Adam West passes away at 88

Adam West as The Gray Ghost

Just heard the sad news (leukemia) a couple hours ago and I wanted to get a posting up this weekend with a little bit of my thoughts on West's career. As a kid I kinda used to like the original Batman TV show because like Spiderman on The Electric company it was one of the very few live action outlets available for some of my favorite comic book characters. As I got older I won't lie I did develop a certain degree of disdain for the show because of it's campyness although I certainly never felt that way for West himself who by all accounts has always been a stand up guy in his personal life.
I'm really glad that over the years he managed to in part rejuvenate his show biz career despite his type casting handicap with voice acting work on The Simpsons and The Family Guy. As some of you may remember he was also the voice actor in The Grey Ghost episode of the Batman animated series. That series brought a lot of critical acclaim and respect to the super hero genre and that episode in particular was certainly one of the best if not the best episode of the series. Ironically, West plays an out of work actor who can't couldn't find new acting gigs due to a type casting handicap but would go on to help Batman solve a series of crimes carried out by some psychotic fan boy using sophisticated remote controlled toys.

Ya know I have to admit even though I came to grow weary of the original Batman TV show I always maintained my fondness for the classic Batmobile from that series (I dug the Batboat to). I used to have the original die cast ones from Corgi but at least I still have a couple packaged ones from a Hotwheels release some 8 or 9 years ago which I saw in a Dollar store of all places. Looking back I should have picked up more of them. As a crime fighter you probably don't want to drive around seated in an open canopy (not much protection from gun fire) but that's ok it was such a cool design I still love it till this day.

Farewell 007

Roger Suave

So I'm just doing this spur of the moment posting on what is now mostly an in active blog site. Only heard the sad news about an hour ago about Roger Moore passing away at 89 from cancer. Right on the heels of Sound Garden's front man Chris Cornell no less but in his case his death was in some ways even more tragic given that he was only in his 50s. I figured I better throw something on the internet especially with all this russia/trump investigation and terror attack in Manchester drowning out all other news stories including this one. Again, what seemed to be one of those timeless celebrity icons from my child hood has left us. There's really not much of anything I can say that you don't know or haven't heard already if you know anything about Roger Moore's career so let me pivot a bit to some of the 007 toys I used to have when I was a kid.

Ya know I still see the 007 submarine car (Corgi) from time to time at comic and toy conventions, usually going for a pretty hefty price tag. Especially for the ones that are in better condition part of that being if the 007 logo sticker is still present and not too tattered and faded.

I also used to have both the large scale and smaller Moon Raker shuttle craft toys (also from Corgi). Both featured retractable landing gears and cargo bay doors that open. But the bigger shuttle also had a removable satellite which had extending solar panels where as the smaller shuttle just had a fixed molded piece in it but I loved both em just the same. I see the smaller shuttle once in a while at a con but have yet to come across the bigger one. I wonder if all these 007 toys will bump up in value now?

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Might as well throw this up here as well while I'm at it it's seldom I ever come across any fan art related to the Ostrander era and it's pretty original and other wise well done. If you want to get a better look at it go here... http://elena-casagrande.deviantart.com/art/Suicide-Squad-banner-for-Blastoff-Comics-625873780

Bill Paxton passes away at 61 so to the grim reaper I say "Fuck you asshole!"

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Unfucken believable! I literally only 30 moments ago just read the sad news about Bill Paxton having passed away during some sort of surgical procedure. Here we go again with yet another iconic actor from the sci-fi genre of the 80s passing away and we're not even done with February yet. Many people wouldn't know that his list of credits both in front and behind the camera is very extensive but I'm not going to get into a long winded posting about his fantastic career. But suffice it to say I loved Bill Paxton he's been in some great films both big and small that I've enjoyed since the mid 80s.
The land mark role that put him on the map no doubt was private Hudson from ALIENS but we actually saw Bill before that in a small part in the original classic Terminator film. Since then he's played in a number of great films like Tombstone, Apollo 13 and One False Move. He's also done some work on the small screen I remember him in particular most recently from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D when that show was actually watchable. Bill was also in another great yet little known film that's one of my favorites from his acting resume. The movie is a modern day vampire film from the late 80s called Near Dark in which Paxton plays a psychotic vampire with an entertaining and twisted sense of humor when it comes to hunting his prey and taking on his enemies.

As if 2016 wasn't bad enough it looks like 2017 is already becoming a shit year for celebrity deaths from my child hood in the science fiction genre. We also lost Richard Hatch to cancer earlier this month whom you remember from Battlestar Galactica, The Streets of San Francisco and most recently from Star Trek Axanar. I actually met him only about a year and a half ago at a convention in San Jose California.

