Adscape 2: The Captain Tootsie Revenge Squad

"Okay, everybody, calm down! Silence I say! This meeting of the Captain Tootsie Revenge Squad is hereby called to order! There's no old business to attend to, so let's move on to inducting our latest member! I believe that we should begin by introducing ourselves, and as chairman I shall go first!"

"I am the feared Dr Narsty! I love make small children unhappy! I would venture to say that I am Captain Tootsie's arch nemesis, having come closest to defeating him by depriving him of his precious Tootsie Rolls! Oh, if only those rotten, meddling children hadn't been around to pull the cork out by it's string! Curses!"

"I also shouldn't have included a string in the first place! Augh! I'm too angry to go on... Spies! Take over!"

"Guten tag. Ve are Hans and Schmanz, Cherman schpies from ze Vorld Var II."

"Ja, ve ver azzined to make schure zat Amerika vas not hidink zecret veapons in der schmall towns!"

"Zadly, der Kaptain Tootsie schowed opp und kecked our Ärsche!"

"Ja, he schtomped us into schnitzel!"

 "Me, I'm Red, Red the Terror. I never even knew I was up against Captain Tootsie 'til it was too late."

"See, I'd just busted out of the clink and I figgered I'd follow the standard pattern: tie up a fat kid and live in his house for a while. Things were going great - I found a fat kid in record time and the house was real nice - pink walls, yellow polka-dot coitains, the woiks."

"Next thing I know... Whammo! I didn't even get a chance to dress up in the kid's mudder's clothes!"

"Monster Man is next! Monster Man tell you all about time me met Captin Tooty."

"Monster Man still not know what happen. See, me have perfect plan:"

 

"Me spend week and week planning. Push child, open bank! Then me take monies to store for soft fruit and trail mix!"

"Monster Man still wonder how went wrong."

"Favourite theory involve sun spots, weather balloon. Too complex get into right now - Monster Man send you Powerpoint him work up."

"Worst part whole thing always having listen to candy talk all time."

"Serious, it like him have man from Marketing in him ass. Kid not know about balance diet? Him have question authority some day."

"Yes, well put, Monster Man. Just another reason that all children should be locked in a small room filled with bees."

"So now you know our stories and our reasons for hating Captain Tootsie as much as you do. We'll go through things like membership fees and the weekly 50/50 draw to pay for the water cooler later. For now, I'd like to fomally welcome you to the Captain Tootsie Revenge Squad..."

"...KILLER BEAR."

John, Though Many Conspire Against Him, Buys Comics

It's true - people have been giving me delicious free food like it was going out of style, and if there's one thing that a full Johnathan does not do, it's get around to writing things. I'd resist, but... pork and clams. Pork and clams!

Before the delightful review section of the evening begins, I have a contest to direct you to: one Patrick Wensink is celebrating the release of his book Sex Dungeon For Sale by having what I consider a bang-up contest. First, it's a colouring contest, which is nice because you have to demonstrate a little skill. Secondly, the prizes:

Tales Designed to Thrizzle – by Michael Kupperman
Fool- By Christopher Moore
AM/PM – By Amelia Gray
Help! A Bear is Eating Me! – By Mykle Hansen

ALL AUTOGRAPHED. Now, I'm sadly not familiar with Amelia Gray or Mykle Hansen, but Michael Kupperman and  Christopher Moore are two of my very favourite creators, so I can imagine that I'd like all four of these equally. Head on over to Patrick's web site for more details. You can get a taste of his writing there as well - I had a chance to read Sex Dungeon For Sale this week and had myself a very good time. Check out the story "My Son Thinks He's French", which was tied with "Jesus Toast" for the position of John's Fave Story of the Book. If there's a common theme to the stories in this collection, it's represented in this one: the world is behaving strangely and the characters are taking it at face value. I'd venture to say that it's JOHN APPROVED.

R13 No. 2

They really had me at “human skull-infused robot fights monsters”, but the guys behind R13 aren’t going to just sit back and rake in the Johnathan-dollars on a bare minimum of effort, oh no. This issue features the beginnings of a hint of an origin for my favourite skull-bot, with entirely unexpected ties to Classical Greece, to boot!

Nice touches this issue: R13’s skull moves around and looks at people inside of that crazy dome, which I hadn’t picked up on the first time around, and which is both very humanizing and very creepy. Plus, this issue features Echidna, one of the most underused of mythological menaces. Dare we hope that Typhon might put in an appearance later on?

So: a solid book from a brand-new studio. If you derive any enjoyment from the “big guys punch monsters” school of supernatural comic then you should give this one a go. Plus, mine came with buttons!

