MADE  YOU  LOOK !! 

Please Tell Me! GALKO-chan Vol. 2 - A weird slice-of-life comedy told in short segments, that purports to tell what Japanese high school girls talk about. Bodily functions, sex, hygiene, biological mysteries. Sharing feminine hygiene products, constipation, boobs, weight loss, pedicures, diets, nipples, belly-button lint, wiping one's bum. Of course they talk about other things as well, but it just seemed like I should get the "stuff you don't read about in comic books" out in the open first. Funny but in a subdued way that feels fairly genuine. I was attracted to this because of the unusual look of the artwork, which is in color -- but not the usual sort of four-color comics we're used to. The line art is mostly in shades of purple or dark blue (although borders, balloons, and lettering remain in black), and the coloring is done in textures, as with a fine-line marker or coloring pencils. In all probability it's being done in a graphics program to give it this unusual look, but I like the resulting effect.

Some of the pages have punch lines of a sort, after opening with a title like "When 2 people who are wearing glasses kiss, do their glasses bump and get in the way?" ... OR ... "Is it true that horny guys tend to lose their hair faster?" Please Tell Me! GALKO-chan.

I hadn't realized there was a anime made out of this last year, but the anime follows the actual content of the manga pretty closely, so that's the best way of getting an idea of the content of this manga ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10m-Y27K96c

The anime is all right, but isn't so interesting-looking in terms of the visuals. It's nothing special animation-wise, just your standard competent animation job. The cover of the book I've got here reproduces exactly the look of the pages inside (along with the margin notes about the characters in each strip).

GALKO: Despite her sharp tongue, she's a nice kid -- and popular in class. Her hobbies include cooking and watching movies.

OTAKO: She sits in a corner in the back of the class, but she and Galko are good friends, for some reason! Her hobby is teasing Galko.

OJOU :  An airhead who often gets involved in Galko and Otako's conversations. She has plenty of hobbies, but her current favorite is ... them.

All of the characters have punning nicknames. Galko is a kogal girl into fashion and makeup. Otako is a nerdy girl into manga and anime. Ojou is a rich girl who has everything but brothers and sisters, and lives in a big mansion with a huge home entertainment system. To be honest, I think Ojou gets a bad rap here with that "airhead" line. During summer vacation, she sent postcards to Galko and Otoko, inviting them to come to see her perform at a piano recital. After following Ojou's ridiculously detailed directions to find the recital hall (they stopped at a tobacconist's store along the way to shake paws with the friendly cat who lives there), they were ushered into the hall with great reverence and treated like V.I.P.s, and when Ojou went up on stage to perform, she appeared in a beautiful evening gown with her hair elegantly coiffed, wearing a tiara, earrings, and a jeweled necklace. Ojou then proceeded to sit down at the piano, and play a difficult, complicated and beautiful piece of music. After her stunning performance at the recital, they all went out to a local Japanese restaurant and Ojou looked at the waitress and said "I'll have the usual". Galko and Otoko asked if she came to the restaurant a lot, but I just got the idea that Ojou was trying to impress them by being suave. When the waitress brought Ojou's order it was Curry Udon (a very messy dish of ramen noodles in a soup-like sauce that is eaten with chopsticks), but despite the fact that Ojou was still wearing her elegant gown from the recital, she managed to methodically but gracefully consume all her noodles without spilling or splashing a drop.

Quote from: irishmoxie on March 16, 2017, 10:07:31 AM
I looked at the cover of this and thought it looked like a story I would like. I'm going to give it a try after ditching the series after issue 4 or so.

I enjoyed the story quite a bit, based on the character interaction between Patsy and Hedy, and was relieved to see Hedy portrayed at last as more multi-dimensional than the somewhat stock villain she played earlier in the series. I was really hoping for Hedy to become an important part of the cast, as she had been in the old Patsy series. This issue also had a more humorous bent to it, with Hedy's change of heart towards Patsy based on their long shared history and reaching out in friendship to ask forgiveness motivated by, of all things, Hedy having fallen in love with Belial, a demon from Hell who had tormented Patsy on her having previously visited his domain, sent their by her former boyfriend Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan. Oh, and Belial is also very sorry for what he did to Patsy, too.

