Southern Illinois Road Trip

Spent the last two days in southern Illinois signing books, but I'll post more on that tomorrow. Yesterday we had tornadoes hit three miles south of us and there's a lot of water in the streets after another rain an hour ago. More soon...Wayne

Xodiac From Saturn

Another happy coincidence, like seeing Julie Newmar on TZ the other night. This time around, it was quite the surprise, as I had been Google Image-ing for Hubble photos. One of the photos that popped up was of The Outer Space Men, linked to a blog by Mike Milo, an animation guy. Mind you, I never knew these guys had a group name, or that they were made by Colorform as assumed villains to Major Matt Mason. I only knew that there was one dude from each planet, and that, if not for seeing one at a convention once, I'd think I had imagined them all. I bought Xodiac from Saturn at a Monaco's on Irving Park Road in Streamwood, because I liked the color scheme and the cool helmet. When I read a book with a chapter about The Flatwoods Monster, something seen after a UFO flew over Braxton County WV back in 1954, I imagined the description given matched 'ol Xodiac. It was not until years later that I saw the original sketch from the newspaper, the UFO occupant looked like a nun with part of a chair stuck to the back of her habit. Xodiac was around for awhile, he could float in our pool, but the rubber/unknown substance it was made of really stunk after being out in the sun. Sadly, he went the way of most of my 60s Cool Stuff, like the Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots, my Monster Magnet from Whammo, and those strange demolition derby cars you'd pull a whip through to get them going. Interestingly (or not), I never did own a Matt Mason. I just knew I had Xodiac and never saw any of the others again, I had seen the ones from Neptune and Mercury, the former looking somewhat like a really sun burnt George Harrison....Wayne

Mid-Life Career Changes

Hey, at one point I was going to be Slappy the clown before getting my last job literally a day before my being fitted for a clown costume. Now I am again looking for work, and two things I found I might do would be to sketch nudes of Abe Vigoda and then sell them on eBay or make lamps out of dead squirrels, hey, the information is all right there, people. Maybe I'll become a radio technician and scowl and have wavy hair like the guy in the 1940 ad above. Its the back cover of my oldest comic, BLUE BEETLE#6. The back up features were Dynamite Thor and Sub Saunders, but nobody was fighting the Nazis or the Japanese because we weren't in WWII yet. No ads for war bonds or paper drives. Yet every other issue I have of the Golden Age Blue Beetle will have every story centered around fighting the real villains of the 1940s, except for a few issues when BB went to Saturn. I still love that ad, though. The guy was making more than twice his salary and looking like someone just made him sniff a dirty cold medina right before the flashbulb went off. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going out in the rain to look for squirrels...Wayne

A Happy Coincidence

I found a pleasant surprise awaiting me and my big bowl of vanilla ice cream in the wee hours of last night. Just hours after my post on Batman and Robin Bondage, I turn on the SciFi Channel and see Catwoman. But, no, its Julie Newmar in white ears in an episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, playing Miss Devlin in an episode called "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville." Some fat guy makes a deal with the female devil to go back in time and the only problem I see in the script is that there was no oil to be found in Indiana in the 1930s, two things the episode centers around. It got me thinking, though, how this episode, with the pointy ears, might have gotten Newmar to be the first choice as Catwoman. (I will always have a fondness for Julie Newmar, because she was the subject of my first R-rated dream as a child of seven or eight). Well, jumping from my private recollections to Batman's fetishes, I present the following, as you can see above. Adam West saw no interest in Newmar's costumed ass because he was keeping in character with the Batman of the comics, who we all know loved getting dry humped by a goat while the Joker filmed it on 8mm...

Meanwhile...At The OTHER Stately Wayne Manor...

Buddy the Mitch Vs. Brain From The Planet Arous

Actually, that was Willy the Sid's brain my dog was chewing on as a pup, not that ghost thing from the John Agar film mentioned above. Bob asked me if the brain was Photoshop-ed, I had sent him a teal umbra top secret debriefing regarding border collies a week or so ago. I mentioned that to explain the entire story, which would then make it a nice, homey pre-Internet tale, I'd have to give it a proper on my blog. The year was 1990, the city was Nashville. Sidney Williams presented me with his brain, not just any brain, his own, with his thoughts inside. Printed from an old dot-matrix printer and cut in thin strips like ticker tape, one could pull a bit of Sid's thoughts and story ideas out of a small hole near the brain stem. Sid seemed to fixate on a redhead at the supermarket as well as wondering if she would kill him and eat his ribs. Best that he moved on and married Christine. All three of my nieces practiced learning to read from those twelve strips of paper, each with one complete sentence. Over the years, pieces had ripped and been taped back together, and ripped again. Sid's words became blurry after the brain ended up in a swimming pool. Then my dog came along and chewed a hole big enough that he could stick his nose through the brain stem and make it move like a prop in a Three Stooges short. (Note: in the John Agar film, his character had a dog named Thor who was possessed by a good brain to fight the...never mind). The brain collapsed in on itself after that last stunt, and seeing as how my nieces all had since learned to read other things, I tossed out the whole mess. Between my dog and my nieces (who also like to tear body parts and organs asunder), all I'm left to do is keep the heads in my Bobak polish sausage jar. There are only a few I laid out as a sample, you can see that my dog got at the soft tissue of a Hulk Hogan shampoo bottle Snake gave me when he and Bunny were first dating and still lived in Lincoln. Going back to that lobby scene at the Crowne Plaza--setting for "Skull's Rainbow," a story which Sid and I co-wrote and set at the very World Horror Convention we were at, and then sold to Constable Books' NEW CRIMES in the UK--everyone is saying their goodbyes from different directions, some seated and others standing or waiting on a shuttle bus or their luggage. Sid says to me, as an after thought, hey, you got my brain, right? Joan and Beth look at us like we are crazy. I had started to unzip my luggage when Brian said that he had seen it up in the room, and was in the elevator in a flash. Until he returned, the women really thought that there was something else to the story, but there it was, Sid's brain. I gave it a good home for almost sixteen years, and my nieces learned to know what the phrases cannibalism and supermarket stalkers meant...Wayne

I'm Being Followed By A Moonshadow

The subject heading would have read I Am Zardoz, but I didn't think many of you would know of that strangle little Sean Connery film, but then again, how many of you are familiar with Cat (Yusef) Stevens lyrics? I took the train up north to eat pizza and watch some films with Larry and Tycelia at their apartment. Larry showed me a new camera thingie on his wife's Mac and we took a few photos. That's Larry in the center, but almost all of you know that already. I had to cut out around 10 PM because it takes about two hours to get home via train, then bus, but the coolest moment was as I walked down Wilton Street a block to the el. From some apartment, "Riders On The Storm" was playing. I heard it my entire time and let it fade with ...killer on the road as I turned onto noisy Belmont Avenue. Anyways, here's the photos...Wayne