Get me to the church on time!

For the first time in decades, this non-practicing Lutheran has attended a Catholic Church. Joe Sinnott’s son Mark told me we’d better not be late for Sunday morning Mass or Joe would give me heck. So I made sure we were there on time! Joe and Mark are in the area for the Super MegaFest Comic-Con in Framingham, MA, and I’ll be heading back there shortly.

A contemporary of Joe’s, the artist Ramona Fradon, is traveling with them. Ramona had a long and notable run drawing Aquaman for DC Comics, and I am a big fan of her work on “Super Friends”. Ramona was later hired to draw the comic strip “Brenda Starr”, which she did for fifteen years.

Speaking of Catholicism, if you’re a Silver Age fanboy you know that Joe inked Jack Kirby’s pencil art for Fantastic Four #5, the story that introduced the quartet’s most infamous villain, Doctor Doom. Get out a reprint of FF #6 (I assume if you have an original comic it’s sealed) and take a look at page #2. Most of that single page was inked by Joe, but everything else in the book was inked by Dick Ayers. Why? Because Treasure Chest, a publisher of comic books that were distributed to Catholic parochial schools, made Joe an offer he couldn’t refuse, to illustrate the life story of Pope John XXIII.

Sinnott

The story was released in serial form and now, for the first time, all of the installments are being collected in a single volume, scanned from the original art in Joe’s archives. This project, which means so much to Joe, is thanks to the hard work of Mr. James Tournas, otherwise known as Jimmy T., who ran a successful Kickstarter project to get the money together. See that $1500 pledge down on the right? I wonder who contributed that princely sum? 😉 There are 25 paperback artist’s proofs that were printed locally in Boston, and I’m looking at one of them right now. The final print run of 500 10″x15″ hardcover copies should arrive on (literally) a slow boat from China the first week of December.

Joe also has all of his original art to the story of the Beatles, authorized by Brian Epstein’s NEMS Enterprises and published in 1964 by Dell Comics.

dellbeatles

It would have been great if a similar deluxe hardcover edition of the Beatles book were done, but a certain someone, through Apple Records, nixed it. “Saint” Paul said no, and so the decision was made for the Pope John book. A higher power than the Beatles must have been at work!

OontZ Oomph

While accepting that getting a smart phone is inevitable, I continue to rely upon my LG flip phone, now over five years old. It does everything that I want it to do — phone, speakerphone, text, take an occasional low-res photo, check e-mail, and be an accurate clock. Best of all, it fits perfectly in the little watch pocket on a pair of Levi’s jeans. The LG phone has Bluetooth, but I don’t wear an earpiece so I leave it turned off. It also does not do something that I like. It does not distract me.

I have been in several close encounters with drivers that are texting, including one on the Massachusetts Turnpike where a car started to swerve into my lane. The driver was face down at 65 mph, with an occasional glance up. It’s even a problem when encountering people walking with their eyes down on the screen. I will say “heads up!” before they can walk into me, and sometimes the person appears surprised, but other times there is the look of annoyance.

Being an Amazon customer since July, 1996, one year before Steve Jobs’ triumphant return to Apple, I am hooked into the Amazon “ecosystem.” I have never owned anything from Apple, not even an iTunes account. The one thing I have that makes good use of Bluetooth is an Amazon Kindle 8.9″ Fire HDX. My primary Bluetooth speaker is a Sony SRS-BTX500, now discontinued, that I found at Best Buy for half price ($150). If it’s still listed on ConsumerReports.org, the customer review is mine.

The BTX500 is an excellent product, and although it’s portable it’s relatively large and heavy, with a bulky power supply. I wanted to get a really cheap and very portable Bluetooth speaker, and I’m enthusiastic about the one I chose — the OontZ Angle that I ordered from Amazon for $40.

OontZ Angle

The OontZ is from the latest incarnation of Cambridge Soundworks. The original Cambridge Soundworks company that was founded by audio/video legend Henry Kloss in 1988 was sold to Creative Labs, which sold it in turn, and the current owner carries on the Cambridge Soundworks tradition of offering nifty, inexpensive products. I recommend the OontZ Angle for its good sound quality and excellent battery life. The sound is surprisingly detailed for music, and voices are particularly well-articulated, making the Angle ideal for news stations. Before you find a review that complains about the mini USB port I will note that the Angle now has a micro USB port, like the LG phone, which was the reason I chose it. At the time every other phone had a proprietary connector.

POW! ZAP!

Scene from "That Darn Catwoman" - Batman, Season 2, Episode 40: Airdate Jan. 19, 1967
Scene from “That Darn Catwoman” – Batman, Season 2, Episode 40: Airdate Jan. 19, 1967

For decades I resented seeing “POW!” and “ZAP!” on every newspaper and magazine article about comic books. The blame belonged to Sixties Pop Art and its offspring, the Batman TV show — a show I loved, and that I can honestly say changed my life, by transforming me overnight from a casual reader of comic books into a hard-core fan. And now, well, I guess I’m old enough to embrace the silliness of POW! and ZAP!, especially because it’s no longer the norm, thanks to comics having gone mainstream and movies having set a very different tone for the genre. (ZAP! was also the title of the raunchy underground comic that made Robert Crumb a cartooning star.)

tastewar says of this article on Wired, about the Sixties Batman TV show finally coming to home video, “This seems to me like the kind of story that would be right up your alley.” And indeed it is. The article gives a good overview of the hassles behind the holdup all these years — a legal tangle that, curiously, didn’t prevent the feature-length movie version of the show from being released. The good thing about the delay is that it means the latest video restoration technology was used and the set is available on Blu-ray as well as DVD. I am crossing my Bat Fingers that Santa will give me the complete Batman TV series on Blu-ray, when he comes at the same Bat-Time, down the same Bat-Chimney that he does every year.