Rodanof42

benito-cereno:

"The Thing on the Fourble Board" from Quiet, Please (1948)

A few months ago, following a certain post I made (to say which one would be a bit of a spoiler), someone brought this delightful piece of history to my attention, and I am very excited to share it with you now.

"The Thing on the Fourble Board" is widely considered the best and scariest piece of radio to have come out of radio’s golden age of horror and mystery programming. If you listen, you will learn why.

A fourble board is a horizontal platform on an oil derrick that is as high off the ground as four lengths of pipe are long (“fourble”=”quadruple”). This is the tale of a worker at the oil derrick and the staff geologist, and what they discover about the things their drilling has (literally) unearthed.

I’m trying my best to find the right balance between not over-hyping this and making it clear that this is the coolest fucking thing you will hear this Halloween.

I know asking you to listen to 25 minutes of old timey radio is asking a lot in this crazy iPad world we live in, but this is exactly the length of an episode of Welcome to Night Vale, so I know you can find time for it. Just imagine the narrator is Cecil and the geologist is Carlos. We can do this, together. Don’t worry: the writing is tight and the pace is fairly brisk. You won’t get bored.

You can download an mp3 of the show here if you want it on your listening devices instead of playing it on YouTube. (please let me know if this link doesn’t work)

Just take a few minutes, maybe while you’re cooking dinner or washing dishes or whatever, and give a listen to one of the most revered pieces of horror radio in history, and if you like it, please share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

5upmushroom asked: Yo, I made a word cloud from your last 2500 posts (give or take). Fresh or wack?

OH SHIT, SHOUTOUT TO “DON” EVIDENTLY

seanhowe:

Original Jack Kirby photomontage, used in Jimmy Olsen #134.

Click here to enlarge. (Warning: you might gasp.)

Jumping catfish! The Zoomway’s turned into a daffy light show!

Find a guy dressed as Bill Finger and steal his clothes.

There's a lot to be said for the splash page which concludes Dean Trippe's deeply personal Something Terrible, a new 18-page digital comic available for $0.99. You could spend a serious amount of time figuring out and naming each character pictured in the previously released and wildly reblogged image "You'll Be Safe Here": The Rocketeer, Indiana Jones, He-Man, and essentially every member of the Bat-family. Gremlins, Transformers, Spider-Men and... is that the Crow? Beloved characters populate a scene witnessed in the foreground by a young boy, standing protected by Batman himself.

What you couldn't see until Trippe released the story behind it was just how much the scene meant to him not as a fan but as a man, and how much the world of fiction and fantasy can offer a child who truly needs an escape from an unthinkable reality of abuse and trauma.

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Johnny Ryan's 10 Rules:

deantrippe:

1. Draw as many comics as you can.

2. Read as many comics as you can.

3. Learn how to process criticism in a way that doesn’t inhibit your ability to create.

4. If there is something you’re nervous about drawing, you’re worried what people will think of you when they see this drawing, then you should definitely draw it.

5. Rules are stupid. If you’re an artist and you follow rules you have already failed.

6. That’s all I got…sorry.

7. Y

8. O

9. L

10. O

sounds legit

the only rules you need

For all the flaws it might have, New York Comic-Con has one very, very important thing going for it: A gigantic, well-organized Artists Alley that takes up an entire convention hall all by itself, full of amazing creators showing off their newest comics. There's enough there that you can spend the entire con checking out great stuff and never have a chance to set foot on the floor, and come away perfectly happy.

I haven't read everything I picked up yet, but there were three things that looked so good that I couldn't even wait to get home to dive right in. They're the ones to watch out for, fresh from the Javits Center!

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Well, I guess the Affordable Care Act is like the crack epidemic in the sense that Republicans use both to spread a bunch of racist lies and to fuck up our country in a way the disproportionately affects people who are poor and people who are not white.

PS. Seriously, fuck Republicans.

tompeyer:

Clark Kent thinks sadly of the misery and injustice in the world.

seanhowe:

Letter from 1966 Marvel Comics staffer to fan:
Jack Kirby “plots the story as he draws it”; Marvel’s “whole operation is based on the story instinct” of Stan Lee

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is out in paperback this week; oh, how I wish I’d come across this amazing letter in time to include mention of it in the book. It’s a February 1966 letter from then-Staff Writer Denny O’Neil to Marvel fan Jay DeNatale, and it includes what’s possibly the earliest insider account of Marvel from someone other than Stan Lee.

