There's been more than a little speculation about the identity of Joe Locke's "Teen" character in Agatha All Along. I mean, of course, there is -- they are not being subtle about that being an intentional mystery within the show. The most commonly noted candidates are Nicholas Scratch (Agatha's son) and Billy Kaplan (one of Wanda Maximoff's kids). The most recent episode was pretty forthright in putting out a strong hint that it is Nicholas.

Here's another idea I haven't seen anywhere, though... what if he's Franklin Richards?

One. Agatha Harkness was introduced in the comics as Franklin's nanny. Obviously, he's too old to need a nanny in the show, but she has been looking out for him. (She is almost aggressive in pulling that wine out of his hands in this most recent episode.)

Two. While Franklin in the comics has historically been a young child with blonde hair, he's been portrayed as a black-haired, pseudo-emo teeager for the past five years or so. Very much line with the appearance of Locke's character.

Three. Franklin has been sought by more than a few evil enemies for his soul. Two of the most notable are Mephisto and Nicholas Scratch, both enigmatic characters already referenced in Agatha All Along.

Four. While a counter-arguement for this being Franklin could be that the MCU hasn't really even introduced the Fantastic Four to the broader MCU franchise, A) that is not entirely true and B) this could be the modern equivalent to a back-door pilot. You'll recall that we did see Mr. Fantastic as portrayed by John Krasinkski in Dr. Strange: Multiverse of Madness and he specifically notes that he and his wife have a child. Franklin's name also appeared on a computer screen in X2: X-Men United. So he is already an established character in the MCU, albeit in their alternate universes. And while the Fantastic Four: First Steps movie won't be out until next July, actively highlighting Franklin in the MCU now could act as part of a marketing tactic to intrgue Agatha viewers to come back for the FF film. Marvel Studios has been doing this type of thing for years; for example, introducing Tom Holland as Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War a year before he was in a dedicated Spidey movie.

Now I'm not fully convinced Locke's character is indeed Franklin Richards. It strikes me as a bit of a heavy marketing gamble and, while Marvel Studios has had some such gambles in the past, I suspect they're a little more gun-shy on that type of thing just now given the not-great reception some of their recent projects have had. But on the other hand, they brought a life-size, flying Fantasticar to Comic-Con this year, so maybe they are going to go big and are playing a longer game here with First Steps and are trying to play into the fan-favorite-ness of the Agatha character.

Regardless, audiences will certainly find out before the show wraps up at the end of October, but I wanted to put the idea out into the internet now, mostly just so I can claim that I figured it out before you did! 😁

I will admit that, at the outset, I was skeptical of the whole concept of the Marvel Cinematic Universe working. The individual films might hit or miss as dependent on the particular writers, directors, cast, etc. but a joint film invited a lot of potential problems as it would "force" various individuals together who might not work together well. One of the problems you used to hear a lot about with large cast movies woulld be that there was always at least one person perpetually gunning for the spotlight, and was more interested in making themselves look good than helping to produce a good finished product. It was rare when movies like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World worked because it was in spite of the cast, not because of it.

But to the studio's credit, the MCU has been working incredibly well for close to two decades now. Some movies have clearly been better than others, and a lot is still dependent on the particular writers, directors, cast, etc. but even their "flops" still brought in hundreds of millions of dollars. And one of the next movies on deck is Thunderbolts* (I think the asterik is officially part of the name) which dropped a new poster and trailer this week.

Now, I was a fan of the comic when Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley introduced the team back in the late 1990s. What I liked about it was not simply the "villains acting like heroes" angle but the "villains preteding to be heroes to further an evil plot but then come to realize they actually like being heroes" angle. Not only did it set them apart from a concept like Suicide Squad but the characters' changing motivations became more intrinsically generated rather than being simply superficially self-serving. There's more dimensionality to the characters when they start thinking, "Hey, I'm getting more out of life emotionally than the basic financial motivations I had been living by previously." I grew less interested in the comic when that core concept was dropped in the early 2000s.

So when Marvel Studios announced a Thunderbolts movie and started driving towards a cast with characters that never especially grabbed me, and explicitly making it more Suicide Squad-esque with Valentina Allegra de Fontaine filling in as the Amanda Waller character, I was ready to dismiss it pretty much out of hand. However the trailer did add in a new (to me) element that could offer some really interesting possibilities, depending on how they handle it. Or, rather, him.

There's a character name-dropped in the trailer as simply "Bob" and a quick Google check reveals the character to be Bob Reynolds, the Sentry. The Sentry, largely a Superman analogue from a power set standpoint, was introduced in 2000 but he was given a backstory that went back to the Golen Age of comics, pre-dating the Fantastic Four. Part of the original concept was that part of his 'final' victory over The Void was that, in order to truely safeguard the universe, Sentry had to wipe his and The Void's entire existence from everyone's minds, meaning that no one -- not even Sentry himself -- could remember them. What was especially clever, I thought, was that the Marvel creators behind him -- Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee -- as well as Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada developed a real world backstory about how he was created by Stan Lee and "Artie Rosen," and the character had been forgotten. They even got Lee himself to do interviews in which he played up his famously bad memory and said he had totally forgotten working on Rosen on the character. (Rosen never existed. The name is borrowed from classic Marvel letterers Artie Simek and Sam Rosen, which is why it sounds familiar, and John Romita Sr. did the 'original' design sketches in a Golden Age style.)

So now with Sentry in the Thunderbolts*, I am intrigued. The character, at least from what we see in the trailer, seems to have no memory of being a superhero. Coupled with his apparent anonymity (Yelena asks who he is), that plays into the notion that he is being introduced, like his comic book counterpart, in an environment where he has already mind-wiped everyone. What could make for some interesting storytelling with this, if they follow some of the basic ideas from the character's introduction, is if Sentry is in fact shown to have been part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe this entire time, being just off-screen in many of the now-classic shots. What if, for example, they flashback to that scene from The Avengers right after "That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry" and the camera pans around the assembled heroes in a circle... but the shot continues on for an additional few seconds and we see Sentry float down from above to join them? What if during the airport battle in Civil War Sentry is in the background saving airplanes that are getting damaged mid-flight from some of the battle's flying debris? What if we see a different angle in Endgame after Falcon's "On your left" and there's Sentry among the army of heroes?