That should probably give you some idea that in no way is this one issue comprehensible to anyone as a stand-alone story. There's just tons of old business being tied up here, and anyone who hadn't read the rest of the series prior to this would just be completely lost.

Quote from: 60sBettyandReggie on March 16, 2017, 12:24:00 AM

Quote from: MLJ 1939 on April 17, 2016, 04:49:03 PM
Archie had a Hot Dog-esque dog named Bonaparte for one story in Archie Comics #33. He even made the cover of Archie Archives #10! Archie's other dog Oscar, who appeared in a number of Sahle-era stories, did not bear a resemblance to Hot Dog.

I just came across this Oscar dog. I had never heard of him before.

Oscar first appeared in some of the early 1940s comic book stories.

PATSY WALKER AKA HELLCAT #16 (of 17) - The penultimate issue of the series. Can't say I'm too surprised, as I knew it wasn't selling that great. This seems to be the general pattern for most Marvel series that I like - they last for somewhere between 12 and 18 issues before ending. Recent examples that come to mind include FF (2nd series, 16 issues, 2013-2014), SHE-HULK (12 issues, 2014-15), ANT-MAN (19 issues over two series bridged by a one-shot, 2015-2016), HOWARD THE DUCK (5 + 11 issues over 2 series, 2015-16), and SQUADRON SUPREME (15 issues, 2016-17). The only Marvel title that I really like that seems to have escaped the chopping block (so far, anyway) is SILVER SURFER (15 + 9 issues over 2 series, 2014-2017).

Too bad about PATSY WALKER, because #16 was possibly my favorite issue of the entire series so far. There's basically no action here, and nobody punched anyone (or anything), with Patsy only wearing the Hellcat costume on 2 pages (plus one more panel) of the story. The entire issue is conversation, but what I liked about it is that Patsy had a conversation with her erstwhile frenemy Hedy Wolfe (who up to this point in the series had been portrayed more like a typical soap-opera scheming, manipulative villainess) and made a sort of peace with her. At this point I realized that this was just what the series had been lacking. I was halfway through reading the story, hoping that maybe this was a change of direction in the series to hopefully see if they could find some new readers, but alas the letters page revealed that it was not to be. Apparently it had been hovering at the cancellation point for a few issues, but the editor at Marvel allowed the creative team to wrap the current storyline up as they had intended, rather than force them to write some kind of hurried ending a few issues previous. Ah well.

I'd still like to see someone take a stab at a PATSY & HEDY series again someday. They were essentially Atlas/Marvel's answer to B&V for 15 years and 110 issues (1952-1967), although their relationship was more like that between Archie and Reggie than B&V's. Incidentally, Al Hartley was the main artist on that title for most of its lifespan (in addition to being the main artist on the PATSY WALKER solo title). Al Jaffee (now mainly remembered for his work on MAD Magazine) drew the earliest issues of the title, and in the beginning the stories were mostly humorous. Patsy had actually been created all the way back in 1944, as a feature appearing in MISS AMERICA, by well-known comic book scribe Otto Binder (famous for his work on Fawcett's CAPTAIN MARVEL in the 1940s and 1950s, and later, as the writer of many of the SUPERMAN family titles under editor Mort Weisinger in the early Silver Age), together with artist Ruth Atkinson, and received her own title in 1945, which ran for 20 years, ending in 1965 - but PATSY AND HEDY continued for over a year longer, attesting to the greater popularity of the two girls as rivals. Like KATY KEENE, the title often featured fashion pages with designs submitted by readers, or paper dolls to cut-out-&-paste on cardboard. Also like B&V, Patsy & Hedy started out as high school girls, but in issue #95 (Aug. 1964), they actually graduated, and subsequent issues of P&H were subtitled "Career Girls". This more or less coincided with a general shift away from humor towards soap-opera/romance plots, in post-1962 issues. From 1963 through mid-1967, all of Marvel's 'girl titles' - MILLIE THE MODEL, MODELING WITH MILLIE, PATSY WALKER, and PATSY AND HEDY, would probably best be classified as "romance" titles, although they had all started out as "girl humor" titles, and remained so for a decade or more. A somewhat typical issue of the later run of P&H was #104, which is strikingly similar to the 2006 New Look B&V story "Bad Boy Trouble" with Patsy and Hedy both being attracted to a Marlon Brando-type 'Wild One' eerily prescient of Nick St. Clair.

