| Real painting by real painter William Rochfort |
Mission Statement: to do very little, for very few, for not very long. Disappointing the easily pleased since 1819. Not as good as it used to be from Day One. History is Bunk - PT Barnum. Artificially Intelligent before it was fashionable. Fat camp for the mind! Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost. The Shock of the Old! Often bettered, never imitated. "Wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein" - Pauly Shore.
Back in my pre-teen youth, I used to buy Commando comic - “War Stories In Pictures”, it seems horrifying now, that I consumed and enjoyed that sort of thing. Fortunately my teen self then discovered fantasy comics, and also a thing called Monster Mag, an A4 size magazine that had articles about horror films, but when unfolded revealed an A1 size (that's big) horror film photo on one side - captioned “Open It Out If You Dare!!”.
ReplyDeleteWar Stories and Battle Picture Libraries had fantastic plane art. I loved drawing planes (of the non-Euclidian kind).
DeleteYes, I meant to mention the artwork on the covers was very exciting to a young lad like me. My interest in all things War, was inspired by two brothers, older neighbours who were really good at painting Airfix models, building diaramas and who would occasionally let me join in their war gaming.
DeleteGoofy things that for some reason you remember. As a yute, I read comics all the time. Place I would go to had them out in a dispay case and the price was 10c, which even my broke ass could afford. Due to strange circumstances, we had to go live with my paternal grandparents for awhile, and I had to get comics from a vending machine at a nearby grocery store. The price was 12c but the dealbreaker was that the machine would only take dimes and pennies. Back then La had a state law that restricted the price of payphones to no more than 5c a local call, so dimes were nearly impossible to find. My comic book consumption decreased expotentially as a result.
ReplyDeleteSaturday mornings were the high point of my week as a kid. I'd cycle up to the "paper shop" with my pockst money and spend as long as I could spinning the comics rack. Marvel and DC were only sporadically available, never in sequence, so following stories was frustrating. It didn't matter. If I was really lucky there'd be one of those fat special issues, with a spine. I don't think I've ever enjoyed published material in any form as much as those Saturday morning comics. Marvel came first, with DC an emergency back-up. Batman was okay, not as interesting as Green Lantern and Flash, but Marvel comics back then (around 66-68) were indeed a marvel. I devoured every word in every panel, every ad, every bullpen editorial. They started my obsession with American culture (older readers may remember American culture), alongside the Beach Boys. Forgive me for being a white suburban kid. I'm still a white suburban kid. Some things you can't change, like the memories of those color-saturated Saturdays. Oh! And a pack of Bazooka Joe© bubblegum! Sorted!
DeleteBazooka Joe was gold for the dentistry profession.
DeleteBack in the late 90s, when I first started to read about 60s comic books selling for decent money, I contacted my mother to see if she still had the over 200 mags I had kept at one time. Woman was a hoarder before that term became in vogue, and I had the first copies of Spiderman and the Fantastic Four amongst other things. So, I was dreaming of instant thousandaire status, only to find that the one damn thing in her life that she had decided to jettison was those comics.
... and that's exactly why they're worth big bucks now, of course. But there's something weird and cold about the collectors' market - no matter what is collected. The idea of preserving and hoarding is opposite to the idea of creating, the instant excitement of being alive. No carefully-preserved comic in museum-grade Mylar can recreate that Saturday morning sensory overload. I don't regret losing any of the physical stuff - the books, the albums, the toys. Hanging on to all that is not the same as the experience, or even the memory of the experience.
DeleteAgreed.
Deletemoney was always an issue in my house. i had a paper route back then the long island press baskets on the front a back of my bike every day before school i did my route sunday's papers were a motherfucker rain or snow we [boys on their bikes only] delivered and collected on saturdays what customers owed sometimes we'd get tips and with those nickels and dimes i purchased comics 'amazing stories' 'strange tales' marvels new super heroes and my favorites challengers of the unknown blackhawk sgt. rock the haunted tank the hulk wasn't green back then
ReplyDeletei had them all eventually we moved my comics were left on the street by my father to teach me a lesson ...what that lesson was i never found out we rarely spoke after that i moved out when i was sixteen
the artwork is fantastic
thanks for the memory... woody
No problem with availability or sequencing in my American suburban drugstore, but the experience was otherwise very similar. The other thing that they sold was (as seen from our current vantage point) classic science fiction. Phillip K Dick, Arthur C Clarke, Issac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Jack Vance, etc. They deigned to carry it in the paperback racks because it was seen, like the comics, as junk.
ReplyDeleteRay Bradbury was maybe the very first author I was aware of, as in someone whose name I'd look out for. Discovering SF at that time, pre-internet, without any guidance except your own instincts, was a personal voyage, picking up likely-looking paperbacks from second-hand bookstalls. Bradbury led to Vonnegut, Dick ... in a sense I never came back.
DeleteChabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay opened up whole new vistas into my father's life for me and when he read it--a _serious_ scientists who had no time for novels and such--he was gobsmacked and I learned about his crazy collection of Superman comics that had been lost in one of his family's innumerable moves around D.C.'s "Jewish ghetto." 60 years later he could tell me the details at length. Just amazing. He is also the guy who introduced me to sci-fi, especially of the classic "hard science" variety, though I also owe him for Vonnegut, which was not exactly sci-fi, but I'll take it. I'm glad neither he nor my mom are here to see this shitshow, but miss them both and all the authors and books they turned me onto...
