Author: Mike Gold

Pioneer comic book and newspaper strip artist George Tuska
died yesterday at the age of 93.

It’s hard to imagine an artist with a greater pedigree.
Beginning in 1939, George worked on such features as The Avengers, Black
Terror, Buck Rogers, Captain America, Captain Marvel (both Fawcett and Marvel), Challengers of the Unknown,
Doc Savage, Green Lantern, The Hulk, Iron Man, Justice League of America
(a.k.a. “The World’s Greatest Superheroes” newspaper stip), Luke Cage, Planet
of the Apes, Scorchy Smith, Sub-Mariner, Superboy, Superman, T.H.U.N.D.E.R.
Agents, Teen Titans, Uncle Sam… and that merely scratches the surface.

George was a gentle man who once had taken the
extraordinary step of punching out well-known wiseass cartoonist Bob Powell
while working in the Eisner-Iger shop. Will Eisner said Powell, as brilliant an
artist as anybody in that hallowed shop, absolutely deserved it. The stuff of
legend.

On a personal note, George was drawing the Buck Rogers
newspaper strip during its final years, from 1959 to 1967. During that last
year, I was an unpaid intern at the National Newspaper Syndicate and was
allowed to contribute story concepts and ideas. As a 16 year-old, I was amazed
and thrilled to be working anywhere near
George Tuska.

Why hasn’t Marge Simpson done a Playboy fold-out? Easy: from the tip of her toes to the top of her head, she’s just too tall.

But at least the fabled “Magazine For Men” is doing a pictorial on the teevee queen. And it’s a cover story, to boot. She’s legal, having had three children and a show that’s run for two decades.

Hopefully, this will lead to a continuing presence for the blue haired actress in the struggling magazine. It’s been quite a while since Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s Little Annie Fanny had any real exposure; perhaps Marge can fill the gap.

Although, personally, I’m holding out for Turanga Leela. There’s something about that eye…

As we brace ourselves for the new Doctor Who specials, the return of Sarah Jane Adventures, and Matt Smith’s first season, here’s a little gasoline to pour on the fan-fire – my take on the six top moments on Doctor Who.

6.
Quiet Time

There’s a great moment in the Doctor Who teevee movie, one
that we had rarely seen (if ever) in the original series: the Doctor, in this
case Doctor Seven, quietly sitting in the TARDIS in his comphy chair, reading a
book. Of course, drama being what it is he quickly gets, well, killed. Fatally.
And then begins a difficult regeneration into Doctor Eight. That wasn’t the
worst thing that confronted him: he had to face Eric Roberts as the Master. He,
and his series of proposed telemovies, was doomed.

5.
The Ears Have It

There’s this great moment in Rose, the first of Doctor
Nine’s shows where Christopher Eccleston stops the action when he crosses a
mirror in the TARDIS. He peers into the mirror, thinks he’s kind of good
looking, but he’s not too sure about those ears. In one stroke, Russell T.
Davies established the Doctor had just reincarnated and, therefore, the fight
that destroyed the other Time Lords had “just” happened (however one defines
“just” in time travel) while, at the same time, revealing quite a lot about this
new Doctor’s personality. Nice moment.

4.
The One and Phony Master

Stephen Moffat is the current Doctor Who showrunner and,
along with Davies, the most significant writer of the new series. But between
this series and the original, the BBC aired a wonderful “Doctor Who” episode
called The Curse of Fatal Death. It was a charity fundraiser ten years ago, a
brilliant parody, and the Who debut of writer Moffat. It featured no less than
five new Doctors – played, sequentially, by Rowan Atkinson, Richard E. Grant,
Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant and Joanna Lumley – and one stellar Master: the
gifted stage and film performer, Jonathan Pryce. Had one of those movie
projects ever gotten off the ground, he would have been perfect in the role and
might have given Delgado a run for his money. It isn’t easy being menacing in
such a broad parody, and it is to the credit of both Pryce and Moffat that it
comes off. (more…)

Christie’s auction house in London will be auctioning the 22-inch, well, action figure of King Kong used in the filming of the movie of the same name. In specific, the little guy was used in the Empire State Building scene at the end of the movie.

“Oh, no, it wasn’t the airplanes.”

Only the metal part (see right) survives; the cotton/rubber/latex/rabbit’s fur “clothing” rotted off years ago. The auction will happen around Thanksgiving; I’ll bet lots of well-heeled Hollywood moguls have aliases bidding on the trophy.

Jules Feiffer is known for his work as a graphic novelist, a cartoonist, a screenwriter, a novelist, and a playwright  – although among comics fans he is perhaps best known as Will Eisner’s long-time assistant on, and oft-time writer of, The Spirit. But in the outside world, he might very well be best known as the illustrator of Norton Juster’s children’s classic, The Phantom Tollbooth.

Now that a half century has passed, Feiffer and Juster are finishing up their second project together. Titled The Odious Ogre, it is scheduled to be released by Scholastic Books next year at this time.

Feiffer told Publisher’s Weekly he’s had a blast. “The one thing I will say is that, in relation to the
other characters, he is possibly the biggest ogre in captivity,”
Feiffer said. “He was great fun to draw, though—more fun for me than
for the ogre.” He did the illustrations in pen and ink
brush with colored markers, gouache “and anything else I could think
of. It’s my new way of working, which I love.”