It's interesting to note that of all the titles Timely/Atlas/Marvel published from the 1940s through the 1960s, Patsy Walker and Millie the Model were the only two characters who had their own titles in continuous publication from the Golden Age right through to the Silver Age of comics, a time spanning tumultuous changes in the entire comics industry. That makes them part of a very select group of comic book characters who can claim likewise. At DC, there were Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, as well as The Fox and the Crow and Leave It To Binky. At ACP, Archie, Wilbur, Katy Keene, and Jughead (who barely qualifies, his own title having squeaked in just barely in 1949). At Dell/Western Publishing, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Tarzan.

The other thing noteworthy about the 1963-1967 period in which all the girl humor titles converted to soap operas is that this was a time period in which audiences were changing and genres were in transition. The continued story which would soon become one of the hallmarks of Marvel Comics was not yet fixed, and the girl titles didn't have continuing stories. It wasn't even standard procedure for the superhero titles in this early stage of the resurgence of the superhero comics, and even the idea of a 'romance' title with continuing characters hadn't really existed up to this point in time. The emotional angst of romance comics was to make a significant impact on Marvel's Silver Age comics though, in the romantic relationships of many (if not most) of Marvel's superhero characters. Maintaining his secret identity as Spider-Man caused Peter Parker to have relationship problems with girls, keeping them at arm's length. An early potential love interest, Betty Brant, J. Jonah Jameson's secretary at the Daily Bugle, where Parker sold news photos of himself in action as Spider-Man, had a romantic interest in Peter that was reciprocal, but maintaining his secret life as Spider-Man always kept them apart - he could never explain his odd disappearances, or occasional injuries in battles with supervillains. A rival for Peter in the form of Bugle reporter Ned Leeds also had romantic feelings for Betty. Blind attorney Matt Murdock had a similar romantic interest in his legal secretary, Karen Page, and she in him, but both his blindness and his secret identity as Daredevil kept the two from ever developing a real relationship. In order to teach him humility, Odin, leader of the Norse Gods of Asgard, had punished his son Thor's hubris in ancient times by means of an enchantment which kept him trapped in the body of a lame mortal physician, Dr. Donald Blake. Blake loved his nurse, Jane Foster, but Odin disapproved of his choice of a mortal woman as a mate, and Blake felt his physical infirmity while in his mortal guise made him somehow unworthy of Jane's love, while Jane was falling in love with Blake's Asgardian alter-ego, Thor. Dr. Bruce Banner, a nuclear physicist who was exposed to gamma radiation, causing him to turn into the raging, superstrong Incredible Hulk whenever he felt nervous stress or anxiety, loved Betty Ross, the daughter of Army General "Thunderbolt" Ross, whose avowed mission was to destroy the green behemoth, and he disdained Banner as a weak milksop and an egghead, while Banner was afraid that turning into the Hulk might expose Betty to danger. To make matters even further complicated, Major Glenn Talbot, a handsome, athletic and brave military man working under General Ross's command, also hated the Hulk, and competed with Banner for Betty's affection. These continuing soap opera elements grafted by Stan Lee onto superhero stories from romance comics stamped the Silver Age Marvel comics as different from the kind of straight, uncomplicated hero vs. villain stories in comic books that had come before, and were one of the key ingredients in their rise to popularity over DC Comics from the beginning to the end of the 1960s. Even though romance comics as a genre were already beginning to die out in the 1960s, the sticky emotional situations, misunderstandings, and rivalries and secrets that had given that genre its popularity to begin with lived on in the new Marvel superhero comics -- but there would be no resolution to these romantic crises, as the romantic subplots continued like daytime dramas from issue to issue. One can't help but wonder what might have happened if Patsy Walker and Millie the Model had also developed continuing dramas with supporting characters always at emotional odds with each other, like a true soap opera. That genre had been well-established since the days of radio dramas in the 1940s.