ReplyDeleteKavalier and Clay is a great read. My father didn't turn me on to any writer, but he did take me on weekly library visits from when I was ten or so. I soon learned the kids' section was pretty undemanding and got stuck into the SF and horror section - this was where Ray Bradbury wove his magic, and HP Lovecraft lurked. Who could resist a title like The Illustrated Man, or At The Mountains Of Madness? (Shout-out for The House On The Borderland here).
DeleteNo comics, though. Not literature, not art. How wrong they all were.
i''ve always been a little lulu comic book man. still makes me laugh out loud. tubby's enthusiasm is hysterical. this painter is cool. a rockwell throwback!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.williamrochfort.com/previous-work/
Deletemy absolute favorite is still this comic book kid one. is the porkpie hat right for 50's?
DeleteYup!
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whoopee_cap
(pmac still has his)
I liked the adverts at the back of US comics. I wanted some X-Ray Sex, and also Sea Monkeys, but my parents persuaded me not to purchase. I have since found out they were not real monkeys!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.remindmagazine.com/article/279/whatever-happened-to-sea-monkeys/
We'd all like some X Ray Sex, Bambi.
DeleteDoh! Spex. X-Ray Sex sounds awful.
DeleteA childhood friend bought the sea monkeys. They were frozen tiny shrimp. As to the classic x ray glasses, I'll never forget the first time I saw a photo of the legendary college football coach (and pedophile protector) Joe Paterno, and I immediately thought that he was the poster boy for those ads. https://www.gettyimages.fi/detail/uutiskuva/joe-paterno-head-coach-of-penn-state-before-the-start-of-the-uutiskuva/76325536?adppopup=true
Deletefrom comics to authors i guess that's the way it went for us . bradbury may have been king but harry harrison ruled hard sci-fi i have his deathworld omnibus sitting on my desk to be reread again and his make room make room really opened my eyes
ReplyDeletewhen certain avenues were closed to us this genre always let us soar... when did 'we' lose it ???
woody
When did we lose hard, adult SF? My guess is when Star Wars infantilised not only SF but cinema itself. Today, adults build Lego Star Wars kits to display in their basements. That's about as far from being turned on by Harry Harrison as it's possible to get. Is there anything "wrong" with adults spending their time and money on a pleasurably harmless pastime? To the extent that it works against developing the imagination, yes. But, their choice.
DeleteAh, jeez....on so many levels my cultural discontent is because I won; more accurately the things I loved and championed moved from the fringe to the center and took over.
DeleteComic books were considered trash (that's why moms threw them out); we're now twenty-something years into the biggest films of all time featuring guys in stretchy spandex.
Science fiction was banished to a separated rack in our local library; it was kids' stuff and again, trash. Now it's everywhere.
That first Ramones LP made friends into enemies; now Blitzkreig Bop is the go-to choice for dozens of corporations' commercials.
I'm walking down the street: teenager in a Misfits shirt. Teenager in a Kiss shirt. Teenager in a REPRINT of a 11978 Boston tour shirt.
I listen to “Dumbstruck Dumbf**k” by Neck Deep and wonder why it sounds just like every other pop-punk band since the early 90s.
And don't get me started on professional wrestling moving from the fringe to Hulk Hogan at the Republican National Convention. You want something that would confuse my father if he wandered into a time machine in 1974 and popped out in front of a television in 2024, that's it.
I ought to be happy... actually, I AM happy, my life rocks, man...but I'm happy for entirely different reasons than what I mentioned above. All the things I love won out; I can say I was right about all the fringe stuff that made a weirdo outcast teenage rebel type, but jeez, "now it's time for something completely different."
This, right here, is Golden Age commenting. Have you read this?
Deletehttps://falsememoryfoam.blogspot.com/2025/05/long-words-no-pictures-no-jokes-no.html
Although I say it myself, it's the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of music blog writing.
I Love this Art post. William Rochfort is a very talented painter and his web site is very informative.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Woody's Oct. 7 comment - he described my exact experience as a "paperboy". I used my earnings to buy vinyl LP's - not comics. I don't remember what paper I delivered - but it was on Long Island, New York. It might have been the N.Y. Times instead of the Long Island Press - either way - those Sunday editions were huge and indeed M-F'ers to wrangle.
i remember as my time as a paperboy was coming to an end 'fathers' started showing up in their cars to help their sons deliver the papers ...the beginning of the end for a lot of the kids.
Deletei also remember buying my records at Korvette's in jamaica queens the section was on the mezzanine which allowed one if so inclined to help themselves to more than what they were paying for. eventually i got a job in the record stores in downtown brooklyn once i moved there.good times
woody
I stopped delivering papers on my bike before car paper delivery took over. I transitioned over to doing lawn work for the neighbors. Paid better than the paper route. I bought my records at a place in the Roosevelt Field shopping center. You are right - good times - wonderful memories. As kids, we were basically able to do anything we wanted (unlike today) - especially possible with a few bucks in your pocket from the paper route and/or lawn work.
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