Gordon Henley from the original Star Wars (A New Hope) film and also most recently in Rogue 1 thanks to inserted footage never used from A New Hope died from a bizarre and tragic choking incident during a meal last month.

Let me just throw this in here real quick let's see if you can figure out the Star Wars reference here in this Battlestar Galactica comic book clip art from Dynamite Entertainment.

Anyways, also last month we lost Miguel Ferrer whom Robocop fans certainly remember and perhaps even some Star Trek fans as well. Miguel died of throat cancer.

Lashina cosplay

Julie Wilhelm

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I remember when I first saw this Starfire bonus pin-up page back when I was a kid in the mid 80s. It was in the back pages of some issue of Ambush Bug (#2) which I was browsing at for reasons that I can't remember since I never had any interest in that character. I remember being so sprung at the time to see something like this in a comic book by a main stream publisher like DC.
But ofcourse by today's standards this is quite tame. Especially when you consider how the character has been re-imagined in the DCU reboot. At the time I was tempted to buy the issue just for that bonus pin-up page alone but just couldn't bring myself to paying the cover price for an issue of Ambush Bug. I've seen that same issue in $1 boxes a couple times recently but it's just as well to have found this Starfire bonus pin up online.

Janus Directive splash page

It seems after all there may yet be a little bit of Suicide Squad stuff to blog about as we kick off 2017. I was at the library today when I noticed a Janus Directive trade paper back on the shelf. I never knew there was a TPB of that multi-titled DC story line in which a conspiracy devised by Kobra turns all the U.S. meta human special ops organizations against each other. The top part of this splash page ( jeez, did they really have to draw Bronze Tiger with that excessive bulge in his costume?) from Checkmate 15 can be found at the DC Wikia page but I mostly like the bottom half with the character chess pieces.

Also today, I was reading Justice League vs Suicide Squad # 3 on Youtube. I have to admit it was actually pretty good. Top notch art with some well done character development and a story line that looks very promising.

Unknown Suicide Squad Millennium art recently discovered

I recently found this art work on DC's wikia page. Although I don't know where this art work originated from I'm always never the less delighted to uncover some Suicide Squad related art from the late 80s and 90s. We see there Rick Flag and Bronze Tiger along with Karen Grace (mission casualty) who's got some some "history" with Flag back from their pre Ostrander Squad days together. There's also The Privateer (a.k.a Mark Shaw), a former manhunter recruited to help Task Force X for the Manhunter Louisiana fortress assault mission (see Millennium week 4, Suicide Squad 8 and 9).

Ok I just wanted to open up this next segment of the posting by saying I was a graphic designer for 10 years so I thought these panels were funny as Hell. Last night I came across this these panels (issue 4) while watching some youtube videos that basically let you read the Suicide Squad Rebirth series in slide show format they have issues 1- 7 so far. Considering how easy it is to read a comic book series these days online I think you must really really want to buy something for the sake of having a hard cover in your collection.
Anyways, this latest Squad series is much of an improvement from what DC came up with when the DCU relaunch first happened not to mention The Squad title reboots prior to Rebirth. This rebirth series is certainly worth taking the time to read on youtube but not worth buying and taking up space at home. It does have it's moments, like Captain Boomerang getting killed in issue 2. Just go to Youtube and paste the following in the search bar...suicide squad rebirth #1. Or start with a later issue but either way after the video finishes it'll go right to what ever the following issue is until you finally reach # 7.

Swamp Thing and The Golem

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I recently found a couple of volume 2 Swamp Thing issues (only fitty cent each) from the early 80s I used to have back in the day. I really like rereading old issues like these because you really do often get more out of it when you read these stories as an adult as opposed to a teenager. I had almost forgotten how the early story line of that series was heavily steeped with an Old Testament and World War II narrative mixed in with some of the same Jewish folklore that Ragman mine is derived from. The few panels I posted here from Swamp Thing 11 do a good job of explaining the nature of The Golem.
 In this story line Swamp Thing teams up with a group of guys going after this evil mutant girl who they think is the herald of the coming "anti-Christ" that will bring the apocalypse with him when he/it comes to Earth. As you can see here they utilize a golem to help fight this evil mutant but we see later that the golem can sometimes get confused about it's mission due to it lacking a soul and mind. Think of a computer given a task a bit too complex for it's fairly simple programming. Let me digress for a moment to make this point. This imperfection in the golem is a fundamental aspect of the Ragman suite which was created from rags with a variation of the golem spell by Jewish mystics in order to create a protector with a human mind and hence the ability to reason.

BACK ISSUE magazine #92  October 2016

December 8th Update: It's December and that means it time for Hannukkah.