The last couple of issues of PATSY AND HEDY, cover-dated Dec. 1966 and Feb. 1967, were subtitled "Gals on the GO-GO!" and tried to tap into some Tiger Beat-style teen-mag hybrid fascination with celebrity teen pop, something that DC Comics was also doing at the time in a couple of their romance titles. Neither PATSY AND HEDY nor PATSY WALKER's solo title lasted long enough to catch the late-1968 trend at most major publishers to do teen-humor Archie Comics-style, in the wake of THE ARCHIE SHOW's debut in September 1968 to great television ratings. Marvel, always one to keep a watchful eye on what was selling for their competitors, was actually ahead of the trend, converting MILLIE THE MODEL to THE NEW MILLIE THE MODEL with issue #154, cover-dated Oct. '67, and later adding a new title starring MILLIE'S RIVAL CHILI (May '69), while DC followed suit in '68 by converting some of its older teen titles like LEAVE IT TO BINKY/BINKY'S BUDDIES and SWING WITH SCOOTER to this style, and later adding DATE WITH DEBBI/DEBBI'S DATES. Both companies featured the cartooning of Stan Goldberg on titles, while DC also included future ACP talents Henry Scarpelli, Doug Crane, and the prodigal Samm Schwartz, before he returned to ACP.

DARK HORSE PRESENTS #32
WONDER WOMAN 77 BIONIC WOMAN #3 (of 6)
BATWOMAN #1                           
VAMPIRELLA #1                       
THE WILD STORM #2                         
CAVE CARSON HAS A CYBERNETIC EYE #6 
GREAT LAKES AVENGERS #6
BETTY & VERONICA COMICS ANNUAL #252 - The Dan Parent fairy tales continue with "Thumbelonica". Loving it!

SABRINA'S 80 PAGE GIANT COMIC #1 has been cancelled.

Seeing as how they had already cancelled the earlier solicitations for REGGIE'S 80 PAGE GIANT COMIC #1 and JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS 80 PAGE GIANT COMIC #1, I can't say that this one came as any great shock to me.

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #293 is also cancelled. Rumors seemed to be that ACP was losing the license from SEGA, so this isn't a shock either.

Oh, and here's another example of a pin-up. BUT... it's a cover, you say. There's very little difference in most Archie comic books, anyway. Most covers are just pin-ups that happen to be outside on the front of the book.

Or if you want to look at it another way, they had a few extra covers lying around, so they just printed one on the inside instead and called it a pin-up.

Either way you slice it, it's still a one-panel gag. The only real difference between a one-panel cover gag and a one-panel pin-up gag is that for the cover, whoever's name is in the title needs to be in the one-panel cover gag, so a one-panel pin-up gag that only has the characters Melody and Alex in it won't make a good cover for a comic book whose title is JOSIE. Josie doesn't even have to be the focus of the one-panel cover gag, she just needs to be in the picture, even if she's not doing anything but watching or laughing. Other than that, they're interchangeable. All of the JOSIE one-panel cover gags could also have been used as one-panel pin-up gags. Later on in the 1970s, they stopped using the one-panel gags on some covers, and instead of a joke, the cover showed some scene from a story inside the comic, so that cover was only really appropriate to use for the single issue that carried that particular story, but most Archie covers just have jokes unrelated to whatever stories are inside that issue. The few titles that were exceptions to that were the minority  of series that focused less on humorous stories, like LIFE WITH ARCHIE or ARCHIE AT RIVERDALE HIGH.

