Category: Cartooning

Swimming in India Ink

The new Black Panther movie brings Sub-Mariner to the MCU screen. He apparently now has some sort of an Aztec connection. Or maybe it’s Mayan. Whatever it is, he’s nothing like the character created by Bill Everett in 1939.

Sub-Mariner #57, on sale 50 years ago, October 1972, with art by Bill Everett

By 1972 Everett had stopped drinking, and he was helping other alcoholics through his work with AA. His art was better than ever, but then tragically he died only a few months after issue #57 was published. There is some more information at this link:

https://www.cbr.com/marvel-namor-bill-everett-final-days/

A glaring oversight is there’s no mention that Everett illustrated Daredevil #1. Although he had trouble meeting the deadline, Everett’s art is as fine as anything he ever drew. He was a master of inking with a brush, as was my dear old friend Joe Sinnott.

Toth’s Angel and Ghost

My first exposure to “comic book art” wasn’t in comics, but from the syndicated Space Angel cartoon series on TV.

Alex Toth (pronounced with “toe”) was the artist behind Space Angel. Toth hired Doug Wildey to help produce the series, and Wildey in turn hired Toth to help him with Hanna-Barbera’s Jonny Quest. After Quest, Toth designed H-B’s less ambitious animated series, Space Ghost.

I loved this stuff when I was a kid, and I still love it. Space Angel had a 6-page promotion in the children’s magazine Jack and Jill.

I borrowed those scans from a Facebook post by author Ken Quattro, who wrote Invisible Men, a history of Black comic book creators.

https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Men-Artists-Golden-Comics/dp/1684055865

The U-Files

The 90’s! The decade of The X-Files and the infamous alien autopsy.

Lovely Rena, a member of the monster-fighting GUTS team, encounters a grey alien in an episode of Ultraman Tiga.

Like the 2005 return of Doctor Who after fifteen years, Ultraman returned to TV in 1996 after a 15-year absence. As with Who, each new Ultraman occupies a different body.

With a partial exception during Ultraman Ace, women had played secondary roles. They mostly handled communications at the command center, like Lieutenant Uhura.

Rena in Ultraman Tiga was a featured character. Her presence was obviously intended to attract teenage boys to the series.

This next scene leaves no doubt the studio knew the effect that Rena would have on their target demographic.

Rena was played by Takami Yoshimoto, who is now 51. Takami was literally born into the Ultra family, as her father, Susumu Kurobe, was the first Ultraman in the original 1966 series.

Takami’s popularity quickly extended beyond Ultraman. The LaserDisc store I frequented throughout the 90’s had Japanese “girl watching” videos for rent, similar to this one with Takami.

Click here to see the safest “boudoir” photo of Takami I can share. It is nonetheless NSFW unless you’re working from home.

Takami with her father, November, 2020.