When FiOS kicked in with all of the HD channels I wasn’t getting, but should have, I also started getting HD Video on Demand offerings. I like Gary Sinise’s work, so I watched a few episodes of CSI: NY. One was really good, another was pretty good, but one was flat-out lame. Here’s the big finish.
[flv:/Video/2008/JUN/CSI.flv 440 330]
This really gets my comic book fan hackles going. It portrays comic books as having a bad influence on kids, and I’m really tired of that misconception. In fact, it makes comic book readers look stupid, and their parents too, because in the show what those kids needed was some adult supervision.
How old is the character supposed to be whose friend drowned in the cardboard sub? At the oldest I’d say he’s 35. And the death happened when he was, say, ten years old. Better make it eight. Ten-year-old kids aren’t that stupid. OK, so that means the flashback takes place 27 years ago, in 1981. The drawings appear to be the character Bullseye, from a Frank Miller issue of Daredevil. Miller took over writing the series in late 1980, and that type of ad was long gone from comics by then. The age of the newsstand comic book was pretty much already over, and comic book shops had taken over. Further, there weren’t any “Laughing Larry” type figureheads that I can recall, for any of the cheap outfits advertising in comics. And the idea that he’d still be in business is, well, silly. But I bet the character actor playing Laughing Larry had a good time with the part, because he looks like he usually gets stuck playing a gangster.
Above is one of the original ads for the cardboard submarine, taken from a 1967 Marvel comic. I never owned one, but Boing Boing has a picture of the real thing, also from 1967, at this link. Hmm… maybe they’ll do a show where some kid dies abusing the Digi-Comp 1.
Oh…how I wish I had kept all my old comic books! I used to read The Archies and many of the superheroes, plus Disney. My dad would get me a comic book when he’d get his Sunday paper and my collection was huge. They either ended up with a friend or relative after I was done with them. Enough to make a grown woman cry!
Ben Grimm was almost always the Thing. That was the whole point of his character. He couldn’t be normal, and Reed spent all of his free time trying to cure Ben.
Ah yes, Wendy the Good Little Witch, with her blond hair coming out from under that cute little hood of hers.
Hmmm. I would think that until Super-Hero comics started to monopolized the industry in the early Seventies, the number of female readers was actually pretty healthy. The emphasis being on “readers” and not the number of obsessive collector fanboys, of course.
When comics were marketed under the “Hey Kids! Comics!” banner, boys and girls read comics as an integral part of growing up in America. Comics were marketed for kids, not for male teen-agers of all ages. I would say that the majority of readers of “Archie” comics were girls. All you have to do is look at the members of the Archie Club who got their short stories and letters printed in the Archie comics. The vast array of Harvey comics (such as Richie Rich, Casper and Wendy) certainly had very large numbers of female readers. The Disney comics published by Dell, and later Gold Key, surely had large numbers of girls reading them. This leads into the numerous comics which were centered around cartoon characters and TV shows, usually published by Dell and Gold Key.
Of course, we can’t leave out the one genre targeted solely at female readers – the Romance Comics! Most publishers, especially DC and Charlton, had entire lines devoted to “Romance”. At one time in the Sixties, DC had seven regularly published Romance titles, such as “Young Love”, “Young Romance” and “Girls’ Love Stories”. I doubt that many boys read those! In fact, in today’s back issue market, those Romance Comics go for quite a bit, probably because they were read but not “collected”.
Two “Comic Book Giants”, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, are credited with creating the first romance comic book in the late Forties! Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo did Millie The Model in the Fifties! As Doug mentioned in another post, the great Joe Sinnott did hundreds (thousands?) of pages of Charlton Romance comics with Vinnie Colletta, to keep the money coming in during the lean years of the very early Sixties.
John Romita did some excellent Romance covers and stories for DC shortly before he moved to Marvel in 1965! (hint hint!) Marvel actually revived their Romance line in 1969, publishing “My Love” and “Our Love Story” until about 1976.
I guess in a summer dominated by blockbuster Super-hero movies, such as Iron-Man, Batman and The Hulk, it’s easy to forget that comic books used to appeal to a wide range of tastes by publishing many genres. The rise of manga and anime has been great in getting female readers back into comics and fandom. I was just in a bookstore today, and the “Manga” section was larger that the Science Fiction and Fantasy” section!
Gee, I guess I’ll have to write about the $6.98 Polaris Nuclear Sub at another time!
Alicia Masters! Of course! And how else could she love “The Thing” unless she WAS blind? Naturally, Ben was only ugly when his powers were turned on. I see you’ve inherited Dad’s penchant for bad puns.
Joan, I like Gary Sinise, too. He’s terribly underutilized and under-rated as an actor.
Jean, you’re referring to David Hadju’s book. I can’t jump on everything the moment it’s out. I’m getting there. It will be called — heh, heh — “Hadju, don’t make it bad.”
Ben’s romance was with the blind sculptor Alicia Masters. Sue and Reed got married, and before Jack Kirby left the book they had a baby.
Until manga, girls made up a very small percentage of comic book readers.
Hi! I remember those ads! And the ones for mini-bike plans, bad-tasting trick gum, and all those body-building powders that God-knows-what was in them! My sister and I love Gary Sinise! Our cat Cinnamon even looks like him-her eyes look like his-it’s so funny! When I pet-sat for my neighbor I wouldn’t watch the CSI triumvirate on her HD tv since I didn’t want to see the gore up THAT close! 🙂
You did get that e-mail I sent you about the new book talking about the “evils” of comic books, and arguing how wrong that line of thinking was, right? Did girls in general read many comic books? I know you showed me a few, and I loved the romance between Ben and the Invisible Girl in the Fantastic Four.
One thing I DID break down and get one day when it appeared at Wal-Mart: SEA MONKEYS! Yep, the little brine shrimp actually did hatch and lived for three months!
I was actually bitten by a spider in the shower the other day! I’m still waiting for my “spidey” senses to start tingling… Any day now … 😉