There's one more type of pin-up page that doesn't really involve any kind of joke, but just shows a typical scene with a good looking girl as the focus, but which can also work as a cover. The cover shown here is connected to a story inside, but without the dialogue balloons and the silhouettes of the two sinister figures lurking in the background, it would have been equally appropriate if it appeared inside this or another issue of JOSIE with a title like "Melody's Pin-Up".

Quote from: steveinthecity on March 13, 2017, 08:42:58 PM

Quote from: 60sBettyandReggie on March 13, 2017, 08:33:05 PM

QuoteHas there ever been Melody fashion pages?

Yes. I have been reading some old She's Josie comics and there are a few Melody Pinups/fashion pages.

I think I must have a more exacting definition of what a fashion page is, but it isn't this. There are plenty of pin-up pages. In my definition what makes a fashion page a fashion page is that it isn't a funny candid moment from their lives, or a gag joke setup... they're modeling, posing as if for a catalog, to show off their outfits. There isn't a joke to justify the page, or even any dialog balloons, 95% of the time. It's just about the girls looking good, and maybe, depending on the editor's whims, an interactive page where a reader might see their design get credit and be illustrated by a professional artist.

I guess nobody ever bothers doing image searches when they wonder about these things but me, so here are a couple that I found that are actual fashion pages. I didn't find many, though, which makes me think maybe the fashion pages weren't that common in JOSIE. At least, not like they were in B&V.

These are two from SHE'S JOSIE #4.




Apparently there were still a few fashion pages in later issues. Possibly from issue #46? (Just a guess, really.)



Not sure exactly where these came from. My guess would be some of those ARCHIE GIANT SERIES issues.


Couldn't find any better images of this page, Melody's "Punk Fashions".
I guess these are the kind of outfits Melody wore when they went out to see The Clash or The Sex Pistols or Black Flag or The Dead Kennedys play. I'm just going to roll with the theory that sure, she didn't blend and stuck out like a sore thumb, but nobody gave her a hard time, because... well, because she's Melody.

(She could have gotten some help from Jughead... I mean, Captain Thrash.)

Quote from: kassandralove on March 13, 2017, 06:17:16 PM
Has there ever been Melody fashion pages? I can't remember.

JOSIE always seemed to have pin-ups, but I don't remember any fashion pages per se. I'm sure if their were fashion pages for Josie and Pepper, then there would also have been fashion pages for Melody.

Post-Pussycats I can't remember seeing much in the way of fashion pages OR pin-ups, but I don't have a lot of the original issues. CapPalace would know, I think - she's got a largely complete run of JOSIE.

Any drawn by the two Dans.

Quote from: irishmoxie on March 12, 2017, 09:26:44 PM
I have all these. They are ok. They can't decide if they are manga or graphic novels.

Graphic novels. That's exactly what they refer to themselves as, on a text page included at the back that is introducing the imprint and (more or less, I guess) outlining their mission statement: "MINX is a line of graphic novels that's designed especially for you - someone who's a bit bored with straight fiction and is ready for stories that are visually exciting beyond words..." ??  (I don't know what they were imagining they were aiming at in terms of an age level, but clearly they're assuming readers who aren't comics-literate at all... and is it just me or does this sound incredibly condescending to their readers' presumed intelligence?)

These are all established indy artists, and I'm not seeing any more than the usual diffuse (hard to escape it after all these years) manga influence here common to artists of a generation when manga was commonly available for them growing up (which is to say, the late 1980s/early 1990s). No, these are more or less typical examples of different indy artists' styles, nothing here consciously aping real manga styles. I've seen what you're referring to much more often in mainstream comics, although it's abated somewhat since the late 1990s, when it seemed like it was everywhere you looked. Some of that was overt publisher-dictated "let's try to grab the manga fans" initiatives (Marvel Mangaverse, Tsunami, and other Marvel miniseries featuring Spider-Man or one of the X-Men, or to give a more recent example, DC's AmeComi Girls, based on a line of statues and action figures of redesigned bishoujo DC superheroines), and some of it was just new artists coming in on established mainstream titles who were heavily consciously influenced themselves, and were seeking some sort of 'fusion' in-your-face manga style merged with traditional American superhero comic art to grab attention as 'the new hotness' in comic book artists. Joe Madureira, Pop Mhan, Humberto Ramos, Todd Nauck, etc.

