Another Iron Man song? Why not? I devoted weeks and weeks to Road Runner songs. I can certainly celebrate Iron Man 3 for one more Tuesday. After all, it’s a big hit movie! This time it’s a folk-y kind of cover of the classic tune. It’s like reading comics at a Renaissance Fair.

Click the link below and enjoy!

Iron Man – Men-An-Tol

If nothing else, Victor Fox’s Weird Comics lived up to it’s name,  It’s pretty much equally divided between a couple of sensationally lame superheroes  ad some just plain weird features.  Headlining, for some reason, this issue is The Dart and of course his partner Ace the Amazing Boy.  When I saw Ace on the cover wielding a baseball bat I thought, “No way does he actually does that in the story inside”, but he totally does.  I don’t know, maybe I’m just being unnecessarily squeamish but it sure seems like if you’re a Golden Age comic book publisher the very last thing you need is having kids reading stories where a kid goes Inglourious Bastards batshit berserk with a baseball bat.  It just seems like kind of bad for business.   Bucky never stooped to using a bat, and he actually fought Nazi’s.

I’ve been chasing the mystery that is Kooba (apparently it’s supposed to be pronounced the way actual Cubans say the word “Cuba”; this would never have occurred to me) for a long time but all reports indicate this was just another one of Victor Fox’s get rich schemes that crashed and burned.  It doesn’t seem like a particularly good business model to publish a bunch of ads for a nonexistent product in an attempt to drum up interest in it, but apparently that’s exactly what Victor did.  Kooba does not exist.  And the world is a little sadder place because of it.

Headlining, for some reason, this is issue is The Dart.  This issue says that our hero is a “reincarnation of the Roman racket buster Caius Martius” but according to the Public Domain Superhero Wikia he actually was Martius who got himself stuck in a stone block by an evil sorcerer and woke up in contemporary America.  I’m not exactly sure why he was called “The Dart” seeing as how he didn’t use darts and was principally armed with asword; one assumes it has somthing to do with the fact the publishers Quality and Ace already had characters called “The Sword”.

I’ve read a lot of Golden Age comics, but I can count the times that a mystery man gets whacked in the head with a wrench by a henchman on the fingers of one hand.

Now, we get to the weird.  Like The Sorceress of Zoom….

…and Dr. Mortal…

Also pretty weird was Marga the Panther Woman, who was a pretty standard jungle girl, except for the fact that she had been”inoculated with the traits of a black panther” by her panther.  You would think this would lead to all sorts of Cat People type sexual shenanigans but sadly it just seemed to have given her super strength. 

On the other hand, we never Sheena or Rulah pulling stunts like this.

For Victoria Day, we have some peeks at the Punch in Canada, perhaps the first Canadian comic periodical, running 1849 to 1850. All the art in this posting is by that publication’s founder, John Henry Walker. A detailed write up on the introduction of Punch in Canada, can be found here, on Canadian cartoonist John Adcock‘s blog.

Click on the above & below cartoons, to view them in greater detail.

Above, the front cover art gracing most (perhaps all??) 1849 issues of Punch in Canada. Beneath, the cover art found on the 1850 issues.

Cartoons from the December 15th, 1849 issue (above) & December 22nd, 1849 (below). In the beneath cartoon, John Henry Boulton, M.P. for Niagra, had been favored for appointment to the Judicial Bench, but was blocked chiefly through the efforts of a Toronto newspaper, the Colonist. (Information from Volume 1 of J.W. Bengough‘s Caricature History of Canadian Politics.

Above, from the December 29th, 1849 issue, “The Trappers”, in reference to the decision to make Toronto Canada’s capitol. The trappers are two representatives from Toronto, Henry Sherwood & Robert Baldwin. (Again, this information comes from Bengough’s Canadian Caricature history.)

Beneath, a smaller cartoon, from the January 19th, 1850 issue, showing a Canadian view of Americans. The “in the style of H.B.”, refers to then-popular British political cartoonist John Doyle (father of cartoonist Richard Doyle), who signed his work “H.B.”. Having seen much of John Doyle’s work, I’d describe it as uniformly dull, flat, boring — sorry, but even this little sketch by John Walker has more life in it than most John Doyle cartoons.

