This should have been posted Yesterday but because of severe stomach pains I just couldn´t do it. As the first post of the month I wanted to do something I didn´t get around to last month because of all the celebrity birthdays, namely posting issue three of George Perez´s LOGAN`S RUN.


As our last issue this one is written by David Kraft, penciled by George Perez and inked by Klaus Janson. I won´t bother you with a summary of what happened so far but you can go and read issue 1 and issue 2 .


As I always like to include a little sumthin, sumthin for my faithful readers I want to include some original art pages from George Perez´ AVENGERS vs JLA series. Now here´s the thing : I went through all issues to see from which issue these pages are but I could not find them in any of the issues. This is because - apparently - the pages are from the original AVENGERS vs JLA series that was slated to come out in the 80s but was canceled because of a pissing contest between the editors of DC and Marvel at that time. So I thought this was to good a find not to share it with the world. And speaking about find, I´m not sure where exactly I found these pages but thanks to the original poster, whoever you may be.


This post´s musical part of the video section could be summarized under " The soundtrack of my life " as all these artists have made a symphonic impact starting with Shakin Stevens who turns 68. For a lot of people he always was a cheap Elvis knock off but for me he´s the guy who kept Rock and Roll in the charts when Mtv and music shows became big in the 80s.



Speaking about Mtv, one artist that was always played - back when they actually showed music videos - was Chris Rea who celebrates his 65th anniversary and the video I initially wanted to include here, On The Beach was always in their Greatest Hits show. For me the song always reminded me of that longing we fell for the open sea and it´s one I like to play and think back on my trips home to Spain and the endless days of my youth.



Now if I told you that Today is Steven Weber´s 55th birthday you would probably have no idea whom I´m talking about. On the other hand if I told you that it´s the anniversary of the actor who plays the bad guy Vaughn Du Clarke, the evil mastermind behind the MAX RAGER on the hit tv series iZOMBIE you would instantly know whom I´m talking about. After FABLES has ended it´s run VERTIGO is better known as producing comics that are successfully adapted as tv series and iZombie has definitely hit it´s stride in the second season which is in no small part thanks to such charismatic but evil antagonists like the one portrayed by Steven Weber.



From zombies to other cult horror movies, today is the 63rd anniversary of Kay Lenz who has appeared on every tv show there is from Gunsmoke to Petrocelli, Hill Street Blues, Magnum P.I., Cagney & Lacey, The Fall Guy, Murder She Wrote, MacGyver ( she´s a guest star on the PHOENIX FOUNDATION´s podcast of the episode Last Stand in which she appeared), Riptide, Starman, Mr. Belvedere, Moonlighting, Hotel, Houston Knights and Simon & Simon where she appeared as four different characters. Kay Lenz also became pretty famous to the Mtv generation as the girl from Rod Stewart´s Infatuation video from 1984. She also appeared in an episode of Lois & Clark : The New Adventures of Superman and did the voice of American Maid on The Tick and Bird Woman on Adventure Times.


To Today´s audiences she may be best know for he appearance on shows like ER, Law & Order : Special Victims Unit, JAG, NCIS, Cold Case, The Closer, CSI : Crime Scene Investigation, Bones or House M.D while I remember her from another House, namely the movie by Roger Corman.


I have been meaning to do a post on him for ages but never came around to do it so in the meantime here´s one horror movie that really scared the s - word out of me. The sequel was not as well received by the movie audiences as it went into the horror comedy direction but this is straight horror and I take any excuse to put more cult horror stuff on the blog.



This being a comic blog I should probably mention Simon Bisley who turns 54 Today. IF I had more material on him AND I wasn´t so taxed out from my grueling ordeal last night this post would have probably been about him so I guess I owe it to him to at least put him in the video section.



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Today one of tv´s hottest sci fi babes, Jolene Blalock celebrates her 41st birthday. She is of course best known for playing T´Pol on ENTERPRISE.


From all the alien sexbombs on al the different Star Trek tv series T´Pol is on the top of my list. STAR TREK VOYAGER stuck Jeri Ryan and her big tits in a skin - tight suit in the show after Season 3 as 36DD drone of Borg Seven of Nine but ENTERPRISE just went and put the alien blow up sexdoll in the main cast of the show right from the pilot episode. Thanks, guys.


Sub - Commander / Commander T'Pol was the hottest vulcan sexbomb in the history of the universe and Enterprise's version of said Barbie of Borg ( read more about Jeri Ryan and the hot Star Trek women in her post ).

Under an agreement with the Vulcan High Command and Earths Starfleet T´Pol was placed aboard the NX - 01 Enterprise as Science and Executive Officer, serving under Captain Jonathan Archer. However she would eventually be brainwashed into " serving under " Commander Charles ' Dubya ' Tucker the Third, while under the effects of Trellium D.

I mean a Trellium - drugged out, semi emotional vulcan love slave with great curves and a killer rack - what's not to like about that ? Commander Fucker.....I mean Tucker had mul - t´pol orgasms thanks to the forbidden vulcan sexmassage....I mean T´Pol´s vulcan " body relaxation massage ".


Although I have to say T´Pol was also needy for Tucker´s earth meatpole because while Phlox gave her the idea to practice the vulcan massage it was T´Pol who went all " Kama Sutra on acid laced steroids " on Tucker.


She was so turned on by their midnight olympics that she had to use the old " it´s just for scientific reasons " schtick to bang him into submission.


Not that he put up much resistance to her since he´s been whacking off to her body since their first sessions in the decontamination chamber.


He even slipped Doctor Phlox a few bucks to get some quality time alone with T´Pol in decontamination like most of the horny males on board.


But he only managed to get her to strip and put the detox lotion all over his body with her boobs the first halfdozen times. It was totally worth it.


Okay, she didn´t repeat the sex experiment after finally banging Tucker silly ( which is the first rule of every scientific research - not having wild sex......but to repeat the experiment ) but it is not know if it was because of disappointment or because she was afraid she would like it too much. And in the mirror universe he even helped her out during Pon Farr.

There is this rumor that Pon Farr,the thing that turns all female vulcans into absolute nymphos worse than a cat in heat, was just a cheap attempt by the writers to get a bigger male audience. Well, I`m up for anything that lets T´Pol show off her hot body.


Now Pon Farr sounds hot and all, but I´m not sure I could wait another seven years before a lass like T'Pol wanted to explore her biological urges again. Although you would probably need seven years just to recover again from getting banged silly by T´Pol every day during Pon Farr.

 
Jolene Blalock's Vulcan portrayal helped keep Star Trek : Enterprise in the limelight, but it was her time spent in decontamination rooms and applying " neuropressure "to colleagues that re - ignited my warp engines.


Reading some online threats you could think Jolene Blalock was the first actress on Star Trek who was brought in to sex the show up. But as a matter of fact Marina Sirtis was on tv long before rocking the cleavage and the best parts of some episodes were Marina breathing heavily.


There are even some online rumors - but there´s probably no truth to it - that her role was supposed to be the ship´s telepathic sexdoll. In the first draft Deanna Troy wasn´t the ship´s counselor but rather the " ship´s consolation officer " a orgasmic priestess from the planet Betasex skilled in all known sex techniques to be used by the male crew for stress relief.


Because of their telepathic abilities the women from Betasex were ideal prostitutes and they also had a very high pain threshold and were very resilient so their clients could do them really hard. Which happened very often when they were working at some mining outpost frequented by sexstarved aliens with dozens of huge schlongs or slimy tentacles.

Anyway, that´s just a silly rumor and there´s probably nothing to it. I mean the whole concept would never have passed american tv censors.

That´s all for Today´s post, happy 41st Jolene and many happy returns !


For Today´s video section I have found some clips

I´m still a bit in shock over the news that one of my favorite artists, Paul Ryan passed away during the last weekend at only 66 years of age.


Longtime readers of this blog may remember that I mentioned him and his five year run on FANTASTIC FOUR quite a few times. For me this was one of the good comics that came out in the dark comic age of the 90s.

Originally I wanted to do a long post but since I spent most of the day looking for Paul Ryan art - as my picture archive is not as extensive as it once was - I´m just going to post some of his great covers to remember all the series he has worked on. Maybe with comments here and there.

D.P. 7 issue 10 is probably the first comic with Paul Ryan art I ever saw.


Either this or issue 11. Those issues were always in the 1 Deutschmark bins at german comic conventions or comic trade shows. Anyway, my brother has most of the series but I never got around to read it.

QUASAR was of of the first series that I put on my pull list because of Paul Ryan. It´s crazy but I just recently read the overpriced and badly printed ANNIHILATION CLASSIC that reprints the first issue. I only stayed on the book until Paul Ryan left with issue 6 or 7 which were Acts of Vengeance tie ins and returned when Greg Capullo turned it into a must read book.
 

The same happened on Ravage 2099. Yup, I was one of the people who read it despite of Stan Lee´s more than generic writing. Still it had beautiful Paul Ryan art. But as soon as that ended I was out the door.


Speaking about Acts of Vengeance, you will find art from Paul Ryan in most Marvel omnibus or collections reprinting story lines like Operation Galactic Storm, John Byrne´s Scarlett Witch saga in Avengers West Coast since he was the only artist who drew trhe main AVENGERS book at the same time as he drew AVENGERS WEST COAST following such artistic titans like John Buscema and John Byrne and he made it look easy.   


And speaking about following John Byrne, he handpicked Paul Ryan to follow John Romita Jr on his stint on IRON MAN. I was a bit surprised when I got the Epic Collection WAR GAMES because more than half of it is by Paul 'Ryan and this may be one of the best Epic Collections yet since it includes the complete run by John Byrne in one volume. The transition from John Romita Jr to Paul Ryan is pretty smooth and Paul incorporated the new much bulkier look of the Iron Man armor in the Avengers books. 


I have always preferred the original 12 issue limited SQUADRON SUPREME series to WATCHMEN ( since I have already explained the reason for this on many occasions I won´t bore my readers by repeating them ) partly because of Paul Ryan who finished up the last issues. While the series has its fans many are not aware of the brilliant graphic novel SQUADRON SUPREME - DEATH OF A UNIVERSE by Mark Gruenwald and Paul Ryan that at least as good if not better than the original series. The story ended their universe and brought the team to the 616 Earth - which of course is all but a moot point at this moment thanks to Disney. Thankfully the graphic novel is included in the SQUADRON SUPREME OMNIBUS hardcover. 


Speaking of parallel universes Paul Ryan also did the art on FANTASTIC FIVE from the M2 universe. I always enjoyed that parallel world since they had some great books like SPIDER - GIRL ( on which I will do a post very soon ) with a positive outlook for the future, a rare thing in comics now.


A few more covers for Marvel. I´m not sure if he also did the interiors.


Paul Ryan also worked at DC where he drew the big icons like Batman or Superman, the last one mostly in the fifth Superman title SUPERMAN - THE MAN OF TOMORROW which was created to have a Superman book every week. There were sadly only four issues each year but Paul Ryan more than made up for it by drawing the entire Justice League on occasion and doing a few extras like the SUPERMAN - GHOSTS annual 10. 


He even got to draw an entire different Justice League ( and most of the other heroes in the DC universe ) in the LEGENDS OF THE DC UNIVERSE : CRISIS - THE UNTOLD STORY special. As the cover is not by Paul Ryan here´s some of the interior art of which you can see more in this review. 


I also have to post interior art for Paul Ryan´s last DC book because while he did a long run on FLASH - issues 119 to 136 the cover were by other artists. But because they were of such high caliber like Mike Wieringo and Steve Lightle I didn´t complain. And I still had Paul Ryan inside the comic.


But Marvel and DC were not the only companies Paul Ryan worked for. When CrossGen comics was the third big comic publisher they had all the best talents and while Paul Ryan did not get his own title he always delivered on those fill in issues he did to relieve the regular artists.


Last but not least Paul Ryan did a lot of work for the swedish comic PHANTOMEN about one of the greatest pulp comic icons ever, The Phantom, The Ghost Who Walks and I hope that some american - or german - publisher makes those stories available for the general readers.


And that is all for this post which I hope has been able to show the books Paul Ryan has worked on. He always managed to combine great design and elegance with solid storytelling while throwing in strong perspectives and dynamic action. And he could drawn anything that writers threw at him and was never afraid to do crowds with dozens of characters. Artists like him, who always stay within their deadlines and who can do two books a month - and do them good - there are not that many left.

As I had to look for stuff from Paul Ryan all over the internet there are quite a few links I have to add to the post. First of there are the posts on the passing of Paul Ryan and as representatives of all the numerous ones that are without any doubt going to be on the internet in the weeks to come I selected the ones by COMICBOOK.COM and CULT FACTION . 


Dan W from IT`S A DAN`S WORLD has a write up and an interview with Paul Ryan and Ed Rhoades at THE PHANTOM REFERENCE GUIDE has an interview with Paul Ryan about his work on PHANTOMEN with a lot of original artwork. As you can expect Paul Ryan pops up in quite a few posts from COMIC BOOK RESOURCES like Drawing Crazy Patterns : Avengers Falling For The Scarlet Witch , Drawing Crazy Pastterns : The Entire Marvel World Is Destroyed ! Wait, Now It´s Back ! , Knowledge Waits : Nine Times Doctor Doom Cheated Death Itself and Gimmick Or Good ? Fantastic Four 371 - 375 . They also have an orbituary on Paul Ryan and Gimmick Or Good ? Flash 80 about Mike Wieringo´s first issue on FLASH.

I know there was not a lot of Superman in this post but I want to include something for my spanish speaking audience so here´s almost an hour of the classic cartoon. THIS is what the real Superman looks like, Hollywood.



Today would have been Heinz Rühmann´s 114th birthday. There always was some controversy because he kept making films in Germany during the Nazi´s reign and was close with Goebbels and Goehring although he never made outright propaganda movies. He starred in a few movies that critiqued the military like Die Abenteuer des braven Soldat Schwejks ( I had the luck to be able to read the novel it was based on during my military service and not a lot has changed in the last hundred years ) or Der Hauptmann von Köpenick - which is one of my favorite movies.

I remember seeing it on one of the 5 Mark matinees the local school in Neckarweihingen used to do and being impressed by the social issues that were tackled in the movie. Besides showing how conditioned germans are to obey authority figures - especially those in uniforms - it also reveals the problems with bureaucracy that haven´t changed that much. Take it from one who has been in the position of the main character. It´s the old dilemma : without a permanent residence you don´t get papers, without papers you don´t get work and without work you don´t have a chance of earning money for a permanent residence. It´s a neverending spiral.      



Sadly I only found a short clip of The Captain of Köpenick - even if it is the most important scene - but I found another cinematic jewel I had not seen before. Der Herr vom anderen Stern is an early science fiction movie that was ahead of its times. The movie was produced by Heinz Rühmann and in it he plays a traveler who lands on earth via mind powers and has to deal with the german authorities, politicians and other criminals. 



I´m staying with my german speaking audience for a video from .... really ? Smartypants is the actual translation for Klugscheißerin ? That´s really putting it mildly. Anyway, here´s a video from Miss Smartypants about if comics are art and you should watch her videos which are smart.



Comic Misconceptions with interesting facts about The Ghost Who Walks.



Today´s music video was picked for this special remembrance post.



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Old jungle saying : when the jungle sleeps, the Phantom wakes.

Today one of tv´s hottest fitness babes celebrates her 50th birthday : Kiana Tom, mostly known for making men drool on FLEX APPEAL.


Of course like most shows with hot sexbombs FLEX APPEAL didn´t air in Germany. As I understand it - at least from the commentaries on the internet and later from the clips I could watch through the internet - the biggest pull of the show was Kiana Tom herself and her firm puppies ( 36Ds ! ) stretching the thin fabric of her tiny tops in a most fetching way.


According to wikipedia she was an original member of the ESPN fitness show " BodyShaping " until 1995 when she left to host " Kiana's Flex Appeal ". Being that her stunning 36D - 23 - 35 measurements were the only reason anybody watched " BodyShaping " in the first place, her show eventually became the more popular one. She has written a number of books on the subject of physical fitness and she even posed for Playboy magazine. In addition to hosting, she has made a few appearances on screen as an actress, most notably in Universal Soldier: The Return.


She also was on other shows like BLADE WARRIORS but I mostly missed the show because of work. But I caught a few episodes and I can say she really looks good in those. In fact, since I didn´t know she was born in Hawaii I cast her as Psylocke in multiple comic book casting posts.


Yeah, I know you´re probably tired of hearing me say that but asian girls are my kryptonite. And by assessory all exotic looking sexbombs. Damn, that´s one of the reasons cosplay queen Yaya Han still hasn´t gotten her own post. I want to give her props but I´m afraid it will turn into porn.


Which I have to look out for on basically any post involving hot cosplay girls if I don´t want to look like a pervert. Anyway, back to Kiana Tom. 

Born in Maui, Hawaii, she is the daughter of Chinese American child actor, Layne Tom Jr. She is part Chinese, Hawaiian and Irish. She was a cheerleader for the Los Angeles Raiders before becoming a TV personality.


As an actress her most famous part was in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER 2 or UNIVERSAL SOLDIER - THE RETURN how it is sometimes called were her short bit part at the beginning is the only redeeming value of the flick.

In the scene Jean Claude Van Damme and Kiana Tom´s character Maggie are running an exercise run against the universal soldiers. They are separated and Kiana Tom is captured by wrestler Goldberg. Now I don´t know where the logic is here as he´s supposed to be some kind of cyborg but he does what any healthy man would do in his situation. Namely tie the helpless Kiana Tom to a tree whose shirt reveals a really huge bulge.


