at Yikes! here

Trip to Japan Part V

The next day we didn’t do much. It was low-key. My wife and I took a break and went shopping in the Saitama area. Luckily for me, shopping in a foreign country can still be and interesting endeavor. I guess the big highlight of the day occurred when we went to the Aeon shopping center. It’s a new complex built and organized in a similar fashion to an American shopping mall.

Here’s the outside of the AEON shopping mall. You can see the Saitama Soccer stadium in the background. It was built for the World Cup championship from a few years ago. My Mother-in-law and my wife both complained that stadium cost a huge amount of tax money and that the structure can only be used for soccer so it’s such a waste. I thought about that for a moment and said “I’d rather waste millions on a soccer stadium than a stupid war” My statement seemed make to make them feel a lot better about the whole thing… but not me of course.


It was fun to walk the aisles but what was the most fun was the store itself. Everything was so small but in a huge space. Here was the gigantic building with a very high ceiling but the shelves were all very short, what I might consider a child’s height in the states. Of course the average Japanese person is shorter than the average American, but my western biased mind felt they were wasting so much space that could be filled with products. I felt like Santa Claus in the elves’ town. On the other hand, not having huge shelves made the place feel very open.

Here are a couple of pics of two AEON employees preparing red bean paste for sale. It’s sweet and used in many desserts in Japan. We ended up buying some. I think the gal who sold us the red bean paste was overwhelmed by my appearance as she just filled the containers to overflowing, a very un-Japanese-like thing to do.


Another interesting aspect of the mall was that since it was so spacious, there were combo shopping cart/kid strollers available for families to use. It’s kinda’ a normal thing in the states but to see it in Japan made me realize what a novelty it must be here. I also saw folks in wheelchairs, which was nice. Life in Japan can be pretty hard when your disabled as next to nothing is accessible. This mall was very different as there was plenty of room to move around and it was a straight shot from the parking lot to the mall interiors. It reminded me that disabled folks in Japan put up with a lot of crap and here was the one place they could come and have a normal shopping experience.

The other “important” stop of the day was a second trip to Book Off. It’s a used Book, CD, and Video store. Book Off is one of the few stores created in the aftermath of the economic bubble that’s been wildly successful. Now there’s no point in buying everything new. My wife sold a bunch of old titles that she had left at her parents’ house and picked up some newer titles to take back to the states. When it comes to novels her tastes tend to run in the thriller and horror realms although she’s open to almost anything. Of course they had a fantastic selection of manga and I was happy to browse the aisles. My SO also bought some manga too as she grabbed several Black Jack digests and huge collectors digest of a comics about cooking and food, although I don’t know it’s name.


After we left Book Off, I noticed a different store that had a similar name to Book Off. It was called Hard Off. I had a lot of fun explaining why Hard Off wasn’t such good name for a company. My in-laws laughed about that for days.

We finished up our shopping excursions by swinging by a family friend that runs both a ceramic studio and an organic food store. She’s a great lady and she really wanted to talk to me as she’s been studying English for years. My wife and in-laws affectionately call her and her husband “the hippies” as they run an organic business, love 60s’ and 70s music and are big outdoor lovers. Naturally, they don’t look like hippies but I bet they’d dress a little like them if they could get away with it Japan.

We had a nice conversation in her ceramic studio and the place was full of adult students busily using potter's wheels and other tools as they prepped for a ceramic show that was coming next week. As my mother-in-law picked up her fired piece, my wife and I headed next door to the organic store. It’s a small place mostly stocked with fresh vegetables. But that makes sense, as food, like everything in Japan, is very expensive. Organic food has almost become a luxury but our family friend believes that it’s important to have healthy, natural foods to eat. Before we left, I mentioned that I think she would really enjoy Oregon and that I hoped she and her husband could visit someday.

Here’s my mother-in-law’s ceramic piece in its finished, painted form on display during the ceramic show the following week. The birds nest on top with eggs was my SO's idea.


That day, I think I managed to get another trip to 7-11 in there too.