Doug Wheeler

 Barry Pearl takes  a fun and informative look at Iron Man III in context of the original Tales of Suspense stories in the comics.

http://forbushman.blogspot.com/2013/05/iron-man-iii-review-and-look-back-at.html

Here’s a nice look at the late Joe Kubert’s wraparound covers for his final DC series.

http://ripjaggerdojo.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-books-of-joe.html

From the Wayback Machine, here’s a detailed look at the history of horror comics other than EC, written by sci-fi writer Lawrence Watt-Evans!

http://web.archive.org/web/20090422090241/http://www.watt-evans.com/theotherguys.html

Finally today, here’s a modern loo at one of my favorite early Teen Titans issues featurimg the first TT appearance of Speedy.

http://bronzeagebabies.blogspot.com/2013/05/that-zany-bob-haney-teen-titans-4.html

With Summer officially arriving in another month, the time will soon be past for these Arrival of Spring cartoons, all from the May 1913 issue of Cartoons Magazine.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the cartoons in detail, and read their captions.

Above, Fred Morgan‘s cartoon, “Waking Him Up”, serves as the frontispiece to the May 1913 issue.

William Kemp Starrett, Drew, Harry K. Godwin, and Walker O’Loughlin, below, give us various signs of Spring.

Two more signs of Spring, above, both by Clare Briggs.

Beneath, the forced duty of Spring House Cleaning, by cartoonists Robert Satterfield, O’Loughlin, and Ole May.

Doug Wheeler

— Doug

It’s ‘Canada Week” here at Comic Book Compulsive, apparently, and while, as previously established, I know precious little about Canadian comics and have read precious few Canadian comics.  Oh, I appreciate them like all heck, but I am no expert.  So I don’t really know what to say, or think for that matter, about Better Comics #7.  Except that it’s strange and wonderful and unlike anything else I’ve ever seen.  It’s not just different from the handful of Canadian comics I have read, it’s different from any Golden Age comic.  Brok Windsor is a pretty standard “earth man in a strange fantasy world” strip, but the artwork by Jon Stables is absolutely original and ahead of it’s time; to me it looks more like something from a 60′s Underground Comix than a Golden Age Comic.

Ad while not nearly as good Circus Girl by Hal Herr and Ley Fortune is definitely visually interesting and certain like nothing you’d find in an American comic book of the time.

They said that Iron Man 3 would be a blockbuster and it did not disappoint. Fortunately, I have plenty of Iron Man recordings to tie in with the movie. Notice I said the word “recordings” and not “songs”? That’s because our piece of vinyl goodness for this Tuesday is a spoken-word recording, The Story of Iron Man! If you have the comic book you can read along. If not, try to imagine the pictures by simply using your own brain.

And just in case you feel cheated because you were expecting a comics-tune today, I’m also giving you another cover version of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” as played by the UCLA Marching Band. March along!

Click the links below and enjoy!

 The Story of Iron Man

Iron Man – UCLA Bruin Marching Band

I’ve already done a post featuring the Johnny Canuck story from Dime Comics, but here’s another story from that issue, “Rex Baxter and the Island of Doom”.  It features, naturally, Rex Baxter, a two-fisted adventurer type who invariably was getting in fantastic situations who was another long-running feature of the comic.  It was very nicely written and drawn by Edmond Good who who all know from his work on such American comics as Tomahawk and Sky Sheriff, 

It wouldn’t be Mother’s Day, without an R.F. Outcault comic strip of Buster Brown tormenting his mom! Above, “Buster Brown Kidnapped”, scanned from the 1905 promotional giveaway magazine, “Mr. Melville B. Raymond’s Buster Brown”, used to advertise upcoming performances of the touring musical stage play.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view the pages in detail, and be able to read the text.

Beneath, two pages of photos from the play.

Doug Wheeler

Richard Felton Outcault

You don’t know how tempted I was to share another Road Runner song with you loyal I.T.C.H.-ers – but I think I’ve proved my point: There are a heckuva lot of Road Runner songs! Now it’s time to move on to new business. Iron Man! With Iron Man 3 in theaters now, it’s time to celebrate ol’ Shell Head himself. Will this be another month-long celebration? I’ll know better after I see the movie tonight. For now, here’s a hard rockin’ cover of the classic song.

Click the link below and rock out!

Iron Man – Electric Eel Shock