But it gets even better as Goldberg ( named Romeo in the movie which might explain why he tries to get it on with Kiana ) rips open her shirt !

  
Now that´s what I call entertainment : we´re only six minutes into the movie and we already see Kiana´s bra - clad melons exposed ( sadly she doesn´t go bra - less although she definitely has the hardbody to pull it off, but since she doesn´t show more skin it is the erotic highlight ). It is just a quick glimpse, but you can see that Kiana really doesn´t have much to be ashamed of because those perfect heavenly hangers look amazing !
If the rumours on the internet can be trusted Kiana Tom is a very private person but still very business savy. And she waited with doing the pictures for PLAYBOY till she decided that she was in the best physical condition ( May of 2002 ). And I have to say : Thank you very much for that, Kiana !

Too many celebrities never grab the chance to do nude pictures when they are really in good condition, when their banging bodies are in their prime.


Then, twenty years ( or thirty years ) later their biological clock starts ticking, they want to prove they still look good and do some pictures.


Well, how are we supposed to come to a qualified decision ? We don´t know how she looked when she was young and sexy. So please girls, do some nude shots while you look good. Otherwise there is no proof.


Once again, time to wrap things up. As always I managed to talk about a lot of other stuff than Kiana Tom, but since the post is just an excuse to post as many pictures of her as possible I wanna wish her many returns !


Since I already did an all Kiana Tom video section in last year´s post I´ll do the usual selection this year. You can find a plethora of Kiana Tom videos on YouTube but to add something new here are two GIFs of Kiana.


Kiana Tom vid



space girl



the empire strips back


picture



yaya han

animated



carol vorderman lip sync battle











New to the blog ? Everything you need to know about TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN :top ten posts / more posts of interest / best of the best
 

It´s hard to believe but we are already in the middle of March and I´m still pimping ESSENTIAL HULK volume 7 because it´s offered at amazon for 7 to 8 bucks which is a real bargain price for a 20 dollar phone book.


Now longtime readers may remember that I pimped this book as early as January the 6th but I haven´t really written much about the actual comics that are collected here because I always got sidetracked by other stuff.

I originally wanted to post this Yesterday which would have been my first THIS MAN THIS MONSTER MONDAY post but while I had collected a lot of material for the post I hadn´t gotten around to get rid of all the doubles and cut down the rest to the proper size. So because I had to do that AND get rid of a lot of clips that had accumulated on the laptop I could not do the post. The german networks have started showing the new episodes of CASTLE on Mondays and because the new season of EL MINISTERIO DEL TIEMPO is on right after that I was busy with that until 23 o´clock. After that I finished preparing the pictures for the Hulk post but then I was too tired to start a new post and my vision was also starting to get blurry so I went to sleep. What can I say ? I´m getting old and having the Paul Ryan tribute post at the top of the blog for one more day is not that bad.    


So. ESSENTIAL HULK 7. I guess you already have volume 6 in your comic collection since it is THE most important volume collecting the entire part of Sal Buscema´s epic Hulk run that was inked by the great Ernie Chan.


I have already written at length about why this is the best part of Sal Buscema´s HULK run so we can skip that part and come directly to volume 7 of ESSENTIAL HULK. One of the reasons why I ordered it was that it fills a huge gap in my Hulk collection. Because while I had read most of the Sal Buscema / Ernie Chan issues in different translations I hadn´t read the issues between 227 ( which was the last issue in BIBLIOTECA MARVEL HULK 29 ) and 248 ( the first issue of BIBLIOTECA MARVEL HULK 33 ).


So I was curious to find out how Doctor Banner went from being the Hulk for over a week to changing back and forth with his alter ego as usual.

In the first issues after the ones I already know we have the Hulk bunking at Gamma Base while Doc Samson is trying to cure Doctor Banner and things are finally looking up. Or they were if it was not for the evil machinations of Moonstone who has one of her earliest appearances here.


And she doesn´t even need her super powers for that. She just uses her womanly wiles and her expertise as a psychiatrist to wrap all the guys around her little finger Doc Samson included. You might think the Hulk could handle her power wise but he´s so totally outclassed brain wise that the poor sap has no chance. Moonstone just uses everyone for her own needs and if she has to turn the Hulk into a raving beast destroying all hopes of him being cured as a convenient distraction that´s just bad luck.


After this the Hulk leaves Gamma Base and makes the acquaintance of  Fred Sloane with whom he goes on a trip that brings him to a team - up with Captain America, the Falcon, Sam Wilson and his nephew Jim Wilson ( who was Hulk´s sidekick in the sixth volume ) and a confrontation with the criminal organization known as The Corporation of which Moonstone is a member. Which is a callback to my french issue of Captain America.


So far I haven´t gotten around to do a post on it like with my issues of GAMMA but thanks to my latest purchases of a few volumes of ESSENTIAL CAPTAIN AMERICA I have now all the necessary material to list all the pages that were left out in the french reprint. Anyway, one of the villains in my french issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA is Animus who makes another appearance here as yet another deadly associate of The Corporation.


The Corporation was introduced by Jack Kirby during his second run on CAPTAIN AMERICA and also popped up in stories with Jack of Hearts and Machine Man who guest stars in issues 234 to 237 ( although if you want to be precise we only see an impostor who sets Hulk up in issue 234 ).  


By the way, since I´m pimping a black and white comic I should post more black and white pages but even I can only work with the material I have and I didn´t find that many black and white pages. I will try to include the few I DID find and also add the color version of said page. Which is not a requirement for pimping the ESSENTIALS but I know my readers like to see how the pages differ from the black and white version to the color.


Coming back to the crossover between HULK and CAPTAIN AMERICA I should probably mention that teaming up with Captain America is future Avenger Quasar who still goes by the name Marvel Boy at that time.


Now this is Wendell Vaughn, not Robert Grayson the Marvel Boy that was in George Perez´ FANTASTIC FOUR who went mad and blew himself up.


Before closing the post ( I just knew I had to continue this in a second part ) I have to mention one of the highlights of this volume, HULK ANNUAL 8, guest starring everyone´s favorite canadian Bigfoot.


I must have read this annual in the spanish or german translation because I knew of the existence of Sasquatch before I knew of the existence of Alpha Flight. The story is co written by Roger Stern and John Byrne, the pencils are like with most comics in this collection by Sal Buscema and the inks are beautifully done by the fabulous Alfredo Alcala, just awesome.


The characterization in the story is exceptionally well and you wish the issue had more pages so you can find out what happens next with Maureen Mores Friesen, the young woman who actually manages to befriend the Hulk. Too bad that Walter Langkowski ruins it all again.


I don´t know what it is but most brainy types in the Hulk comics are just colossal dicks. That Doc Samson is just a huge douchebag who has an inferiority complex in regards to Bruce Banner AND the Hulk goes without saying. He really doesn´t score any points in this volume letting himself be used by Moonstone in - almost - any way. And Walter Langkowski doesn´t score any higher either. Remember that this is the guy who sacrificed himself to bring the Hulk back to Earth from the Crossroads which will lead to the destruction of Vancouver. Okay, heavy damage of.

Anyway, true to form the real villain of the story here is Sasquatch who picks a fight with the Hulk just to see who is " the strongest there is " which decimates an entire area of the beautiful untouched nature.


Not only that, there is even a scene where he almost manages to kill Bruce Banner. I mean, okay, the reader knows that he will turn into the Hulk at the last minute but Walter doesn´t know it and he when Bruce´s shirt rips and he seemingly falls to his death all Walter can say is " Ooops. "To satisfy his scientific curiosity he would have killed somebody. Because anybody BUT the Hulk would be dead after that fall. Who is p.o.ed now.


And to top it all of this senseless fight has cost the Hulk another shot at finding a friend and maybe the possibility to live in peace somewhere.


I´m not sure if it is because two writer worked on this but it´s one of those great HULK stories that stay with you once you have read it.


Sadly I didn´t find many original black and white pages from this as one can really appreciate the art without the coloring. This is one of the reasons why it´s worth it to get this as an ESSENTIAL even if they will reprint this material in an Epic Collection a few years down the line. 


So I hope I have managed to wet your appetite enough that you get one of the remaining six copies because I know you will bite yourself in the proverbial butt if you see this later anywhere and have to pay 20 bucks.

But before we come to the link and video section there are three more bargain books I want to mention. First off the hardcover Indestructible Hulk - Gods and Monsters which contains issues six to ten of the series. Normally this goes for 25 bucks but it´s currently at amazon for less than 5 Euros. While the last two issues have been reprinted in a DAREDEVIL trade the first three issues are totally worth it for the Walter Simonson.


A bit more expensive is the IMAGE COMIC hardcover that was supposed to come out on the tenth anniversary of Image Comics but due to the other Image founders besides Erik Larsen it was delayed for four years.

This hardcover with a limited print run of 1,000 went for horrendous prices before going for 25 bucks and it is now offered at less than 10 at amazon. There are four stories drawn by Jim Valentino, Todd McFarlane, Marc Silvestri and Erik Larsen who naturally does the best story, the origin of Dragon which was also included in some other comic. If you want to have that story in a nice hardcover it´s probably worth buying. I know that I got this at some point but I don´t know if I still have it or sold it.


And les but not least ( little play on words here ) is volume 1 of THE TROUBLE WITH GIRLS, the story of good looking hunk Lester Girls who just wants to enjoy the simple life in a small town with a loving wife and go fishing but instead is thrust into a life of danger and espionage where he must endure wealth, fancy cars, palatial estates and beautiful women who just throw themselves at him. Thankfully his faithful sidekick Apache Dick is there to relieve him of his fair share of all that. This is one of the best black and white series lampooning James Bond and other spies / hitmen for hire guys and even if the discount here is probably not that big with a price of 11 Euros I haven´t seen these collection anywhere else. There is a second volume but you have to wait 4 to 6 weeks until delivery. I wouldn´t wait too long with this one as there is only one copy left.  


and Captain America 280 and

and MY MARVEL LIFE 1980 and

and Avengers 172 and

and Avengers 181 and

and Avengers 211 and

and Captain America 254 and

and Captain America 266 and

and Daredevil 151 and

and Daredevil 158 and

and Daredevil 171 and

and Daredevil 181 and

and Dazzler 1 and

and Defenders 95 and

and Fantastic Four 232 and

and Iron Man 114 and

and Iron Man 145 and

and Iron Man 149 and

and Iron Man 118 and

and Marvel Team Up 74 and

and Marvel Team Up 113 and

and Micronauts 1 and

and Power Man & Iron Fist 75 and

and Super Villain Team Up 15 and

and Thor 274 and

ca ching

Today one of my all time favorite cult sirens, Sabrina Salerno celebrates her 48th birthday so I wanted to re - post her entry in a shorter version.


I especially made some brandnew animated GIFs for this occassion but when I checked out the original post I found out that I had already posted new animated GIFs there. But since I´m not letting them go to waste I´ll post them here anyway. And with that out of the way let´s get to our main topic : Today´s celebrity birthday babe, italian sexbomb Sabrina Salerno.

   
Sabrina was mostly known for two things ..... well, actually three things : the twins ( obviously ! ), lots of wardrobe malfunctions of the tiniest outfits that were riding up or wet t - shirts and see - through bikinis.

 
Last but not least she was famous for her scorching liveperformances .



Which were much better than some of the videos because of the bouncing action she invented long before japanese games designers had the idea.


Whatcan I say, it was the 80s and I was a young lad in the prime of his hormonal virility and I was easily distracted ( or sexually aroused ).  

For those who didn´t live the 80s I should probably explain that at that time there were a lot of ultrahot sexbombs who tried - and most were mildly successful - to enter the charts through their physical attributes.


Music videos were something new and at first it was just doing any kind of video for Mtv, which at that time showed music videos instead of cartoons, animes or reality shows. The visual aspect was very important especially when somebody realized that it greatly benefited the video and therefore sales ( back then videos that were played on tv equaled record sales ) if the singer was hot or there were some scantily clad playmates.


The most successful member of this club was either sexbomb Sabrina Salerno or page 3 girl Samantha Fox depending on where you lived.


If you lived in the United Kingdom, Samantha naturally had more fans because of her nude pictures in THE SUN and various men´s magazines.


And if you lived in one of the countries that did not show the uncensored version of Sabrina Salerno´s video for her worldwide smash hit BOYS BOYS BOYS on tv like Germany Samantha Fox was the bigger star there.


If you lived in Italy, which was Sabrina Salerno´s home country she was of course the big star there since she won her first beauty contest with 15.


She was also pretty big in most countries that showed the uncensored version of BOYS BOYS BOYS like in Spain although I never saw it there.


Sabrina owes most of her career to that video and the tiny bikini top that couldn´t contain her massive ..... talents. It was quite simple : since the song had been released before without much success until the production company realized that they should make a video with such a sexbomb.



They decided to put Sabrina into a pool where she was singing and getting


all wet wearing a very transparent white bikini. As the shooting went on it became obvious that her voluptuous breasts were waaay too heavy for her


top. It kept sliding down lower and lower and showing part of her nipples


which already were very clearly visible through the thin white fabric so she had to pull it up numerous times before they completely fell out .


Sabrina managed to do that in a way that got you a good look at her milkshakes and the director was smart enough to leave it in the video


( he even included it in slow motion ) and the rest is as they say history.



They couldn´t completely ignore Sabrina in Germany because even though television only showed her cut video she somehow managed to become number 1, which I think had something to do with her hot pictures that appeared in youth magazines like BRAVO or even men´s magazines.


So they had to invite her to FORMEL EINS which was the music tv for german teenagers. The show was a total train wreck, they always cut the videos because the producer of the show was in Bavaria and they are very catholic and prudish down there. When Sabrina was there as a guest they didn´t play her video and told her she had to do a live performance. Which was obviously more than they bargained for because Sabrina began to shake rattle and roll her boobs up and down like there´s no Tomorrow.


Of course they were appalled but they could not do anything against it. The camera man tried to prevent the worst by doing a lot of close ups and just filming Sabrina´s head but as you can see it didn´t help that much.



Speaking about Sabrina Salerno on german tv : in 1988 she appeared on Die Spielbude in Mallorca and I had the luck of taping it but my mother caught me and when she commented how big Sabrina´s breasts are I was so embarrassed that I deleted it. Now there were other live performances of Sabrina on german tv but not nearly as many as on spanish tv, and not many of them which I caught and was able to record. So this was one of her few rare appearances on german tv and because I was too young and stupid I erased it. Now of course there is the internet and YouTube where you can watch videos with Sabrina in all her glory - unless it gets deleted.



On the british tv show TOP OF THE POPS something similar to what happened on Formel Eins occured : they wouldn´t play her music video because it was way to sexual - well, too bad for them because her sexy live performance was even hotter which in the end won over millions of fans and shot a whole generation of british boys into puberty prematurely.



But she really got famous through her New Year´s performance on spanish tv in 1988 where she sang her song HOT GIRL and her breasts got out of control and popped out of her top. In Germany they would have censored it but the spanish tv immediately put it on a loop and kept showing it in slow motion during her live performance. It is her best known clip ever.



In Germany Sabrina is always labeled a one hit wonder although she had over a dozen Top Twenty hits worldwide like BOYS ( SUMMERTIME LOVE ) , SEXY GIRL , HOT GIRL , ALL OF ME ,  ( version 2 / extended mix ), LIKE A YOYO , MY CHICO or YEAH YEAH ( version 2 ). In Italy, Spain, France and other countries she´s a big superstar, pop icon and sex symbol since she managed to turn her initial claim to fame into a career that lasted a few decades. Besides her music career she appeared in movies and tv.



Now there is not much about Samantha Fox in this post either and one reason for that is that the post is still too long even after I cut the part about Brigitte Nielsen ( which you can still find in the original post ).


I might have gone a bit overboard with all the videos and animated Gifs I added to this post but what is life if you can´t indulge yourself a bit now and then. The other reason there is not much about Samantha Fox in this post is that I think Sam never realized her potential like Sabrina did.


I always had the impression that she could do more but didn´t want to do it. I remember that some years ago, well, more than a few years because this is about a video cassette, I found a video of Samantha Fox which was kind of a MAKING OF one of her calendars. I expected to see some skin, not like hardcore but at least as much as you could see in the pics for the calendar but the video was more like something out of Sesame Street and every time there was some exposed skin Sam was frantically obsessed with covering up again as quickly as possible. Now maybe she was tired of always showing her body and being objectified but then she should have either not do the calendar in the first place or not try to sell a video that is tamer than an episode of the Muppet Babies. Just my 5 cents worth.


The post was not really comic related but at least I got a better picture of Milo Manara´s cover for the italian version of PENTHOUSE magazine.

  
And I still hadn´t any luck finding art from Manara´s Sabrina comic. I wanted to add some stuff about the whole controversy regarding Milo Manara´s Spiderwoman cover but that will have to be in a separate post.


One final thought about the music industry, not that much has changed and there still are some hot singers out there who could easily cause the sales figures of any men´s magazine to skyrocket with their physique.


That´s all, many happy returns Sabrina and thanks for the mammaries. We start Today´s addendum with a few Sabrina live videos I couldn´t fit into the text. The first one is Guys and Dolls from a concert in Italy.



Here Sabrina  performs her most famous song in a spanish tv show where she once again has trouble keeping her skintight outfit under control .

Here she is in another great outfit on a spanish tv show performing My Chico. I don´t know about you but I´m saluting. Well, a part of me.



Another performance of Boys, this time with some striptease action.



Damn, Sabrina´s live gigs really are something else and she looks sexier than ever in this video singing and dancing ( and bouncing ) to Hot Girl.