Admittedly, that type of thing might not appeal to a mass audience. One of the things I historically enjoyed about Marvel was the archeology of it and how all these disaparate -- sometimes even contradictory -- stories could work together, despite sometimes being written decades apart. If that kind of thing is dropped into the MCU, would that be something most casual movie-watchers would even recognize, much less care about? I have no idea. But the possibility of it being there certainly has my attention as something that could be more creatively unique than yet another attempt to make a Suicide Squad movie.

I caught part of a piece on the radio yesterday about the Chicago Mothman. It was from the Curious City podcast which WBEZ airs on Thursday afternoons. I usually only half-pay attention when I hear it because I pretty much only catch it while I'm driving, but they often have interesting backstories and trivia about various aspects of Chicago based on questions from listeners.

My ears perked up with yesterday's installment, though, because the question came from Sarah Becan. I've referenced and reviewed some of her work here before, most recently back in June. Her question was on a topic that I'd heard/seen her express interest in before: the Chicago Mothman.

The piece was originally recorded back in 2019 but since I apparently missed it then and it was just re-run again yesterday, I wanted to share it here. Most of it is not actually comics related in any way, other than the question coming from Becan, but it was a cool reminder how pervasive the comics community is here in Chicago. I hope Becan gets a little more interest in her work because of it, too.

Of all the comic strips that I would never, ever, ever have expected to make the transition to animated cartoon, I would think Gary Larson's The Far Side would be at the top of my list. I don't recall hearing about it at the time, but apparently it as indeed made into a Halloween special for CBS in 1994, directed by Marv Newland of Bambi Meets Godzilla fame.

Much like Larson's strip, there's no single cohesive story, or even recurring characters; it's just a string of largely unrelated gags mostly only with tenuous connections to one another. Which strikes me as a difficult premise to sell for television. Even sketch comedy shows have recurring actors and characters. But even more strangely for a network special, there's almost no dialogue throughout the entire half-hour. I have no idea how that snuck past network executives.

And yet, it somehow was greenlit for a sequel! But not until 1997, nearly three years after Larson's last new Far Side comic ran in papers. However, that sequel was only broadcast in the UK. Both eventually made it to DVD in 2007, but they have long since sold out.

Continuing with the strangeness of all this, after the first special aired, Larson made any number of changes to the piece. Not just a bit of re-editting or changing the order of the gags, but he added several entirely new sequences as well as changed the animations on some of the existing material. I've only seen the home video version but based on the descriptions of the original, it seems to me that all the changes were done for the sake of improving the humor.

Ultimately, the whole endeavor of producing an animated version of Larson's singularly absurd comic is almost a tale as equally absurd itself. Although I'm grateful for it, I really don't understand how any of it actually happened.

Neither of the two specials, either in their original or editted forms, are online. You can find a smattering of short clips but the most extensive look at them that I've found is from animator Paul Johnson's Adventures in Inbetweening series in which he discusses some of the details of the animation process -- not surprisingly, mostly focused on the inbetweening frames that he specifically worked on -- from the second special.

Atari was the home gaming system in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There were some competitors like Colecovision and Intellivision, but no one had more than a smallest percentage of the gaming market compared to Atari.

In the early '80s, Atari paired up with DC to produce a series of comics based on some of their games. There were four titles originally, and were packaged with some of the games themselves. The one that really stands out to me is Swordquest. In part because it was done by some really top-notch talent: Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, George Pérez, and Dick Giordano. But what also stood out to me was the contest associated with it.

There were intended to be four games in the series. In each game, the player had to solve a series of "logic" puzzles interspersed with some action sequences and solving each puzzle revealed a clue. (I use "logic" in quotes here because there didn't seem to be any logic to them. In fact, in an interview with the eventual winner of the Fireworld contest, he complained that the puzzles were pretty random and he won by essentially by putting in tons of hours and systematically trying every possible combination.) The clues directed people to a page and panel in the accompanying comic book with a word stealthily drawn into the art. If you found the five correct words -- there were red herrings as well -- and placed them in the correct order, you could compete in an official playoff. (As an example, you can see the word "revealed" in scales of the fish in the foreground of this image.) There was one playoff for each game, and the winner of each would win a trophy item of some sort: a crown, a chalice, a talisman, or a philosopher's stone, each ostensibly worth about $25,000. Those four winners would then compete for a grand prize of a sword valued at $50,000.

Pérez was a perfect choice for this project. Not only does the sword and sorcery genre well-suited to his style generally, but his intricate linework allows for relatively easy placement of hidden messages. In fact, I had to go to one of the later issues for the example here because the earlier ones are almost too well-hidden! But in getting Thomas and Conway to write the books, they were clearly wanted this to look like as professional a comic as possible. They tied in very well with the games themselves, and provided a solid bridge between the individual gameplay and the overall story arc Atari was trying to convey. (Frankly, the games themselves did not do that at all. There's barely any story within the games, though, to be fair, there's only so much story and gameplay you can pack into a 32 Kb cartridge!)

Ultimately, and unfortunately, the series was never completed. Atari ran into some serious financial difficulties mid-way through this contest. The first three games (and comics) were released, but only the first two contests were held. The third contest was cancelled part-way through, and the fourth (as well as the championship) got nixed entirely. My understanding is the fourth comic was never completed; I don't know how much was ultimately written or pencilled, but it never got to Giordano's desk for inking.

All of the Atari comics, including the first three issues of the Swordquest series can be read over at AtariAge.

Here's a weird bit of seredipity I discovered over the weekend.

Back in 1983, a movie came out called Yor, The Hunter from the Future. Based on I-can-only-assume-were-a-couple-of-television-commercials, my eleven-year-old brain thought this looked like a great movie. Very much in the same vein as the Conan the Barbarian film that had come out the year before. With a LOT of pleading, and despite his protests that it looked like crap, I convinced my dad to take me to see Yor in the theater.

It was crap. Even my eleven-year-old self who was totally hyped to see this movie walked out of the theater thinking it was terrible. The plot didn't make sense, the script was even worse, the acting was wooden, the effects were bad even by early 1980s standards. Hell, the costumes were awful and most of the cast had on little more than animal skins!

