Thursday, September 01, 2016

It´s Comic Titans Thursday with Gene Colan

I have taken a little break from doing new posts because I was busy finishing the post addendums from Sunday and Monday but I absolutely had to do a special post to commemorate Gene Colan´s birthday.


Originally I wanted to do an all TOMB OF DRACULA post but then I decided to include more stuff from other series. And to make it more interesting to my foreign readers I´m including a lot of splash pages from the german versions of the comics by publishers Hit Comics or the Williams Verlag.


We´re surely starting the new month with style. This is my 745th post which means that we´ll soon reach post 750 and after that post 800.

Hopefully I can use these to do another Best of the Best post which I didn´t do at this year´s blog anniversary or my birthday which is when I usually do them. Although it will probably be quite difficult to select the deserving posts because the overall quality has increased so dramatically - at least I like to think so - that it´s hard to find any that stand out. Still I hope I can manage to give those readers that only pass here sporadically a reason to turn up more often by showing them what they missed while at the same time enticing new readers to become followers of my blog. 

We start Today´s birthday checklist ....... well, not at all with Today´s birthday. As I had to take the aforementioned break from posting new stuff to finish the last two posts there are still birthdays from last month to address starting with a few from Tuesday, August the 30th where we first have sexbomb Cameron Diaz who turned 44. The busty blonde is as easily at home in comedies like Bad Teacher as in action movies like Charlie´s Angels ( which would be way better if they had cast a woman who can actually believable portray a special agent instead of Drew Barrymore and concentrated more on the story with the agent played by Demi Moore in the second movie ) thanks to her sparkly personality and having legs up to her chin but she also has some comic book movie credit from the awesome Green Hornet and The Mask in which she debuted.  


Now I know that the general public doesn´t necessarily feel the need to check out the original source of comic book movies - much like most movie goers who are rabid James Bond fans don´t read the Ian Flaming novels - so I figured they might be surprised to learn how different The Mask movie is from the various comic book mini series by Dark Horse.



Michael Chiklis celebrated his 53rd birthday who is currently on Gotham ( and the less said about the series the better ) and had a cameo on an episode of Axe Cop. He also was the main character in the ultra realistic and brilliant The Shield - which has nothing to do with Marvel´s supreme espionage division of the same name - and The Thing in what people now call the GOOD Fantastic Four movies after the horrible fiasco of the latest attempt to reboot the franchise. To tell the truth the most faithful movie adaption of the comic is still the Roger Corman produced flick from 1994 which since then has become a much sought after bootleg cult classic. As I have already posted it a few times I´m not going to repeat myself here.


And we´re staying with cult movies as german comedian Helge Schneider celebrated his 61st birthday who has appeared in the western Texas - Doc Snyder hält die Welt in Atem and in the James Bond parody 00 Schneider - Jagd auf Nihil Baxter. I admit it took me a while to get his personal style of extremely deadpan humor and anarchistic antics but thankfully my cousin insisted on giving him a chance. He is an acquired taste and I have his latest 00 Schneider - Im Wendekreis der Eidechse to look forward to.

On a more comic - or better comic book - related note award winning french comic artiste Jacques Tardi turned 70 best known for his World War II comics and chronicling the adventures of occult investigator Adele Blanc Sec which has been adapted as a quite entertaining movie in 2010.



Underground comix legend Robert Crumb celebrated his 73rd birthday who really deserved to have a post dedicated to that but after a quick survey of my material on him I realized that while I DID have enough for such a post it was not of the necessary quality that would have warranted.


Kind of comic related is Mary Shelley´s anniversary since she created THE most famous monster of pop culture that has been adapted in comic form a few times. You could probably do a whole series about that alone.


With that we come to Yesterday´s birthdays which are only four, starting with teen pop sensation Debbie Gibson who turned 46. She was the Britney Spears before the was a Britney Spears around the time I was in Realschule and while I was too old to be part of her target audience I appreciated it when - like pop star Tiffany - she posed nude for PLAYBOY.


Anyway, I actually bought one of her albums Out Of The Blue which I found at a rummage table of music cassettes ( ask your grandparents what those are ) together with Mary J Blige´s What´s The 911 as I constantly needed new fuel for my walkman. Fallen Angel is the only song that I remember.



We haven´t talked tv series yet which is going to change with Jonathan LaPaglia who celebrated his 47th birthday Yesterday. I first saw him in one of my favorite sci fi series ever Seven Days where he starred alongside the incredibly hot Justina Vail who played the sexy russian Dr. Olga Vukavitch. By the way, am I the only one who thinks that name might be a bit unfortunate for her character because it totally sounds like a porn name ?