Speaking about looks here she is on spanish tv program Entre Amigos with her song Dirty Boy Looks which could be caused by her f - me outfit .



Another stunning live performance of Dirty Boy Looks and even without her porn diva outfit Sabrina looks very busty in her red cleavage top .



Here she is rendering Yeah Yeah although this time with a black top .



Again Sabrina sings Yeah Yeah in black but with some bouncing action.



This video of Rockabilly seems to be newer than the others because Sabrina looks older. Her Wonder Twins are still in great physical form.



And I just had to add the last one because of Sabrina´s brilliant outfit.



New to the blog ? Everything you need to know about TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN :top ten posts / more posts of interest / best of the best
 

It is said that you can´t go home again but when I received my comic order last week I felt like a kid again - or at least a much younger man than I am Today because of a hefty dose of classic VALIANT comics ( now that a new Valiant has started they are ) that were part of said order.


But not for the reason you might suspect. It didn´t have as much to do with the fact that these were comics from a company that was a big part of my pull list in the 90s and more with the price I paid for these issues.

And for that we need to back up a little bit further. Namely to my tribute post on artist Paul Ryan because in it I mentioned the awesome LEGENDS OF THE DC UNIVERSE : CRISIS - THE UNTOLD STORY special he had done.


For those who don´t know, LEGENDS OF THE DC UNIVERSE was a series that came out at the end of the 90s in which various big name writers and artists told stories that somehow fit into the overall continuity of the DC universe although they didn´t tie into the current storylines of that time.


I remember that I bought issues 7, 8 and 9 because they contained a Green Arrow / Green Lantern story by Denny O´Neill, Greg Land and Dick Giordano about their first meeting and issues 10 and 11 which contained a Batgirl story by Kelley Puckett, Terry Dodson and Kevin Nowlan. I may have bought one of two more issues but besides the special by Paul Ryan I didn´t read much of the series. Maybe nostalgia is tainting my vision here because the DC books suck so much right now but I wish I had gotten more of the issues. Maybe I was trimming down my pull list at that time or maybe I was just not ready for this kind of stories ( or maybe I was spending too much money on Valiant books to add more titles to the pull list ) but for whatever reason I only saw the issues that landed in my comic book store at that time which were what customers didn´t want.

Which is the only plausible explanation that I never bought issues 20 and 21 by Steven Grant, Mike Zeck and Klaus Janson. I mean, I´m such a huge Mike Zeck fan and how can you pass up on a story about Abin Sur meeting an ancestor of Hal Jordan in the Wild West ? This one really has it all !


So after finishing my Paul Ryan post I went looking for these issues and I did find them but not at the online comic shop where I usually do my orders because they give you a FREE COMIC BOOK DAY or GRATIS COMIC TAG comic for every 10 EUROS worth of comics from you overall order.

Which was not a problem since I am still waiting with my usual order until they get the free comics for 2016. I have already gotten all free comics that interest me of 2015 so now I´m waiting to see what 2016 has to offer. Anyway, the problem was that I didn´t want to just order two comics because that way you have to pay more for postage and packing than for the actual comics. Now there are still a few series I read on a regular basis but it hadn´t been that long since my last order and I had added some issues of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA by George Perez to boost that one. With the prices that you pay for the reprints of those issues the original back issues are way cheaper and this is probably the only way for me to read the anniversary issue 200 which not only has art by a star studded ensemble like George Perez, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert and Brian Bolland but also pages by Jim Aparo so I couldn´t pass that up. 


So I was looking for some issues to add and at first I was thinking about the DARK HORSE presents anthology because I had read every issue of the second volume but I never got around to continue with the third volume.


The only problem with that was that all issues I found at the online comic shop with the LEGENDS OF THE DC UNIVERSE issues by Mike Zeck were more expensive than at my regular online comic shop so I tried to come up with other comics to add to my order. The next thing I tried were one dollar like the ONE FOR ONE comics form Dark Horse but after some time I had to realize that I would never get over 15 bucks that way. So instead of series I went with favorite creators since this online comic shop has the comics categorized by name or by creators. Besides Mike Zeck I was looking for the usual suspects like Gene Colan and George Perez but also Norm Breyfogle since I always try to add some of his issues to my comic collection. That brought me across the BLOODSHOT issues by Norm but I already had the two issues they had. But since they were priced at 90 cents and 1 Euro I thought that maybe I could add some VALIANT issues to my order as long as they were at 1 Euro or below. There are always some missing issues on my special dollar bin diving list and lately I have been more interested in old comics like those from Valiant or Hero ( there is a CAPTAIN THUNDER AND BLUE BOLT post coming up in the near future ) so I looked up all the Valiant series I used to read and lo and behold I found some issues for 1 dollar but most issues went for 50, 40 cents or less.


And this is really the part which brought me back to when I started buying american comics because back then they cost 75 cents and soon a dollar.

The exchange rate was 2 Deutschmark for 1 Dollar but after a few years the german D  Mark was so strong that the exchange rate was 1 : 1 which made me especially happy. Sometimes I wonder why I read so many series back then but when you only pay a buck for a comic it is easy to follow twenty or thirty books a month. I tell you, I was adding more and more issues and for the life of me I could not break the 50 Euro mark which is when you get free shipping. Anyway, Today the comic industry feels that more expensive comics are the way to go inflating prices to 4 and even 5 dollars for a meager floppy but I disagree. Anyway, I also looked for other books that might be at bargain prices and in the end I had too many - as usual. There were over 2 dozen Marvel ESSENTIALS and DC SHOWCASEs priced at 10 and 12 Euros of which I could not add any to my comic order in favor of the fourth THOR VISIONARIES WALTER SIMONSON trade ( in fine condition ) which I found for 6 Euros, MARVEL MASTERWORKS IRON MAN 4 hardcover ( in very fine condition ) for 15 Euros and the MARVEL MASTERWORKS MIGHTY THOR 10 hardcover ( brand new ) for 30 Euros.

It´s weird, two years ago I had zero MARVEL MASTERWORKS because they are just frikkin expensive and now I have ten hardcovers. What can I say ? I´m a sucker for bargains. Now I know that part of why the IRON MAN hardcover was priced so low is that a big part - if not all of it - is also part of the new IRON MAN omnibus hardcover and who is going to buy it at the regular price when you can get an omnibus at the same price or paying a bit more ? Me I will probably never have the necessary money to buy the omnibus anyway and 15 bucks is not too much to have the chance to read the comics again I only got in the translated version from the Williams Verlag. I also think that the paper quality and color restoration is better. 


Now the THOR hardcover was not as reduced in price as I thought - the original price was 55 dollars not 70 dollars like I suspected - but my limit for MARVEL MASTERWORKS is 35 bucks, 40 if it´s really good. I have paid the full price for some but those are exceptionally important volumes.

A few months ago I bought the IF ASGARD SHOULD PERISH hardcover for 15 bucks and that was by John  Buscema but the second half was inked by Tony DeZuniga. Now I have nothing against his inks but they tend to be a bit heavy and are better suited for artists who don´t have a distinctive style yet. But the THOR MASTERWORK is also by John Buscema with inks by his brother Sal Buscema and the great Joe Sinnot for the most part. It´s the story where - I think - Thor gets really old, Hela is killed and Loki becomes boss of Asgard and tries to marry Sif. Weird but good weird.


Speaking about bargains and MARVEL MASTERWORKS THE MIGHTY THOR, some of you may recall that I mentioned that I got the 12th volume at a bargain price and it´s right now at 24 Euros at amazon which is a pretty good price for a 70 dollar book. Yeh, I know, it´s " only " 69.99 but come on, that´s 70 and everybody knows it. So if you always wanted to read the story about Thor and Loki fighting in Rutland, Vermont, during the world famous Halloween parade that has been mentioned in so many comics here´s your chance to find out. Last but not least I picked the THOR VISIONARIES WALTER SIMONSON volume 4 trade because even if it´s banged up a little 6 bucks is a good price and I already have the first two trades but then let it kind of slide and now it´s difficult to find them in the original re - coloring instead of the one where they bury the art under a ton of fancy airbrush effects. And it also has one of my favorite THOR stories in it, which was not drawn by Walter Simonson but Sal Buscema ( who doesn´t get nearly enough credit for his work on the series ) and even better it ends with a quote from my favorite Edgar Allan Poe story. 


But before we finish ( yes, once again it took me quite a while to find a picture of Gene Colan´s DER EISERNE from the Williams Verlag and now it´s time to wrap things up ) I should tell you more about the Valiant comics I got since this is what the post was initially supposed to be about.

So I got one issue of HARBINGER which as an added bonus had X - O Manowar in it, two issues of SHADOWMAN I was still missing, five issues of TUROK, DINOSAUR HUNTER and thirteen issues of SOLAR. It would have been fourteen issues but I was not sure that I didn´t already have one of them. Anyway, all in all twenty one issues and they only cost me twelve bucks. So tell me, what do you get from Marvel these days for twelve bucks ? Three comics when you don´t pick a five dollar book and bad ones at that. Okay, I don´t want to bash Marvel or DC but I just want all those comic readers out there to consider that there ARE options and if you have seen some of the videos Terry Hooper posts with great comic hauls, well you can get these kind of bargains at almost all comic shops if you try. For as long as I can remember there have always been some comics which you could get at bargain prices if you are prepared to stray from the mainstream. Now in our next episode about Valiant comics ( not in our next episode because I don´t want to have two Valiant centric posts following one another ) we will see if the comics I bought are any good. Which means we will be talking a lot about SOLAR which is the series I have read the least and from which I bought the most issues.  


By the way, this whole thing started with a comic by Mike Zeck and it ends with a comic by Mike Zeck because I found out that he did a comic for Valiant called BLOODSHOT : LAST STAND which I now have to track down.


Speaking about tracking down things it was quite difficult to find some of the material for this post so as usual I want to give kudos to the guys and gals that provided the content like the good guys from SCANS DAILY who provided the stunning final page from THOR issue 374 by Sal Buscema.

I have already linked to HAMMER FILMS in a previous post so you might have already read his posts on MARVEL DOUBLE FEATURE 19 which has some Gene Colan Iron Man pages, IRON MAN 139 Facades, Ruses and Masques ( which will come in handy in one of my next BOB LAYTON`S IRON MAN posts ), Marvel´s Unsung Hero Don Heck , DAREDEVIL 47 Brother Take My Hand ( which is included in the MARVEL VISIONARIES - STAN LEE hardcover so this will be featured in an upcoming post ), DOCTOR STRANGE 6 Lift High The Veil of Fears , DOCTOR STRANGE 38 Eyes of the Beholder , DOCTOR STRANGE 41 Maelstrom at the End of Time and DOCTOR STRANGE 42 The Black Mirror ( which are all included in my ESSENTIAL DOCTOR STRANGE so they will also be featured in an upcoming post ) the Dracula / Doctor Strange crossover The Montesi Formula , DOCTOR STRANGE 183 Beware the Undying Ones , The Wedding of Dracula and his Gene Colan tribute in 5 parts ( 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 ).


COMIC BOOK RESOURCES shares some Mike Zeck love with their great post on Mike Zeck´s G. I. Joe covers and they even count down the Top Five Mike Zeck G. I. Joe covers . Last but not least I think I already linked to MARVEL COMICS ONLINE but just in case I didn´t here are the links to Der Eiserne ( Iron Man ) by Williams Verlag , Die ruhmreichen Rächer ( Avengers ) by Williams Verlag - which is where I found the Gene Colan splash page - and Die Fantastischen Vier by Bildschriftenverlag . Not only do they have a lot of the german splash pages but also all the editorial pages which is one of the reasons I was reluctant to post this since I know my friend Terry Hooper will spend a few days checking them out. As will I.

Coming from the Williams Verlag to another William we start Today´s celebrity birthday round up with William Shatner who turns 85 Today. Here in Germany they like to put him in the STAR TREK corner and label him as a one - hit - wonder but he has given us so much more than the coolest guy in science fiction with a hot babe on every space harbor or alien planet with T. J. HOOKER, the TEKWAR universe which he created and last but not least as a performer. I hope he´ll be around for a very long time.



Somebody who is also not a one hit wonder is Hubert Kah who was a big part of the Neue Deutsche Welle, a movement to get more german singing artists played on german radios which was sweeping the nation when I was in Realschule. Hubert was one of the main artists whose hits Der Goldene Reiter or Rufe Engel Null Sieben topped the german charts and even were translated to english. He celebrates his 55th anniversary.



We also have a comic related birthday as Bud Sagendorf who was one of the main artists on the POPEYE comic strip was born 101 years ago.


Somebody who knows more about the history of Popeye might have even done a whole post about him but since all I can say about him is that I was bummed that all the cartoons in the Deutsche Comic Bibliothek edition by the FAZ were by some other artist I am posting this cartoon instead.



As always I have kept the best birthday for last which is Hugo Egon Balder who turns 66. Anybody who has read my posts on dutch sexbomb Monique Sluyter knows that Hugo was the presenter of the most important german tv show for a whole generation of men and adolescent boys called Tutti Frutti on one of the first private tv stations RTL when they started out.


I have already done it in my post about ITALIAN SOCCER MOM SIMONA VENTURA but for the benefit of new readers who might have missed this I should probably explain what TUTTI FRUTTI was. There was a show called COLPO GROSSO from Italy with some dancers dressed as certain fruits who would dance to a special song and when the last refrain said " chin chin " they popped their tops and the candidates had to bet ( before they opened their tops ) if they had stickers of fruits on their breasts or not.

If they had fruits - or rather stickers with fruits - on them the candidates would win points and if they had enough of them they could get the women who presented the european nations to strip. Who could get the most women the most naked was the winner and the points they would score were called country points or Länderpunkte, a word that has become a household expression in Germany. It´s not unusual to hear german tv viewers say : Well, we´re not going to see any Länderpunkte in this movie. Anyway, the show was done to promote the Ecu, the new currency for a United Europe ( no, that really didn´t work out that well ) but the important part was getting to see girls strip. Although the men always couldn´t remember which girl represented which country and so often the hottest looking girls never got their turn. The one in the middle was my favorite so naturally she was picked very seldom if they picked her at all.


The show was adapted by various countries and it was called AY QUE CALOR in Spain and TUTTI FRUTTI in Germany. In Germany it was the show nobody watched ( or admitted watching ) but everybody saw.

When it was first shown in the 80s I was doing my military service in Munich and in my room there was cable tv - unlike at home. So every Sunday afternoon I took the ICE to Munich, bought some american comics at the station, went to the barracks, showered, shaved and watched TUTTI FRUTTI before going to sleep. And I always made sure to catch the beginning, I didn´t want to miss the big breasted hottie from the intro.


Boy, she was something else. I had some happy dreams back then.

And if you want to know who this Simona Ventura woman is and how she connects with TUTTI FRUTTI click the link above to head on over to her.


enki bilal



x o

Today I spent most of the day putting all the pictures I downloaded while doing my last post in the right folders but I nevertheless wanted to do a post. Since the Easter holidays started Yesterday I wanted to return to my KRABAT post because that movie was shown every Easter on german tv.


Probably because big parts of it take place during the holidays and the theme of the movie plays into the whole religious aspect of it. Anyway, I´m not sure if they are still showing the movie every Easter but since the Krabat post has been one of my most popular posts I spent some time fixing a few things so I could re - post it. So you may ask how I came to write about the awesomeness that is Krabat. Well, it´s one of my favorite movies and while it's pretty well known in Germany, Serbia and Russia because pupils there have to read it for school most people in the United States or outside of Germany and these countries never heard of it.

The first thing I ever saw of Krabat was the animated movie done in 1977 by Karel Zeman. If you have ever heard of it then probably under the title " The sorcerer's apprentice ". Now you might ask yourself why I decided to turn this into a MOVIE RUMMAGE TABLE post but you should be able to find all the movies I´m talking about here for relatively little money.

KRABAT - THE SORCERER`S APPRENTICE


I remember that I was still very young when I saw the stop motion movie KRABAT and it totally creeped me out. It was so terrifying that I had troubles sleeping for months and indeed you can say that the images haunt me to this day - such an impact did the movie have. Even if it's a movie aimed at kids there are some gruesome deaths, gory mutilations and other scary scenes in it. I don't know how it ever passed the censors of german television of the 70s but somehow it did. And I'm glad because it's one of the best animated movies I have seen in my whole life.

Even if the animation is a bit crude by today's standards it is amazing what wonderful effects they achieve in the film. The director of the movie Karel Zeman ( born on the 3th of November 1910 in Ostroměř; died on the 5th of April 1989 in Prague ) was one of the founders of the chezck animation movie and one of it's greatest innovators. His invention was that he integrated parts of real movie footage into animated sequences.


In Krabat there are many things like fire, smoke or snow falling within the animated sequences which gives it such a realistic feeling. I saw it again and it's astounding how modern the movie looks and how scary it still is.

Here is a four minute clip with subtitles from " Krabat - the sorcerer's apprentice " that shows how Krabat comes to work at the black mill.



Now what's the movie about ? It is based on Ottfried Preussler's famous childrens book KRABAT ( published as THE SATANIC MILL in english ) an interpretation of the wendish tale ( sorry, the wiki page is only available in german ) that dates back to the 17th century.


The movie tells the story of Krabat , a fourteen year old Wendish ( i.e. Sorbian ) beggar boy living in the eastern part of Saxony who is wandering through the region of Lusatia ( Lausitz in german ) during the Great Northern War ( Grosser Nordischer Krieg ) at the turn of the 18th century.


He tries to get by as good as he can but because of the war food is scarce and he has to sleep outside on most days. Traveling together with three companions and begging while singing Christmas carols they get some food but the winter is harsh and they soon have to part company again.