What I did not realize until recently, though, is that the concept is based on an Argentinian comic called Henga el cazador by Eugenio Juan Zappietro and Juan Zanotto. As far as I can tell, it's never been translated into English. It did, however, make it over to Italy which is where director Antonio Margheriti first heard of it. My understanding, though, is that the tail end of the movie diverges a significantly from the comic, as it takes on a heavier Star Wars influence. ("Wait, Sean, I thought you said it was a Conan knock-off?" Yeah, don't ask.)

So despite having American Reb Brown in the title role of the movie, most of the cast of Yor is European. Primarily Italian. That puts Yor very much in the same production ballpark as the spaghetti Westerns that made Clint Eastwood famous. Most of the villains were played by Italian stunt men, but there were a few actors with brief speaking roles. That includes Aytekin Akkaya in the role of Ukan, leader of the "Sand People." (Though there's no real desert anywhere nearby, and these so-called Sand People are inexplictably a blue-ish/purple-ish color.)

Within the context of the movie, these Sand People are a minor set of antagonists. Honestly, from a narrative perspective, I'm not really sure why they're in the film at all. Just a way to pad out what would otherwise be an hour-long movie, I would guess. And while Akkaya is probably not a familiar name to many in the US, he was a Turkish actor that was fairly prolific throughout the 1970s and '80s in Europe. His part as Ukan is relatively minor, but he does have the "honor"(?) of fighting directly with Yor.

Why is this note-worthy?

Because in 1973, Akkaya starred in an Italian movie called 3 Dev Adam. Usually translated into English as Three Giant Men. In it, he portrays Captain America who teams up with El Santo to defeat the evil Spider-Man and his gang. (None of the characters were officially licensed and the story takes some... liberties with the characterizations.) And while that alone is interesting in that it has Akkaya cast as both the hero and the villain in movies adapted from comic books ("You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.") the next time Captain America appeared on film was in the 1979 and 1980 made-for-TV movies, portrayed by none other than Reb Brown! Dick Purcell, who portrayed Cap in the serials, died in 1944 before his Captain America serials had even been released, which means in 1983, Yor featured an on-screen battle between the only two living actors to have played the living legend!

The first trailer and several promotional articles for the movie Here dropped this week. On the one hand, I'm thrilled when a big budget movie based off a comic breaks through, particularly when it's not a big tentpole superhero feature. On the other hand, there is so much focus on the OMG-IT'S-A-FORREST-GUMP-REUNION aspect combined with the digital deaging to make Tom Hanks and Robin Wright look much as they did thirty years ago, the fact that it's based off Richard McGuire's graphic novel and that he was the one who invented the formal structure endemic to the idea of the narrative is almost entirely lost. Director Robert Zemeckis is talented, as is scriptwriter Eric Roth. Hanks' and Wrights' abilities are well-known. I'm sure it'll be an excellent film. But let's take a moment to focus on McGuire whose inventivness got all this rolling back in 1989 when his original six-page story (before it was expanded to the 300-page, Eisner-nominated graphic novel) was first published in Raw...

I should have blogged about this earlier but Vivian Kleiman's 2023 documentary No Straight Lines about queer comic book artists is currently available for free on PBS's Independent Lens website. I expect it will only be online for free through the end of the month, so you should take the time to watch it if you're able. I only saw it myself this past weekend, and it was quite good. I found myself trying to track down copies of some of the works shown while the film was still playing.

I've heard a number of actors over the years speak to roles that they became so associated with that it completely overshadowed not only their other work, but their very identity. Leonard "Mr. Spock" Nimoy spoke to this, as has Barry "Greg Brady" Williams, I believe. In many cases, to my understanding, actors initially try to disassociate themselves with the role as much as they can, but not infrequently later come to accept that actors rarely are able to touch audience in such a deep and profound way, and they re-embrace the role. Nimoy's 1975 autobiography, for example, was titled I Am Not Spock while his 1995 autobiography was called I Am Spock. Actors in these positions often acknowledge that being able to step into a role like that is indeed a rare gift and that there are hundreds and thousands of talented actors who never are afforde that opportunity.

Even more rare, though, is when an actor is able to do that multiple times. Harrison Ford is Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Patrick Stewart is Jean-Luc Picard and Charles Xavier.

There is one actress that isn't recognized that way any more, but mostly by virtue of her famous roles being largely done over a half century ago. I'm talking about Penny Singleton. While not her first acting role, Singleton gained notoriety in 1938 by playing the title character in Blondie, a film based of Chic Young's comic strip of the same name. She had excellent chemistry with Arthur Lake, who portrayed her husband Dagwood. The two became so beloved in those roles, they made 28 Blondie movies together over the next twelve years as well as a weekly Blondie radio show during much of the same period. And even though both stopped production in 1950, the movies were kept in circulation for most of the next decade. For many, Penny Singleton actively was Blondie Bumstead for twenty years.

Singleton herself worked mostly behind the scenes during much of the 1950s, working on behalf of labor rights. She was even elected president of the American Guild of Variety Artists in 1958. And if she never did any acting work beyond that, she still would have had an impressive and memorable career.

But do you know what she did in 1962? She took a voice acting role at the age of 54 for a low-budget cartoon that was, for all intents and purposes, a knock-off of another cartoon. Penny Singleton became Jane Jetson.

The Jetsons. "Jane, his wife."

And while the original show only lasted a single season, Hanna-Barbera brought Singleton back every time they needed Jane's voice. The show was revived with new episodes in 1985. There were Jetsons made-for-TV movies in 1988, 1989, and 1990 plus a theatrically released film also in 1990. There was a Hanna-Barebera themed ride at Universal Studios where Singleton came in to do voice work at age 82! She got brought in for TV commercials that licensed The Jetsons. She essentially did not get replaced until her death in 2003. If you watched virtually anything with the Jetsons speaking, you've almost certainly heard Singleton's voice.

If you're a fan of voice acting work, you probably knew this already. But this is a blog about comics so, while there's certainly some overlap, it is a different audience and I just wanted to take a moment to highlight that one of the earliest super-popular live-action adaptations of a comic character was done by a woman spent the last half of her life being iconic as a completely different character. Something to think about the next time you read a Blondie comic strip.

If Marshall McCluhan is right and the medium is the message, what is the message of social media?That is in reference to McCluhan's 1964 book Understanding Media in which the author contended that the medium in which a message is delivered is as powerful and impactful as the message itself. "The medium is the message." So what does the existence/use of Bluesky (or Mastodon or X or whatever) say about us, both as creators and recipients of content via that outlet?