Feiffer and Juster are planning their third collaboration for release in 2060.

The long-awaited graphic novel Hammer Of The Gods: Mortal Enemy
by Mike (Powers) Oeming and Mark Wheatley will be debuting at this week’s Baltimore Comic-Con. All three will be available at the Insight Studios booth, #1911.

Furthermore, the remaining 70 copies of the Lone Justice ashcan edition will also be available. Serialized here on ComicMix, Lone Justice will begin its ten-part run from IDW/ComicMix in December.

The Baltimore Comic-Con will be this Saturday and Sunday at the mammoth Baltimore Convention Center along the waterfront.

“We’ve received tremendous fan feedback from the online incarnation of Lone Justice: Crash, and I really enjoy the immediacy of it,” Wheatley said. “This ashcan is the first time any of this material will see print, and that brings an excitement all its own.” TInnell will also be at the Comic-Con, joining Oeming and Wheatley at the Insight Comics booth.

Lone Justice: Crash! is the second time Wheatley and Tinnell have teamed up for a ComicMix serialization. Their first effort, EZ Street, the tale of two creative brothers, was nominated for a Harvey Award. It also contained a comic-within-a-comic aspect, as it featured Lone Justice as one creation of its central characters. Despite the obvious connection between the tales, however, both graphic novels can be enjoyed entirely independently from the other.

Being a superhero isn’t just dangerous work, it’s also very expensive. Imagine a recession-era Batman without Bruce Wayne’s fortune or Iron Man without Tony’s Stark’s billions. Their respective crime-fighting enterprises would be very different – or perhaps all together grind to a halt – if their money was to simply disappear. Just like many Americans in the past year, that’s exactly what has happened to Lone Justice, the pulp-style action-adventure hero created by Wheatley (Breathtaker, Mars) and writer Robert Tinnell (Feast of the Seven Fishes, Sight Unseen). Our hero experienced the devastating financial loss of the Great Depression, but he didn’t lose his drive to keep fighting crime…regardless of the consequences.

“Given our title, Lone Justice: Crash!, it was difficult to resist calling this the Lone Justice: Crashcan, but life is confusing enough as it is,” Wheatley laughed. “So, c’mon by the booth and pick up of the Lone Justice: Crash! Ashcan!”

Archie Comics is perhaps the most innovative publisher
around these days, although for many comics fans they’re beneath the radar.
That’s a shame; folks are missing out on some great stuff.

Some fans are aware of their New Look digest books
(“Ultimate Archie”?), and Mike Uslan’s Marriage of Archie and Veronica has made
headlines. For me, well, I’m looking forward to their upcoming crossover with
the 1950s/60s Archie Comics characters: Cosmo the Merry Martian, Super Duck,
Seymour and friends. But the stunt they’ve just announced is the most
provocative one yet.

Tom Root, co-head writer/ co-producer of Robot Chicken and co-creator/executive
producer of Adult Swim’s new Titan
Maximum parody series, is writing the 200th issue of Jughead. Yeah, that’s volume two of Jughead; you know how comic book numbering goes these days.

Both Robot Chicken
and Titan Maximum are, to put it
politely, hardly family fare… unless your family has the name “Manson” in it.
The Adult Swim broadcasts are heavily bleeped – the DVD releases are not – and
they tend to be quite violent and, dare I say it, irreverent. Oh, and extremely
funny. Which probably tells you more about me than you wanted to know.

The story, “Something Ventured, Something Gained,” starts
out with Jughead trading his, ahh, metabolism to a witch for a
mega-cheeseburger. Bizarre wackiness ensues: Archie tries to cut a deal to
trade the witch his awesome wholesomeness to restore his best friend to
normalcy, Betty and Veronica try to cut a deal to restore Archie’s purity, and
so on. All the while, Jughead actually
gains weight!

It probably would have been easier for the Riverdale crew
to just drop a dime on Sabrina, but hey, count me in! After all the mindless,
in-perpetuity crossover events from DC and Marvel, I can use a self-contained
book-lengther!

Remember Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg? Roy Crane’s Buz
Sawyer and Captain Easy? Alex
Toth? How about much of that beautiful black and white art in Warren’s
magazines Creepy, Eerie and Blazing Combat?

The one thing they all had in common – along with a hell
of a lot of other great art – is the fact that they were drawn on Duoshade
boards. That’s a certain rather expensive type of paper that allowed an artist
to brush a developer solution over an inked drawing creating different types of
horizontal lines for shading. Originally, they boards replaced the painstaking
task of cutting and pasting the effect onto the original art. It allowed certain
types of dramatic shading and feathering techniques (that’s a line that
consists of teensy tiny lines, giving a softer edge to that line).

Note my use of the past tense.

Now Graphix, the company that makes Duoshade boards (as
well as the Unishade boards, which is a similar type of stuff) has discontinued
production because production has grown more difficult and costly to produce
and demand as declined over the years. Younger artists use their computers –
not necessarily a complete substitute – and many are unaware of the existence
of the product.

Sadly, this comes at a time when the reproduction of comic
art in America has never been better. In the past, some of these types of
effects would close up or turn to mud. With better printing and better paper,
Duoshade – when properly used – gave us some beautiful artwork.