Last week, Denro tipped me off to a half-price sale of Criterion videos at Barnes & Noble. I picked up the Blu-ray release of “Kiss Me Deadly” for twenty bucks. It’s based on a Mike Hammer story by Joe Sinnott’s longtime buddy, Mickey Spillane. Mickey was supposedly not happy with the ending, where director Robert Aldrich managed to bring the Cold War into the story, but I think this quirky and murky movie is both entertaining and fascinating. The whole thing is on YouTube, for now anyway, and I suggest kicking it up to full screen mode at 720p and kicking back.
Category: Comic Books
Joltin’ Joe under the weather
Joe Sinnott hasn’t been feeling well lately, and he even pressed his son Mark into service finishing the inking job on the latest Sunday installment of the Spider-Man syndicated comic strip for Stan Lee. Although Joe checked out fine on Monday he’s suddenly come down with a case of pneumonia and he’ll be at a hospital for a couple of days. Mark’s wife Belinda says that Joe should be okay, dehydration is his biggest problem, and I’m looking forward to hearing that he’s home again and resting and back as his drawing table.
Post for a friend
Morris — This is Philip Seymour Hoffman, circa 1987, in his New York University dorm, Weinstein Hall, room 729. Contents of the room include a Playbill, Spin Magazine (from Tower Records), a copy of Vanity Fair, and two Amazing Spider-Man comic books.
All the way with LBJ!
Silver Age comic book fans are familiar with Superman’s visits with JFK at the White House, but when LBJ was President, and needed some super help, he picked up the Bat Phone.
Jimmy Stewart’s Swank apartment
I had lots of fun calibrating the video projector. Assuming my consumer-grade colorimeter is reasonably accurate, the test numbers indicate that the picture is now just about perfect. Fifteen years ago, when I bought the Sony 32XBR100 TV, which is still working fine by the way, after first adjusting it I watched the then newly-restored “Vertigo” on LaserDisc. I watched it again today, but streaming from Amazon.
“Vertigo” is now at the top of some lists as the greatest movie of all time, beating out longtime champ “Citizen Kane,” and I have to agree with that assessment, on the basis of the premise that a man’s obsession with a woman is inherently more interesting than a man who is obsessed with himself. At the more trivial end of what makes “Vertigo” interesting is a magazine in Jimmy Stewart’s apartment. There’s a copy of Swank, which was one of the many periodicals published by Martin Goodman, Stan Lee’s boss at Marvel (then Atlas) Comics.
By coincidence I happen to be reading an excellent book, “The Secret History of Marvel Comics: Jack Kirby and the Moonlighting Artists at Martin Goodman’s Empire” by Blake Bell and Dr. Michael J. Vassallo, which goes into detail about the creation of Swank to compete with Esquire, only to fail in competition with Playboy.
Follow-up: The authors of “Secret History of Marvel Comics” tell me that the magazine does not appear to be a legitimate issue of Swank — “The cover doesn’t match up to either any of the Martin Goodman issues, nor any of the earlier incarnations. So it seems it was a mock-up for the movie.”
A super man at 100
Amy Adams is all the reason I need to enjoy any movie, but I didn’t watch “Man of Steel” until last night because I expected it to have the orange-and-teal color scheme that plagues recent movies with heavy CG effects, along with endless over-the-top fight scenes and a complete lack of fun. Unfortunately, “Man of Steel” met those expectations.
George Reeves was 24 years old in 1938 when Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1. A year later Reeves was in “Gone With the Wind” as one of the Tarleton twins, and it would be more than ten years after that before Reeves would find his place in pop culture history, in “The Adventures of Superman.” Reeves was born George Brewer 100 years ago today. Fans of the old show are encouraged to visit The Adventure Continues site, and the companion page on Facebook.