Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Christmas with Jim Aparo ( my 600th post )

You are probably sick of the disappearing and re - appearing Alyssa Milano post and with all the trouble of splitting the Bart Sears birthday post into two and then doing the same with the Alyssa Milano post I totally forgot that this is my 600th post. So I wanted to make this special and at the same time do something for Christmas since I don´t know if I can post on the holidays so there was only one name that came to mind : Jim Aparo.


He has done his share of Christmas stories - on THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD and THE OUTSIDERS - but I have chosen THE NIGHT THE MOB STOLE CHRISTMAS ! Mostly because it´s the only Christmas story I have from Jim Aparo in it´s entirety. A lot of people say that the comics from this period never dealt with any problems but here we have Plastic Man as a homeless person, what we called a hobo back in the days and which in the story is referred to as a panhandler because a woman broke his heart in a previous adventure. I also love Batman´s enthusiasm as .... but let´s not spoil things. Here´s the story from THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD 148 which according to the DC wikipedia was drawn by Joe Staton and inked by Jim Aparo. And since they are credited with " artists " I´ll go with that.


See what I mean ? One minute he gets almost drowned the next he´s all : " Plastic Man, you did it again ! " One thing´s for sure. You won´t hear Batman say anything close to " Let´s start highballin´ ourselves for the Sunshine Estate ! " in DC´s NEW 52. But let´s get on with the story.


There was also a house ad in the issue and since the artist is not listed anywhere I´m going out on a limb and say it´s by mi paisano Jose Luis Garcia Lopez. Who did all of the advertisement around that time.


His art is so gorgeous. I recently bought the ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN by JOSE LUIS GARCIA LOPEZ hardcover because it was in my shopping cart for ages and I thought " What the h - word are you waiting for ? You´re not getting any younger. " I thought about giving it away as a Christmas present but as soon as I got my hands on it that idea was done with. Finito. Over. Kaput. As usual DC has no introduction or extras in this but it´s worth it for the art. There are some stories that I hadn´t realized were drawn by him which I read in the SUPERMAN SUPERBAND.


So I hope you got all your ducks in a row for Christmas Day. Where I´m concerned there are still some comics left from my Big Christmas Contest which was not as popular as the last time. I guess most comic readers in Germany know where to get their free gratis comics by now. Thankfully somebody came up at the last minute who will take the most of it but I don´t think I can send it to him before the holidays. In any case Merry Christmas and I hope this helped to get you into the right mood. Party !


Since Plastic Man was the star of Today here´s the intro to his cartoon show. Yeah, I didn´t know he had one either but this really happened.



He even had live action segments by a cheesy actor. Or a method actor.



I know that in Britian Doctor Who and Christmas go together like stollen and Glühwein in Germany. The next Christmas episode will not be aired until a few days so I already watched THE NEXT DOCTOR which is THE best Doctor Who Christmas Special EVER. Of course I could not find the episode on YouTube but I found something even better. A Doctor Who / Back to The Future mash up called BLINK TO THE FUTURE. I didn´t make a special post on Back To The Future Day ( you may remember that in BACK TO THE FUTURE II Marty McFly travels to October 21st, 2015 ) this might make up for it. You can also check out this link to see fourteen predictions that the movie made which actually did come true.



For our music video of the day I chose one from THE VOICE OF HOLLAND : Maan with The Power of Love, one of the songs you hear EVERY year.



And finally here´s Yaya Han with Christmas greetings in three languages.



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