Batman Unseen No. 5 (of 5)

Dave made a crack about this being more akin to “Batman Unread”, which is a shame, because it was a) really fun and b) came out, like, weekly and so was this great guaranteed good time with my Wednesday book purchase. And now, finally, we’ve gone beyond Batman fighting an invisible man to Batman being an invisible man.

Invisible Batman was jut about as entertaining as I had reckoned he would be, but what I hadn’t banked on was that this was an iteration of the Dark Knight Detective that really make me think. Specifically, I was thinking about the logistics of fighting homicidal maniacs while naked, because of course that’s the real downside to many forms of invisibility. I have to say that even if I was the GD Batman I wouldn’t come within a kilometer of your average Gotham villain without a very sturdy cup, invisibility or not.

That's right, Rachelle. This issue features naked Batman fighting another naked man. How do you like that?

Batman Confidential No. 38

In contrast, this is a Batman comic that is sucking. Not all the time, but this arc… sheesh. I bought the last issue because Lady Blackhawk was in it and was certainly going to bring some fun and this issue because Blackhawk himself was making an appearance - sore disappointment in either case. Lame lame lousy lame story, bad rendition and characterization of a great character (both of them, though Zinda Blake much more than Blackhawk), rehashing of a plot that was handled better in Birds of Prey…Bleah.

World of New Krypton No. 10 - I’m really enjoying this as an exercise in interstellar diplomacy and an exploration of an alien society, plus the only place to read Superman right now. Who would have guessed that Adam Strange would be the latest character to become ubiquitous?

North 40 No. 6

I just wrote yet another review of an issue of this comic where I basically just shouted “Flying kid vs. Lovecraftian octopoid god-thing! Civil War flashback! Super-powered rednecks!” I think that this is a perfectly valid way to praise a comic that I love, but it has occurred to me that just listing the high points of each issue might not be as effective at conveying just why you should be checking this out as I’d like it to be.

See, Aaron Williams and Fiona Staples invested the first three or four issues of this series establishing just how effed-up and interesting things had gotten for the people of Conover County as a result of the reality-warping accident in issue 1. Personalities, factions, locations and relationships have been established, generating a very effective and highly creepy stage for the plot to play out on. It’s Good vs. Evil on a field of Ignorance, and this issue begins expanding the scope of the story beyond the borders of the county.

Plus: revolver-based sorcery!

Oh, poo. I just found out that this was issue 6 of 6. Hopefully, it's going to be like Chew or B.P.R.D. and just have a lot of miniseries, but the prospect of never reading this again makes me sad.

King City No. 3 - I'm writing this just after the stuff that I wrote about Sex Dungeon for Sale (that's right, this is all done non-sequentially and it still manages to be disorganized) and so my food-based lethargy is still a problem. Keeping it short and easy for my hip-happy fingers, King City is a) well-written, b) delightfully (as opposed to frustratingly) complex and c) very funny from foreground action to background detail, but without sacrificing good meaty story on the altar of the joke. Very very very good times.

Jonah Hex No. 50 - Jonah Hex drawn by Darwyn Cooke. A treat for the senses! Sense. A treat for the eyeballs! If you're going to read one Western comic this year, this should be it. You should read more, though.

Tales From the Beanworld Book 3: Remember Here When You Are There!

Will you look at that: the first new Beanworld stories since the Nineties. Unless maybe that comic last Christmas was new, which i kinda think it was. So the first new Beanworld stories in a year.

This reemergence of Larry Marder and his world is a source of never-ending delight to me. For years all I had of the Beanworld was one skinny little Eclipse collection of the first three or four issues - I barely hoped to get to read the rest of what had been produced, let alone anything new. And yet a couple of nights ago I sat back and read the continuing adventures of Mr Spook and Professor Garbanzo and the Pod'l Pool Cuties, occasionally heaving great sighs of contentment. What a time to be alive!

As Erica takes great delight in pointing out, the Beanworld is extraordinarily strange, but I have to say that that is one of the reasons I love it so. If you've never given it a try, do yourself a favour and flip through the collections the next time you get a chance - if you end up getting into it, you'll thank me.

Zorro: Still sexy 50 years later

I don't make a secret of how much I love Zorro. He's exactly like Batman except Spanish and, y'know, first. Zorro is a fictional character so cool that Bruce Wayne, an even cooler fictional character, decided to base his whole life on him.

So I was pretty excited that Disney has released the complete series (two seasons, 78 episodes) of the black and white Zorro television show that ran in the late 1950s. The DVDs are part of Disney's stylish Disney Treasures series. The Zorro DVDs, divided into two sets: season 1 and season 2, come in fancy black metal boxes and include fancy collectors pins and postcards. They also include a long-winded introduction by Leonard Maltin, but fortunately my remote control includes a skip button.

