2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 9: Joy to the world! Your God is dead!

Did you find all six differences?

What's the holiday season without a little harmless blasphemy, huh? Relax. God's got a sense of humor about these things, I'm sure of it.

Today, we pay backhanded tribute to cartoonist Henry Boltinoff (1914-2001), who worked for decades in both comic strips and books. He's what you'd call a journeyman. His magnum opus, however, may be a long-running newspaper feature called Hocus Focus in which he would present two seemingly identical versions of a cartoon and ask us, the readers, to spot six obscure differences between them. I used to pore over such puzzles as a kid, though I never got good at finding the differences.

"Find all six differences" cartoons are still fairly common even today. You'll see them in Slylock Fox on a regular basis, for instance, and they're still used as filler in newspapers, newsletters, and fliers. Recently, at the office complex where I work, there was a cartoon like this projected on a monitor across from the elevators. I suppose it was there to keep people entertained while they waited.

I decided to take one of Henry's rather innocent cartoons from 1959 (plucked from Comics Outta Context) and take it in a darker direction. Or maybe Henry's cartoon wasn't so innocent! Obviously, these college students from 1959 are pretty square looking, but one of them is concerned enough about the state of the world that he worries the new year will not arrive. Can you sympathize with him? I can.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 8: In the Malph of Madness

Here, we see how comedy is subjective.

What, you thought we were getting through this without some Happy Days content? If you've been following this blog at all for the last few years, you know that I've been the co-host of a Happy Days podcast since 2018. We're currently making our way through an early '80s animated spinoff of the long-running sitcom called The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang. 

On the cartoon version of Happy Days, Don Most reprises his role as Ralph Malph and is there to serve a few basic functions, namely to be the show's resident coward (a la Shaggy from Scooby-Doo) and to crack corny jokes. Rest assured, he does plenty of both. His "comedy" tends to provoke groans from his friends and outright anger from his enemies. The latter is depicted above. The angry fellow in the middle is again something I found through Comics Outta Context. Anyone know who he was or where he originally appeared?

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 7: In which I get annoyingly artsy

Any minute now.

Like I said at the beginning of this series, I've been a comics fan almost my entire life. I was introduced to the medium at a very early age through newspaper comic strips, with Beetle Bailey, Peanuts, Hagar the Horrible, Hi & Lois, and the formidable Bloom County being among my favorites. My love of "sequential art" deepened as I discovered Marvel and DC, mainly through "spinner racks" of cheap comic books at the local drug store. (Was the original Crisis on Infinite Earths a major part of your childhood, too? How about the Ambush Bug miniseries? Spider-Man's costume change?)

It wasn't really until my late teens, however, that I discovered the weirder, edgier, darker side of comics. First, there was the documentary Crumb (1994). Then there were the graphic novels I discovered in the college library. I would spend hours poring over those, plus Art Spiegelman's anthology RAW. And my trusty guidebook was Scott McCloud's seminal Understanding Comics (1993). I think the comic strip above is my attempt at doing something McCloud-ish that plays with the medium of comics, using repeated panels to suggest the passage of time. The artwork is again cribbed from the much-missed Comics Outta Context Twitter account.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 6: Alice in Somethingland

They totally ripped off that Tom Petty video.

Have you ever heard a good answer to the Mad Hatter's famous riddle about why a raven is like a writing desk? Of the explanations I've heard, the one I like best is that Poe wrote on both of them. (He wrote about a raven while literally writing on a desk. Get it?) But even that didn't satisfy me, so I scripted the vignette you see above. Actually, this little comic was my way of reusing some famous artwork by Sir John Tenniel (1820-1914). In particular, I like the expression he gave Alice here. You can tell she's just about had it with the Hatter.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 5: The Silver Surfer crossover you didn't know you needed!

Filmed not too far from where I live!

There used to be a great Twitter account called Comics Outta Context that would regularly post random panels from old comic books, mainly DC and Marvel. I'd often use these tweets as the basis for comics of my own. That account is long gone, but I held on to some of the parodies I did, like the one you see above. I think a lot of the comics I'm going to post this month with come from that same stash.

By the way, if you happen to run into the person who ran the Comics Outta Context account, tell him (or her) to drop me a line.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 205: 'Ed Wood, Secret Agent' (2013)

You can almost hear the theme song, can't you?

NOTE: We lost someone very special this week. On Sunday, December 1, 2024, Greg Javer, aka Greg Dziawer, died unexpectedly of cancer. I'd known of his illness but not that he was terminal, so this news came as a great and horrible shock. Greg wrote many articles for this blog, and we also recorded numerous episodes of The Ed Wood Summit Podcast together. I considered Greg a good friend, and he was extremely generous with his research. A proper tribute to him will appear on this blog once I have all the facts assembled. 

This week, I'd simply like to share a story by author Colin Schmidt that appeared in, of all places, an Australian Dr. Who newsletter in 2013. It imagines Ed Wood as a Mission: Impossible-type secret agent, with Criswell, Tor Johnson, and Bela Lugosi as his teammates. This story was sent to my email account by someone who was looking for Greg! I dutifully forwarded it on to Greg, but he never rendered an opinion on it. I'm pretty sure he would have enjoyed it, though, and I'm pretty sure you will, too.  J.B.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 4: The Adventures of Batman & Robin

What, you think superheroes are oblivious to name-calling?

For the first few years of my life (1975-1981), my family lived in a little ranch-style house in a cozy little neighborhood in Flint, Michigan, right down the street from my rambunctious Uncle John and his family. I've retained quite a few memories from those days, and some of the fondest revolve around Channel 20, a local independent UHF station we used to watch quite a lot. It showed mostly (or all?) reruns back then. Typical offerings included Lost in Space, The Adventures of Superman, The Abbott & Costello Show, and, best of all, Batman.

Thanks to MeTV, I've gotten to revisit Batman in recent years, and the series and its characters have again taken up residence in my imagination. Hence the terribly-drawn comic above. Please forgive me for it.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 3: The monster cereals are always in season!

I've never had any Carmella Creeper. Is it good?

I never had any of General Mills' monster cereals as a child. My parents just wouldn't go for it. Frosted Flakes and Apple Jacks were okay, but Franken Berry and Frute Brute were out of the question. I remember seeing a box of Count Chocula at a friend's house once and being consumed with both fascination and jealousy. I finally got to have them as an adult. By then, according to those who know, the recipes had been changed (for health reasons) and the cereals weren't as good as they used to be. They tasted fine to me. Maybe it's a good thing I never had any of those cereals in their '70s and '80s heyday. I might still be chasing an impossible Boo Berry high from when I was seven.

Anyway, the comic above was written back in October but I'm just sharing it now. Maybe, in this context, it's Advent and not Halloween that arouses Carmella Creeper.