So I’m reading my copy of Nova Classic, ‘cause that’s what
all the cool adults do, when I come to issue five of the original ‘70s Nova
series and a section on the Comics Code jumps out at me.
Richard Rider, AKA Nova the Human Rocket, visited Marvel’s
offices hoping to get a comic book title based on himself. Amazingly, Nova
wants the comic to show all his sexual conquests (“Necking and Such”) rather
than be censored by that pesky Comics Code. Sadly, of course, the “Necking and
Such” adult content would never appear. Not wanting to miss a lost opportunity
nor bow to past censorship, I’ve decided to reconstruct these possible lost
scenes using actual dialog from the Nova comics, Enjoy!
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
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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.
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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.
An immature goob on youtube didn’t like a throwaway joke comment I made on a random video. So this person, along with their friends, went through all my uploaded videos and gave them poor ratings (1 star) out of spite. They didn’t rate my clips based on the merits of the videos themselves but rather on simply being petty. Since my vids don’t get a lot of traffic this is a major blow to possible future viewership. If someone generally doesn’t like something I’ve posted that’s fine but to go through, systematically, and rate everything I’ve posted poor is ridiculous. They even downgraded the positive comments for goodness sake! I would ask my fellow friendly bloggers, if you have a youtube account, to please rate my videos with five stars, check the thumbs up on previous posted comments, and leave comments yourself. It would be much appreciated. Of course, if you truly don’t enjoy what I have uploaded, I wouldn’t ask you to comprise your integrity but if you feel inclined, it would be very helpful. I’ve mitigated the damage somewhat but I’m sure this person and their friends will return under other accounts to further push down my ratings so your assistance is greatly appreciated.
On another note, here’s an outtake from my one my favorite documentaries Comic Book Confidential. This vid starts out with William Gaines of EC comics but then goes into a propaganda film about why Comic Books are an evil abomination. This was part of the big push to ban comics in the 1950s that led directly to the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Don’t let anybody ever tell you that the government and “polite society” wasn’t out to get comics.