American comics artists have been influenced since at least the mid-80s by manga art, but that covered a wide spectrum from Frank Miller being influenced by Lone Wolf & Cub's Goseki Kojima (Dark Horse asked Miller to draw the covers for the American translation, which was, I think, only about the second or third manga to be published in English at that point) to Ninja High School's Ben Dunn being saturated by watching a lot of anime in the early 80s (he went on to draw the American licensed adaptations of Captain Harlock, Star Blazers, and Gigantor, but he was ahead of the curve. 15 years or so later, he was invited by Marvel to draw the bookend specials for the launch of a bunch of one-shots introducing the Marvel Mangaverse). The American who was most successful at cloning an absolutely authentic-looking manga art style was Adam Warren. Dark Horse hired him to draw adaptations of the anime Dirty Pair and Bubblegum Crisis in the 1980s, and that gained him enough of a following to draw various of his own projects, as well as be invited to draw a story arc for Image's Gen13 and much later, miniseries for Marvel such as Iron Man: Hypervelocity and LiveWires. He's been drawing his own manga/superhero webcomic, Empowered, for years now, which Dark Horse later issues in print collections. Far less slavish to authenticity but nevertheless wearing their influences on their sleeves are artists like Blue Monday's Chynna Clugston-whatever (Hey girl! If you're going to change husbands so often, stop hyphenating your surname! It's drawing too much attention!! ...and besides, it's a real bitch for comicbook databasists...) or Scott Pilgrim's Bryan Lee O'Malley (... or is it Brian Leo-Malley?, I can never remember... Actually, I'd always get confused and just call him Scott Pilgrim. Or is it SnotPilgrim? No wait, that's Scottgirl... er, Snotgirl).

At one point it seemed like there were a couple dozen of those "Yeah buddy! Manga, that's what I'm talkin' bout!" guys. They were all over the books at Marvel, and especially Image. It got to be pretty annoying, but I can't see that here at all. You'd think it would look more like shoujo art, wouldn't you, since that's the age demographic they seem to be going for here, or Rumiko Takahashi or CLAMP  ...? Kristin Gudsnuk's HENCHGIRL is a good example. I can see a lot of Rumiko Takahashi influence there, or in a more general way, something like JONESY or LUMBERJANES, which seem like they're aimed at approximately the same target.

