This week is the anniversary of Curiosity landing

Labels: curiosity, mars, space

  ¶ 9:29 PM 0 comments

  Wood Chips 24: Sunset on Mars .


Click "Wood Chips 24" heading at top to hear Ray Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven" on X Minus One  (1955). EC's adaptation was in Weird Science 18 (March-April, 1953). Following the Wood panels while listening offers a textbook example of specific differences in adapting a short story for radio and comics. Wood's research into period architecture is seen throughout amid lush vegetation, and he also drew what he knew; between 1937 and 1940, he lived in four different small towns in Wisconsin.

Drawing Green Lake, Wisconsin (a real place), he filled the interiors with such Victoriana as a roll-top desk and a shelf for displaying dishes. Surely Bradbury must have been delighted the first time he saw Wood's interpretation of his story. But note the curious window on page five which has four panes on the bottom sash and six on the top sash (which fills two-thirds of the window frame). This is similar to Wood's "There Will Come Soft Rains" error of the automobile preventing the automatic garage door from opening and closing.









H.B Vestal was the first illustrator of "Mars Is Heaven" in Planet Stories (Fall 1948).

1890s Queen Anne style Victorian homes in Wisconsin. (Top two images are the same building from different angles.)




To read the entire Wally Wood "Spawn of Mars" story, go to Cloud 109. It was published in EC's Weird Fantasy 9 (September-October, 1951).
To read the entire 3D "Spawn of Venus" story. go to Golden Age Comic Book Stories. It was created for an unpublished EC 3-D title (1954), but it was never published by EC.

In 1968, to get the original art for the Nostalgia Press EC reprint book, I went with Bill Gaines and Jerry DeFuccio to the real vault of horror, a midtown storage facility where Gaines kept the art for each of his comic books in large individual manila envelopes. I remember this as a large, dimly lit room with a concrete floor and locked storage rooms somewhat like small trailers. These had to be pulled out and unlocked. It was necessary to set up a work light on a stand inside the storage trailer so Jerry DeFuccio could locate each envelope. Gaines pulled a story from each envelope and handed the envelope back to Jerry. Then I stacked each story on a nearby table.

Earlier, when I told Wood I was going to Gaines' vault, he asked me to retrieve his 3-D sf story, "The Spawn of Venus", so he could use it in witzend. That was the first time Wood had seen the artwork in 15 years, and he then published it in witzend 6 (1969).




To see all of the "Spawn of Venus" pencil pages, go to stwallskull.


To read the entire Al Feldstein "Spawn of Venus", go to Entre Comics. It was originally in Weird Science 6 (March-April, 1951).

Labels: bradbury, defuccio, feldstein, gaines, mars, pearson, stwallskull, witzend, wood chips

  ¶ 3:05 PM 2 comments

 
This is a drawing I did in 1970, an assignment from Jay Lynch that was published on the inside front cover of Jay's underground comic book Roxy Funnies (1972). It was originally supposed to be for Jay's Bijou Funnies, which regularly ran an illustration on the inside front cover to summarize the interior, a sort of visual contents page, but in this case, Jay held it for two years and then eventually used it in Roxy. It seems related to Jay's Roxy back cover which also shows feminist literature plus a JoBo. (Only now do I see that I misspelled "squeamish".)


The JoBo had eyes that popped out when it was squeezed. Steve Allen called it a "goo goo doll" when he used it as a prop on his 1962 television show. However, the name of the product as it appeared in novelty company ads was JoBo the Rubber Boy. Today, it's known as the Martian Popping Thing, sold by Archie McPhee.

Jay explained how he began to draw the toy into his comics: "At that time I was in touch with this guy in Texas who ran a novelty company called Elbee. The Jo-Bo toy was something that hadn't been made for the last decade or so. This guy got the rights to it or the molds for it, and he was making new ones in China. So the Jo-Bo toy appears in a lot of strips I did then, just as the propeller beanie, invented by Ray Nelson, started to appear in strips in the 1950s."

Jay recalled giving me the assignment in 1970 and seeing Avon's Robotmen of the Lost Planet (1952): "I probably just told you to draw a sexy woman with a Jo-Bo toy, and all the rest you came up with. There is a lot of stuff that I kind of plugged in the comics that caught on big. I think the first modern reference to Bettie Page was in a strip that Kim Deitch and I drew somewhere. Jeff Rund was in touch with her then and planned to do some books on her. I mentioned her in some strip to subconsciously whet the public's appetite, but the books (the Bettie Page Private Peeks series, I think it was called) didn't come out until several years after that strip was published. I used JoBo on the back cover of Conspiracy Capers and in a Nard n' Pat strip in Gothic Blimp Works. I kind of liked the old guy from Texas who ran the toy company. In the 1950s, there was that comic that has Martian JoBos attacking Earth."

Was Robotmen of the Lost Planet an offbeat experiment in product placement? One has to wonder: What kind of deal led Avon to draw the toys as science fictional comic book characters? And why the change in packaging?

Jay responds, "The toy itself was around from the l930s to the l950s, when it temporarily disappeared. I take it that Archie McPhee must have been familiar with the Robotmen comic book when he started calling it the Martian Popping Thing. In the early incarnations of the toy it was a circus freak character. Now it's a Martian. It's gotta be the comic book that was responsible for the change."

For an illustrated synopsis of the Robotmen of the Lost Planet storyline, go to Clea's Cave.   Here is an interview with Ray Nelson about the invention of the propellor beanie. For Jay's children's books, Mo and Jo and Otto's Orange Day, go here.

Labels: archie mcphee, avon, bettie page, bijou, elbee, goo goo, jay lynch, jobo, mars, memoir, propellor beanie, ray nelson, roxy, steve allen, toon books

  ¶ 3:46 PM 0 comments

  Mars Is Heaven Control click heading to hear the X Minus One adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Mars Is Heaven (May 8, 1955).

Labels: BBC, bradbury, google, heaven, mars, martians, nasa, wood

  ¶ 2:27 PM 2 comments