This afternoon I was waking up from a nap and hit the “random Pandora playlist” button that’s set on my Logitech Internet radio. Pandora played this, from “Where Have I Known You Before,” my favorite Return to Forever album.
While listening, I picked up my new smartphone and the AP News headlines said, “JAZZ MUSICIAN CHICK COREA, DEAD AT 79.” Either Pandora (now owned by SiriusXM) has some super smart software, or it was a message from beyond the 7th galaxy.
As a sensitive 10-year-old kid, the first time I saw Jack Kirby’s art it looked, well, scary. As I liked to tell my dearly departed buddy Joe Sinnott, his “friendly faces” on Kirby’s art got me started buying the Fantastic Four.
My first comic book from the Marvel Comics Group was Daredevil #19. It was drawn by John Romita, who had previously worked for DC, drawing romance comics. In hindsight, this made the art less intimidating for me.
As a kid I thought of Stan Lee as a sort of Walt Disney, but saying that to anyone in Hollywood would have, at best, elicited a loud laugh. I say “at best” because that would have at least meant the person laughing knew who Stan Lee was. Much more likely would have been a puzzled expression and “who?” Forty years later, after Disney bought Marvel, that’s where Joe Sinnott’s retirement money came from. Joe would joke with me that he’d finally arrived as a Disney artist.
For most of my life, the question of who did what in creating the MCU (Marvel Comics Universe), as it’s now called, was a topic of heated debate only among comic book fans and the True Believers of the M.M.M.S. (Merry Marvel Marching Society). How times have changed. The New Yorker is weighing in with an historical analysis. I haven’t read it yet, so I don’t know what conclusions it reaches.
If my walrus character, now named Wilton, were another animal, he would be a hippo.
Hippos are funny!
Except in Colombia, thanks to the late drug cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar.
A sentiment shared by everyone of a certain age.
An important name, but not widely known, in Sixties British music, has passed away. Hilton Valentine’s guitar on “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, released in America on August 8, 1964, is unmistakable from the first note.
The thing about the British Invasion is there wouldn’t have been one without England having a lot of bands ready for export, following the Beatles in jumping across the pond. Many acts, like the Animals and Hollies, formed in 1962. The Springfields, with Dusty, were on the American charts with “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” in 1962, before the Beatles released “Love Me Do” in the UK.
The cartoon in today’s e-mail from The New Yorker.