But hey, it goes both ways, too. There have been a number of mangaka who've publicly acknowledged their love of superheroes, and not just the Ultramen, Kamen Riders, and Super Sentai costumed heroes that are a staple of Japanese broadcasting's kidvid fare. Even more so now, in the wake of Tim Burton's 1989 BATMAN, American superheroes have foreign fans, and many American-originated comics have influenced manga in Japan. One of mangaka Jiro Kuwata's earliest solo jobs as a teenage manga creator was a thing called Rocket Taro, which bears an uncanny resemblance in style to Superman -- but not just the character Superman, the very specific art style being used by American Superman artist Wayne Boring in the 1950s - comparing the two, it's pretty obvious that Kuwata-san had copies of those comics and studied the style until he could duplicate it nearly to a T (or should that be an S?). It sticks out as a stylistic oddity among other Japanese gekiga stories of the 50s. They did get the old George Reeves B&W Superman TV series in Japan, and I think it may have been adapted in some TV-themed manga magazine, of which their were many. The experience turned out to be good training for Kuwata, because by the time Japanese TV shows and movies began inventing their own superheroes, Kuwata-sensei became the go-to guy (it's not entirely clear whether Kuwata was specifically seeking to work in this genre, or publishers were seeking him in particular because of his prior experience with Rocket Taro (possibly it was a little of both), but whatever the case, he drew a slew of homeland supers in the late 50s/early 1960s, beginning with Moonlight Mask and SuperGiant, based on early TV shows. He then went on to create his own boy detective masked hero, Phantom Detective, and co-create 8 Man, considered to be the first cyborg hero in Japan (a murdered detective whose brain was transplanted into an android body), and drew the manga based on the anime series Mach-GO-GO-GO (known elsewhere in the world as Speed Racer). That same year (1967) he also got the job of drawing the first Japanese Batman manga (reprinted just about a year ago by DC in its entirety in 3 volumes, in English for the first time). The interesting thing about those is you might expect his Bat-Manga to look like the 1966 Batman television series, but it's clear that the Japanese publisher of Shonen King was sent copies of 1960s issues of DETECTIVE COMICS and BATMAN, and Kuwata chose to re-tell those stories in manga style -- significantly improving them in the process, IMO. The striking skeleton-costumed death-cheating villain of the American comic story "Death Knocks Three Times!", known in the American comic story as "Death Man", was re-named LORD Death Man in Kuwata's manga, and the American TV cartoon BATMAN: The Brave & The Bold adapted the manga story in a 10-minute animated homage looking for all the world as though Batman had suddenly taken over an episode of the classic 1967 anime, Speed Racer. While the American comic book villain Death Man never again made another appearance after his initial story in Detective Comics, somehow Lord Death Man has lived on, going from Kuwata's Bat-Manga to America's B:TB&TB cartoon, and then back into American mainstream comic books again in a BATMAN Incorporated story arc written by Grant Morrison.

I just love the weirdly multi-recursive idea of a contemporary American comic book based on an homage to a classic 1960s anime series' style, in a modern American animated spinoff cartoon, being based on a (until quite recently semi-obscure) 1967 Japanese manga story based on an American comic story from only a year or so earlier. But then I love it when you place 2 big mirrors facing each other and stand in between them and look back and forth from one to the other. Maybe it's not so weird though, because American comic books were around in Japan in 1945 with General MacArthur's Occupation Forces. It's been established that Osamu Tezuka (Manga No Kamisama, "The GOD of Manga") was influenced by post-war Disney comics given to him by an American serviceman. When asked about what influenced him to create the boy robot hero AstroBoy, he cited being a fan of both Walt Disney and Superman ("but by way of Mighty Mouse"). By forty years after Japan's defeat in WWII, it was Japanese culture that began influencing American culture, with the turning point considered to be the late-1980s release of anime feature films like AKIRA and GHOST IN THE SHELL (but "Japanimation" had its fans as far back as AstroBoy's appearance on American syndicated televison in 1964). When the 1980s New Wave band The Vapors sang "I'm turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so, think so, think so, think so", they probably didn't realize how literally right they were. While legend has it that the lyrics to the song are inspired by facial expression of someone in the act of sexual self-gratification (and that's all I'll say... just Google it) the song seems to be a fitting theme to a point in time when Japanese graphic pop culture returned to invade American culture, the same way that American culture had invaded Japanese culture 40 years earlier.

Quote from: steveinthecity on March 12, 2017, 07:08:50 PM
Something I hadn't though about earlier, but maybe ACP should have made a better effort to accept outside advertising in their comics.  Surely there's some clever sales/marketing people that could have gotten them ads from businesses that want to sell to the Archie readership demo.  I'm sure ACP generates sales and subs through the in-house ads, but I'd imagine far less than if they were instead promoting candy, toys, movies, tween accessories, etc.

This is true. I've been reading different ACP back issues from different years and making a mental observation of the types of paid advertising that was carried, and there's been a consistent steady reduction of that over the past couple of decades.

