The year of the comics

It’s Jerry Grayson’s fault. He knows all these people with opinions about comics and culture, and as the geek social fallacies would advise, said, “Hey, if I get all my friends together, they’ll be friends too!!” Which actually worked this time, for a jam let’s-all-try-it discussion for his own 1972 Project.

Not enough Doom lately

I keep saying that I’m not too interested in the current movies and TV series, but that claim is easily scuttled by the fact that I have kids aged nine and almost-eight. I have seen very little of the live-actions, but when it comes to cartoons, I’m catchin’ up fast.

Ophite

Concept sketch by Gennifer Bone

I did not actively sit down to trigger every single thing I could at once in conceiving and writing my first stories for Ophite, but considering that I didn’t, it’s a fair list

Time travel trippin’ up

September is Cosmic Zap month here at Doctor Xaos Comics Madness. With galactic dimensions in the balance, with insight battling it out with insanity, who can doubt that the very fabric of time would sooner or later begin to fray? All of which is to  say, time travel sucks so bad, oh my God. Nuances to follow.

Bare-chested villainy

BONUS POST: Thanks to Ed McW and his May pledge at the Doctor Xaos Patreon! It’s long past time for more Doom posting. I have the same thought now as I did when looking at this title on the racks forty years ago: what an excellent idea.

Doom’s face

FF #10, Stan & Jack in “postmodern R us”

In the unbelievably awesome Fantastic Four Annual #2, when Victor von Doom puts on his mask for the first time, a minion protests, “But master, it has not completely cooled yet!” and in the from-behind panel when he’s putting it on, vapor rises from the contact point to remind us of how hot it was.

My Doom

There are no paltry “heroes” in this comic book.

In digging around the internet to find out what those pictures in my memory are, I initially thought that my most cherished issue of my original hoard must have been one of the Astonishing Tales stories, by Roy Thomas and Wally Wood, 1971. But no! It was the one-shot prequel to that series, published in Marvel Superheroes! #20, 1969, also by Thomas and with extremely of-the-moment art credits: Frank Giacoia (artist), Larry Lieber (pencils), Vince Colletta (inks).

Joseph Culp

By about age 12, since any idiot could see that Proposition 13 was going to pass, I knew I had to get into private school on scholarship, and I did, at 15 attending what was then called Robert Louis Stevenson High School or RLS (now the Stevenson School) in Pebble Beach. I was from Del Monte Park, the back-end no-tourists part of Pacific Grove, so I was a day student, and very much more so, a low-rent townie.

The politics of Doom

Gee, what’s it doing there?

Victor von Doom debuted in Fantastic Four #5, in July 1962, and his origin and general depth of character were presented in January 1964, in the FF Annual #2. This identified him as the ruler of Latveria almost immediately in the history of the character, unlike the political history of Magneto for instance, who first appeared in September 1963 and was retconned into being a survivor of the Holocaust in 1981.