The course of events that led to Fantastic Four #1 that presented here are pretty much in keeping with the Stan Lee/company line, but the amount of credit O’Neil gives to Kirby for plotting—right down to the story beats in the margins of the pages—is notable.

Among the other fascinating bits:

• “Mr. Goodman insists that we keep sketches and editorial comments for reference and reprint.”

• “Currently a Captain America pilot film is being shot in an animation process similar to that used by Hanna-Barbara”

• “A producer named Robert Kranz [sic] is interested in the live television rights to several Marvel heroes” [Note: Robert Lawrence and Steve Krantz were both involved in the animated ‘Marvel Super Heroes’ series. Was a deal ever made for live-action series?]

• There’s no mention of the recently departed Steve Ditko.

As if all that weren’t enough, O’Neil included with his latter a Xerox of Jack Kirby’s pencils for Fantastic Four #47. (You can compare this to the inked, colored, and lettered page here.)

bigredrobot:

darthshadow:

hclark70:

g33kologie:

Some Lady Is Cranking Out Dinosaur Romance Novels

Come on, Chris Sims. Could you maybe have gone with a less obvious pen name?

On the one hand, anyone who knows me knows that I am WAY too arrogant to ever use a pseudonym on anything I write.

On the other hand, a pseudonym that is basically my own name would be the most likely choice.

This is my life now.

If you had asked me six months ago whether we, as a culture, ever needed another story that took a familiar story and added zombies to create wacky supernatural hijinx, my answer would've been a quick and definite no. It's a premise that's been done to death, shambling resurrection and death again, and when October rolls around, you can't swing a dead cat that feasts for the flesh of the living without hitting some bold new reworking of the zombie formula.

If, however, you then asked me if I wanted to see a zombie story about Archie and the gang written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and illustrated by Francesco Francavilla, I would've probably done some pretty quick backpedaling. That is exactly what I want to see, and now that Afterlife With Archie is finally on its way for a spoooooky Halloween debut, I can confirm that it's every bit as fun as you want it to be.

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You trying to tell me the media and particularly the sports media has a disgusting pattern of treating white players like actual people and non white people like savages?

Cartozia Tales is an idea I wish I'd had.

Actually, that's not quite accurate. Cartozia Tales is a bunch of ideas that I wish I'd had, put together inside of yet another idea that I wish I'd had. It's a Matryoshka doll of seething jealousy on my part, and if it wasn't so good, I'd hate it. Fortunately for everyone -- particularly the people reading every issue, like I plan to -- editor Isaac Cates and the crew of cartoonists and special guests creating his comic have the talent to back it up, and the end result is a comic that takes the idea of building a fantasy world and makes it something that's genuinely fun to read about.

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Q: How do you square what happened to Bill Finger with your love of Batman? Is it a problem? -- @MikeFromNowhere

A: You know, it is and it isn't. I think the record will show that outside of a few years here and there where I just wasn't interested in what was going on in the comics, there has been very little that has stood in the way of my love of Batman. It is river deep, mountain high for me and Batman, and at this point, I don't think there's anything that's going to change that. But at the same time, there are those moments where I'll be reading one of my favorite stories, or watching Batman: The Animated Series or Brave and the Bold, and that damn "Batman created by Bob Kane" credit comes up, and I'm just angry about it for the rest of the day.

Jack Kirby said it best, Mike. Comics'll break your heart.

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bigredrobot:

savorysnack:

wkndplns

same

Not even kidding when I say that this is one of the all-time greatest Punisher covers.

This month is the 50th anniversaries of both the X-Men and the Avengers. Each day I’m spotlighting a cool comic book moment from either the Avengers or the X-Men but I thought it is only fair to spend a little time on the NOT so cool moments in each of their histories. So throughout the [...]

Following the success of the 2012 installment, Smut Peddler -- the anthology featuring woman-made, sex-positive comics -- is returning in 2014. The newest edition will feature work from creators Spike Trotman, Faith Erin Hicks, Jess Fink, Jen Vaughn, Kate Leth, Niki Smith and, quite possibly, you.