For three consecutive nights, a raven appears in his dreams and tells him to listen to his master's voice and seek out the black mill near the village of Schwarzkollm which he finally does when the hunger gets to him ( even if all the people he meets on the way try to discourage him from going to the mill ) where he becomes the new apprentice for to the master.

At first Krabat lives a good life at the mill and although he is working hard he has food on the table and a warm place to stay and a nice bed to sleep in. These are things most people take for granted and you only appreciate them if you don´t have them. But Krabat soon discovers that strange things happen around him and that the mill is actually a school for black magic and that he and the mill's journeymen are virtually prisoners there.

During the week they do the normal work of running the mill but on Friday nights the master initiates them into the strange rituals of the Art of Arts. The very first Friday the master turns Krabat into a raven, a trick the boy quickly learns to do himself.


The senior apprentice Tonda, Krabat's best friend and older brother figure, dies, ostensibly of an accident, on New Year's Eve in Krabat's first year at the mill. Tonda offers strangely little resistance to his own death.

Krabat's suspicions of foul play are further reinforced when another journeyman and friend, Michal, dies the following New Year's Eve. He soon realizes that the master is bound in an horrible pact : he must sacrifice one journeyman every year on New Year's Eve, in exchange for his powers. So every year on New Year's Eve the master and the senior apprentice go at it mano a mano - or better claw a tooth - in real mortal combat style in a magic " free for all no disqualification deathmatch " .


These are some of the most horrifying scenes of the movie with flashy strobe light effects, scary music and an overall frightening mood.

When Krabat first arrived at the mill it had stopped and when he agreed to become the new apprentice the river started to flow again and the mill continued to grind corn ( or whatever it is they grind there ). At the end of the year with the death of the senior apprentice it stopped again until a new apprentice joined their ranks. The whole scene in the movie is tainted in red and it looks like the river turns into a river of blood.


In the movie that is the circle of life and death and although Krabat hopes that they will not find another fool to live there he knows that the mill doesn't work till that happens. And because of the war there are enough starving beggars out there who are willing to make a deal with the devil.

The master never gets mentioned by name ( I guess it is assumed he made a pact with the devil ) and is more badass than Darth Vader. Besides the normal tasks the apprentices have to do to keep the mill working the master sends them on secret missions where they have to use their magic to trick people and basically rob them of their money and their valuables.


On one side the master uses this as another revenue stream to keep the mill running on the other hand he secretly sabotages the missions to take the senior apprentices out of commission - or at least to injure them so bad that his victory on the upcoming New Year's deathbattle is assured.


Wishing to take revenge for his friends' death, Krabat secretly trains with a friend to increase their magical strength so one of the two can win against the master. Whenever they can they break into the master's chamber and practice the spells of his big book of magic the KORRAKTOR.

Krabat´s quest is aided by a girl from the nearby village, a church singer whose real name is never mentioned and who is only called Kantora.


I think because Krabat meets her on Easter and is entranced by her beautiful singing her name is derived from the word Kantor ( in english cantor ) that is the name for the chief singer of a church choir. Krabat learns that to end the spell, his lover must challenge the master for him; then whoever loses the challenge, the master or the two lovers, will die.


I'm not going to say more because maybe you want to watch the movie ( it is embedded further below ) and there should be some surprises. Suffice it to say that KRABAT is one of the best movies I have ever seen.

HARDCORE HARRY POTTER or I GOT NINETY - NINE SPELLS

It's all pretty heavy for a kid's movie because aside from the horrific main story it also shows the horrors of war but since it's one of the best known tales in Germany nobody thought twice about it. The whole movie is like hardcore Harry Potter in fact it predates it by twenty years.

But while the Potter books treat magic and evil as something trivial that can be toyed with impunity it is by far more dangerous in the movie as Krabat learns to use extraordinary power at the price of enslaving his being to the evil miller. The Potter kids find they can defeat the most horrifying evils with a few magic tricks and a little cleverness and courage. Evil deserves more respect than that, because it is far more dangerous and powerful, working primarily through corruption of the will. The movie depicts this process with the miller breaking the wills of his apprentices through pointless work. Eventually, the men are so dominated that they acquiece in their own deaths, literally digging their own graves.


Another difference between Harry Potter and Krabat is that Krabat lives in a much harsher world. Yes, Harry's an orphan and an outsider and Voldemort is out to get him - buhuhu. Cry me a river, why don't cha ?

Krabat would give his right arm to live in a nice house like the Dursley's even if he had just a small chamber. He has to sleep outside in winter. And he has to beg for food. Yes, in Harry's world a war is on the horizon. But Krabat lives in real war. He doesn't visit a nice school like Hogwarts and has to work at a mill till exhaustion. Besides that he knows that his days are literally numbered because it's only a matter of time till the year when he is the senior apprentice and has to battle the master in a duel to the death on New Year´s EVE. He has to learn magic to survive because the death of one of the two in inevitable. So, yes, Harry had it easy.

Naturally there are also wonderful landscapes in the movie and quiet scenes like when Krabat spends time with the Kantora or his companions. It's just one of the masterpieces of animation art everyone should know.


Being based on the book of Ottfried Preussler it is full of christian symbolism and events like New Year's Eve and Easter play a big role but the movie is far from being preachy. It has some nice lessons about good and evil and naturally love conquers all but you never get the impression that somebody is trying to impose his values on the viewer.



Of course when I got older I realized that there had to be a book that this was based on so I sought it out at the local library. And the book that was written by Ottfried Preussler was the second book about Krabat I read.

KRABAT - THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE WORLD

Why the second book ? Because when I finally read the book KRABAT I was very surprised as I didn't pick the normal version that the movie was based on but a book written by Jurij Brezan called KRABAT - THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE WORLD. Well, at least I think it was.

Jurij Brezan ( jurij english wiki / jurij german wiki ) - born on the 9th of June 1916 died on the 12th of March 2006 - was the greatest sorbian writer, writing in sorbian and in german and he wrote three books about Krabat : The Black Mill ( 1968 ), The Transformation of The World ( 1967 ) and finally Krabat - The Preservation of The World ( 1993 ). His books have been translated in 25 languages. I'm not entirely sure which of the last two I read but judging from the dates at which the books were written it must have been Krabat - The Transformation of The World. I remember that the story was much broader in scope and Krabat takes on the role of a Dr. Strange type white magician who battles against the evil miller in a battle that literally takes them through centuries. There is much more magic and mythology involved ( things like the winter solstice play a great role ) and the end battle is like out of The Lord of The Rings.


If you only know the book by Ottfried Preussler or if you don't know any of the books you should read Jurij Brezan's adaptations. I only read one but it was one of the best fantasy books I have read. And of course you have to pick up the original book which is also a very captivating tale.

KRABAT - THE OTHER MOVIES ( WAIT, THERE`S MORE THAN ONE ? )

When I first wrote this post - almost eight years ago - they had just finished doing another adaption and things really looked promising.


And while I would never discourage anybody from seeing a german movie for me the movie has a small flaw because the producers did not have the cojones to even try to compete with the Harry Potter franchise. Which is probably the sole reason why you never heard of this film. It delivers on all other aspects with great actors, fantastic costumes and great special effects. But while it manages to realistically portray the horrors and desolation of war it just falls short because if any material had the potential to make the Harry Potter movies look like child´s play it´s this.

Still, the movie is good enough that it is worth watching despite this flaw.



Now what many people don´t know is that there is a third Krabat movie although technically speaking it was the first one since it was produced in 1975, two years before Karel Zelman´s great masterpiece in animation.

The Black Mill was produced by the DEFA studios in what used to be the German Democratic Republic. Under the russian regime there were many restrictions but like with the Digedag comics they found a way around that by making fairy tale movies since they were technical speaking german literature with historical meaning. The stories were sometimes filled with anti establishment messages ( just read the Münchhausen stories ) and they had action and fantasy in it. They really went all for it and produced what many consider the best german movies to this day.

The movie was on YouTube but I never finished watching it when I still had the chance. I have it in my amazon basket since forever and a day but I never get around to include it in my order. From what I have seen the production values are pretty good and the actors make their characters believable. It seems to be more aimed at kids but I have heard that there are some gruesome scenes like the Black Miller killing apprentices when he´s angry. This movie goes back to the traditional folk tale so people who are only familiar with the book by Ottfried Preussler might get a bit confused. There are some things they wont know like the master possessing The Book of Knowledge or that Krabat has a light circle around one of his arms. In the original tale he saved an old woman´s life and because she had nothing to repay him she gave him luck and ever since he´s had this light circle on his skin and he always had good fortune.


For Today´s kids the movie might seem a bit slow but there are many people who grew up with this version and prefer it to the newest movie.  

BUT WAIT, THERE`S MORE : KRABAT ON STAGE

Besides movies and books KRABAT is a big part of german culture and many schools perform it on stage like these kids from Lichtenstein.



But there are not only these plays by aficionados, even serious theaters like the Schauspiel Frankfurt can´t resist Otfried Preußler´s rich material.



Of course the evening is not complete without Krabat - The Musical.



There is a band called KRABAT and even a german hardrock band called ASP ( german wiki / english wiki ) that has many songs about Krabat.



Even though this is not the kind of post where you expect some links I managed to come up with some interesting ones I just have to include.

Chris Kubica at THE RUMPUS has an interesting post, The Last Book I Loved : Krabat about how this book literally changed his life, THE FREE LIBRARY even has an interview with Jurij Brezan by Gregory Wolf and if that is still not enough for you then you can read the pdf file of Adrienne Eva Muncy´s Seniors Honors Thesis Postmodern Mythology : Ecology, Cultural Survival, and Sorbian Folklore in the Works of Jurij Brezan . 

With all the videos I have already added up to this point you might think I could pass on the videos I include at the end of the post just once but I have too many of them. And sometimes I´m even flabbergasted myself about the high quality of the videos you can find on youTube. Like this great documentary that shows movie pioneer Karel Zeman at work.



Here is the english version of the Karel Zeman documentary for those who don´t understand german. I would have posted just one but the quality in the german version is much better. It says that this is in two parts but don´t despair if you can´t find part two, it´s only a minute long.



Since The Black Mill was deleted I wanted to add another fairy tale movie from DEFA. Here is The Twelve Months of which I had never heard before. I picked this because it´s beautifully animated and you can see that it is all hand drawn. Sometimes you have to remind kids that there were animated movies before all this computer animated, soulless crap they now flood cinemas and tv with. And I´m sure my sister would love this.



About which I have heard something is the Karel Zeman museum in Prague which is visited by Club de Animacion in 3D. Yep, we are totally putting as many languages as possible in this post and this clip is for my spanish speaking readers. Assuming there are some of those readers left.



And we are also totally educational with another documentary, this time about the comic with the Digedags ( which I mentioned in this post ) MOSAIK which was THE biggest comic in the German Democratic Republic.



Last but not least here´s another video from The Voice which I think fits very well into the overall topic of the post about traveling and being lost.



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The dead are dead and talking won´t bring them back to life.

For those who are currently spending the holiday at home and are maybe just a little bored right now I wanted to post something special and what could be better to get you comiker juices flowing than George Perez´ third issue of the brilliant FINAL CRISIS - LEGION OF THREE WORLDS ?


Strangely enough this is the third time I´m trying to post this, the first two tries I spent too much time looking for some original art pages.

As you will see I wasn´t very successful in finding any of them - or better I DID find some pages but the quality was not good enough to include them here. You see, I´m not including these pages just for curiosity´s sake but so that people can see George Perez´ great pencils. Which you can´t see if the page is not of a certain quality. So this will be a rather short post although I will include a piece of original art. But more about that later on. When I started this series of posts I was expecting some negative feedback but so far the responses have been overwhelmingly positive. Apparently a lot of people either passed up on this book or remember it fondly and as Today´s output by DC is rather questionable in quality it reminds people of why they used to love those comics. Now you might say : " But Subzero, this is only a five issue series and you are already three issues in ? There will be only two more glorious months of George Perez goodness left. "Don´t despair, with four issues of George Perez´ sci fi classic LOGAN`S RUN there will be enough George Perez related stuff to post with a possible AVENGERS BY GEORGE PEREZ and a WORLD`S GREATEST COMIC ARTISTS : GEORGE PEREZ spotlight on it´s way. And since I like to have things balanced once Legion of Three Worlds is over I will start with the first twelve issues of the Mark Waid penned The Brave and The Bold which George Perez drew ( with a little help by Jerry Ordway ). I already have all the pages laid out with a few original art pages although I hope to find a few more before I have to start that.

But that´s enough preamble for now so let´s get in media res with issue 3 of Final Crisis - Legion of Three Worlds. As usual too much cool and crazy stuff has happened in the first two issues to recap it all here so if you have not done so already check out my posts on issue one and issue two .


Now you may have noticed that in the story Geoff Johns makes reference to the first Legion of Three Worlds adventure in which the three Legions came together to aid the Tornado Twins ( the son and daughter of Barry Allen and Iris West and the parents of Xs from the Legion ) against Zoom and his 25th century speed soldiers. And you might say : " Wow, that sounds like a cool story. Where can I read it ? " Well, you can´t. Because it was never written. Geoff Johns dropped the hint of that story though it hadn´t happened yet and he obviously meant to write the story at some point in the future ( no pun intended ) but he never got around to do it. And now with the NEW52 obliterating the old continuity I doubt we will ever get to read it. Are there even the Tornado Twins in the NEW52 ? Sometimes I wonder how that story would have played out. Anyway, I´m really behind on my SHOWCASE PRESENTS : THE LEGION OF SUPER HEROES so I don´t know if this is something Geoff Johns came up with on his own or if there were seeds for this in the olden days Legion stories.


Now before we come to the video section there was one piece of original art by George Perez I want to share with my readers. I already posted a few colored pages ( don´t ask me in which post ) of the first AVENGERS / JUSTICE LEAGUE crossover that never got made. Well, here´s a page that is labeled as being from that same story. Can anybody back me up here ?


And with that we start the video section which heads off with a celebrity birthday from Yesterday but since this post was supposed to go online Yesterday I guess that´s okay. In any case I just had to give a shout out to my girl Mariah Carey who turned 46 Yesterday if my sources are correct.


Because some online pages say she was born 1969 while others say it was 1970. I´m going with 1970 because that was the date that was official when I wrote my first Mariah Carey posts back on the old boob blog.

Another thing that´s hard to get official accuracy on is Mariah Carey´s breastsize. I googled it Today but the " official " size of 38D is totally bogus. I mean around the time of the Annual Golden Globe Awards in 2010 her breastsize was officially confirmed as 38DD and by 2012 when she did the Christmas video with Justin Bieber her jingle bells had grown another few sizes bigger so they must have been 40DD or at least 39DD. So maybe I´m biased here but she doesn´t look like a 38D woman to me, sorry.

Anyway, the videos I post Today are special because I have been looking for them a long time. I think I first posted the picture above and the one below of Mariah´s big gold discs stretching her blue shirt in 2009. It took me a while before I found more pictures of this set but I had no idea from which performance this was. Daimn, Mariah really looks so hot .... drool. 


A few years after that I found another set of pictures and finally learned that this was from a live performance on The Today Show in 2003. But I still couldn´t find any videos of this no matter on how many websites I looked. Strangely enough I did eventually find videos of this just a few months back when I had stopped looking for them and on YouTube of all places. I haven´t posted them yet as if I was waiting for her birthday. 


Now if you have seen the post when it first went up you might have noticed that there were a few hours between when I started adding the videos and when I added the two animated GIFs with Mariah Carey.

The reason for that is that I wanted to do something special for Mariah´s birthday - if I did not do a full post on her like she deserved - and at least add some cool GIFs but after a quick search on the internet I had to come to terms that the ones I was looking for were either nowhere to be found or too small. So I had to do all the screenshots and because Mariah Carey was too small in some of them cut them to the right size. Which was especially difficult when the camera was swaying from one side to the other. All things considered I think I did a great job. The GIF below is of course the best part of her OBSESSED video and I have to say that I was a bit obsessed with the video for a while. Mariah looks very different than in the videos below but I think she got bigger in all the right places. She definitely looks happier since she stopped worrying about her weight.


Three things I would take to a deserted island ? Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson and Halle Berry. I´m bending the rules a bit by posting two videos of Mariah but it´s her birthday and it took me long enough to find them. There is a third one from this performance on YouTube but the quality is even worse then in these two so you would only injure your eye sight. 




Since I didn´t want to post another New Teen Titans or Avengers video with George Perez art - they get kind of repetitive after a while and I want to keep some for upcoming New Teen Titans posts - I thought about another artist who worked on the Legion of Super Heroes where he delivered a legendary run as well as on such books as Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Green Lantern / Green Arrow and of course Warlord.


He was one of the main artists on Ehapa´s GRÜNE LEUCHTE comics I read as a kid - the other artist was Joe Staton - and I always enjoyed his stuff. I never understood why DC never did a collected edition of all his Green Lantern issues because they did three or four different versions of Neal Adam´s Green Lantern run. At least they have started reprinting his brilliant Green Arrow series now that the Arrow tv series makes people interested in Green Arrow comics. Maybe it will take a Green Lantern tv hit series to finally see more Green Lantern by Mike Grell paperbacks.


Here is an inteview with Mike Grell about the books he worked on.



In issue 3 of Legion of Three Worlds Dawnstar, Polar Boy and Wildfire travel back in time to the day when Lex Luthor starts loosing his hair so I thought it might be a good time to remind people why Lex Luthor is bald.



