Twenty-five years, twenty number one issues, and five jokes. Yep, it can only be Groo The Wanderer. The one, the only, the only, the one — back in a silver anniversary special from Dark Horse, who clearly have too much money coming in from Star Wars and Buffy if they feel they can spend money…
Twenty-three years ago today, Hasbro brought the Autobots and Decepticons to store shelves all across America. Initially reusing previously-released toys from the Japanese Takara toylines Diaclone and Microman, Hasbro issued the toys under the name Transformers. The basic back-story of the toyline and subsequent comic books and cartoons was developed by the Marvel Comics writers…
One hundred and thirty years ago this past Wednesday, Thomas Edison made the first ever audio recording, which consisted of him reciting "Mary Had A Little Lamb". It entered the charts at #1. But twenty-five years ago today, the world’s first compact disc was produced at a Philips factory in Germany, ushering in a new…
Yesterday was a very special day for lots of folks. In the baseball world a couple of home run records were set, in the political world attendees at the progressive blogosphere’s Nerd Prom (yes, they have one too) schmoozed with the Democratic presidential candidates, and we at ComicMix celebrated head honcho Mike Gold’s 57th go-round…
Twenty six years ago this very second, with the launching of a space rocket and a moon landing with a funky flag, MTV launched into the homes of a half million cable subscribers. (For the youngsters in the audience, MTV stood for "Music Television" and they would actually play music videos 24 hours a day.)…
On this day in 1930 The Shadow first aired on the radio, as the announcer of Detective Stories, and the announcer proved to be more popular than the show, leading to the creation of the character we know and love. The show became famous for its trademark opening line: "Who knows what evil lurks in…
On this day in 1940, A Wild Hare was released in theaters, which was written by Rich Hogan, animated by Virgil Ross, and directed by Tex Avery. It was in this cartoon that Bugs Bunny first emerged from his rabbit hole to ask Elmer Fudd, now a hunter, “What’s up, Doc?” It was also the…
The LA Times profiles “the Dean of Science Fiction,” Robert A Heinlein, in preparation for the 100th anniversary of his birth on Saturday. Michael Cassutt’s new column at SciFi Weekly is also about Heinlein, and gives more details of the Heinlein Centennial going on this coming weekend in Kansas City (Heinlein’s birthplace). The Globe…
Thirty years ago today, Marvel released the debut of Marvel Comics Super Special #1 featuring Kiss, where they squared off against (who else?) Mephisto and Dr. Doom. The issue was printed with ink that had blood added from each of the band members, a feat not surpassed until Mark Gruenwald’s ashes were mixed in with…
How did we get to this before Mark Evanier did? 29 years ago today, the above strip brought Garfield to the world at large. Since then, he has consumed more lasagna than the entire cast of The Sopranos and has shed enough hair to clog Hoover Dam. Oh, and a whole lot of books, TV…
Peter David notes on his blog that according to Corey Tacker, keeper of Peter’s bibliography with a completism that borders on mania, this month’s Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man marks his 1000th comic book published. For those of you scoring at home (or even if you’re alone) that comes out to about 40 comic books out a…
Thirty years ago today, the first Apple II went on sale at the West Coast Computer Faire. It included color, sound, paddles for Pong and Breakout, a 6502 microprocessor running at 1 MHz, 4 KB of RAM, an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, the Integer BASIC programming language built into the ROMs, a…