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“This is where – if you are the kind of person that thinks that books should be read with their authors in mind – it becomes relevant that JD Salinger saw more combat during World War II than almost any other American. The ‘Great American War Novels’ of that generation (Catch 22, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Naked and The Dead) were all written by men who saw far less of war’s horror than JD Salinger did. He was on Utah Beach on D-Day, at the Battle of the Bulge and he was one of the first Americans to enter a liberated concentration camp. And yet, Salinger returned home and wrote, not about war but, about Holden Caulfield bumming around New York City. So, you can say that the stakes aren’t high in this novel, but as Salinger well knew, the cruel and phony world of adults doesn’t just treat people like Holden Caulfield poorly, it kills them.”

-

John Green, Crash Course (Literature)

(Relevant given the widening release of the documentary SALINGER)

“

As an intern for Marvel in the late 70’s, racist jokes were routinely, as in every day, thrown my way. By white intellectuals, By people who did not regard themselves as racist and did not regard their remarks as racist simply by virtue of the fact they were the ones making them. Marv Wolfman routinely had me making multiple xeroxes of Gene Colan’s gorgeous pencils for TOMB OF DRACULA, and, after a few passes, the pencil graphite would be all over my hands. Several staffers, some who are still in the Marvel offices today, would pick my hand up and show the graphite-covered hand to the bullpen while exclaiming, “Hey— your hands are black!” (Marv never did this, by the way. In fact, Marv rarely came out of his office. I started to think he WAS, in fact, Dracula).

I was the office mascot. The little black kid. The co-key operator for the Xerox machine (with John Romita, Jr., who enthusiastically relinquished the top slot to me). My how liberal we are. Jim, go grab this, “In a jig.” Staffers, some still in the biz, used to come by and rub my head “for good luck.” One staffer kept little jigaboo figurines on his desk: warped, offensive little gnomes in white face eating watermelon. Denys Cowan stole one off of this guy’s desk and gave it to me as a Christmas present. I keep it on my desk here to remind me some of these people still work there…

I didn’t know Larry Hama when he suddenly became my boss on CRAZY Magazine in 1980, but I had been warned that he was, indeed, the best man for the job because he was thoroughly nuts. “Two-Gun” Hama, as he was called behind his back, arrived at Marvel and, like Denzel Washington in Training Day, immediately went about turning my life upside down. Hama has had the most profound and lasting influence on my life, my sense of self, and my sense of honor and morality. He is the most important father figure in my life, and I am most grateful to God for the years we struggled together in that tiny office at Marvel.

The first thing Hama did was build himself a bunker. Steel flat files cases and a drawing easel were arranged in such a way that people passing by the office could see me but not him, and had to stop and deal with me before they dealt with him. He installed red gels in the overhead light grilles, which gave our office a hellish tint and made the mood even more off-putting and less inviting to the rubes. EPIC ILLUSTRATED’s Peter Ledger painted Larry’s office phone bright red and molded little icons all over it, and Larry played Jefferson Starship and The Ramones as he held court with the likes of Bobby London, Mary Wilshire, Heidi MacDonald, Shari Flannigan and other top artists from NATIONAL LAMPOON and other humor magazines.

First day on the job, Larry took me to lunch to explain the New Deal to me. Before his arrival, I had been paid twenty-five dollars a month (yes, a month) to be Paul Laiken’s assistant on CRAZY. Larry was incensed that Marvel had allowed this, and immediately gave me a raise to a whopping $400 per month, which, for a nineteen year-old, was a good deal. Larry later worked to get me on staff (I was, officially, a freelancer), and soon I was making an actual salary, with benefits and so forth.

At the restaurant, as we waited for an open table, a lovely blonde and her lunch companion stepped past us, and the host appeared and began to seat them. Hama objected, politely— we were here first, and the host quickly sat us instead. Hama sat at the table, removed his mirrored aviators, and said, “Jim— never let the white man take advantage of you.”

And, I guess, that’s when it hit me: Larry was Japanese American. A guy many people sidled up to and spoke loudly and slowly, hoping he could understand them. Larry was a Hollywood actor, having appeared in many films. His diction was perfect, and he spoke English better than I did, and in as many dialects as he wanted to.

Larry suddenly made my world make sense. Suddenly, somebody at Marvel had my back. Staffers were much less likely to rub my head or make the black-hands jokes once Larry arrived.