Sometimes I am just too tired for my brain to work properly or else I would have made the connection between the Legion of Super Heroes and Captain Future sooner and could have posted more Captain Future videos.

Because not only do both series take place in the future and were adapted successfully into animation but Edmond Hamilton, the creator of Captain Future also wrote comics. And guess which ones ? That´s right, he wrote Legion comics. So here is the first part about Captain Future from Der phantastische Adventskalender which focuses on the cartoon. As you might have guessed by the title it´s in german and if you don´t want to wait until I post the next video head on over to his YouTube page where he has more videos on the Captain Future pulps and other comic stuff.



Last but not least here another video for my german readers. It´s an animated fairy tale movie called The Hunchbacked Horse ( Das bucklige Pferdchen ) which I found while making the post about Krabat.



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Today she celebrates her 51st birthday so I thought it´s about time re - post my original post - especially since I added a lot of new animated GIFs to it ( I took some old ones down but you can see them in the original post ). Simona is one of the hottest MILFs on italian tv and maybe in the whole world. I first saw her waaay back when we could still receive italian tv via the normal tv cable. She was the presenter of QUELLI CHE IL CALCIO which was probably the best show about soccer - EVER.


QUELLI CHE IL CALCIO is a sports - oriented variety program that is broadcast live from Milan. The popular show mixes coverage of Italian Serie A soccer in real time with comedy and music. And hot women.

Yes, that´s the difference between italian tv and german tv : in Italy a show about soccer has comedy, movie stars, interviews, music acts, a megahot presenter and a dance group with various incredible sexbombs. In Germany it´s some old guys sitting around a table and drinking beer.

 
But back to the best soccer tv program on the planet.  Not only did they have the hot Simona Ventura presenting the show they also had a ballet with THE italian Ueber Power Girl of all time EVER : Federica Ridolfi.


Aside from participating in the usual dance numbers with the other girls of the ballet troupe Federica also has her solo performances which are ultrahot ( although italian fashion designers Dolce & Gabbana weren´t too impressed with her dance when they visited the show, those dudes were so gay, and I don´t mean that as an insult, just stating the fact ).



Anyway, when men in Italy think about soccer they think about Federica.


But back to Todays birthday babe : Simona also hosted X - FACTOR


and ISOLA DEI FAMOSI ( the italian version of SURVIVOR ) because of her good sense of humor and a body that just won´t quit. She has the best outfits on tv ever, is not afraid to show her stuff and while Simona´s not mega stacked she has a lot of sex appeal no matter if she´s wearing a shirt with a bit of cleavage, a hot teacher´s outfit, doing a super sexy wet carwash or dons a black dress that barely covers her big talents.


And she also bends over a lot especially when her impressive boobs could fall out of her dress at any given minute. Really, she bends over a lot !!!


Now with movies or comics I could just tell you which ones were the best and you would know where to get them. It´s not that easy with a tv show.

Especially past episodes from tv shows from Italy. I don´t even know if the shows are still on air since I have no access to italian tv. So it´s going to be a lot of pictures and clips. I know that some readers have a problem with that but I don´t want to put any download links on the blog and I also don´t want to link to other websites that are not safe for work. In any case most of these links or websites are deleted sooner or later so I tried to cram the best stuff with Simona Ventura in this post. Bare with me.

Here are some of her best tv appearances : sexy teacher / hot secretary.


And here´s a clip from that show :



Simona also did her version of Jessica Simpson´s carwash video THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKING - at least that´s what I think it´s supposed to be - and she really goes all out on this one and gets totally soaking wet. The guy in the car ( I don´t know who the lucky dude is but I envy him ) understandably goes totally crazy inside. Better than viagra !


And if you don´t believe me here´s the clip so judge for yourself :



Another of Simona´s best tv moments was on ISOLA DEI FAMOSI where she wore a dress that was obviously waaay tighter than she anticipated.


During the show she was constantly fiddling with it because she could obviously not breathe - at least not without spilling out of her top.


Now she´s in quite the dilemma because on one side she was desperately trying to prevent the dress from squeezing her breasts up to her chin. But then you see her pause with her hand grabbing the zipper, realizing that if she loosens the dress ( or if her breasts destroy the zipper which´s more likely ) she might show more than she wants. In the end she decides to let it be even as more and more of her bosom is squeezed out of the top.


 That´s the best part and when she bows down during her entrance.


Sorry boys, but I couldn´t find a clip a clip of that on YouTube so I had to upload one and the quality is not so good but it´s better than nothing.


And it gets better : on X - FACTOR Simona was wearing various black dresses with such impressive cleavages it left all males speechless. Simona really knows how to work that cleavage ! You go girl !


Here are some clips from the shows :







Next up is another special video. I think Simona has lost a bet and has to do the famous " chin chin " performance from the COLPO GROSSO show.


For my non - european readers out there : there was a show called COLPO GROSSO from Italy with some dancers dressed as certain fruits who would dance to a special song and when the last refrain said " chin chin " they popped their tops and the candidates had to make a bet ( before they opened their tops ) if they had stickers of fruits on them or not.


If they had fruits - or rather stickers with fruits - on them the candidates would win points and if they had enough of them they could get the women who presented the european nations to strip. Who could get the most women the most naked was the winner and the points they would score were called country points or Länderpunkte, a word that has become a household expression in Germany. It´s not unusual to hear german tv viewers say : Well, we´re not going to see any Länderpunkte in this movie. Anyway, the show was done to promote the Ecu, the new currency for a United Europe ( no, that really didn´t work out that well ) but the important part was getting to see girls strip. Although the men always couldn´t remember which girl represented which country and so often the hottest looking girls never got their turn. This one was my favorite.


The show was adapted by various countries and it was called AY QUE CALOR in Spain and TUTTI FRUTTI in Germany. In Germany it was the show nobody watched ( or admitted watching ) but everybody saw.


When it was first shown in the 80s I was doing my military service in Munich and in my room there was cable tv - unlike at home. So every Sunday afternoon I took the ICE to Munich, bought some american comics at the station, went to the barracks, showered, shaved and watched TUTTI FRUTTI before going to sleep. And I always made sure to catch the beginning, I didn´t want to miss the big breasted hottie from the intro.


Boy, she was something else. I had some happy dreams back then.


In Germany the show was hosted by Hugo Egon Balder, Tiziana and Monique Sluyter, who may be responsible for my fixation on Power Girl.


I mean it must have been around the same time when I read Bart Sear´s version of Power Girl in the pages of JUSTICE LEAGUE EUROPE and when saw Monique´s striptease as Marilyn Monroe on TUTTI FRUTTI.



In the old comics artist Wally Wood kept making Power Girl´s breasts bigger and bigger to see how far he could take it. Or at least that´s the urban legend. Fact is that the artists after him drew her with normal proportions .... or what is considered normal for superheroines. Till Bart Sears took over the character and buffed her up and returned her to her signature breast size - at least for up until the whole NEW 52 fiasko.


For me Bart Sear´s version is still the definite version of Power Girl.


But back to Monique Sluyter. I think she´s dutch and she was one of the girls on TUTTI FRUTTI. I have to say I liked her more than Tiziana who always played the goofy part. Not that Monique couldn´t be goofy and would have problems with the german pronunciation ( although her accent could drive men crazy ). But she always did it with charme and some tongue in cheek humor. It also helped that she is totally hot.


Now, back to Simona, she also has to do the chin chin dance even if she´s allowed to wear a bra beneath. Although she has to do it two times.



But sexy Simona can even top that. Here she is with a stunning strapless black dress that´s just a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen !!!


It´s a wonder that her impressively well rounded star qualities ( 36DD ! ) don´t fall out the way she´s leaning forward so far and so repeatedly.


Man, this woman is just too much ! The top of her dress can barely contain the wonder twins from spilling out. If only we were that lucky !!!


Anyway, thankfully I also found that clip since it´s her best clip EVER !



So, this post has gotten longer than expected - and with a lot more clips - but finally I got to give a shout out to one of my favorite tv cult sirens.

Manny happy returns Simona and Viva Italia !

To close things here´s a compilation with some of her breast moments :



New to the blog ? Everything you need to know about TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN :top ten posts / more posts of interest / best of the best

Since lately a lot of people are posting their " comic hauls " on YouTube or their websites I thought I might write a post about my last comic order I just received since it ties into the topic of Disney´s slow - not so secret - price increase from 4.00 $ to 5.00 $ for a single floppy comic book.


And I know, for the moment they are only doing it for their " special books " but come on, we all know how these things work. Or at least the ones who have not started reading or collecting comics Yesterday and have been around the block a few times know how this thing will play out.

First they do it on their special books, then it´s going to be more books, then it´s going to be almost every book and they it will be every book. At first there may be some extra content but soon it will be back to the regular page count with no extra content and there may be even less pages in the end. Don´t believe me ? The last time they increased the price from 3.00 $ to 4.00 $ they got rid of most of the letter columns.

Anyway, I think 4.00 $ for a comic is already a hefty price and I really thought that the independent comics would use this ocassion to kick the big two´s butt because they are finally at the same price point while most of the independents deliver far better entertainment than the drivel you get from the big two hucksters. But that didn´t happen. I don´t know if they were too scared to go up against the big guys but in my opinion there was an opportunity wasted here. In the end it was Disney and DC themselves who drove readers away and into the arms of other publishers by flushing decades of continuity down the toilet to make a quick buck. 


Now you might have read my post about all the Valiant comics I got for 50 cents, 40 cents and less along with a few other bargain books ( to which I still have to do the follow up post, but it´s coming, promise ) and for the longest time I have been planning to do a post about all the great comics UNDER 4.00 $ I have in my collection which are most of the specials and prestige format comics as well as all the MARVEL MONSTER issues. By god ! This is a 100 pages comic for 3.00 $, so what can you possibly put into a 4.00 $ comics that is worth spending one extra dollar ? And you should be able to get all MARVEL MONSTERS for cover price since they are not rare. 


So I want to go over the books I got on my last comic order to see what you can get for 4.00 $ or 5.00 $ these days. I have to mention that the online dealer I ordered it from had a special trade and hardcover sale where he sold a lot of his inventory for a really low price and that all the books would be labeled as " very fine " or " fine " which means they had some minor damage like being bent or the cover had printing damage.

None of these books would be labeled as new but it is what you would get from another collector or at a reduced price sales. And it´s not like you can get books in brand new condition for that price. I just ordered the second trade of the new UNCANNY X - FORCE series for under 4.00 € from amazon and I got the first one for around the same price. They also offer the AVENGERS ASSEMBLE hardcover - yes, the hardcover - which contains 8 issues for 5.55 €. So it´s not unreasonable you can get comics cheap.

FOR 3 EUROS - THE MIGHTY CRUSADERS : ORIGIN OF A SUPER - TEAM

My brother always tells me that I buy comics I already own and while that is true for some of the books we will find down the line this is not the case with this one. Well, unless you count the horrible STAR - TEAM pocket books from german publisher Condor Comics which might have reprinted some of the material collected in this 96 page paperback.


Now when I say horrible I don´t mean that the comics inside were horrible - although many of Today´s readers might say so - but the production qualities and especially the translation to the german language was bad.

One of the infamous staples of the Condor pocket books was they used typed lettering which reduced the amount of words you could put into the caption boxes and speech balloons. And because of the reduced size of the pocket books that was reduced even further. So often a sentence like " You will never get away with this, dastardly villain ! " was reduced to a simple " Bah ! " in the german version. Anyway, this is a trade I have been looking for quite some time and which I would have bought sooner if I had been able to find it somewhere. The normal price for it is 12.95 $ but since I could not find it at other comic shops I can´t tell you what the current market price for this would be. But I can tell you that if you want to buy it from amazon you have to pay 34 Euros and more. At first I was afraid this would not be the original comics I knew from my youth because in the info about the trade Joe Staton was mentioned as the artist and I don´t remember him from the Crusaders series but he only did the cover. 


Since you all are reading Terry Hooper´s brilliant COMIC BITS ONLINE blog religiously ( or at least you should if you have a soul ) I don´t need to explain who the Mighty Crusaders are and this trade reprints - as the title suggests - their origin which took place in FLY - MAN issues 31 to 33 and finally in the first issue of their own comic book MIGHTY CRUSADERS 1. 


The art is very different from what I remember since I came to the series around the sixth or seventh trade and by that time Rich Buckler and Tony DeZuniga were on the book but I always wanted to know how this particular super team came about and now at last I can read that story.


FOR 3.50 EUROS - THE DARK TOWER : THE GUNSLINGER BORN HC

Here we have a comic where I already own all the single issues. But since it is the hardcover and I didn´t already have that I just had to grab this.

Especially at that price. I switched to the hardcovers with the third or fourth story so with this I can pimp my porn shelf even if I have to shuffle the books around a bit. Although that will happen anyway once I have finished reading Black Tower´s THE HOOPER INTERVIEWS phone book ( review pending ) and have to find a space for all the Black Tower stuff he sent me lately. There is not much to say about the series as either you know the books by Stephen King or not. The comic adaptions have slipped a bit in the later part but here it´s all good since this is the first one.


And the art by Jae Lee - either you love it or you hate it. Because this is not exactly a new book and there have been two german versions - one in the regular trade and hardcover format and one in an ovesized hardcover format - and an american omnibus released this may account for the low price at a very good condition. I have to admit that I´m way behind on my DARK TOWER comics because I kept waiting for that next hardcover that never arrived. I´m not sure if the decision to release it in softcover only was due to low sales but I have the next ones in my online basket and I´m just waiting for the right moment. Or for more money to come my way.

FOR 4.35 EUROS - JACK OF FABLES : THE FULMINATE BLADE

This trade is significantly thinner than the one I already have but with a regular price tag of 15 bucks on your average trade I´m not complaining.

I always meant to get in on this series but so far all I bought is the FABLES crossover with JACK OF FABLES which was offered at one of amazon´s Three Trades For 15 Euros sales. Which means I also only paid 5 bucks for each of the three trades. And the first issue as a VERTIGO ESSENTIAL although I might have already given it away for free during my last Christmas Contest. It´s hard to keep track of the comics I give away.


The story is not about Jack but rather seems to be a solo story starring his son, Jack Frost, who some of you might remember from the RISE OF THE GUARDIANS animated movie. Not the same guy though. This self contained story is probably better for readers who are not that familiar with the FABLES world like myself so this might be a plus. The art is your typical VERTIGO art which means it´s capable but you wouldn´t buy this on the art alone. I guess the last VERTIGO comics I bought because of the art are iZOMBIE ( I just loooove the tv series ) and AMERICAN VAMPIRE.

FOR 4.91 EUROS - UNWRITTEN 8 : ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLDS

More VERTIGO stuff. I got trade 8 for 4.91 Euros and trade 9 for 5.05 Euros so without splitting hairs I got both for ten bucks so let´s say five bucks each. Any way, we are now officially in 5.00 dollar book territory.

THE UNWRITTEN is another of these VERTIGO books where I found the premise very interesting : celebrity Tom Taylor was the inspiration for the main character in a series of best selling kids books in the vein of HARRY POTTER written by his father. The only difference being that the things in the books are real and come back to haunt him. For the usual reasons of limited budget and time I never got around to read the series - although I always found the covers by artist Yuko Shimizu exceptionally interesting.


I don´t know if starting at the back end is really such a great idea but when opportunity knocks you have to answer and it worked on DOCTOR WHO where I started with The End of Time which was the last story with David Tennant. Sometimes knowing how things are going to end helps and makes you more interested in what came before. And in any case, this is not the finale of THE UNWRITTEN since there are two more trades left.

FOR 5.23 EUROS - THE SPECTRE TRADE 2 : THE WRATH OF GOD

Okay, this is more than 5 bucks but I can´t do a post on only half the books I ordered and even if this is just a bit over the limit I want to include the following ones - which go more over that line - ad addendum.

Funnily enough I already own one issue contained in this trade. It´s issue 16 which was drawn by the great Jim Aparo and inked by the no less talented Kelley Jones. Each one of these artists alone would be reason enough to buy the issue so when I found out that this issue existed ( as always through the research for a post on this blog ) I had to buy it.

Now the issue is also contained in this second trade from the acclaimed run by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake who then went on to do an equally celebrated run on MARTIAN MANHUNTER. It collects issues 13 to 22 in which The Spectre deals with the topic of war which is always a heavy subject. Aside from one issue by Joe Phillips, one by Joe Ridgeway and the aforementioned Jim Aparo issue this is all Tom Mandrake art.


The trade has an impression around the cover but this is one I bought merely for the reading. I haven´t finished with it yet but so far people think that The Spectre might be out of control so in the next issues he will go up against Superman who will be wielding the Spear of Destiny. This is such a great series and this trade ties in with so much stuff - Eclipso, The Justice Society, John Constantine, The Phantom Stranger, Zatanna, Etrigan, Superman - that I would have gotten eventually even if I had to pay full price. This one and the MARTIAN MANHUNTER series are fantastic reads and not all of it has been collected in trade, in fact the second trade of THE SPECTRE just came out in December 2014 and the second one of MARTIAN MANHUNTER in September the same year.

I just love all the characters in this trade so this is another great addition to my comic collection. Did I already mention that this is a 20 $ book ?   

FOR 5.56 EUROS - FANTASTIC FOUR VISIONARIES GEORGE PEREZ 1

Speaking about 20 $ books, this is the crown jewel of the order and the reason why I couldn´t wait any longer - I didn´t want to risk to miss this.


Everybody who has read more than two posts on this blog knows I´m a huge George Perez fan and although I have this issues in various formats - ESSENTIAL, german pocket books, spanish comics - since I haven´t the money to buy them all in MARVEL MASTERWORKS this is the next thing.


