Saturday, January 17, 2015

Mohammed's Cameo in Marvel Comics...

From Marvel Preview #1 (1975)...
...and a tale in tribute to the EC Comics of the 1950s called "Good Lord!".
The point in this panel was that God himself was a benevolent alien who sent representatives not only to Earth, but to all worlds!
(If anything, leaving Mohammed out of the lineup cold be construed as an insult!)
You can read the story HERE.
Art by penciler Dave Cockrum and a group of inkers known as the "Crusty Bunkers" including Neal Adams and Joe Rubinstein.

Friday, January 16, 2015

Reading Room SPACE PATROL "Testtube Tyler"

Let's end the week with a workplace joke...but with a sci-fi twist!
This never-reprinted one pager from Ziff-Davis' Space Patrol #2 (1952) was Testtube Tyler's sole appearance.
Obviously, Cedrick never reappeared either.
And, to top it off, the writer and artist (who may be one and the same or two different people) are unknown.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Brian Clemens (1931-2015)

The name might not be immediately identifiable, but his most famous creation is...
...although they couldn't use the show's name on an American comic book because some upstarts in tights had usurped it!
Wonder what ever became of those guys...
Besides a sequel series, The New Avengers, Brian Clemens also created and wrote The Professionals, CI 5: The New Professionals, Thriller (not the 1-hour b/w Boris Karloff show, but a color 90 min anthology series), wrote episodes of Danger Man (aka Secret Agent) and Adam Adamant Lives, and scripted a number of popular genre movies including See No Evil, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and the cult flick Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

The Englishman Who Explained Muhammad and Islam...

...did so almost a century ago!
You've probably heard of him...
Yep, the guy who wrote War of the Worlds, Time Machine, Things to Come, and numerous other seminal sci-fi tales also did quite a bit of highly-acclaimed non-fiction, including the incredibly-popular Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, first published in 1919!
It caught on first in Britain and America and then throughout the rest of the Western world, selling over two million copies in its first decade of publication, receiving highly enthusiastic reviews.
(Even twenty years after its initial publication, The Outline of History was so well-known to the public that, in The Maltese Falcon, Sidney Greenstreet's malevolent Kasper Gutman tells Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade that the legend of the Falcon is true..."These are facts, historical facts, not schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells' History, but history nevertheless.")

Coming right after the carnage of World War I, the Outline was neither unduly pessimistic and cynical about the human condition nor Pollyannaish about humanity's future.
Instead, it offered an account of the development of the world's civilizations (including Asian and African, usually left out of Eurocentric "histories") up to the (then) present, to convince readers that an enlightened future depended on a clear, unprejudiced/un-nationalistic view of the past.
His look at Islam and Muhammed, found HERE, is a fascinating piece of scholarship.
I suggest you read it...with the caveat that the OCR scanning or keyboarding has a couple of glitches.
The complete Outline can be downloaded from The Gutenberg Project HERE or read and/or downloaded from Archive.Org HERE.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

We Stand with Charlie Hebdo...

...as they return to the public forum...
...on newsstands and the Net!
BTW, we're showing more guts than CNN, New York Times, and others who "talk the talk", but don't "walk the walk" by running the cover itself!