Meanwhile....

I try to highlight the work of other comics bloggers at least once every other week, because there's plenty of good blogging going on elsewhere.

Ol' Groove has a tribute to legendary artist Neal Adams.

Why is Neal Adams such a catalyst in the origin of the Groovy Age? 'Cause when Adams came on the scene at DC drawing mags like Strange Adventures (Deadman) and Brave and the Bold, comicdom had never seen anything like him.

Amen. Adams' work was transcendent, and enormously influential. Although he's best known for his Batman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories, he was also a prolific cover artist for DC especially in the 1967-68 era, when virtually every title featured several of his covers.

It's been awhile since I linked Fred Hembeck, but that's not because I don't love reading his blog. The main problem Fred has is that he has no permalinks to individual blog entries, so if somebody reads this a month from now and clicks on the link, they're not going to find the entry I pointed to. His January 23rd post is on the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon show from the 1960s.

I watched faithfully on my primitive black and white TV set--and yes, the Captain America episodes were clearly my favorites, possessing as well the one theme song I could, even many after years last seeing the show, still hum (conversely, I recently checked out some Sub-Mariner episodes--more on THAT later--but y'know, I STILL can't recall that tune!...)-- and then, one day they were gone, and I didn't anymore. Watch, that is.

I can't remember the individual theme songs, but I do remember, "You belong! You belong! To the Merry Marvel Marching Society!"

The Fortress Keeper has a serious post on the Final Crisis series that is nearing conclusion, and the apparent death of Batman (as Bruce Wayne) in that series.

Although this blogger once defended Geoff Johns’ use of gore in Infinite Crisis as an effective way to advance the story, the ever-mounting pile of corpses at both DC and Marvel taught us that modern comics were less about redefining super-heroics in a post-Sept. 11 world (as Messers Quesada and Didio often insist) than getting a rise out of an increasingly small and jaded fanbase.

Once pristine characters like Supergirl and Mary Marvel were shamelessly sexualized, C-list heroes like Tigra were beaten down and humiliated to prop up superstar writers’ pet projects and old-school paragons like Captain America were ridiculed for being “out of touch” with the Facebook nation.

Read it all, and also this post which the Fortress Keeper references. If you want to know why I focus on the Silver Age Comics, it's because that's the last era where superheroes were legitimately heroic, where the stories were uplifting, and where the gore and humiliation were kept to a minimum. As for the "death" of Batman, I'll let Bruce have the last word on that:



On a lighter note, Mark Engblom has an entertaining series on the Superpowers that Time (or Superman's writers) Forgot. In one of the Superman TV episodes from the 1950s, the writers gave Superman the ability to vibrate through solid objects (much like the Flash in the Silver Age).