Apart from the cover being slightly bent this trade is in superb condition and while most comic historians gloss over this period of the book in favor of the runs by Jack Kirby and John Byrne this was in my ball park.


It seems that my favorite times have always been the periods between great creative teams - as my posts on The Overmind Saga and the Epic Collection All In The Family prove - but I loved this. Luke Cage, Hero For Hire, on the Fantastic Four, human Ben Grimm and his Thing exoskeleton, the evil Reed Richards a.k.a. The Brute from Counter Earth, Salem´s Seven and through it all crazy George Perez drawing his behind off with mindboggling amount of detail. If something got smashed George drew the fragments so detailed that you could put it together like a puzzle.


As the name implies this collects the issues by George Perez and those issues ONLY so the first trade collects FANTASTIC FOUR 164 to 167, 170, 176 to 178 and 184 to 186 without the covers done by Jack Kirby, which are included on an additional page. So the completionists may be better suited with the ESSENTIALS, MARVEL MASTERWORKS or various other trades which reprint the series in chronological order, I couldn´t resist. 


FOR 6.31 EUROS - CLANDESTINE : BLOOD RELATIVE HARDCOVER 

Another piece of resistance and while the dust jacket has seen better days everything beneath it is in pristine condition. I´m a sap for Alan Davis art although I have to say I´m not sure if the same coloring was used in the single issues of this second, five issue mini series here.


I don´t remember the coloring being so flat and muddy but I´m too lazy to look for the issues now. In any case it´s a great read with an Alan Davis clearly enjoying what he does and it´s a pity the series didn´t have more success. Which might have to do with the fact that the Marvel guys did not promote this book nearly as much as its mutant of the month series.


Aside from the books listed here I ordered two black and white phone books, SHOWCASE PRESENTS SUPERMAN 4 which contains the famous Superman Under A Red Sun story and ESSENTIAL DEFENDERS 4 for 9.19 Euros each. I would have included more as there was a dozen more I would have liked but I had to cut it short because of my limited budget and because my mother would have blown a gasket if two boxes full of comics had arrived here. I wanted to mention this special trade sale on the blog but before my order arrived all the remaining books were already at their regular prices. I think I just got my order in at the last minute.

Speaking about cutting things short it´s once again time to wrap things up as I have spent enough time sitting on this chair as it is. I hope this post was interesting for some and you know why for me 5.00 $ comics are just a crazy idea. Next time we will be back to our usual shenanigans. And speaking about our usual shenanigans, since I will probably not get to do a post Tomorrow ( because I will be adding the standard bell and whistles to this post ) I wanted to mention tv cult sire Krista Allen who celebrates her 45th birthday on that day. The brunette sexbomb played Clark Kent´s hot new teacher on SMALLVILLE, Jim Carey´s new neighbor with the big boobs in LIAR LIAR, the sexy oracle on CHARMED, vr honey Maitreya and the human template the stripper Jade Blue Afterglow on X - FILES but she is probably best known for her role of Jenna Avid on BAYWATCH HAWAII.


Now my readers outside of Germany probably don´t know what BAYWATCH HAWAII is and for the longest time I thought it was a BAYWATCH spin off.

Like BAYWATCH NIGHTS. So I was very surprised when I went looking on amazon for that and couldn´t find it. That´s because in Germany they titled seasons 10 and 11 of the regular show BAYWATCH HAWAII which exists nowhere else. Only in Germany there is a BAYWATCH HAWAII. I don´t know if they felt the need to give it an extra push because they exchanged the whole cast and relocated to Hawaii or they thought the german viewers would be too confused in any case it was a weird thing.

BAYWATCH was really big in the 90s and it is like THE ultimate babe tv show. No kidding. No other show had more actresses who were featured in Playboy or playmates. If there was a hot babe during the time the show was produced you can bet that she´s in - at least - one of the episodes.

You can say what you about David Hasselhoff but he sure has an eye for hot sexbombs and he is my hero for putting them on tv. So it´s no wonder that Krista Allen was added to the Who´s Who of male fantasies that was going through the revolving door on that show like Pamela Anderson, Carmen Elektra, Tracy Bingham, Teri Weigel, Jenny Mc Carthy, Jasmine Bleeth, Donna D´Erico, Kelly Monaco, Brande Roderick, Stacy Kamano, Nicole Eggert, Mitzi Capture, Gina Lee Nolin and Erika Eleniak before her.


Besides that Krista played famous french softsex nympho Emmanuelle in 8 made for tv movies. As she did it when her body was in prime condition she was able to believable portray the sex machine with the high moan factor who merciless milks men until they can´t remember on which side the doorknob is. The show had some strange 3D effects - because that was the new thing at that time - and the stories were not that great but it was all worth it to see Miss Allen get her freak on. Whoa, did she ever. She´s like a force of nature. Here it was shown on PRO7 but so far I haven´t seen the DVDs anywhere. Maybe I´ll have to buy them in Spain. Because I have no clips from that I can´t make any animated GIFs but if I had any I couldn´t post them anyway. So here´s to Krista Allen, many happy returns and thanks for the mammaries. And if you haven´t seen them do yourself a favor and hunt down those Emmanuelle tv movies.

I wanted to include a video about one of the George Perez issues from the Fantastic Four Visionaries trade but instead here is one about FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL 14 in which Nicholas Scratch and The Salem Seven return.



I couldn´t find a video about ClanDestine and since I already posted the Alan Davis episode of iFanboy here is a video about one of his greatest series Excalibur. Which strangely enough also wasn´t promoted as much as Marvel´s other mutant books. A mere coincidence ? I think not.



The next season of Doctor Who will not start before 2017 with a 2016 Christmas Special so in the meantime it´s back to watch the old episodes again. Thankfully I was busy with binge watching the new SUPERGIRL series so I could watch the crossover episode with THE FLASH but for the less fortunate here is a cool Doctor Who moment with Peter Capaldi.



In keeping with the topic of the post here is a video for my german readers with Der Blitz especially for those new comic collectors.



To close things out here´s Dami Im´s performance of Purple Rain during her second week on The X - Factor Australia where she once again gets a standing ovation. I posted this before but had to opt for the Mariah Carey videos since it was Mariah´s birthday and I don´t want more than one music videos on a single post. Unless it is a celebrity birthday post.



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I think I have fallen a bit behind with posting these since I didn´t post an issue in February. Maybe I can squeeze in the next issue at the end of this month but for now we continue with the fourth issue of LOGAN`S RUN written by David Kraft, pencils by George Perez, inks by Klaus Janson.


Now you might have noticed that I chose a different title for this post.

Duh, of course this post has a different title than the ones before because it´s a different post. That´s not what I meant. All the other George Perez post titles start with BY GEORGE ! but in this case the title of the comic are too long to keep the post title to one paragraph which is what I like to do here. Unless there is a big reason for a particular title I try to keep all the post titles to one paragraph. The other thing is that the comic has actually two titles, the one on the cover Dread Sanctuary ! and the one on the splash page Enter the Eternal Ice - World of Box !  Because the first one is almost identical to the title of our last issue I decided to go with the second one and because I think it sounds better. Again, to keep the post title to one paragraph I took the liberty of shortening it a bit. As usual there is no recap of the previous issues since I don´t want to spoil anything. Who has seen the movie knows what happens and those who haven´t seen it - what are you waiting for ? As usual here are the links for the previous issues ( issue 1 / issue 2 / issue 3 ) and now let´s continue.


You may have noticed that the announcement for the next issue reads Next : End - Run ! The Final Chapter ! and while it is indeed the end of David Kraft and George Perez´ adaption of the movie it is not the end of this series. Intrigued ? Return next time for the stunning explanation.

Before coming to the video section there is one celebrity birthday I want to mention. Soft sex / erotic movie / b - movie cult siren Mia Zottoli who celebrates her 48th birthday Today. There are a few more birthdays in the video section but I wanted to mention this one apart because there will be no video for this as the videos I can post don´t have a very good quality or don´t show enough of Miss Zottoli´s qualities and the ones where you can see more of her are not safe to post. So I spent some considerable time Yesterday and Today making two GIFs that are safe for posting. I made this one below for Terry Dodson so he learns what this looks like.


The month of April really has a lot of hot sexbombs that celebrate their birthday that month and with Krista Allen, Mia Zottoli and Nikki Fritz ( who celebrates her birthday Tomorrow ) this was always an extra busy time for me back when I had my old boob blog. This is almost like the trifecta of erotic actresses but not quite as my top three erotic actresses are Nikki Fritz, Mia Zottoli and Shauna OBrien - in that order. Too bad nobody ever bothered to make an erotic movie starring all three of them.

Back to our cult siren of the day, since I still hope to give Mia Zottoli a solo post at some point I´m not going to put everything from my old post here. If you watch b - movies you have probably seen her in some movies and if you watch erotic movies chances are very high you have seen her take her clothes off. She had some breast surgery early in her career from which she benefitted greatly as you can see in her best best movies which are The Mummy´s Kiss, Fast Lane to Las Vegas and Sinful Temptations.


Especially the last one is my favorite Mia Zottoli movie not only because she´s in her best physical condition in this one but also because it has a lot of nude scenes with her in such a relatively short film. So check out her movies - if you haven´t yet - and many happy returns, Mia Zottoli, and as always good luck, stay healthy and thanks for the mammaries !

We continue with Ingo Insterburg, one of the founding members of the german comedy quartett Insterburg & Co who has achieved the ripe age of 82 Today. To people of my generation you don´t have to explain who he is : besides being part of the german kabarett bedrock he has appeared in four movies and written several books. He is famous for playing countless instruments among them many strange ones he invented himself often made out of kitchen appliances like a saxophone he built out of a waste water tube. Here is one of Insterburg & Co´s biggest hits.



Our next birthday is 79 years old actor Billy Dee Williams best known for playing Gotham´s district attorney Harvey Dent in the first BATMAN movie with Michael Keaton ...... oh who am I kidding ? He´s of course best known for playing Lando Clarissian in the first STAR WARS trilogy back when Marvel Comics first had the license for the movie adaptions.


At the moment Disney is flooding the market with new STAR WARS series but I have to say I´m more interested in reading the old ones, green rabbit included and all. I would like to read those in nice hardcovers but since the only hardcovers so far are those incredibly expensive omnibus I will probably have to apt for the trades ( although the first omnibus is on amazon at a current price of 70 bucks which is not bad for a 125 dollar book ). So far I haven´t seen the new STAR WARS movie - although I have heard only good things about it so far from people who have seen it - so here´s a little serenade to celebrate. May the Force be with you, Billy.



The birthday keep coming with Michael Rooker who turns 61. He has done a whole slew of movies too many to list them all here but to Today´s generation he´s Yondu from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

Which - believe it or not - ties into Today´s topic. You see, one of the series David Kraft also wrote at Marvel is DEFENDERS and GIANT - SIZE DEFENDERS 5 reintroduced The Guardians of the Galaxy to Marvel readers. It is included in my MARVEL MASTERWORKS DEFENDERS 4, as well as their first appearance in MARVEL SUPERHEROES 18 which was penciled by the great Gene Colan so I can finally read those stories.


Since Today´s pop culture afficionados probably don´t know very much about those guys here´s a little video to lay down some basic Guardians of the Galaxy knowledge dating back to the original team with Yondu.



Another Marvel movie related birthday - or is that Disney movie related birthday - is Paul Rudd from the almost equally successful ANT MAN.


I know he played the Scott Lang Ant Man and not the original Hank Pym Ant Man but there are not that many videos about Scott Lang on YouTube. So I hope that this one will do to celebrate his 47th anniversary. I hope Michael Douglas stays healthy so he can reprise his role one more time.



So Today final video is a cartoon video or rather kind of a cartoon video. Usually I end with a music video but since we technically have two of those ( Insterburg & Co and Star Wars ) I decided to change things.


You may have noticed that I always talk about what the new generation doesn´t know about comics and other pop culture related stuff so here´s a video where we really find out about that. I have watched quite a few of these and the ones where they are confronted with typewriters or old telephones are hilarious but I must warn you : they can become quite addictive. Anyway, I have to say I didn´t recognize all of the theme songs.



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While doing the video section for my last post I realized that Today would have been Gil Kane´s 90th birthday and while I still haven´t gotten around to read the ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN hardcover that collects his issues I just had to pay a little homage to one of the great comic book artists.


Because this caught me a bit unprepared I thought about what might be interesting and since this is the stuff I´m familiar with I thought why not post the german covers since everybody knows the original covers.


Because they look quite different from the american version and sin some instance they were switched around - for which reason I don´t know - like is this one above where we have Superman fly in the opposite direction. Thank god Animal Man only had a big A on his chest instead of an AM which would have led to quite some confusion with readers on this one.


The german covers were cluttered with a lot of promotion and while I always loved that they put so much extra stuff in it I bet Lex doesn´t like being shoved to the side to promote SUPERMAN III - The Steel Lightning.


But they didn´t only promote movies with DC superheroes - since there were very little of them back then - and one of the reasons to buy the comic was that they included a lot of movie posters. Which before the invention of videotapes was how you could relieve the movie experience.


Some people say that Superman´s rogues gallery has always been lacking but that´s because it´s not easy to come up with somebody to challenge him when you don´t understand what he´s all about. Most writers who have problems with that go back to ye olde kryptonite, magic or alien tech schtick which brings us to one of the greatest Superman villains - in both the best and worst way - Terra Man. Nobody ever called this cool space cowboy Maurice and what´s even better than one Terra Man ?


But sometimes you didn´t even need a villain and I bet the one who wrote this story with Superman´s brother ( who only appeared in this story ) had one of those pesky brothers that can ruin your whole life himself.


Of course Superman´s go - to villain par excellence was Lex Luthor who was still wearing his green and purple power suit before John Byrne transformed him into the personification of the evil corporate America.


And speaking about personifications of evil it does not get much more meta than Satanis who - as always - had another great name in Germany : Super - Satanis. Or was that because in the story Satanis looks a lot like Superman ? I don´t know since I still have to read this story but I´m a bit miffed that DC did not include the first part of this storyline in the Gil Kane ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN hardcover. I get that it was not drawn by Gil Kane but for the money they charge for this they could have thrown in a few freebies like a few extra issues and maybe also an introduction.


Besides his work on ACTION COMICS and SUPERMAN Gil Kane also did an annual for DC COMICS PRESENTS and two issues of the SUPERMAN SPECIAL which were published as the SUPERMAN ALBUMs in Germany.


I know that Gil Kane did a lot of series like GREEN LANTERN and ATOM but I will always fondly remember when he came onto the Superman books and brought a fresh wind after decades of Curt Swan dominated art. 


So there you have it, two for the price of one which I don´t really do that often but I just felt I could not add this to the last post. Which would have been too long with all this stuff anyway. Now the downside to this is that I have to come up with a second video section Today but thankfully there are enough Superman related videos between my bookmarks for that.

We´re starting with something else however as Gil Kane also worked for Marvel where he did the art for AMAZING SPIDER - MAN ( among others ) and his issues with Morbius or the Stacys are classics. Since I want to hold on to The Death of Gwen Stacy for that particular entry in my DEATH IN COMIC series here is issue 122 titled The Green Goblin´s Last Stand ! 



Since I couldn´t find interviews with Gil Kane here is a video that showcases the comic books he has worked on during his illustrious career.



I take any excuse to put more Filmation on the blog so here is the first part of a featurette about the first Lou Scheimer Superman cartoon.



I mentioned kryptonite in the post but do you know it´s real origin ?



What does it say about the respective quality that I´m more excited about the tv shows of DC super heroes than their current movies ? You can draw your own conclusions to that while I wanted to post a clip from the long anticipated ( I had to watch the entire first 17 episodes of Supergirl only to see it ) crossover episode between SUPERGIRL and THE FLASH.



New to the blog ? Everything you need to know about TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN :top ten posts / more posts of interest / best of the best

I know that it´s technically still Tuesday but " Black and White Wednesday " just sounds better and when I have finished the post it´ll be Wednesday anyway, so the point is moot. My last post was about comics master Gil Kane but I felt he deserved a bit more attention than I could give him on such a short notice so I went into my archives and dug some nifty covers.


As usual I wound up with too many covers for one post - the man has had a very long career after all working on a plethora of books - so, as the title suggest I am putting all the covers where I found the original art here. I have tried to find the color versions of the covers but I was not always successful. So, scroll down the post and enjoy more Gil Kane art.


I hope you like my selection and I even managed to squeeze in THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERBOY and some Power Girl. The CAPTAIN MARVEL covers are courtesy of Richard Guion who posted it on GIANT-SIZE MARVEL and you can find more Gil Kane art at COMIC BOOK BRAIN . 

Today we have a lot of birthdays to go through and I´ll start with a comic related one : DANGER GIRL creator J. Scott Campbell, who turns 43.

I have to admit that I´m not entirely sure what he is doing at the moment but I think he does covers for Disney. There was a time when I followed his work back when he created big hits like GEN 13 and DANGER GIRLS. I think he´s still milking the last one, doing one special repackaged edition after another and doing a plethora of mini series but I don´t think most comic people are really that interested unless he would do the interior.


Somehow I fell off the train when WILDSIDERZ was announced and I really thought that had tanked. As it turns out this was planned as a mini series and I don´t know what happened but two issues did came out. I found this out when I was looking for the VALIANT comics. Anyway, since I don´t think interviews are as interesting as seeing the artists at work here is a video where he draws Storm and as you can see he puts a piece of paper on it so he doesn´t smudge it. This is a trick I had to find out on my own.