Henry Jenkins responded to this idea years ago with an extended answer on his blog, but the short answer is: "Here it is. Here I am."

What he was getting to is that social media like Facebook and blogs are the drivers of capturing people's attention in the 21st century. Traditional advertising essentially doesn't work because there's simply too much competing for our time and attention. It's become white noise. We have, as consumers, learned to filter out much of what does not interest us, so we're not apt to pay attention to, for example, traditional car commercials unless we have an immediate interest in car commercials -- if we are actively ourselves in the market for a new car and need to get up to speed quickly on what's currently available. This means anyone trying to market a product or service needs to quickly and fairly efficiently target people who are already pre-disposed to hearing what they have to say.

The question about "gossip comics journalism" leads quickly to the state of comics journalism in general, and I've seen a repeatedly complaints over the years that were generally disappointed with how the "main" comic news outlets were little more outlets for publishers press releases....

Comics Gossip Sites are as close as the industry gets to journalism.

Since there is no REAL journalism in comics, gossip columns are all we really have.

i'm sure has been noted already but comics (& every medium) needs better journalists.

depends what you term gossip. all other comics news sites are intermediaries for soft interviews & press releases

It's essentially the same debate that's being held about journalism at large. Although the AI-generated content angle has entered that broad discussion but has yet to permeate into comics journalism, as far as I'm aware.

Part of the reason I, and many others, write these kinds of things is simply to keep my name and identity in your consciousness on an ongoing basis. Years ago, while I was still running my Fantastic Four fan site, I made a point of making regular, weekly updates so that there was always something there for people to check in on. The same holds true for my daily blogging today. Part of it is an exercise in writing regularly as a form of practice, but part of it is to keep my name out there. I make a point of trying to write posts in advance of every day that I know I won't be at a computer and able to blog, precisely so that the stream of information coming from this location is continual. (I'm not always successful, admittedly, but I do try.) I'm deliberately trying to build cultural capital within the comics community by standing up every day to say, "Here I am."

Of course, just saying "Here I am" would get repetitive quickly and people would pay it little heed. It would be more white noise to ignore. But if I said something different each day, something interesting, THAT might provide enough incentive for people to return. Think about it in terms of the funny pages from the newspaper...

People came back to read Calvin & Hobbes each and every day because they enjoyed it. Some jokes were funnier than others, some strips were drawn better than others, but there was a more than good chance that creator Bill Watterson did something entertaining on any given day. Other newspaper strips (which I'll leave nameless, but you know which ones I'm talking about) are trite, repetitive, uninspired and generally boring. A strip created yesterday doesn't look all that different from one created 30-40 years ago and, because of that, a lot of people don't bother keeping up with them. (Unless it happened to be physically wedged between Calvin & Hobbes and Far Side on the newspaper page and you couldn't help but follow it.)

The same idea holds for me. If I don't at least try to come up with something clever and original on a regular basis, I'm going to fall off your radar. So guys like myself are out here trying to generate NEW content all the time. That includes interviews, reviews, anecdotes, photos, videos, and a whole host of other options. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Newsarama or CBR or The Beat or Bleeding Cool or anyone else who's provided some information about the comics industry. Not all of it is useful or pertinent to me, just like not all of it is useful or pertinent to you. You, as an individual, are going to pick out the sources of the information you like, the information you want, and you'll follow that. Maybe that information will be nothing more than official press releases, maybe it will be news peppered with a heavy dose of personal bias, maybe it will be little more than snark, but there's an audience out there for all of it.

And the things that matter, the things that people respond to en masse, will arise from whatever corner it happens to stem from and spread out accordingly. Maybe it comes from a publisher's web site, maybe it comes from a creator's Facebook page, maybe it comes from an interested, but decidedly third party's blog. And maybe it comes from a video taken with a cell phone camera by an otherwise anonymous individual who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Regardless of where it comes from, though, it will be passed along through other blogs and emails; it will be reTweeted (re-Xed?) and Redditted; it will be the inspiration for message board discussions and vlogs.

Comics journalism is not really any different than comics gossip columns, then, as both are essentially just an ad hoc group of individuals all trying to say, "Here I am." And while that could be read to have negative implications, it's actually intended to have positive ones. Information about comics -- whether it's considered "journalistic" or "voyeuristic" is irrelevant as someone will take interest in it -- is being disseminated through a vast network of people, largely unhindered by any interests but their own. This sort of approach brings more information to light more quickly, and allows the individual consumer to determine for themselves what is important and/or relevant in a more honest fashion. And, further, it allows -- even encourages -- greater discussion about the events in question.

Here in the 21st century, we have an overwhelming surplus of things to hold our attention. We're not limited by whatever filters "traditional" channels historically held (and continue to try to hold) up. We're consumers of information, just as we're consumers of food, clothing, and shelter. We can shop around for the sources and types of information we want to receive, and filter out the everything else. Don't like what I have to say? Go read Rob Salkowitz. Don't like what he has to say? Go read Johanna Draper Carlson. Don't like what she has to say? Go read Josh Fruhlinger. The list goes on and on. There is an audience for everything, and everyone can find an audience. Comics journalism does NOT rely on the narrowly-defined model of journalism that's been taught in schools for generations; it's every discussion you have and every post you make. Every time you log in and say, "Here I am," you have joined the ranks of comics journalists whether you know it or not, whether you intend to or not. Just because you don't have a business card that says you work for The Comics Journal doesn't mean you're not as much of a news/information/gossip source as they are. You are seeing comics journalism here, on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, on every other social media outlet available. Comics journalism isn't just a handful of websites; it's everywhere.

Welcome to the 21st century.

Today we’re taking a look at the villains from the Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon. The show was conceived by Joe Ruby in anticipation of the still-a-year-out Conan movie. Once the show was approved, Alex Toth was asked to design the main characters of Thundarr, Ariel and Ookla while David High designed the world and their environment. Steve Gerber was hired as one of the lead writers. When Toth was unable to continue work on the series, Jack Kirby was brought in to design most of the villains.

