Keith Giffen's Legion of Super-Heroes on Adventure Comics 500 cover

Now for a bit of Legion/DC Comics trivia.  Adventure Comics was cancelled in 1982 with issue 490, but it was revived soon afterward in a small digest-sized format.  DC reprinted the Legion of Super-Heroes stories in chronological order, and Paul Levitz wrote an afterword explaining various bits of Legion history.

Adventure Comics #500 was a milestone anniversary issue.  To celebrate, DC had Keith Giffen draw the front and back covers of the digest.  On the front side, the 60s era Legion looks through the time monitor at their 1980s era counterparts.

The back cover flips the mirror around, with the new Legion looking at the monitor to the older version.  Notice how all the characters are truly flipped around: Colossal Boy was standing on the left on the front cover, on the back cover he's standing on the left.   Cowabunga!  That blows my mind, man.  Nuff Said!

Jim Lee's Comic-Con 2010 Scavenger Hunt for Original DC Comics Sketches

Jim Lee is a fun guy to follow on Twitter.  He loves doing sketches for fans.  Some pros have stopped doing them at cons, because some guys just turn around and auction the sketch on eBay for a quick profit.  Last Sunday, he hid a bunch of great sketches of DC Comics characters (Green Lantern, Batman, Catwoman, Superman, etc) at various places around the convention.  He's left them in all kinds of places, including the women's restroom at C2E2 earlier this year.  Usually people find these sketches within minutes of Jim's tweet.  What a fun idea!

Note: Some of these scavenger hunt sketches were from the C2E2 con, where Lee played the same game.

Batman.  I am sure Jim Lee can draw Bats in his sleep.  Classic.

Flash.  This is the one I wish I could have found.  Definitely if I ever meet Jim Lee in person, and he's willing to do a sketch, I will ask for the Flash!

Wonder Woman.  Jim Lee's wife @Joke2Far hid this one in a women's restroom.  They asked the guys not to go in there, probably hoping a female fan would pick it up.

Here are some of the lucky winners!  The Wonder Woman winner is on the third pic, a cute couple who braved the restroom for the sketch. Nuff Said!

Wonder Woman 600 Splash Page by George Perez (inked and colored versions)

One of the greatest Wonder Woman artists of all time (and the father of the current continuity), George Perez, drew the lead story in Wonder Woman 600.  Diana Prince teamed up with all the super-chicks in the DC Universe, as you can see in the above splash page.  The details in the black and white inked piece are amazing.  You can see several other pages of Wonder Woman 600 original art here.

Here's the final page with colors by Hi-Fi.  The colorist adds a tremendous amount of effects, but there's no doubt that Perez gave him a lot to work with.  Not too crazy about the new outfit, but this lead story was pretty cool.  Nuff Said!

Planet of the Apes Original Movie Posters

Hola, the Dude here, with some far out scans of the original Planet of the Apes movie posters.  I discovered this cool site called IMP Awards with tons of movie posters.  I've stolen some to share with you here. Please keep it between us, I have enough legal problems as it is.


I was way late to the Apes party, caught the first 3 films after they premiered on CBS in the 70s.  I remember seeing the first Apes film advertised all of the place in Los Angeles when it came out.  I am sure there were many variations on the poster released all over the freakin' world.  Did the original Apes poster really did show the full on makeup?  I think this version shows you just enough to wonder, with Dr. Zaius in the spotlight.  Looking at this poster with a fresh pair of eyes, the frightening part of this is the cage for the humans; where exactly did they go to the bathroom?

You can tell from this poster that the third movie, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, has loads of comedy.  Cornelius, Zira, and the baby who will become Caesar are framed in an old American western style photograph.  Below the logo, the Apes look bewildered in those spacesuits as they enter the strange world of humankind.
I heard someone once say that fiction should never try to combine comedy with tragedy.  A story had to be one tone all the way from beginning to end.  Whoever said that didn't watch a lot of 70s films.  Escape is a perfect example:  lots of laughs through the second act as Cornelius' family become celebrities and go on TV talk shows, but after the government figures out that Apes ruled the future Earth, there is one hell of a downer ending.  My advice to you: do not take Quaaludes while watching this flick!

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is one of my favorite films and the revolutionary story makes for a great poster.  The logo explodes three dimensionally at an angle, just enough to blow your mind, even if you aren't stoned.  The apes revolting and the police gettin' ready to force them away sends me back to Berkeley.  Even though I was never accepted to Berkeley and didn't go to college in the 70s!  It's that powerful!
Did you know Fox is getting ready to re-make Conquest?  It's going to be called Rise of the Apes.  I am highly skeptical, IMHO you cannot possibly improve on this classic.  Ricardo Montalban and Roddy McDowell are irreplacable. The ending of this film is a bit of a downer as well, with Caesar's speech providing the vision that the entire world (beyond Century City) is going to be overrun by Apes!  Will the remake show us scenes of Paris, Moscow, Beijing all conquered by Apes?  Now that stirs the imagination.   What would Apes look like speaking in French or Mandarin?  A Russian Ape, that would be quite funny.