”

-

Christopher Priest (via assistedrealityinterface)

Suddenly I am much more interested in Larry Hama than I was five minutes ago. That guy sounds AWESOME.

(via bigfootrock)

I met Larry Hama at San Diego last year (2012) and awkwardly told him that while I loved GI Joe, Priest’s story about Hama telling him to never let the white man take advantage of you was something that I really thought was amazing.

He had kind of a “Yeah… right.” look when I told him that, but I’m glad I did.

tompeyer:

A desperate situation! 

funwrecker:

mindeclipse:

jeandrawsstuff:

'Tales of Metropolis: Lois Lane' has been uploaded IN FULL to youtube!! It's hilarious and well done and deserves ALL THE VIEWS! Also, bonus Kevin Conroy who is THE BEST BATMAN EVER. Please watch and share!!!

One of many awesome DC Nation shorts.

Excellent

DC Nation continues to just be A++ all over the place.

benito-cereno:

In Jack Kirby’s 1972 series THE DEMON, we saw the King’s take on various classic horror monsters, killers, and terrors, including a take on Frankenstein literally named Baron von Evilstein, a name that’s pretty on the nose, even for the guy who created Doctor Doom.

Here we see Kirby’s take on the Phantom of the Opera, Farley Fairfax, the Phantom of the Sewers. You might scoff and say, “Farley Fairfax? What a terrible name for a horror story villain.” Let me remind you: the original opera phantom’s name was ERIC. ERIC. HIS NAME WAS ERIC.

"Kids, hurry home right after school and don’t stay out after dark because ERIC might get you!" Jeez.

Anyway. Farley Fairfax, the Phantom of the Sewers. The Demon. Jack Kirby.

 

If you read comics -- or heck, if you've been to the movies in the past five years -- then you've gotten a lot of entertainment from Jack Kirby. In a career that spanned six decades, Kirby was the driving creative force in comics, creating or co-creating lasting characters like Darkseid and the Demon, the entire genre of romance comics, the entire Marvel Universe and, when you get right down to it, modern comic book storytelling as we know it. The thing is, comics like Thor, Avengers, Fantastic Four and The New Gods were only the tip of the iceberg.

To say that Kirby was prolific is sort of like saying the sun is a little warm, and while we've all seen his most famous creations in comics, movies and TV shows over the years, he has a list of creations that remains unrivaled. That's why today, in celebration of the 96th birthday of the King of Comics, we're throwing the spotlight on some of his most under-used ideas -- ten Kirby Creations that really ought to be a lot more famous.

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cryingmanlytears:

Okay, so I could not find any sort of map or layout of Night Vale and (being a huge nerd who used to make D&D Maps for her brother) I took it upon myself to make a large, comprehensive, and possibly entirely incorrect series of maps which I will have to continually alter as new podcasts come out. This is just how I picture it. I re-listened through the whole thing and took down a bunch of notes haha. I think it’s all as correct as it can be (at least as far as “First Date”). If anyone notices something incorrect please let me know.

(btw you can open that first map up in a new tab to see it better)

Maps of fictional places will never not be exactly my jam.

benito-cereno:

For the next installment of my Scholarship for Dollarship series, here is a question which pertains to one Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose birthday was Tuesday (which he shares with another prominent writer of modern weird fiction). The question comes from Joe Gracyk and is as follows:

In “The Horror At Red Hook”, Lovecraft refers to something as “deeper than the well of Democritus”. He probably got that from Poe, who, in “A Descent Into The Maelstrom”, used an epigraph from Joseph Glanville, who refers to things having “depth in them greater than the well of Democritus”.

Who was Democritus, and why was his well so deep?

“The Horror at Red Hook,” not to be confused with the Horror at Red Rocks, is the rare Lovecraft story set in New York, from the time he lived there before he found out it was full of black people and then ran screaming back to Rhode Island.

The reference to the well of Democritus contained therein almost certainly has its origins in Poe, who was indisputably Lovecraft’s biggest influence. Poe references the well of Democritus not only in the epigraph to “A Descent Into the Maelstrom” as you mentioned, but also in his more famous story “Ligeia,” again describing something as deeper than the well of Democritus.

