There's no sense in scaring the boy

Megan J. Wilson's IPTV series The Sanctum recently debuted online, the Sanctum is a support group for superheroes and supervillians with substance dependency issues. Check out the awesome and yet depressing first episode.

Thanks to John Rogers over at Kung Fu Monkey for the heads up on this series. The title quote is from Inner Sanctum (1948).

The space above the snow

Very few black comic book collectors know about the Black Pulp heroes. And I'm sure that if they were more widely known there would have been a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen type gold rush and plundering. The black pulp heroes appeared exclusively in african-american newspapers like the Black Chronicle and the Chicago Defender, within quality comic strips that were printed from the 1920's to the 1970's.

There were time traveling heroes like Bungleton Green and his Mystic Commandos, adventures in the old west with the Chisholm Kid and Jack Davis, sports hero and university student Don Powers, globe trotting special agent Guy Fortune, Tuskegee Airman the stoic Jive Gray, hard boiled detective Mark Hunt, hard traveling spacemen like Neil Knight the black Buck Rogers, cab driver Tempus Todd, gritty World War II heroes Sergeant Joe and Jim Steele, soldier of fortune Speed Jaxon, black heroine Torchy Brown, and female racecar designer and driver Kandy McKay.



Bungleton Green the longest lived character from those strips, went through quite a few evolutionary changes over the years, he starts out as a bungling n'er do well, goes through a painful zoot suit period, and ends up as a hard edged time traveling urban defender.




Over the years cartoonist Tim Jackson has built a succession of websites designed to be tributes to Pioneering Cartoonists of Color. And he has posted examples of various black comic strips, but the quality of the examples that he currently has online aren't very good. Tim will be releasing a hardcover coffee table book later this year, that chronicles much of their history, complete with clean reproductions of the comics they created, I look forward to that.



And lets not forget the pulp heroes who debuted in All-Negro Comics #1. Characters like Lion Man a young scientist sent to Africa by the United Nations to watch over a mysterious "magic mountain", and the famous negro detective Ace Harlem.


References
-------------------

• From "Under Cork" to Overcoming Black Images in the Comics
  
• Wikipedia: Ollie Harrington
  
• Analysis of black images in comic strips, 1915-1995
  
• Thrillmer: Thrilling Adventures - Speed Jaxon
  
• Barnacle Press: Comics - Bungleton Green
  
• History of All-Negro Comics

Yggardis lives!

I haven't done one of these in quite a while, just posting comic images I find interesting. Especially ones that exist nowhere else on the web. Anyway here's Yggardis the first "Living Planet" at DC Comics. Yggardis wasn't just a living planet he/it was an expert sorcerer and had cybernetic tentacles (yes i know it makes no fucking sense), also if I'm remembering this correctly, anyone who landed upon his surface would rapidly sicken and die. All the Forgotten Villains were damned interesting and could definitely benefit from a loving revisit.

Yggardis debuted in Mystery In Space #60 {June 1960) "Attack from the Tentacle World", by Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino.

When the trucks come

The "ten percent" discussion by Britain's politicians in Torchwood: Children of Earth episode four, reminded me of the Space Traders segment of Cosmic Slop which aired on television back in 1994. The Space Traders was a short story written by Derrick Bell, it was adapted by Reginald Hudlin and Trey Ellis for Cosmic Slop.

In the Space Traders, aliens promise to solve all of America's problems if the United States Government turns over its entire African-American population to them. It's one hell of a story, the Torchwood discussion of just which children should be given up, closely mirrors this clip.

There are no Cosmic Slop DVDs but you can probably dig up a VHS copy.

I sometimes dream in black and white

I was four years old when this performance aired on Top of the Pops, I watched it on an old school black and white HMV television, in my grandmother's brownstone on Speenham road. A year later we left England with several other families on a slow boat to Jamaica. We took along that well built oaken monstrosity of a television, as well as my father's kickass wood finished Grundig RTV stereo (no one makes stereos like the Germans), my indestructible Tonka truck, and most importantly my tricycle. In fact the first time I watched a television program in color was when we moved to the United States due to the election troubles in 1980.

