Mirth on the Bough

Donald Duck deals with anger management issues in Self Control (1938)


It seems like there is a Bird celebration every few months. For instance, today is National Bird Day. Well, I see nothing wrong with considering the wonders of our feathered friends, appreciating their songs, colors, and grace in flight.

Last year, I didn't do much birdwatching. Hopefully, I'll get an opportunity sometime this year. I live fairly close to the Madrona Marsh, which is an awesome place to spot some cool critters.

Detail from the cover art of Howard the Duck #7 (1980) by John Pound

Maybe next year I'll have photos of actual birds, rather than cartoon ducks. ;-)

Pond In The Park

Crested Duck at the Hopkins Wilderness Park in Redondo Beach

I recently paid a visit to the Hopkins Wilderness Park in Redondo Beach. It's a relatively small venue which used to be a Nike Missile site but was turned into a wilderness preserve in 1977. There are two small ponds and a flock of charming ducks that make their home in the back pond.

The park has a high elevation point that overlooks the South Bay lowlands. This high point is covered with a large concrete slab. So, I'm guessing that this was a radar point or where the missiles were launched. It's kind of cool to look at the natural setting of the present day and imagine it as a Cold War installation.



Hopkins Wilderness Park, Upper Pond


Here are some more photos:

Trapped In a World He Never Made

Detail of Howard the Duck #8 (Art: Gene Colan, Steve Leialoha)


With all of the superhero movies filling the cinematic release schedule, you might think that they'd run out of characters to feature sometime soon. If so, you'd be thinking wrong. They may be working through the B-List of superheroes, but there probably are not enough letters to cover all the levels of obscure characters that populate the Marvel or DC comic book universes.

In fact, a Q-List character was featured with a cinematic release on this date twenty-five years ago, Howard the Duck. Oh, that was a bad movie! It had bad acting, bad effects, bad everything!!! It was a failure beyond my ability to express. I still can't understand how anybody thought that this movie would be anything more than a paradigm of awfulness.



Detail of Howard the Duck #12 (Art: Gene Colan, Steve Leialoha)


You see, the source material was some bad stuff. Either it was a goofy anthropomorphic bit of buffoonery or it was a not so interesting bit of pretentious existentialist tripe. In either case, it was unreadably awful, the worst comic in publication. And, if you remember some of the comics of the late seventies and early eighties, there were plenty of atrocious comics to contend for this title of disgrace.