Designing characters for animation is a little different than designing them for comics. Jack only needed to draw these characters a few times before passing them off to animators who would create the actual drawings used for the show. But he needed to keep in mind some level of simplicity so that animators could draw them quickly enough to be used in a Saturday morning cartoon. Interestingly, Jack’s ability to create this incidental iconography for his comic characters which I’ve based this column around proved to be equally useful in animation.

The closing credits of the show cite Alex Toth, Jack Kirby and Jerry Eisenberg as the character designers. Eisenberg was the show’s producer, and had also worked as a layout artist and character designer in animation since the early 1960s. We know Toth did the three protagonists, so we’re forced to guess who the remaining characters were designed by. In watching the show, however, it becomes quite clear where Jack’s fingerprints are.

The first season’s episodes generally followed a similar story progression. The three heroes would stumble across a group of humans being tormented by a band of mutants/savages. Thundarr and his companions would save the humans, who would thank him and tell of the evil wizard who commanded their attackers. Thundarr would take the fight to the wizard, battle through some more mutants/savages and finally defeat the wizard himself. He’d then return to the humans and be given a warm welcome.

What’s striking here is how often there’s a huge difference between the design styles of the wizards and those of their henchmen. The wizards generally have a very Kirbyesque look about them -- they’re dynamic and powerful looking and, not infrequently, have some unusual design elements embedded in their wardrobe. The front of Gemini’s tunic, for example, has a wavy line that is almost unmistakeably Kirby. The henchmen, by contrast, are comparatively bland designs and could’ve been dropped into almost any episode of Scooby-Doo or Jonny Quest without upset.

The curious exception to the forgettable henchmen in the first season are the monks from “Raiders of the Abyss”. While at first glance, they also appear relatively banal-looking background characters wearing a simple hooded robe, they reveal a decidedly Kirby influence once they remove their hoods. Each character sports a pair of odd black tattoos each in the shape of a squiggle that runs along the sides of their temple. It looks like a fairly standard Kirby flourish, but the episode’s artists seem to have read it as a specific design element and included it on every one of the monk characters, regardless of what angle they were being shown from.

Most of the background human characters, too, seem to wear non-descript outfits. Pants are simply drawn as slacks without folds or seams, and shirts are not decorated in any way. Hairstyles are flat and accouterments are non-existent. Again, they could be folded into nearly any other Saturday morning cartoon without notice.

The wizard characters, by contrast, stand out remarkably from the backgrounds. They all feature unusual adornments: irregular piping along their boots, complex belt buckles, elaborate headgear, etc. The contrast against the rest of the characters from the series is striking and the design elements strongly suggest Kirby’s influence on all of the villains of the series. Again, Gemini is a prime example with his stylized boot and glove cuffs, tunic design and, unforgettably, his rotating headpiece.

It seems as if Kirby’s influence over the show increased as it progressed. Towards the end of the first season, notably in the “Battle of the Barbarians” and “Den of the Sleeping Demon” episodes, additional characters show up with typical Kirby hallmarks. The heroes-in-training Shara and Merlic look like they would fit in quite comfortably on Akropolis, as do all the extras in the tavern where Zolgar is found. That almost indefinable Kirby aesthetic is decidedly more pronounced than in earlier episodes with each character, no matter how insignificant, looking as if he had a wealth of stories behind him already.

The show on the whole takes on a new tone with the second series. While the basic premise remains intact, the show largely retires the repetitive plots from the first season, the expository dialogue is integrated into action scenes and the new characters are far more distinctive.

The first new episode, “Wizard War”, drops Thundarr into the middle of a territorial battle between two sorcerers, both trying to expand their respective power bases. More significantly for this column, the design of the wizard Skullus is essentially a giant disembodied head in a jar on wheels, marking him as the first significant character that wasn’t presented as a humanoid. It’s hard not to look at Skullus and see Kirby’s hand in creating him. The unusual goggles and neck-base are almost uniquely Kirby; Skullus also has a multi-cleft chin not unlike the ones Kirby had given the Skrulls back in Fantastic Four #2.

Furthermore, more interesting and dramatic camera angles are used throughout the story. No longer is everything seen strictly horizontally from eye level, but there are camera tilts and up-shots and generally more dramatic posing of the characters overall. As Kirby isn’t credited with storyboarding, it’s unclear if he had a direct hand in that aspect of the show, but the stories become much more akin to what a reader might find in a Kirby comic.

The credits for the show at this point change as well. Gerber is promoted as the only “Story Editor” and Kirby is given the sole “Character Design” credit. Toth’s name is absent, and Eisenberg is no longer even listed as the producer. It’s worth noting, too, that Kirby, along with other folks who worked on Thundarr such as series writers Mark Evanier and Buzz Dixon, found themselves contributing to Gerber’s Destroyer Duck comic not long after the cartoon ended.

Back to the character designs, though, the second season has some decidedly interesting visuals compared, not only to the first season, but to all Saturday morning cartoons for years on either side of Thundarr’s original airing. In “City of Evil” the ruler of the miniature pyramid city presents himself as a floating face (not a head, mind you, just a face) with heavy shadows that almost seem reversed from what one would expect. Gemini, the only villain to appear in more than one episode, shows up in “Last Train to Doomsday” trying to disrupt a supply shipment. While Gemini’s design had already been established, the people seen on the train all wear complex Kirby-fied outfits, highlighting crowd scenes as groups of individuals instead of a generic mass of people.

Perhaps the most elaborate episode of all, with regards to character design, is the series finale, “Prophecy of Peril.” The story opens in the midst of a battle between the protagonists and an army of green robots -- simple designs, but vaguely reminiscent of Doombots. The wizard Vashtar bursts onto the scene with an outfit that must have frustrated the animators on the show. His arms and legs are both encircled by large bands between which are an irregular series of square and rectangle patterns. Then there are the three women of the titular prophecy. Maya sports an ensemble loosely modeled off an ancient Egyptian priestess and is considerably more intricate than what JoAnna Cameron wore as Isis a few years earlier; Cinda the Barbarian does wear an outfit similar to Shara’s but with much more elaborate gloves, boots, tiara and belt; and Valerie Storm switches from a fashion runway evening dress to a brightly colored tunic that evokes the ancient Greeks.