On October 30 1980, violence spread throughout Kingston as rival groups tried to keep their opponents from voting.

There are classical movies that were made in color that I cannot enjoy, because I saw them first in black and white. And it's weird but I still have to adjust to seeing Michael and the Jackson Five in color. Due to the way my brain is wired, I will always see them in black and white.

Moar racefail

Sometimes I wish I was a better netizen, just so that I could go into this thread over at Whitechapel and explain to James Puckett what a huge asshole he is, in detail and with lots of charts and graphs.

James Puckett (6221.5)
I think that this is a case of pretentious douchebags trying to get attention by implying that others are racist because they aren’t capable of writing about anything anyone would pay attention to otherwise.

He is referring to is an article submitted to Racialicious about Steampunk and people of color. Warren Ellis the man who runs that forum seems to have stepped in and handled that idiot. And speaking of Ellis, I do have a few thoughts on the man's current work that I would like to put down here. Excluding the protagonist in Ocean, the heroes in Ellis' works tend to be disenfranchised white males, or rich angry over educated WASPs, out to repair society to death, by repeatedly punching it in the face, or by fucking it with their bullet spitting gilded metal penises.

Books about white protagonists acting out violently against white on white oppression don't interest me. And the idea that society can only be saved by the rich, white, and disaffected, is offensive to me. This is why I feel Global Frequency holds up over time, but Black Summer, No Hero and Doktor Sleepless will not. Reading Ellis' current work is like tuning into an extremely well written, overly literate reality television program. One littered with bits of futurespeak, with a narrative focus on angst ridden, pretentious paleskinned posthumans. (yes that was deliberate)

Ellis' outrageous white others, are not really other enough for me anymore. But Ellis honestly writes what he does know, and he does so fiercely and with what appears to be a lot of heart. Even though much of his current work does not appeal to me, there is no denying that he is a damned good writer. And one who puts that experience on display every time he puts pen to paper.


I also want to talk about this guy, Jericho Drumm also known as Brother Voodoo, Marvel Comics is putting the spotlight on old Jericho and his annoying yet dead brother Daniel. Suddenly Brother Voodoo is speaking patois, and carrying around a staff with shrunken heads. Shrunken Heads are a mostly South American phenomenon local to the Amazon Basin, someone at Marvel has not done their homework. Just go to the Wikipedia entry for Haitian Vodou and move on from there to more reputable resources. The recent spate of unflattering Brother voodoo images makes me uncomfortable and extremely wary. Don't fuck this up Marvel.


Interestingly enough the African Gods known as the Orishas whom the vodou Loa serve, were introduced into the DC Comics universe over ten years ago by John Ostrander. And Shango the black thunder god of that pantheon, is DC Comics' answer to Marvel Comics' Thor. Shango's last in universe appearance was the War of the Gods crossover, so he may have already fallen victim to Geoff Johns' fervent whitewashing of the DC Comics Universe.

As per your requests (man I cannot wait for Google Wave to streamline this shit), here is the link to the Pulp Men's Magazine thread on Flickr.

Dormir concesionario

For your viewing pleasure the node augmentation scene from Alex Rivera's new Mexican cyberpunk film Sleep Dealer.

And for my viewing pleasure the lake scene between Yudhishthira and Vidura Dharma from Peter Brook's adaptation of the Mahabharata, it's been over ten years since my brother and I sat through all four hours of this while it was being aired on WNET 13 (PBS) in NY. I think we were drawn in because Bhima was being portrayed by Mamadou Dioumé a black actor, and Arjuna was depicted as a total badass, and also by the beauty of Mallika Sarabhai the woman playing Draupadi. And there was also that cool priest turned warrior guy. I actually went out and picked up a paperback copy of the Mahabharata and it's still sitting on my shelves unread, I'll have to do something about that. But in the meantime thanks to Google Books here's a feature I've been itching to try out, the first meeting between Bhima and the demon Baka.



It's beginning to look as if I'll have to finally upgrade this template if I want to play around with even better toys, that's not going to be fun.