Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Mexico City, Mexico; Staten Island, New York; Portland, Oregon; Louth, Ireland; Herndon, Virginia; Jamaica, New York; Brooklyn, New York and Chandler, Arizona.
ROCK against Reaganomics at: Theater X-Net
Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Ida's Places in Paris -- from my first jet-lagged day by the Seine.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley
Visit: Michael's Montana Web Archive
Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in the Saturday Matinees and Sunday Comics!
Thanks to Jim Keefe (Visit his Website) -- the LAST Flash Gordon illustrator of the 20th Century, and Flash's first illustrator of the 21st, for his recommendations -- HERE!
Charity Alert: Keep that Resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.
In The Community: Nancy Cawdrey's American Silk Road, The Collective Caravan, and Old West -- New Visions at the Hockaday Museum of Art -- also Fall for Glacier -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better.
Media Watch: Marvel Comics, which killed off veteran superhero Captain America almost a year ago, brought him back to life this week -- sort of -- Captain America's alter ego, Steve Rogers, is still resting in peace at Arlington National Cemetery, having been done in by assassins last March. But his good buddy and sidekick from the 1940s, Bucky Barnes, has picked up the bulletproof Captain America shield, put on a new uniform and taken his place.
What's that you say? Wouldn't Bucky be about 85 years old now?
Well, yeah. But remember, this is the comic book world we're talking about. Bucky was put in suspended animation by the evil Russians and stayed that way for the better part of 60 years. "So he's probably in his late 20s right now," jokes Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada, who decided to promote him to Captain America.
Rogers's old sidekick had already returned to the Marvel pantheon of heroes some time back as the rugged Winter Soldier, redeeming himself for the years he'd spent under the control of the bad guys.
My OWN thoughts, cross-posted from Daily Kos --
MSM and 'Captain America' Again
In what shouldn't be a surprise at all, the Mainstream Media is giving ink to Marvel's resurrection of Captain America.
THIS incarnation of the "Living Legend of World War Two" has an odder history than usual, even for comic characters.
Follow me back to the "Golden Age of Comic Books" below the fold.
My friend, the late Jack Kirby, and his still-living partner Joe Simon created a number of Superheroes throughout their careers in comics. During the late 30's/early 40's they often followed the once-popular convention of young, almost always male, sidekicks assisting the super-humans.
Jules Feiffer said of Robin, the Boy Wonder: God, how I hated him!
As Jack Kirby and Stan Lee undertook the successful revival of Marvel Superheroes in the early 60's, they tried a sidekick named Rick Jones, who was involved in the Incredible Hulk saga. The whole riff was passe, and they knew it soon enough.
When Marvel's Avengers found Captain America in suspended animation, the back-story was that his WWII sidekick Bucky Barnes had been killed in Cap's previous adventure, which gave the reanimated relic some moments of fashionable angst and 60's-style psycho-drama. Artist Jim Steranko even tried making Rick Jones his partner for a VERY short time. I wasn't reading comic books when Cap had yet a THIRD junior sidekick.
Two generations after Captain A's revival, the Arctic ice gave up corporeal Bucky Barnes himself as the Soviet Winter Soldier -- now he's wearing the stars and stripes again.
As Jack said to me, and it bears repeating: "Marvel can use Captain America for a hundred years!"
Well, looks like it's sixty-seven and counting!
One ironic note in Captain America's publishing history is that this character, and his "dead" partner were used as a shrill, Anti-Communist hit team in a short-lived series circa 1953-54. Stan Lee was the writer/editor, and John Romita did the artwork. (See illustration)
This team would later take Spider Man to the heights of popularity a decade later, but THIS Captain America/Bucky team were rank McCarthyite thugs -- when Marvel reprinted a couple of these stories during their heyday, the fans let them know how displeased they were at the coarse, intolerant, and frankly stupid attitudes expressed in them.
The irony was how Marvel was still persecuted by those same rabid right-wingers they had cringed before in these pages. We 60's fans all knew how Lee and his cousin/publisher Martin Goodman were investigated by Congress soon after printing this crap, and submitted to a so-called Comics Code Authority, rather than be censored from outside their industry.