I feel I should point out, too, that Jack did work on about two weeks worth of newspaper strips for a Thundarr comic that was never ultimately published. There’s very little by way of character design -- really just a tank gunner -- but it’s curious to see his interpretations of the protagonists. Ookla, in particular, looks like almost a different character. But despite the stylistic differences between Toth’s original characters and Kirby’s antagonists, they blended together well, thus only making some of the ancillary characters from season one come across as out of place. (I wrote about that all in more detail here.)

The main villains in Thundarr, while not actually drawn by Jack on the animation cells, still evoke much of his style. Sitting through and watching the episodes, it’s fairly easy to pick out which characters were his and it’s especially entertaining in the second season when he did so many background characters. Characters that most people wouldn’t even bother designing. But I like to envision Jack happily sketching away while Joe Ruby was explaining the basic idea, and then handing over a dozen or so characters before Ruby was even finished.

Apparently, I'm mostly doing tangetial-to-comics topics this week. Today, I'm talking about action figures. Nothing complicated, though; just a list of comics related action figures that I would like to see made in a 6-inch scale that could pair with Marvel Legends and Mattel's DC figures and the like. I know some of these have been prototyped or made in different sizes, but as far as I can tell, none of these characters have actually been produced in that scale. Probably because most of them are financially practical. But in no particular order...

• The Phantom
• Flash Gordon
• Golden Age Daredevil
• The Claw
• The Heap
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
• The Sandman and Sandy (I know Wesley Dodds has been done as the gasmask-wearing Sandman; I'm talking about the purple/yellow costume specifically here.)
• The Green Turtle
• Nelvana
• Golden Age Red Tornado (Ma Hunkle)
• Atomic Robo
• Girl Genius
• Captain Klutz
• The Mole Man's monster from Fantastic Four #1
• Rama-Tut

Also, as a minor rant... the seven inch scale is just dumb. A six inch scale makes sense; it's easy math: one inch equal one foot. Any accessories or vehicles or playsets can be rescaled quickly. Easy peasy. Seven inch scale, though? One foot scales down to 1.2 inches. Yeah, it's 1/10 the size but that only make sense if you're on a metric system; imperial units don't scale well that way.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the "Krazy Kat Rag" written by Ben Ritchie in 1911.
Obviously, this is a modern recording. This was sold as sheet music back in the day with a George Herriman drawn illustration on the cover!

Al Capp's Li'l Abner was, as you probably know, very popular back in the day. Enough to spawn a movie in 1940 (which I wrote about here) and and a more widely known color version in 1959. There was even a 1952 TV show based on the Fearless Fosdick comic that appeared within the Li'l Abner comic itself. (I wrote about that here.)

What I more recently discovered, though, was that Li'l Abner continued to be popular enough that a TV show pilot was made in 1966. It was never picked up by any of the networks, but the pilot did evidently air once on NBC in 1967. To fill some otherwise dead air, I gather. It's phenomenally bad, even by 1960s' sitcom standards. What I liked about the 1940 version was that the costumes and makeup were done well enough that all of the characters were immediately recognizable, even if you only had a passing familiarity with the comic. This version, by contrast, takes more of a half-assed approach and only Li'l Abner and Daisy Mae seem to bear any resemblance to their comic strip counterparts.

In any event, here's about fifteen minutes (three 5-ish minute clips tied together) of painfully bad writing. The only real saving graces are being able to look at Jeannine Riley and/or a pre-Brady Bunch Robert Reed, depending on your preferences.

Last week, Marvel announced a primary cast for their upcoming Fantastic Four movie. I hadn't planned on weighing in at all, but I'm drawing a blank on what to write about today, so I figure I'd throw out some thoughts on what I think should/shouldn't be in the movie. I'm not as invested in the characters as I used to be, but I do have some cred on the topic -- I had my first letter published in that comic back in 1988 in which I was also awarded a No-Prize; when fan sites were a thing, I ran FFPlaza.com (the largest, most comprehensive FF site on the web by a wide margin) for over a decade; and I've even helped out some of Marvel's writers and editors out by doing research and providing continuity checks. With some of that out of the way, here's what I think should/shouldn't be in the upcoming movie (in no particular order)...

• No origin. We've seen it; it's been done. And it's not even necessary. ("How can you do a superhero movie with no origin story?" "The Incredibles.") Not to mention that if you try to use the original origin, it makes no damned sense to today's audiences. And there's not a decent way to update it without changing a lot of the motivations and characterizations -- regardless if it's a rocket or dimensional portal or whatever, the root problem is that maybe only two of the team should be there in the first place. Maaaaybe three if you add a scientist background for Sue. Johnny has no place there, and if you change things so that he does, he's no longer the same character. Skip the origin altogether.
• No Doctor Doom. I know he's everybody's favorite villain and the MCU needs a new big bad with them having to drop Kang, but Doom isn't your opener. He should be more of a Thanos type threat, where he's only hinted at for several movies before he becomes the actual antagonist. In fact, I would suggest there should not be a villain at all! Why? Because the Fantastic Four aren't superheroes. They're a family, they're explorers, they work for the betterment of mankind by pursuing ideas and boundaries that will help Earth. They've not there to fight bank robbers or Nazis or whatever. Sure, they'll stop a purse snatcher if it comes up but that's not their goal. Let's leave villains out of this. (I'll get to story ideas that don't include villains in a bit.)
• The offical art that Marvel presented has a very '60s vibe to it. I think this is definitely the way to start. This does several things. First, it immediately differentiates them from every other Marvel movie; they've got a unique tone right off the bat. Second, it explains why they're totally absent from all the Avengers related movies and the Thanos storyline. Third (and admittedly this is really minor) it lends credence to Dr. Strange's quip in Multiverse of Madness about how the Reed Richards he meets "charted in the '60s." (Fun fact: there was actually a band also called the Fantastic Four that got to number 6 on the R&B charts in 1967 with "The Whole World Is a Stage." Strange's commment had two meanings!)
• The '60s vibe should be treated as if it were other media from that time period. That is, it should be set up and presented with the campy vibe of 1960s' science fiction movies like Fantastic Voyage and The Angry Red Planet. They shouldn't go as campy as Adam West's Batman or anything, but it should give the same vibe as going to a drive-in in the '60s.
• But that should only be the first act of the movie. The team should go off exploring or adventuring somewhere where time runs differently than in our reality. The Negative Zone, for example. They jump in back in the '60s and when they come out, it's been a few hours or maybe days for them, but it's been decades for everyone else. They pop up in the MCU in the current continutiy (sometime after The Marvels) and suddenly find themselves having to adjust to a half century of technological and social changes. Which gets me to what should be the hook of the story.
• Instead of villains, the story should then focus on how these four people have to adjust/adapt to life in the 21st century. Reed has no problem with the technology updates, but is even more clueless when it comes to social cues. Ben is now additionally haunted by the loss of many of his old friends. Sue has to catch up on what feminism and activisim looks like now. Johnny is initially excited for all the new stuff and the promise of even greater celebrity, but gets literally slapped in the face when he tries his old pick-up lines. Maybe he gets slapped with a sexual assault lawsuit too. The story, then, is on them acclimating to 2025. Can they maintain their 1960s-era optimism in light of... well, whatever this hellhole of a world has become?
• Now, if you want to additionally tie it into the MCU more broadly, then you bring in the Skrulls. While the heart of the movie should be the emotional elements stemming from what I listed in the previous bullet, the superficial plot can revolve around the team helping to find the Skrulls a new home. That's a danglng plot point from Secret Invasion and The Marvels, so have Reed either design an entirely new scanner that can find a suitable homeworld in a way that Carol Danvers couldn't and/or have the team terraform some otherwise uninhabitable planet.