-Swinebread

WWII Superhero Action

I’m having a blast reading Invaders Classic Vol 1, which I picked up a couple of weeks ago. This book collects Invaders #1-9, Giant Size Invaders #1 and Marvel Premiere #29-30 from the 1970s. The adventures are set during WWII and use Timely Comics’ (Marvel’s original name) big three: Captain America, the Human Torch, and Namor the Sub-Mariner. These wild and wahoo tales are some of Roy Thomas’ best retcons with all out Nazi smashing action. See, good old Roy was very fond of Golden Age superheroes and really wanted to revisit them. 1940s Timely (Marvel) unfortunately didn’t have the business sense to gather up their most popular heroes on one team during the war years. So, while Cap and the guys fought the good fight in all their four-color glory, they never did it together. Roy sought to rectify that, and thus the Invaders comic was born.
These stories are a lot of fun because they’re a nice cross of WWII combat energy and 70’s cynicism. Frank Robbins, who draws most of the art is OK if somewhat crude at times. But, his attention to detail when it comes to military hardware really makes the combat scenes, and boy, those combat scenes are over the top with things like the Human Touch burning through Junkers bombers and Namor pulling Germans out of fuselages to fall to their deaths. That’s right, this is combat and the heroes have a license to kill. Most of the heroes’ battle action is directed towards Axis supervillains though, which is great because Roy created a new Nazi rogues galley with Master Man, U-Man (an Atlantean traitor) and Baron Blood (a vampire). Although, my favorite, Warrior Woman, won’t appear until volume 2 or 3 comes out. The Golden Age diabolical Red Skull shows up too. Our friends from across the pond will want to take note that Union Jack, Britain’s flag draped patriotic hero, makes his first appearance here as well.

Someone gave me Invaders Issue #3 when I was in junior high, many moons after the series ended, but it made a big impression on me, and I’ve always had a fondness for this title. In fact issue #3 has one of my favorite action scenes. It involves Namor brutally ripping apart a German Sub, which kills everybody inside except for the sub captain who accidentally survives. After rereading this story I remembered why I like Captain America so much, and why it pissed me off that Marvel killed him simply because they wanted to make a few bucks in the short term. As we can see from these panels after Namor brings the German sub captain aboard, Cap is a class act all the way.


…But sadly that is how we do things in the real world nowadays. Ethics and morals folks, that’s something that’s sorely lacking in our national leaders during this troubling period when our principles are taking a nosedive. I’ll choose comic book values over fake patriotism and jackboot tactics anytime. Those panels are nice reminder of what we were fighting for and what we should have been fighting for now.


Check out the Invaders for raw, over the top superhero action.


Note: The Captain America: War and Remembrance trade by Roger Stern and John Byrne that just came out, makes a nice companion to the Invaders as both Union Jack and Baron Blood show up. It collects Captain America #247-255 and it’s pretty dam good in it’s own right.

-Swinebread

My New Comics

Howdy Folks! We got a bigger haul than usual. This week’s best cover is Raise the Dead #3.

Battlestar Galactica: Cylon Apocalypse #4 (based on the old show), Dynamite Entertainment.

Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born #5, Marvel Comics.

Jonah Hex #20, DC Comics, Dynamite Entertainment.

Marvel Zombies VS. Army of Darkness #4, Marvel Comics.

Raise the Dead #3, Dynamite Entertainment.

Battlestar Galactica #10 (based on the new show), Dynamite Entertainment.

The Lone Ranger #6, Dynamite Entertainment.

The Incredible Hulk #106 Variant, Marvel Comics. I Had to find out what happened to She-Hulk!

Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Mystic Arcana #1, Marvel Comics.

Impulse Buy: Black Summer #0, Avatar. The prez and the vice prez get taken out by a superhero.

Impulse Buy: MPD – Psycho #1, Dark Horse Comics. I haven’t read it yet, but I think I made a mistake picking this one up. It’s really not my kinda stuff. Well, I can always sell it to Powell’s.

I also ordered a book too. The Spider: Robot Titans of Gotham by Norvell Page. The Spider is one of those pulp heroes from the 1930s. I’ve read about him, so I figured it was time to actually read some of his adventures.

-Swinebread

‘Polish Anne Frank’ Comes to Light in Discovered Diary

I actually learned about this from the Newspaper rather than from TV news or the Internet. AP report Via the NY daily news here

the diary of a 14-year-old Jewish girl dubbed the "Polish Anne Frank" was unveiled on Monday, chronicling the horrors she witnessed in a Jewish ghetto - at one point watching a Nazi soldier tear a Jewish baby away from his mother and kill him with his bare hands.
The diary, written by Rutka Laskier in 1943 shortly before she was deported to Auschwitz, was released by Israel's Holocaust museum more than 60 years after she recorded what is both a daily account of the horrors of the Holocaust in Bedzin, Poland and a memoir of the life of a teenager in extraordinary circumstances.

Apparently her diary was kept by a childhood friend all these years but was finally released when it’s value as a historical document was realized. Check the link and read some of the quotes from her book. Even these small snippets are very moving. Considering the impact that Ann Frank’s diary has had, this is an enormous find. Another voice speaks from beyond the grave.

-Swinebread