The premise of Seven Days is that based on alien technology found at the Roswell site the US government builds a time machine that enables them to send a chrononaut exactly seven days into the past to avert national disasters. Which sounds easy, right ? For some reason the series never got very popular and was canceled after three seasons which have not been released on DVD. I still get a kick out of it whenever Johnathan appears on NCIS, The Sopranos, Bones, Castle, Burn Notice or The Mentalist.



It´s back to movies and comics with Richard Gere who turned 67. His list of movies is too long to post and I thought I had already said all there is to say about the movie Breathless and the Silver Surfer when I mentioned it on the birthday of his co star Valerie Kaprisky just a short while ago.


Well, being the perfectionist that I am I went back and for some reason there is no information on the comic Richard Gere reads in the picture above. It´s Silver Surfer 18, the last issue of volume one written by Stan Lee, penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Herb Trimpe. You can find posts on this issue on JACK KIRBY MUSEUM , MARS WILL SEND NO MORE posted the complete issue, LONGBOX GRAVEYEARD has a post on the first volume of the series and COMIC BOOK DAILY investigates why the series failed.


To wrap up Yesterday´s birthdays a shoutout goes to James Coburn who starred in a gazillion of western series as well as in Our Man Flint and the sequel In Like Flint - if you ever wanted to know where this expression came from. He also appeared in The Muppet Movie and did the voice of Looten Plunder on the Captain Planet And The Planeteers cartoon show.

Finally we come to Today´s celebrity birthdays and I only have one video left which is really sad because Gloria Estefan celebrates her 59th anniversary. I followed her from the days when she was still part of the Miami Sound Machine although I have to say I like her spanish albums best. Although I might be biased in that regards since it´s my native tongue.

The inventor of Tae Bo Billy Blanks turns 61 who starred in many martial arts movies like the Jean - Claude Van Damme vehicles Lionheart and The King of Kickboxers which is called Karate Tiger V in Germany. Billy also appeared in Kiss The Girls with Morgan Freeman, The Last Boy Scout with Bruce Willis and Halle Berry who does her unforgettable erotic dance ( you can´t really call it a striptease since she doesn´t take off any clothes ) and China O´Brian II. Speaking of taking off clothes, while I´m a big Cynthia Rothrock fan the best part about the last movie is sexbomb Melanie Good with her incredibly long legs who is better than good. Or is it she is good at being bad since she plays a stripping contract killer ?


Barry Gibb celebrates his 70th birthday which makes him the last Gibb brother standing. The Bee Gees became a world wide phenomenon with Saturday Night Fever but you can say that the Bee Gees provided the soundtrack for an entire generation. They still have a big influence in pop culture since their songs are among the most covered songs of all time. 

Lily Tomlin who turns 77 has co starred with quite a long list of a list stars like megabusty Dolly Parton in Nine to Five, Steve Martin in All Of Me, Bette Middler in Big Business, Ernest actor Jim Varney and sexbomb Erika Eleniak ( who had her most famous striptease in Under Siege ) in The Beverly Hillbillies, Bruce Willis in The Kid and Teri Hatcher in Desperate Housewives. Speaking of Teri Hatcher, I have finally started watching Lois & Clark - The New Adventures Of Superman and one of the last episodes I watched was Pheromones My Dear where Teri appears as a hot harem girl.


I´m halfway through the first season and I hope I can finish it before my latest DVD order which includes season three of The Nanny ( which includes the episode where Power Girl Lauren Lane who plays C. C. Babcock wears a black dress with an incredible cleavage ), the sixth and final season of The Dead Zone and season three of Burn Notice arrives.

One series I haven´t started watching is The Munsters and Today is also the anniversary of Yvonne De Carlo best known for playing Lily Munster.


I have a few videos about The Munsters bookmarked but I chose this documentary because it actually has Yvonne De Carlo appearing in it.



The last two birthdays I have to mention are people who have had a big impact on pop culture : Rocky Marciano, not only the inspiration for the Rocky movies but also one of the best boxers of all times and Edgar Rice Burroughs whose Tarzan, John Carter, Warlord of Mars and The Land That Time Forgot books inspired countless adaptions in comics and movies.


Whew, that was quite a long entertainment block but I know that some people skip that part because of the high level of sexy women so I like to put some easter eggs in it for all the faithful readers who tough it out and fight through it all. I wrote this a bit in advance so hopefully Tomorrow´s FLASH FRIDAY post will go down with a hitch. Expect things to get fast.

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