Poe’s source on this metaphor is obviously Joseph Glanville, as he has the courtesy of citing his source for us. Glanville was a 17^th century minister who wrote extensively on scientific ideas back when science and God were considered to be the same thing and not bitter arch-rivals. Here is the quote from Poe’s epigraph:

“The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame in any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.”

Poe wasn’t the only one to glom onto this metaphor from Glanville; Immanuel Kant, in his 1781 work Critique of Pure Reason, talks about people who don’t care about learning by saying, “They follow common sense, without parading their ignorance as a method which is to teach us the wonderful secret, how we are to find the truth which lies at the bottom of the well of Democritus.”

SO

Who was Democritus, and why is his well so goddamn deep?

Democritus was a pre-Socratic philosopher from northern Greece who lived from the mid-fifth to mid-fourth century BCE. Together with his mentor Leucippus, he developed a number of theories about the nature of, uh, nature which turned out to be basically crazy prescient. Plato hated his guts and would buy up all his books just to burn them. Nevertheless, he has been called the father of modern science. He is also known as the Laughing Philosopher, due to his reputation for mocking foolishness.

Democritus is best known for his theory of atomism. Here it is, in short: everything that exists is made up of stuff, and space between stuff. If you break that stuff down, eventually, you are going to get to some stuff so small it can’t be broken down anymore. He called this stuff “atomos,” which means “indivisible.” He said there were lots of different kinds of atoms, of different sizes and shapes, and the sizes and shapes of these atoms affect what kind of stuff they made when you piled a bunch of them together. He also said atoms were mostly space, which is why liquid can flow and metal can bend and that kind of stuff.

Hey, yo, guess what, he was right, it turns out. P.S. This was 2500 years ago.

(He was right about a lot of things. He was wrong about some things. He thought individual atoms more closely resembled the matter they made up, and that they connected in a mechanical way. Also, we obviously know that an atom is not indivisible, and it is, in fact, subatomic party girls all the way down. Guess what. He didn’t even have a microscope or a hardon collider, so shut up.)

Bertrand Russell, 20^th century British philosopher et al., said that this was some blind squirrel shit, and they made a lucky guess with no evidence to support their theory and Democritus and Leucippus weren’t that smart after all. Guess what: you are full of shit, Bertrand Russell.

The Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, who wrote at length about atomism in his treatise on Epicureanism known as De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), explains exactly how the theory of atomism came to be: things fall apart. Rocks erode, trees rot, water mixes with soil and becomes mud. And yet we see more rocks, new trees, fresh water. An acorn becomes a tree that looks pretty much like any other oak tree, including those that have died and decayed into nothingness. How does that happen? There must be some invisible, indelible substance deep within matter that determines the properties of the matter we can perceive. You can read about this.

My point is this: eat a dick sandwich on asscheek bread, Bertrand Russell.

Okay, so get to the fucking well already.

Democritus’s theory that everything was made of atoms extended to the entire universe. He held that the earth was round, and that there were in fact many, many, nigh infinite worlds out in the cosmos, all made of matter that arose when a bunch of atoms slammed into each other. Worlds lived for a time, and then they died. Some worlds had a sun and a moon, or many suns and many moons, or no sun or moon at all. In his—looking back, pretty fucking accurate—view, the universe was basically infinite, an expanse of atoms roiling in the void.

That’s Democritus’s well. When Glanville and Kant and Poe and Lovecraft talk about something being deeper or more profound than the well of Democritus, they mean something deeper than the expanse of our ever-expanding universe.

Pretty fucking deep, that is to say.

Anyway, Democritus was a hugely prolific philosopher, writing about ethics and nature and literature and math and medicine and history and law. There’s plenty to read and explore. Alternatively: he is featured in part seven of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. It’s on Hulu. Give ‘er a look.

One of the nice things about having my job is that occasionally, someone I don't know will be cleaning out a garage or whatever, find something weird, and immediately decide that they should mail it to me because they think it's something I'd want to see. It doesn't happen a lot, but it's often enough that at this point, it's stopped being weird. Mostly.

Point being, that's exactly what happened when reader Jeff found his wife's membership kit for the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Official Fan Club from 1994 and offered to send it over. This is not an offer I turn down, especially with the 20th anniversary of MMPR coming up next week, so join me as we explore the garden of delights that is the Power Rangers Fan Club Kit.

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