The Zorro series is like the 1950s Superman series starring George Reeves, except it isn't boring and the action scenes are awesome. The opening sequence also features a bit of animation, which is pretty neat given the era. The song is awesome too. I like that it ends by repeating the word 'Zorro' to the point where the word loses all meaning. 

If you are unfamilar with the character for some reason (which means you HAVEN'T been reading the fantastic Dynamite comic series written by Matt Wagner and drawn by Francesco Francavilla despite my frequent suggestions to do so), Zorro (Guy Williams, aka Professor John Robinson from Lost in Space) is actually Don Diego de la Vega, a wealthy young man who has just returned home to California after studying abroad in Spain. A large part of his studies involved sword fighting (spoiler alert: this will come in handy later). When he returns he sees that the people of California are being ruled with an iron fist by the evil Captain Monastario. He decides that it would be a good idea to pretend to be a useless fop during the day, and transform himself into the dashing Zorro at night to fight the injustice he sees around him. This works out pretty well.

Both Zorro and Monastario are played by attractive actors, which adds to my enjoyment when they are fighting each other. In the third episode of the first season they get into a big whip fight and just start whipping the shit out of each other. You can see it around 5:45 of this colourized clip: 

Because this show holds up really well, is beautifully restored in black and white, and these are probably the only DVD box sets that Batman would own, I highly recommend.

Masters Of The Fourth World?

 A few weeks back, I mentioned how the Masters of the Universe live-action movie from 1987 was, in essence, the closest we’re ever gonna get to a New Gods movie. This isn’t my theory, by the way—former comics great/current comics crackpot John Byrne said as much in a Next Men letters column some years back, and MOTU director Gary Goddard confirmed Kirby’s influence in a letter printed in a later issue. A recent installment of the excellent Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed even discusses the connections between MOTU supporting character Zodac and New Gods mainstay Metron. I first saw the MOTU movie on cable in the Eighties when it was fairly fresh, and my only familiarity with Kirby’s New Gods characters would have been their inclusion in Kenner’s Super Powers toy line a few years before that. However, watching it again after having familiarized myself with (some less charitable souls might say becoming obsessed with) Kirby’s crazy mythology, the parallels were unavoidable.  Let’s have a look at the similarities, shall we?

 -Both feature a war between godlike beings on a higher plane of reality.

 -Both feature a cosmic despot (Darkseid/Skeletor) locked in combat with a noble yet barbaric warrior hero (Orion/He-Man).

 -In both, the struggle eventually comes to Earth, where a group of innocent humans become involved. In New Gods, the most ready examples of this are Claudia Shane, Harvey Lockman, Dave Lincoln, and Victor Lanza. In MOTU, it’s Courtney Cox (who, just like when Springsteen pulled her on stage in the video for Dancing In The Dark, is always being called on by a higher power).

There’s even a surly cop played by James Tolkan (Principal Strickland from Back To The Future) who embodies the “Terrible” Turpin role. Like Turpin, he doesn’t care for all this cosmic hoo-hah, he just wants to put the bad guys behind bars.

 -Both Darkseid and Skeletor dispatch underlings who displease them with energy bolts that dissolve them to nothingness (in Darkseid’s case, the Omega Effect; in Skeletor’s case, it’s energy from his fingertips that is in desperate need of a cool name).

 -Easy parallels can be found between said underlings; Granny Goodness=Evil-Lyn (played here by They Live’s Meg Foster with her trademark creepy eyes), Kalibak=Beast-Man, Kanto=Blade), any one of the Deep Six=Saurod, maybe?

 -Both feature a science fictiony Mcguffin that can open a doorway from one reality to the next—in New Gods, it’s a Mother Box. In MOTU, it’s called the Cosmic Key, and it is immediately mistaken for a fancy new keyboard that puts on an electronic lights show. Hey, it was the Eighties.

 So, there you have it. If you feel the need to investigate further, Masters of the Universe can be found on DVD for about four bucks, and at the risk of sounding snarky, it’s money well spent. Stick around for the end credits, you don’t want to miss the sequel tease! No, Samuel L. Jackson does not show up and ask He-Man to join the Avengers. That would be just plain confusing.

Adscape 1: Captain Tootsie vs Nature

Oh how I enjoy the advertising mascots of the past, with their one-page adventures and monomaniacal outlook on life ("Only Grape Nuts can effectively stop those robbers, Timmy!") and so: Adscape, a place to discuss ads of the past.

