It Started In January 1955 When The Police Discovered The Body Of One Comics Code Official...

Thus did it begin...

Late last year, while presenting Ron Wilber's Star Woes from the old Rocket's Blast Comic Collector, i realized that i hadn't yet run his classic Twilight Of The Heroes despite having thought i had. Perhaps i was confusing it with The Massacre Of The Innocents, another strip from RBCC which did run previously. Or perhaps my deranged mind was playing tricks on me once again. 

Regardless, it's past time for another dive into those old zines and long past time for this tale to appear. However, we're going to break it up for a couple of reasons. The first is length - the story runs for 32 pages. You need a bit of room when telling an Epic, y'know. So we'll break the tale into two posts.

Moreover, we're also going to break this first post as well. After Wonder Woman shows up, it soon becomes NSFW. Fortunately, that's why The Other Voice Of ODD! exists. We can run the uncensored pages safely behind the adult warning.

Twilight Of The Heroes ran over several issues of RBCC, beginning in #139 - the same issue which featured Ron's above linked Star Woes tale.

If you jumped over from this post on the main blog, this is where to continue...

Continued (and concluded) tomorrow...

 page art by Ron Wilber for RBCC #s 139-142 (1977)

Calendars 2019 - January

I've been waiting for 2019. This year Jim Steranko's Supergirls calendar from back in 1974 cycles back around to match up with our current calendar.

And because we do Odd here...

Likely more choices next month, providing we can get a bit of cybercooperation from the gear around here...

Virgil In Blue

To wrap up this week's look back at the artwork of Virgil Finlay, let's take a look at some of his more 'adult oriented' imagery -

Original Caption: "Watchers saw her white body gleaming amidst the spray." -Weird Tales, June 1937

We've seen previously how Finlay would sometimes redraw earlier works. The piece above repurposes a figure study from two years earlier...

(The magazine wasn't titled Weird Tales for nothing)

It's interesting to note how much of this work came from the late 1930s leading into the early '40s - the same time period that Margaret Brundage was doing so much of her work for the same publishers. In fact, the first image in this post (among others) comes from an issue with a Brundage cover (The Carnal God - see this post)

artwork by Virgil Finlay

Blue Monday Calendar 2018 Week 49

The Blue Monday Calendar typically runs on the main site, but this week's painting needed to be moved to our adult 'back room' as Gil Elvgren offers us a more open look at the lovely lady featured in Captivating from 1962 -

Well titled, Master Elvgren.

painting by Gil Elvgren (1962)

Flash Does Tijuana

We've been talking Flash Gordon parodies, so let's look at the Tijuana Bibles, or 8-Pagers as they were sometimes known, though that was sometimes a lie. (And, oddly, the page count didn't include the cover. Printed only on one side and flat stapled, the usual multiply by 4 rule doesn't apply to them.)

There were three of which i'm aware, and one of those was 16 pages in length - an Epic! (Your mileage may vary). In our first, Flash lures Dale into a Moon Voyage...

Obviously, that wasn't enough for I. Wantzum Tuu, and so we got the double length Azura, Queen Of Magic -

Lastly, another standard 8 page tale, Red Hot...

...but this copy later had colour added, so let's use it instead of the original black & white version -

It's a good thing that these were made before Buster Crabbe played the role in the movies, or the puns would have been unending...

art by unknown (1930s?)