Other than the back covers of digests, the ONLY interior paid advertising now being carried in ACP's digests (which is where they'd have the most free space and the biggest circulation to attract advertisers) is for Diamond Comics Distribution. I don't count things like the CW's RIVERDALE and Rachael Antonoff's B&V fashion collection, because where else are they going to advertise, and who knows if it's not paid outright, but some kind of contract/reciprocal arrangement. For that matter, now that I think of it, maybe the DCD ads are some trading arrangement, too.

Quote from: 60sBettyandReggie on March 12, 2017, 05:45:53 PM
Well the way I see it is if we are not getting any comedy from this reboot at least give us some deep sh!t/insight    Something to keep us entertained! Anything.  So far there's been nothing!
I do agree with you on the whole dog-narrating thing. What is it with these new reboots and narrating dogs?? Whose idea was it?   And all of a sudden Moose is into Geology and a History buff!? Ookay. What I liked was his home life, Moose taking care of his younger siblings. That part was nice.

Yeah, it's puzzling though. We can assume he has some kind of learning disabilities that give him a reputation for being a real dumb-dumb, because nobody really knows him ... or actually, no we can't, on second thought. It's pretty hard to get far being interested in Geology and History without being able to read well and retain information... so -- ??

... and he looks about the same physically, more or less (somewhat more handsome, intentionally I think). But why would the whole school be sh*tting their pants in fear of him? Doesn't make any sense in light of the revelations.

MAN-THING #1 (of 5) - The art's not bad at all, but I get the feeling R.L. Stine (yes, the Goosebumps one) had really never read a Man-Thing story before being drafted for this assignment. It's odd, to say the least, and the humor here seems out of place. Still hooked me enough to read #2, but I may have been seduced by the artwork.

COMPLETE TALES FROM THE CON TP - Concult webcom print collection. Humor in a conventional vein. I did get most of the jokes in these strips, but a few were even too inscrutable for me.

SABRINA THE TEENAGE WITCH #11 (March 1998) - Pretty good DeCarlo art. Sabrina meets her evil opposite (Anirbas, what else?) from the mirror dimension, has a visit from Cousin Fern (another victim of Head Witch Enchantra's tempestuous wrath, like Salem - now an actual plant), and inadvertently transforms her teacher into a gorilla while drowsing in class during a zoology lecture. The only thing that annoyed me about this run of SABRINA was the bizarre sexually-ambiguous redesign of Aunt Zelda (the only visual cues connecting her to her former self being her green hair and glasses). At least she shed some excess weight, but looks like she went overboard, winding up with a figure more like Ethel's or Ms. Grundy's, and no fashion sense whatsoever (the big round spectacles and short green hair with a huge curl in front make her look like some sort of punk-rock Dilton). She's a witch, and she self-transformed at the start of the series, so I don't know what I'm supposed to make of that, since she could presumably have altered herself to look any way she wanted. At least they had the good sense to rethink that in the subsequent Holly G run, while Aunt Hilda carried on in the later run looking almost exactly the same (not bad) as here, which seemed to have considerably improved her formerly cranky disposition -- although when last seen in a Gisele digest story, she'd opted for an even younger sexy teenager look, while reverting to her bad-witchy ways.

JUGHEAD'S DOUBLE DIGEST #123 (Sept. 2006) - Good selection of stories, but nothing remarkable. This comes from a brief time where they experimented with coloring in the gutters and borders in various hues in select stories, which gives them an interesting look, although I'm sure some must have hated it.

CLUBBING (OGN) by Andi Watson & Josh Howard - Small B&W trade (same size ACP formerly preferred with the Archie & Friends All-Stars collection) that was part of a DC line of girlie comics [minx] a decade ago - which oddly enough seem to all have been written and drawn by men (one was written by a married couple), even though they all featured young female protagonists. The back of the book has three previews for others: THE PLAIN JANES by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg, RE-GIFTERS by Mike Carey and Sonny Liew, GOOD AS LILY by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm, and a final page showing covers of three more then-upcoming: CONFESSIONS OF A BLABBERMOUTH, WATER BABY, and KIMMIE66. Whether the line ever got further than that, or even if all of those books were ever released, I don't know.