Today, the first of what will probably end up being five or six looks at former Tootsie Roll mascot Captain Tootsie, the man who knows that a brief sugar rush is just the thing for any emergency. Specifically, we'll be looking at the Captain's troubling relationship with the beasts of the forest.

Here we find Captain Tootsie in the woods with the group of young children that constituted his Secret Legion of minor crime-fighters. Suddenly, an old man dressed like an 1800s frontiersman bursts into their campsite and tells them that there's a killer bear on the loose. Shortly thereafter, there's a disturbance at the local girls' camp - turns  out that the bear has stolen some food. Captain Tootsie has a couple of Tootsie Rolls for quick energy and then:

Bear: gunned down. Candy: distributed. Mountain Man: impressed.

I'm all for respecting the opinions of the elderly and the marginally insane, but did this bear - this fleeing bear - just die because Coon Tail Charlie called it a killer? Because the bear only really gets up to two things in this ad, stealing food and growling, and I'm pretty sure that those are half of a bear's job description, along with swiping salmon out of streams and riding the occasional tiny motorcycle. I guess that it's somewhat possible that Charlie had a scrapbook full of mauling-related newspaper clippings with him, but as far as I can tell this is a case of the good Captain really wanting to hang a large animal from a tree.

Another day, another camping trip. Oops, a rattlesnake. What's a Captain to do?

That's right, it's the old rock-to-the-brain maneuver.I guess that I'm not condemning this as much as I do the wanton bear-slaughter above. Rattlesnakes plus children often ends in tears after all. Still, this is a bit of a troubling pattern that is emerging (especially taking into account Tootsie's ability to capture a similar snake using only a stick, seen in the latter part of the same ad).

What really cements my opinion that Cap Toots should just stick to the cities and leave the fauna alone is this next one:

Another day, another nature hike. Note that they have not seen a bear. They have found fresh tracks and Captain Tootsie doesn't have a gun. What to do? Rapidly retreat in the opposite direction?

Not a chance.

Yup, that's right. Captain Tootsie hates nature so much that when he found himself without a way to kill a bear, he went out of his way to make sure that it was deprived of its freedom. They spent hours on that pit, folks. They could have been two counties over if Cap hadn't insisted.

And he does it all while staying on-message.

Truly a complex and fascinating man, Captain Tootsie.

Here, by the way, are the original ads: 1 2 3

The Future's so Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades When I Read Previews

I know the ISB has dissecting Previews covered, but I did at least five spit-takes reading this month's catalogue, so I had to write about it. It's full of crazy crap, as well as lots of stuff that I'm super stoked about. It's a rollercoaster ride of emotion.

First off, the cover:

Nope, those are not stautes. They're not busts, or action figures. These are photos of heads pasted onto the bottom half of busts. I know the July 2010 release means there's many months of sculpting time ahead, and believe me, I'm excited to see a little cold-cast plaster version of Vampire Bill. But seriously. Maybe wait until you have something substantial before you put it on the front cover? Even if it is the back front cover.

Who photoshopped this? Me? My cat? Actually, if Scrapperton did this, good job. But to anyone else, for shame.

I like how this is written like a newspaper headline; "Local Lad Krueger Makes Good in Neighbourhood Nightmares." This whole little piece of copy just rules. God, I'm seriously jealous. Writing for Previews is the best job in the universe. Especially making up the titles for those t-shirts.

Good lord, Marvel. This is some Krusty the Clown level merchandising. Do you have a sick mother in the hospital who desperately needs you to pay for an operation? Or do you have, say, a serious smack habit?

Hurray! Vertigo is making a figure of my favourite chocolate bar-loving, antler-headed cutie pie! A lil' Sweet Tooth to put on my bed side table!

OH. NO.

Ziggy is read by more than 75 million people every day. No joke here. Just a fact.

 

A phrase never spoken by anyone at LBW:

 

RASL #7? In February? So we've had like, one issue this year, but now THREE will come out in the next three months?

Riiiiiight. Maybe scientists will also discover that cheeseburgers are the best food for weight loss. And I'll inherit a cheeseburger factory. Jeff Smith, I love you. That's why your lies hurt me so.

BUT, you know what's exciting? Raina Telgemeier's comic about braces. And the first issue of the new Demo series!!! So awesome. In my head, Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan are BFFs who live together in a big comic-themed house and get into wacky, comics-related high jinx together. Could be true. You don't know.

See? A lot of ups and downs here. Well, until next month, Previews. Maybe in January you'll have learned not to put Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose on the same page as a bunch of kids comics. But don't go changin' just to suit me, Previews.