Beneath and Battle are two of the worst posters.  Beneath should have featured Linda Harrison as Nova front and center. I would have also made a Nova spinoff, a Nova TV show, and Nova door-size posters. BTW, there is a neat little interview with Linda Harrison over at the Forbidden Zone.  I think Battle was the least profitable Apes movie because of this godawful painting.  Why highlight General Aldo (who doesn't look all the frightening) instead of Caesar, the Ape who just conquered an entire friggin' planet?  Big mistake, Arthur P. Jacobs!  Your bank account was in for a world of hurt!

Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis

I had been looking forward to reading Bitter Seeds ever since Cory Doctorow mentioned it earlier this year.  It explores an alternate Earth that is largely the same until 1920, when a Nazi scientist called Von Westarp takes a number of war-orphaned children and turns them into super-men—super-monstrosities in some cases.  By the time they reach adulthood, Germany has a secret weapon to use against the British.  They are out-gunned as World War II begins, until a Scottish warlock shows up who can help turn the tide. 

Any work of fiction that involves super-beings has my interest piqued, but this book delivers a whopping good story because the setting is rooted in a historical event that we are familiar with, and Tregillis did a fair bit of research in that time period.  The super abilities and magical powers are also believable, because they have defined limitations.  The Nazis have only a handful of supers, and they require a battery power pack, connected by wires going into their brains (that Von Westarp was a twisted genius), to fuel them.  The warlocks work their magic through extra-dimensional beings who require blood and sacrifice.  The greater the magic they want performed, the greater the sacrifice must cost.

I had fun trying to match some of these characters against comic book counterparts.  Klaus can turn intangible like the Vision, able to reach into someone’s chest and squeeze their heart.  Kammler is probably the most powerful, a stammering telekinetic who needs to be controlled like a dog on the leash—his personality reminded me of the Hulk.  Klaus’ sister Gretel is probably the most frightening character in the book, with her ability to see into the future, and shape it according to her will.  There are many such characters, but Destiny from the X-Men came to my mind first.

The other thing that adds realism to Bitter Seeds is the fact that both sides do things that are great and terrible in service to their country.  Marsh and Stephenson, on the British side, will pay just about any price to keep the Nazis from invading.  Klaus is shown to be merciless on the battlefield, but has streaks of kindness regarding his sister and Kammler.

I couldn’t get enough of this book and didn’t want it to end.  When I read the last word on the last page, I thought my e-book edition had somehow been truncated.  Like the last episode of the Sopranos, the ending was intentional and appropriate. Fortunately, Tregillis wrote this as a trilogy (the Milkweed Triptych), and the second volume Coldest War will come out early 2011. Nuff Said!

Link:  Ian Tregillis web site.
Link:  Ian Tregillis Inteview on Sword and Laser podcast.

Jim Butcher's Dresden Files Series, Books 1-5

Any fan of Marvel Comics, especially characters like Spider-Man, will enjoy the adventures of Harry Dresden.  I’ve heard about Jim Butcher’s series for a long time, but never sure what the fuss was all about until I read the first book in the series, Storm Front (The Dresden Files, Book 1).  After reading the debut novel, I gobbled up the next 4 books very quickly: Fool Moon (The Dresden Files, Book 2), Grave Peril (The Dresden Files, Book 3), Summer Knight: A Novel of the Dresden Files (The Dresden Files, Book 4), Death Masks: A Novel of the Dresden Files (The Dresden Files, Book 5).

The Marvel connection to Harry Dresden is spelled out in Book 5 when he says:  "I'm a disciple of the Tao of Peter Parker, obviously."  Dresden is a magician/detective, based in Chicago where sorcery exists alongside vampires, werewolves, faeries, and other fantastic creatures, unknown by the world at large.  He’s also constantly besieged with financial problems, romantic entanglements that go wrong, and his magic wreaks havoc with modern technology like cell phones and computers.  He cannot drive any car save for an old VW that Harry dubs the Blue Beetle.  The police don’t always trust him, and he doesn’t score any better with the Mafia kingpins of Chicago.  I’m a sucker for a well told story with good first person narration.  The Dresden books draw me in the same way a good Roger Zelazny novel would, the characters are extremely colorful, and there are several good mysteries to solve.  Dresden also had some youthful misadventures, which are teased to the reader as the series goes on.

You definitely have to read these books in order, to get the most out of the continuity that builds up.  My favorite book of this first set was Grave Peril, where Dresden takes on the Red Court vampires and makes a decision at the end that has ramifications for many books to come.

The one complaint I would make about these stories is that they follow a familiar pattern.  Butcher does a great job of putting Dresden in greater and greater jeopardy towards the climax of each book.  The magic that Dresden uses is well defined, but it still has several loopholes—and usually one of these loopholes winds up giving him a new weapon or source of power that he can wield to save the day.  I’m noticing this more and more as a common problem with most fiction.  When the threat is too overpowering, a Deus ex machina is needed to get the protagonists out of trouble.  After five books in a row, I needed to take a break for a while.

I’m sure I’ll finish the remaining books in the Dresden series sometime during the next year.  I think this is my magical Travis McGee.  Nuff Said!

Check out my books on Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3982222-richard-guion