Next up is Shannen Doherty who celebrates her 45th anniversary. I mentioned her in my posts about Alyssa Milano and while we probably never will know why exactly she left CHARMED I guess it worked for her.


There are three birthdays I want to mention that have no video ( since I only put five into each post, otherwise this would blow out of control ) the first one is Tom Clancy who is no longer with us. He wrote a lot of thrillers that have been turned into movies like Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games and The Sum of All Fears. We´re staying with this part of the movies as Das Boot is one of the most seen war movie and german singer and actor Herbert Grönemeyer who starred in it turns 60 Today. What´s more Wolfgang Treu who was the cinematographer of that movie also celebrates his 86th birthday Today.

We continue with the videos : I think David Letterman has retired but before his 69th birthday he interviewed all the big names like Janet.



From one pop icon to the next, Ed O´Neil famous for playing Al Bundy is even older than David Letterman, 70. After that iconic role he has again huge success on MODERN FAMILY or like they call it in the spanish speaking countries THE SOFIA VERGARA SHOW. I have the first two seasons of that but I still haven´t started watching it. And right after that I can watch MARRIED WITH CHILDREN since I got the complete box set the last time amazon was doing one of their super sales. Initially I wanted to post the documentary about the show but since that has disappeared from YouTube here´s one of the best parts of the show : Psycho Dad.



Hardy Krüger who becomes 88 years old Today is probably more of an icon for my german readers - at least the ones from my generation - as I always liked his work in such movies like Hatari ( which I must have seen a few dozen times ), The Flight of the Phoenix and The Wild Geese ( Die Wildgänse kommen in german ). I found the last two on YouTube but opted for this one so people know there is a good version of this movie.



And last but not least we have a Russ Meyer hattrick since three people who acted in his movies were born on this day. Charles Napier didn´t live to celebrate what would have been his 80th birthday but Candy Samples ( 88 ) and Pandora Peaks ( 52 ) are still kicking. Pandora even was in an Andy Sidaris film and I think Russ Meyer did his last movie with her besides the still unfinished The Breasts of Russ Meyer mammoth project.



New to the blog ? Everything you need to know about TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN :top ten posts / more posts of interest / best of the best

It´s been a while since I have done one of these posts and in light of the upcoming SHANG - CHI : MASTER OF KUNG FU omnibus books I thought I could extend Gil Kane week a bit longer and post his covers for the series.


For the last few days I tried to post more DC covers by Gil Kane because in my last Black and White post only 6 out of the 26 I posted were DC.

But something else always came up and prevented that. Like on Saturday when I was all ready to go - especially since it was Robi´s birthday - but then I went looking for some original art and spent the day and most of the following Sunday putting all the stuff I found in order. So to make a boring story short after getting every piece of Gil Kane art available on the internet I have divided it up into theme groups so there will be several posts appearing in the next few weeks. Like this one right now.  


Speaking about the omnibus books, I´m still not sure if I should get volumes 1 and 2. I would like to read it all but art wise I´m much more interested in Mike Zeck´s art than anything else and I don´t know if volume 2 is worth spending so much money for 8 issues of Mike Zeck art.

Even with the lower prices at amazon volume 1 is still at 88 bucks which is just a bit above my price range. The 2nd volume doesn´t come out until September but I don´t know how low the price on that one will go. If it does get lower at all. Right now there are two really very reasonably priced omnibus hardcovers at amazon.de, STAR WARS : THE ORIGINAL MARVEL YEARS OMNIBUS 1 for 70 Euros and 2 for 75 Euros but I´m not sure if I really want to read those that urgent or if that´s the nostalgia kicking in. I thought about getting one of them as a belated birthday present for my brother but once I got my hands on them I would probably keep them for myself. I don´t think the way he behaved lately he really deserves them. But at the moment I´m a little tight with money anyway.


The problem is that I fear this is another instance of a once in a lifetime opportunity like with the X - MEN : INFERNO hardcover that was offered at half price and I didn´t buy it just because I had bought the trade a few months earlier. The thing is the hardcover had some additional content and now that I have the X - MEN : INFERNO PRELUDE and X - MEN : INFERNO CROSSOVERS this is the one that would complete the set.


So I´m checking daily if those omnibus books are still at that price and hoping I can order them at the right moment. In any case I will probably order volume 2 first because it has not as much Carmine Infantion art in it and as it is in the bargain books section the price may go up again pretty soon as volume one is in the regular book section. The price on that may also go up again but probably not as quick as can happen with the second volume. You see I haven´t really made up my mind yet. 145 Euros is a lot of money to spend but if you get 250 dollars worth of comics that´s not so bad and I would only need volume three to complete the series. Which may also be at a more reasonable price once the first two volumes have sold enough. And if I buy the books and don´t like them after reading I can always use them as collateral and exchange them for other omnibus books like the SHANG - CHI : MASTER OF KUNG FU.

But that´s all speculation so let´s continue with the Gil Kane covers before I go completely off topic and have to write another post for this.   


Gil Kane did three more covers for the series but since those are some of the fabled GIANT SIZED issues they will be featured in a Giant Sized post - maybe two. Marvel really only did these specials from August 1974 to December 1975 and the vast majority of the covers were by Gil Kane.

I couldn´t do a MASTER OF KUNG FU MONDAY post without mentioning Old Groove from the brilliant DIVERSIONS OF THE GROOVY KIND who started it all and since I´m not sure I posted this here is his latest post in that series, The Phoenix Gambit - Part I : Temples of Time from MASTER OF KUNG FU 59 by Doug Moench, Mike Zeck ( this was his first issue ) and John Tartaglione. For those of you craving more kung fu entertainment there is also a post on The Sons of The Tiger and White Tiger and one with the first adventure of The Sons of The Tiger from DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU, which will be also reprinted in an upcoming omnibus. Man, this is the year for enthusiasts of Bronze Age Marvel martial arts series. And speaking about enthusiasts of Bronze Age Marvel martial arts series, Joe Linton at THE PERIODIC FABLE has a three part essay on the innovative storytelling in MASTERS OF KUNG FU by Paul Gulacy ( part 1 / 2 / 3 ).

We start Today´s birthday roundup with one that is already over but it´s an important one. Like I have already mentioned last Saturday german comic legend Robi a.k.a. Horst Brack, der Bestrafer celebrated his 56th birthday. He has written scripts for tv shows and hit movies like The Miracle of Bern - although I think he never got as much credit as other people who were less involved and who got interviewed all the time. Right now the movie has been adapted to the musical format and it´s one of the biggest shows although I doubt there´s any money going Robi´s way. For the hungry comic masses Robi is best known for writing countless comics like the underground cult series MENSCHENBLUT or HORST.


Longtime readers may remember that I announced the german website of HORST as well as two more as I was doing the translations to english and spanisch . But because of various reasons, health problems, computer problems, software problems and all this tedious life stuff I did my last translations in June 2010 but the old stories are still there to read.

I don´t think there is a printed edition in english or spanish available ( hence the two blogs ) and for my german readers who don´t know the comic I can only recommend to get the original issues although most of them are in black and white. There was a new edition released by PANINI that collects the complete works in four trades but for some reason they thought they had to change the text. Which normally happens with new editions of foreign material - each publisher has to do his own translation - but with german comics ? Anyway, don´t worry if you can´t find the old issues. Besides this all stories have new lettering that makes it easier to read, the colors look gorgeous and there is plenty of bonus material.

Another hit series by Robi is ALRAUNE, beautifully drawn by Toni Greis and I don´t have to explain this series to german comic readers because everybody has this - at least the male part of the comic community.


Somebody once said this is the kind of porn comic that has such good writing you read it with both hands. And the art is so hot you wish you had a third hand. The 8 issue series has been collected in two hardcovers which are totally worth the money because for the first time all the pages are in color. I have both volumes and you can find it at the homepage of Schwarzer Turm or at good comic stores just don´t go to amazon because the price for it is ridiculous. Anyway, I don´t think there are more issues of LUNA coming out and usually I would say I´ll get the latest gossip in Erlangen but with the new health problems ( now the other knee is wasted ) and my non existent comic budget this may be the first time I won´t attend. The last time was pretty bad with my injured knee and I was practically a young god compared to my current state of health. So happy birthday Robi and much success from here if we don´t meet in Erlangen. 


We´re staying in the adult entertainment section with our first birthday of Today which is PLAYBOY´s Miss November 2000 Buffy Tyler. The buxom blonde ( 36D - 24 - 34 ) of german descent turns 38 and besides appearing in PLAYBOY videos she was in the movie Frostbite and the Howard Stern Show. I remember her because back at that time I was still buying and reading the PLAYBOY magazine on a semi regular basis. Ah, the good old times when there were plenty of naked women to be found in PLAYBOY. 


We have two DOCTOR WHO related birthdays, the first is David Tennant who has his 45th regeneration. He is of course known as the most popular Doctor in New Who and his long stay on the role has set the standard for all who followed ( no pun in - tennanted ). Currently he is on Broadchurch and Alias where he plays the evil Purple Man Zebediah Killgrave. I have started watching that show with my mother but after a few episodes she lost interest. I guess she like the action spectacle like Agents of S.H. I. E. L. D. more so I´ll have to finish it on my own. The second birthday is Eric Roberts who turns 60 and although most people prefer to forget it he portrayed the Doctor´s nemesis The Master in the movie with the eight Doctor Paul McGann. I was looking through the videos and I picked this one because it was the last time I was really surprised by a regeneration.



Today talk show host Conan O´Brien also celebrates his 53rd anniversary and sometimes he really has the best job in the world because he gets to interview such gorgeous women like Angie Harmon who - surprise - would love to play She Hulk in a movie. Although I´m not sure Disney would let her play her as a drinking, promiscuous, behind kicking gun toting chick.




Since there are not a lot videos about Shang - Chi on YouTube here is one with the master Bruce Lee after which Paul Gulacy modeled his version.



Since I will probably not write about Mangas inthe next future here´s a rather long documentary ( over one hour ) for my german readers.



Okay, you know this was coming. There can be no post about this kind of subject without the obligatory Yaya Han video. She´s the best, looks absolutely stunning and always comes up with great new cosplays.


I really thought I had to post one of the few bookmarked videos I have left but just then I came across this new one from FANTASY BASEL 2015. Yaya´s part is a bit short for my taste but perfect as always. She nails it. 



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In honor of Tom Welling´s 39th birthday we continue with THE best Legion series written by Geoff Johns and graphically adapted ( you can´t say he drew it, that is like saying Mozart played the piano ) by George Perez.


But before we come to the penultimate chapter in this saga there´s one I have to mention. You might have noticed that a post appeared Yesterday titled MY BIG YAYA HAN POST which has strangely vanished from the blog.

A few days ago I noticed that I totally forgot that this month TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN celebrated it´s 10th anniversary. That right, ten years ago on the 11th of April 2006 I started this whole shinding, back then just a little blog with no links, no animated GIFs, no videos, just a man and his dream. Or his frustration about german comic message boards. That depends on how you want to see it. Well, with all the stuff that has been happening lately it´s no wonder I forgot about this big day. Nevertheless I thought about the best way to celebrate this grand occasion and after I considered what my readers would like me to do and then going in a completely direction and thinking about what I would like to do, which posts I have putting on hold the longest and which could fit this occassion there was one one possible answer : to finally do MY BIG YAYA HAN POST.


But as readers know I can get a little carried away when I write about the queen of cosplay so I knew I could not tackle the subject right away and would have to write the post over a couple of days or even weeks with many cold showers in - between. So doing the post was already a given it was only a matter of time. Which brings us to Yesterday when the post first emerged. I was finishing up my two posts about the alternates for my JLA CASTING CALL series and was going to all my bookmarks to see which links and videos I could add. And because I don´t like to do things twice I put all the links and videos on Yaya Han in a post. Of course I could not finish the post Yesterday so I put it in the draft folder. I will be working on the post over the next weeks but it will not go online until I have finished it. And it´s high time to do this post because Yaya keeps coming up with new costumes so the ones I selected begin to look old.


Since it is impossible to do a recap of everything that has happened in the first three issues and do it justice we´ll just continue with the story in progress and if you have missed out on our previous installments here are the links for issue 1 , issue 2 and issue 3 . This time around we have plenty of inked black and white pages so fans of original artwork rejoice.


And now you know why I didn´t call this post TIME TRAPPING TUESDAY, I didn´t want to spoil the surprise cliffhangers. Do writers still do them ?

Anyway, there´s only one issue to go and like in STAR WARS - REVENGE OF THE SITH the question is how are they going to fit it all in ? Before we come to the obligatory birthday roll call with the links and videos I have to mention Tera Patrick who I wanted to include in the post I was planning to do on the 20th this month. One of the good things about my old boob blog is that there are a lot of birthday posts on hot babes and even if I don´t do a solo post on all of them like for Demi Moore, Erika Eleniak or Markie Post I try to at least mention in a short part them when there is a reason.


That´s the good part, sometimes I just have to copy paste. Of course with Tera Patrick who works in porn most of the stuff I posted is not appropriate for this blog so I went through all my old files to see what was left that was still safe to post. Turns out almost nothing on the laptop.

So I went to the internet and waded through the plethora of pictures you can find there to look for the rare ones which look classy and hot and are okay to put on the blog. I also scoured through ll the pictures of Psylocke since she is very often cast in that role by fans on the internet - being hot and of asian descend. All things considered I had all my bases covered.


Then I returned to the internet to find out how old she will be and found out that her birthday is on the 25th of July and not on the 20th of April.

Somehow I messed up the date when I did my first post on her and I never double checked it so the mistake was carried on every year. Talk about wasting a good day on that. And it´s on the day of my patron saint of all days. Well, the good thing is that when the day comes - and if I manage to make a post around that time - I have all things already lined up.

Okay, coming from women who´s birthday is not Today to the women celebrating an actual birthday our youngest one is Emily Wickersham. The 32 year old is best known as special agent Eleanor Bishop on tv hit NCIS. 


Very apropos she is the newest addition to the crack investigation team or like Anthony Dinozzo would say the " bambina ". On the show she´s always very buttoned up even though she has a lot more to offer.


Our next candidate also stars in a hit tv show, Stana Katic who turns 38 Today. This is one of those cases of " copy paste " I mentioned earlier because I did quite a few posts on her. Stana doesn´t fall into my usual type of women since I´m more of a boobs man but this woman has legs up to her chin and she could have made a fortune as a stripper. I didn´t find the GIF from CASTLE I was looking for but here are a few nice ones.


Stana also starred in THE LIBRARIAN - CURSE OF THE JUDAS CHALICE which is one of my guilty pleasures. What can I say ? I´m one of the people who actually watches these films. Sometimes there is just nothing better on tv and for an Indiana Jones rip - off I find them entertaining. To tell you the truth I would have watched the last one just to see Stana.


Here in Germany they are on a hiatus on new CASTLE episodes which my Mom finds great because since Rick and Kate got married the show has become " too ridiculous " for her. One character who has grown quite nicely on the show is Molly Quinn who plays Alexis on the show. The other day I was looking for clips from the episode where they pretend to be in the 70s and Tamala Jones is wearing a Pam Greer outfit but all I could find were scenes with Molly as a hot hippie. Should I be concerned about that ?


I don´t have to explain 40 year old Emily Booth to my british readers because she hosted a bevy of tv shows in the UK, from shows about gaming ( which is one of the reason why she´s well known to pop culture enthusiasts ) to morning shows and game shows. She also starred in a few movies, best known among them Quentin Tarantino´s Grindhouse. She´s the official poster girl for GoreZone Magazine, a supporter of the Classic Horror Campaign and the face of the Horror Channel since 2007. 


Today we really have two sections in the birthdays, first hot women who are on tv and then guys who have something to do with music videos. Our first candidate is Roger Taylor, the drummer for a band I´m very familiar with Duran Duran who turns 56 and is not to be confused with the Roger Taylor who is the drummer for Queen. There are a few songs I instantly associate with Duran Duran and Today I have chosen Wild Boys because this was never shown in full length on german tv when I was a teenager.



I already mentioned that the reason why a lot of music videos were not shown in full - if they were shown at all - in Germany was that before the advent of music channels like Mtv and viva tv shows that showed music videos were produced in the very catholic bavarian tv studios who for some reason were hellbent on getting every tv youth show under their control. Probably to control it. Anyway, they often censored music videos they deemed too raunchy and many female pop stars had to do live appearances because of that. In the case of Sabrina Salerno that ploy backfired because they hadn´t counted on her patented bouncing action which made her live appearance hotter than the actual music video.


One of these shows was Formel Eins which is still kind of around since the company who has the copyright to the name still puts out CDs. The best host on the show was Ingolf Lück who has his 58th anniversary Today.



Another name that is tied to my generations collective musical knowledge is 75 year old Giorgo Moroder one of the big names in electronic music who wrote such hits for Donna Summer like Hot Stuff, On The Radio and I Feel Love . His works on movies like Top Gun, Flashdance and Midnight Express has earned him the Music Oscars and he´s still working Today with the greats of the music industry like Kylie Minogue although to Today´s kids he´s probably best known for his musical contributions to games like Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto : Liberty City Stories, Grand Theft Auto : Vice City Stories and Scarface : The World Is Yours.  



Our last candidate in the music category is Duane Eddy who has his 78th birthday. He´s most famous for the theme of the tv show Peter Gunn.



Although I was not aware of this and the first time I heard the song was the version Art Of Noise recorded in 1986 which won them a Grammy.



After all the babes and music here´s something for the mind : austrian - british philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who was also born on this day.



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If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.