So that's what I think should happen. I doubt it will; it's not any prediction of any sort. I'm just throwing out what I think should be in a FF movie.

(Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the fan art I'm including here was done by Luis Felipe N.)

You're nominally familiar with Nimona, right? Like, even if you haven't read it or seen the film adaptation, it's garnered enough awards and critical attention that you've heard of it. It was ND Stevenson's college project that she later released as a webcomic which was picked up HarperCollins and published as a successful graphic novel that was adapted into an Audible audiobook that was adapted into an animated feature film first by Disney and later by Netflix. Commercially, it's about the best an indie comic creator could ask for.

Now, I had not seen the film adaptation until last night. It was originally released on Netflix, which I don't have a subscription to, but yesterday, they made the entire movie available for free via YouTube... I'm not here to review the movie or how it measures up against the book -- there's plenty of other folks who've already done that -- but I'm interested here in the business decision behind releasing it. As far as I can tell, Nimona is the first feature length film that Neflix has put on YouTube. They've sometimes released single episodes of an ongoing show, but I can't find any other instances of a full film being made available. (There's nothing else coming up in a current search for "Netflix full film" at any rate.) The vast majority of what Netflix uses it's YouTube channel for is, not surprisingly, promotional material: mostly trailers, but also some blooper reels and behind-the-scenes pieces as well.

I think the reasoning behind not putting full films on YouTube should be pretty self-evident. As a business, they want you to pay for access to their streaming service and a streaming service's biggest draw is in the unqiue content they have. Why pay for Service B if it has all the same offerings as Service A? (I mean, they could theoretically also differentiate on price and/or service quality -- but they'd have to seriously undercut every other service to the point of not making a profit if they wanted to compete on price, and the service quality is more of an on/off issue here; it either streams in real time seamlessly or it doesn't.) So why would Netflix opt to offer one of their unique pieces of content up for free on another platform?

The basic concept behind the idea is that of a loss leader, where you offer up a significant offering for free -- understanding that you'll be taking a financial loss on it -- with the hope that it will be enough to entice some people to come back and pay for something else. Netflix is hoping that people see Nimona on YouTube and say, "Hey, this is really good! Maybe I should actually get a Netflix subscription to see what else they've got." It's honestly not far removed from the basic webcomic model where the comic itself is available for free, but readers might pay extra for earlier access or behind-the-scenes extras, or maybe they buy a printed copy of the story or a t-shirt or something. Netflix has, as I noted earlier, done variations of this before by offering up some first episodes of their ongoing series. But why now with a full film?

I suspect that is tied to awards season. On Saturday, they held the 51st Annie Awards, celebrating excellence in film and TV animation. Nimona was nominated in nine categories and won two of them, which puts it in the same company as Pixar's Up. Given that highly favorable critical response and that Netflix seems to be aiming for getting an Academy Award for "Best Animated Feature" (also like Up) the broader release of the movie is likely an attempt to garner some additional attention/buzz around it. Instead of taking out costly ads in trade magazines (or perhaps, in addition to them -- I don't read movie industry trades) they're opting for raising awareness more organically by trying to get people (like me!) talking about it. Maybe this will be something someone with actual voting power reads and they give the movie a little more attention than they otherwise would. Or maybe the easy/free access gives them the chance to revisit the movie and put it more top-of-mind than the others they might not have seen since the Cannes Film Festival last May.

Will it work? Either to get more subscribers to Netflix or to garner an Oscar? I certainly have no idea. On the former, they're also fighting subscribers leaving because of price hikes and on the latter, they're up against Studio Ghibli and Pixar among others. Regardless, Nimona is a thoroughly enjoyable movie and it's worth a watch on YouTube if you haven't seen it already.

In May 1960, Dale Messick, creator of Brenda Starr, was a contestant on To Tell the Truth. I've referenced the show before, but this is the earliest episode I've yet seen which featured a prominent cartoonist... although there's a perennial comic connection caveat that host Bud Collyer was the original voice of Superman for the radio show and Fleischer cartoons.

There's not a whole lot they get into about Brenda Starr here, but will the real Dale Messick please stand up?

Computer created text and images has obviously been big in the news over the past year and change, largely because of the release of ChatGPT and DALL-E (and the various iterations of them). Most of those types of implementations are essentially party tricks. It is pretty cool to type out "Give me a picture of _________" and a few seconds later, you have an image on your screen that roughly matches that description. Usually, though, the text and images that are generated have some inherent flaws when you look a little past the surface. Images of people, for example, frequently show distorted faces and/or hands. I ran a test last January and asked ChatGPT to write me a biography of Paul Sampliner, hoping it might be able to pull in some data sources that I hadn't found had access to, but it gave me a thousand word bio and every statement about Sampliner was factually incorrect. Literally every single statement about him was wrong.

So it's a neat trick to see the computer generate something right in front of you, but it's practical usefulness can be a bit limited.

However, if you limit what you ask these AI systems to do and provide a distinct set of data to work from, they can be useful. I've seen reports of scientists having these systems run through variations of vaccine cocktails to narrow down the ones that have the strongest chance of being effective. They still need to be tested and studied, of course, but now they're studying 100 possible combinations instead of a million. So it you ask a computer to just extrapolate based on a sample set of known patterns, you can get to something more practical.

And that's where my AI experiment today comes from.

When Hasbro released their Moon Knight action figure at the tail end of 2022, I was excited because that's a favorite character of mine. But beyond that, while there have been many Moon Knight action figures over the years, I felt none of them translated very well. Frequently because toy companies simply took a generic figure and painted a crescent moon on his chest and that was about it. Further, the white plastic they always used was highly reflective and never seemed to jive with the night prowling hero; how could you sneak up on bad guys if your suit is the only thing visible? But this new version took its cues from the show, and gave him more of a wrapped-in-dull-bandages-like-a-mummy look which I thought was exceptionally clever.

However, I didn't especially care for the Khonshu figure they released. The design is also based on the show, which is fine, but I prefer the comics version which had more of a featureless face surrounded by a nemes, that striped head cloth often worn by Egyptian pharaohs. In the comics -- the ones I grew up with -- Khonshu never really appeared directly; he simply spoke telepathically to Marc, often using a life-size statue of himself as a kind of conduit. And that's what I wanted a figure of to accompany my Moon Knight action figure: a statue of Khonshu as he was shown in the comics.

If I had a 3D file of him, I could print one on my 3D printer, but everyone who was producing Moon Knight related designs has been focused on the show. And since that design came from artist Bill Sienkiewicz, who was actively trying to make something for comics, it wasn't particularly accurate from a historical perspective so I couldn't use anything based on actual Egyptian works either.

(As an aside, Khonshu in ancient Egypt was frequently depicted with the head of a falcon. So the Marvel Cinematic Universe depiction of the figure with a bird skull for a head is closer to historically accurate than what's in the comics. But I saw Sienkiewicz's version first, and it was the only version I saw for decades so I still prefer that.)

So I'm left with trying to make my own. My modeling skills are pretty rudimentary, though, and sculpting a figure would be a huge task, particularly for what I want to be able to do. I looked briefly at modifying a Hero Forge figure, and I got something I was reasonably happy with, but their figures are scaled to be no more than an inch or two high. The proportions would look wildly out of whack and the details would be crude if I tried simply printing that figure at 600% or so.

There was a Marvel Select action figure back in 2006 that included a Khonshu statue of the type I was interested in as an accessory. Simply purchasing one posed a few problems, though. First, the accessory by itself typically seems to cost $60-$70 US while a complete set (of which I didn't even want the actual Moon Knight figure) was often more than $100 US. Second, it's hollow; they only sculpted the front and the back is just left completely blank and open, which means you can only use it from directly head-on. But here's where the AI comes in.

I uploaded three photos of the toy into an app called Kaedim. Not particularly high resolution or anything; they were literally three images I found online, each shot from a different angle. The software sat and processed those images for a couple hours. (I left to run errands and came back later, so I don't know exactly how long it took.) What it presented me with was a 3D rendering of the toy, as it interpreted it from those three photos...

But beyond just rendering the basic object in 3D, it's tried to figure out what would make sense for the parts that aren't shown in the photos. It's created and entire back that indeed continues the nemes, collar piece, and cloak. What's more, it continued on stuff you can't even see and wouldn't even be relevant for what I'm trying to do -- namely, the figure's entire torso is rendered under/behind the cape as is his right arm! It even figured out the fingers on the closed hand, despite the images not showing that very clearly at all. It rendered what it thought the figure should look like in three dimensions based on the limited data set of a few photos.

Now, this is just a 'generic' 3D rendering, and would absolutely not print well directly. But I was able to take the file into Tinkercad (a free, online CAD program) and fill out some of the details a bit to make this more printer-friendly. I also created a staff with a few simple cylinders and ran the two files through my printer...

The final print is still a little rough in places -- I had some issues with the printer itself midway though -- and there's probably a few ways I could streamline the file a bit more, but I find this to be an extremely functional and useful way to utilize AI. Again, it's not trying to generate something from "nothing" (which no AI program does anyway -- that's part of the ethical debate about what's being fed in as samples to begin with) but it was able to process along a finite, not really creative task of filling out a model based on incomplete data.

Theoretically, I could do this with other objects, but I cannot think of any other example I'd want to try at the moment. But it's definitely an idea to keep in the back of one's pocket, I think. If you're interested in the files I ended up printing from, I do have them uploaded to Thingiverse here.

I dug up a fourteen minute segment of Charlie Rose in which the titular host talks with Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder about two months after the comic strip's debut. McGruder was on something of a media circuit at the time -- I highlighted a contemporary Washington Journal interview with him several years ago -- and he strikes me as trying to force himself to look more comfortable than he is. As he suggests in the interview, much of this notoriety came at him very suddenly. (I should note, too, that he becomes more visibly comfortable in interviews as the years go on.)

As this is as the very start of McGruder's career and he's basically being introduced to a national audience in under fifteen minutes, the content of the interview is relatively superficial. What I find more interesting is Rose's approach. He clearly has his notes and done a bit of research on McGruder himself, but he also has virtually no context for any of it. He admits to his own ignorance of ANY other Black comic strip creators and tries to conflate the content of Boondocks with that of South Park. There's much more said here about how the media handles (or at least handled in 1999) Black creative people than about McGruder and/or Boondocks.

One of the things I used to hear was that television advertising simply didn't work for comics. Between the internet and digital recording, it certainly wouldn't work now, but up through the 1990s at least, there was something of a debate on whether TV spots could help sell more comics. On the one hand, you had people saying there was simply an issue with awareness and commercials would go a long way to letting the viewing public know that comics were still out there and could be found at local comics shops. On the other hand, you had people saying, "Look, Marvel had daily, half-hour, subsidized commercials for G.I.Joe and Transformers (in the guise of cartoons) and those didn't move the needle appreciably. Why would you think a 30 second spot is going to work?"

Malibu Comics tried a few spots anyway when they launched their Ultraverse line. I don't have sales data to show how much these commercials impacted the purchase of Ultraverse comics, but I think "none at all" is a safe bet. But, here, judge how persuasive these are for yourself...