No, this is not my 10 HEAVY METAL / SCHWERMETALL COVERS YAYA HAN SHOULD RE - ENACT post ( because I haven´t finished MY BIG YAYA HAN POST yet so my readers don´t know about it ) it´s the next best thing.


Because of one of Today´s celebrity birthdays I wanted to keep the sci fi theme of my latest Legion of Three Worlds post going and I´m also trying to switch up things so I don´t only have one Marvel post and then one DC post and then one Marvel post again to keep things interesting. There are lots of comics out there which are not Marvel or DC or super heroes at all.

So Yesterday I was going through all HEAVY METAL and SCHWERMETALL covers to find the right ones for the upcoming Yaya cover post. And to clarify, I was not only looking for covers where there is a naked woman on the cover so I could get Yaya to drop her clothes. As tempting as that may be I was rather looking for covers that fall into these three categories :

Firstly covers which are a personal favorite of mine. During the four plus decades of my comic reading history I have read SCHWERMETALL - and later when I could get it HEAVY METAL - since before I was old enough to read it, borrowing issues from my older brother´s collection as soon as he started reading it on a regular basis and although I probably have more issues of the german underground comic U - COMIX I have a huge stack of SCHWERMETALL and HEAVY METAL issues. Lately I haven´t kept up as much as I used to but I still buy an issue now and then like when there is a translation I did of  a comic ( which already has happened twotimes ).

So I can say that I have read quite a lot of issues and among them were some really phenomenal covers which I can instantly recall because the art was so mind - blowing. A lot of them are also fantastic ( no pun intended ) from an aesthetic perspective and offer more than just simple nudity for nudity´s sake. There´s nothing even remotely gratuitous to them. 


For the second category I went with covers that would be interesting from a cosplayers point of view, that could really interest Yaya Han to do them.

Don´t get me wrong, as much as I practically live in denial where Yaya is concerned and realize I have a full blown sexual obsession with her my perv attitude doesn´t prevent me from seeing the real world and keeping possible perks in mind. So while it is a great mental exercise and it helps me release some tension why not go all the way and find some covers that may really happen ? It would be totally cool to really inspire Yaya Han for a cosplay so it could not hurt to throw in a few of those among the others.


And last but least are those covers you would expect from a dirty old man like me which means Yaya would be showing as much skin as possible.

Which - again - doesn´t necessarily mean going full frontal nudity. Not that there would be anything wrong with that or that I would mind. Any excuse to get women naked is okay with me, especially hot asians. But sometimes showing not everything but much rather enough to arouse you and still keep you interested to see more can be more erotic than doing the full monty outright. And I can´t believe I really typed that neither.

By the way I didn´t put the cover below into my selection because while it falls into the first and third category it is too close to the War Goddess Enyo shooting Yaya Han did. So there would be no reason for her to do it.


Anyway, while going through all of the covers for the Yaya Han post  I thought Why not do a post about all the great covers from HEAVY METAL ?

Not everybody likes superheroes and that way I can get some readers interested in this blog that may not normally check it out. It´s not like I ONLY read superhero comics or american comics. I recently put some of the stuff on my laptop in order ( yes, I know that I´m saying that a lot on my posts but I AM constantly working on new post material ) and there was a lot of stuff on women from franco belgian comics like FRANKA, NATASCHA and YOKO TSUNO which are all series I read and enjoyed.

I haven´t read as much issues of FRANKA as from the other two series. I started when CARLSEN COMICS started publishing the series but after I while I stopped reading and soon afterwards they ceased publishing the series. As I learned when I was putting the stuff in order the german EPSILON VERLAG has continued where Carlsen left off and re - published the first adventures so there may be more FRANKA in my reading pile.

She also appeared in the new version of ZACK which I´m happy to report is still being published it´s latest issue being number 202. I know Terry Hooper from the great COMIC BITS ONLINE will be glad to know this.


NATASCHA on the other hand is already IN my reading pile. The series has been published by various comic companies in Germany over the years but now SALLECK PUBLICATIONS has released a collected edition that offers the series in four beautiful hardcovers that include a lot of extra material like articles, art by Francois Walthéry and unpublished stories.

I bought the third book the last time the comic fair in Stuttgart was held because it was the only one which did not include comics I already have but so far I haven´t read it because I still hope I can buy the other three volumes. Who knows ? The way superhero comics are going I may be able to afford them sooner as I think. In any case I plan on reading that so there WILL be a post on NATASCHA in the future, one way or the other.


As for YOKO TSUNO for some reason - maybe because of the art style - I thought this was a series from the 70s that was already done and over.

Well, imagine my surprise when I learned that while Roger Leloup started the series in 1970 it´s still going. I was blown away by all the new comics I didn´t know, in fact the 27th album was just released in 2015. There is also a collected edition of this series by Carlsen Comics with 8 volumes which collect the stories up to the album number 24. I think. They are not collecting them in chronological order but rather theme based like book one collects albums 2, 7 and 14 because they all take place in Germany so it makes sense to release them for the german readers first. But there are 8 volumes out, each volume collects three albums, so it´s a safe bet that they should be at number 24 now. I would love to get into this series again, especially since there must be at least 10 stories I don´t know. 


Now you may ask yourself : Why is Subzero making this long intro and what does it have to do with HEAVY METAL covers ? I´m glad you asked.

You see I had already prepared the material for a post on the back covers of HEAVY METAL. In comics the back cover is usually used for ads but in a few rare instances they put some art on it. But while going through the covers I noticed that over the years they have done a few wraparound covers for the series. And since that is something I like to showcase on the blog I went for that option. The only drawback to that is that if I just post those covers I either have to make them very small or they go over to the right side of the blog where the links and other stuff is placed. So in order for me to avoid that I had to come up with something to bridge the gap until we reach the end of those gadgets. Also there is not much to add to the covers so I wanted to put in a little something for the readers.

But without any further ado here are the covers, I hope you enjoy them.


No links for Today so we start with the appendix and our first celebrity birthday is Jessica Alba who turns 35. She has been in a lot of movies although her best known roles are Susan Storm in the GOOD Fantastic Four movies and Nancy Callahan in the Sin City movies. Where she didn´t go topless although she plays a stripper. I don´t know if we will see a third movie with the same cast because Rosario Dawson already told director Robert Rodriguez not too wait too much between movies ( it took him nine years to do the sequel ) because her boobs won´t stay firm forever.


And I could probably never return to Spain ( as unlikely as that is at the moment ) if I neglected to mention Penelope Cruz´ 42nd birthday. She´s in Zoolander 2 with Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson and Will Ferrell and I have to admit that I enjoyed the first movie much more than I had expected to.



Now the main reason for picking Today´s topic is that one of the hottest women in sci fi entertainment Kari Wuhrer celebrates her 49th birthday. She is best know for her role of Maggie Beckett on the sci fi cult show SLIDERS. She was put on the cast as the boner guarantee for the male audience and they got more than their money´s worth in the Wild West episode where she´s almost spilling out of her snug saloon girl corsage.


She also was in HOT BLOODED, a really bad movie that doesn`t even have full frontal nudity. Nevertheless it´s one of my favorite movies with Kari because she looks really hot in this one. You get to see a lot of cleavage and boobs and in the first sex scene on the bed you can see her sexy ass.

And because one scene where she´s at a gas station and pulls down her leather top to make the desk clerck horny. She´s really pulling it in all directions so you get to see her full boobs. I have no evidence but I swear I can see some nipple. I bet Kari had to do this scene a hundred times as the crew was sabotaging all takes just to see her boobs again and again.

In any case, I had this scene on a video tape on a loop and I must have heard the words " This material just doesn´t breathe ! " a hundred times.


Like I said there is no full frontal nudity in this cineastic masterpiece but you get a bit of sideboob in a scene that was heavily cut on german tv.

They cut parts from when she´s using a whip to get into the mood and pours hot wax on his body. They also cut some parts from where she´s on top of him which I didn´t know until I found the movie on the internet.

Damn you, german tv for keeping Kari Wuhrer´s sideboob away from me !


Our next birthday is Tonight Show ex host Jay Leno who turns 66 Today. He has had all the hottest women in showbiz in his show and the hot appearances of Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Halle Berry, Mariah Carey or Janet Jackson are legendary moments of television history.


A rather sad anniversary is what would have been Terry Pratchett´s 68th birthday if he was still among us. While I could never finish his books I enjoyed the film adaptions like Hogfather or Going Postal very much so here is Wyrd Sisters which to my knowledge hasn´t been on german tv.



Another cult siren who celebrates her 75th birthday is Ann - Margret who has worked with all the greats of Hollywood like the king Elvis Presley.


Here is everyone's favourite hyphenated red - headed swedish - american dancing like a complete maniac in the 1966 film Made in Paris. The film itself is average, which makes this more or less the standout moment.



Another actress who worked with Elvis is Carolyn Jones who would be 86 years old Today. She co starred in what is considered to be the best Elvis movie of all time King Creole but is of course best known for playing goth vamp Morticia Adams on the cult television show The Addams Family . 


The show has become a big part of pop culture but what many people don´t know is that it was based on the cartoons of Charles Addams.


To learn more about The Addams Family you can go to THE UNOFFICIALLY ADDAMS FAMILY WORLD WIDE WEB SITE but first read Adrian J Smiths article The Addams Family : The Cartoons, Tv Series, Movies, Musical And Merchandise on HORRORPEDIA. As for Carolyn Jones she also played Queen Hippolyta on Wonder Woman and Marsha, Queen of Diamonds on Batman. Here is a docu about the ups and downs of her long career.



I just have to include a comic related video. So since this post was about HEAVY METAL, the american version of METAL HURLANT and the most influential artist of that comic was Moebius here is a video adaption of his comic The Long Tomorrow which was the inspiration for Blade Runner.



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Longtime readers may remember that I already did a post on french comic covers but since Terry Hooper over at COMIC BITS ONLINE has done a post on it I have decided to revisit the topic if this is what the public wants.


We can´t have those islanders show us up now can we ? Anyway, to get to a workable selection from the over 550 french comic covers I had I have decided to stick to the french magazine STRANGE. If my readers are interested in more of these posts I can do posts on NOVA and TITANS too.

To further narrow it down I have stuck to the painted covers because I didn´t want to post covers you already know from the original version only with a new logo. There are some covers which are not painted and which I believe are not original covers but I´ll leave that for an extra post. But I DO like the french comic covers with word balloons, though.


And I just have to include this cover because of Spidey´s black costume. I just recently read the Epic Collection : Sins of the Past Spider - Man trade and I have to say I miss the days when he was switching back and forth between the new black costume and the original and was married to MJ.


But before we come to the 18 covers I selected can anyone explain who in tarnation Prince Epsilon is ? I have never heard of this comic in my life.


Any information about this ( french ? ) comic will be much appreciated.


Today´s first birthday is Uma Thurman who turns 46 and you probably expected me to do a post on Power Girl in honor of Uma´s magical boob window worthy cleavage but I already did that in 2012 and there has not happened anything worthy since then that I haven´t already covered.


To prove that the photo above isn´t faked I wanted to add a video from the 2002 Oscars but since there is none where you can see much of Uma I made a GIF instead so I can add one more comic book related video.

The paparazzi and journalists have totally blown it on this one. How is it then can get footage of everything people DON´T want to see like celebs without make up or panties but when there is a sexy woman with big breasts and a huge cleavage - and we are not talking about an unknown starlet here - at a public event - and we are not talking about the opening of the local mall in some small town here - nobody is able to just point the camera at her and let it roll ? Even when they are interviewing Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman they don´t manage to get her in focus. The same with Denzel Washington´s acceptance speech for the Oscar as Best Actor ( here´s the longer version if you can stomach more Julia Roberts ) there is only a short moment where Uma is sitting down. The best you get is in this docu about Ethan Hawke and even there that part is a bit short.


One of Uma Thurman´s most famous movies is KILL BILL by Quentin Tarantion who was inspired to make the movie by LADY SNOWBLOOD.



The action thriller by Toshiya Fujita starring Meiko Kaji in the lead role in turn is based on the manga series LADY SNOWBLOOD ( Shurayuki - hime in japanese ) written by Kazuo Koike ( who wrote series like LONE WOLF AND CUB and CRYING FREEMAN ) and illustrated by Kazuo Kamimura.



Our next birthday is Michelle Pfeiffer who is probably the last legit Catwoman we got in movies. She celebrates her 58th anniversary and after two really bad Christopher Nolan Batmovies the old Tim Burton Batman movies with Michael Keaton look better and better to me.


Because as much as I like Halle Berry´s costume in CATWOMAN she didn´t really play the character from the comic books. This is what happens when the beancounters have control and don´t want to pay for the Bat connection and think they know better than dozens of comic book writers.


Speaking about train wrecks in pop culture, our next birthday is Kate Mulgrew ( 61 ), best known for her role of Captain Kathryn Janeway on the worst Star Trek series ever, STAR TREK VOYAGER. The series was only watchable for the holographic doctor, the hot half klingon B´Elanna Torresand the 36DD drone of borg Seven of Nine played by Jeri Ryan. 


Jeri´s boobs were so huge that they made her skintight suit darker and darker so you couldn´t see them as good but to no avail. Seven of Nine is THE cyborg sex machine every sci fi fanboy wants to assimilate and the only one who could hold a candle to her was Jolene Blalock as T´Pol, the sex massage specialist with the inbuilt Pon Farr automatic nympho mode.


One year older is comedian Jerry Seinfeld who created the cult show SEINFELD of which the best part was the funny and sexy Elaine Bennet.


Even though it was not shown to the general public in Germany ( they always aired it when most people were asleep ) I managed to catch a few with Elaine´s best scenes. SEINFELD has been in amazon´s bargain section a few times now but as always I didn´t have the money to spend.


To show you that there are more reasons why Julia Louis Dreyfus pulled off the sexiness than just some impressive cleavage here is a short clip.



Our music video of the day is in honor or Duke Ellington´s birthday.



Today´s post was about french comics so I wanted to add this video from ALIX based on the french BD series which I just discovered Yesterday.



Normally I have a " five videos per post " limit but since I count the LADY SNOWBLOOD videos as one I am adding this video. It´s in french - sorry - but it mentions the comics by french publisher LUG who also published STRANGE. And Terry Hooper would be cross with me if I didn´t post a video that talks about MYKROS or how it is called in french PHOTONIK.



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Like I promised in the Sarah Louise Young solo post in my CASTING THE JUSTICE LEAGUE MOVIE series here is the re - post of her birthday post which will be re - posted each year. At least until I can do a post on page 3 girl Samantha Fox who shares the same birthday - what a dilemma. When I have finished a post on the british sexbomb I can re - post both posts alternating or one on the actual birthday and the other before or after it. 


Sarah Louise Young was born on April 15th 1971 in Sidcup, in the London Borough of Bexley, Southeast London, and raised in Hampshire, southern England, with a younger brother. Her mother was a seamstress and her father a structural engineer which account for Sarah´s solid structures.


Sarah went to an ordinary school, an A - student with the ambition of becoming a dentist. She was very shy and withdrawn and was scared of cameras that being the main reason why she would never let anyone take pictures of her when she was younger. Sarah was 10 when her breasts began to develop and, at school, was at first teased mercilessly about it. This caused her to become embarrassed about her body and she took to wearing big sweaters and loose clothing to hide her rapidly developing sexdoll figure. At the age of 11 she was mentally way ahead of her class and her breasts began to draw the unwanted attention of male students.


She had to ask to be exempted from gym class because the boys always were reaching under her shirts which were too short to contain her tits and when she partook in strenuous physical activities where her big boobs were bouncing up and down the boys were distracted so much that quite a few injured themselves. Especially swim class was a desaster since she was almost sexually assaulted in the shower by the entire male part of her class after they saw her all wet in a bikini. After that the guys from her class ganged up on her every day during recess and shoved her into a secluded part of the school yard to take turns fondling her big breasts.

While her friends were interested in pop groups, she was more interested in men and soon she discovered what effect her huge torpedoes had on them. It was while she was on a family holiday in Yugoslavia that she had her first sexual experience at the age of 13 with a 22 year old local boy and the fact he was willing to risk a jail sentence for having sex with an underage girl tells you what a booming hardbody she must have had. While the boy surely must have had the sexual experience of a lifetime deflorating the teenage Sarah it didn´t impress her much. It wasn’t until about a year later that Sarah Young became truly sexually active with the realization that she especially enjoyed having sex ( preferably with a stranger ) in public places : the prospect of being caught simply adding to the excitement; and Sarah Young was caught on numerous occasions.

On one such, two police officers who were returning from patrol found her having sex in front of the police station but instead of reporting it they hid and enjoyed the show, taping the whole thing with a camera. After Sarah had finished the police officers came out of hiding and - with a huge grin on their faces - let her off with a warning. On another occasion, the ticket collector of the train she was traveling on interrupted her and her partner having sex in one of the compartments. But after seeing Sarah Young´s titanic bare tits he just checked their tickets and left.

By the age of 15, she had, by her own admission, after having a whole succession of boyfriends and one night stands, become the school nymphomaniac.


In January 1986 she met a man at a bus stop who suggested going to a photo studio to take some trial pictures for the famous page 3 of the Sun. She was surprised because she found herself very unattractive. But Sarah thought that although this would never work, as the camera would only enhance her ugliness, it would be the ideal opportunity to overcome her dislike of cameras. After a talk with her mother to obtain her permission, the photo shoot took place in February 1986. The positive response to the pictures was enormous and from there on her work took off and she was invited to join a modeling agency, and for the first time she began to realize that most men considered her to be beautiful. She admits that she is very shy, but when she's in front of a camera that disappears and she becomes a completely different person loosing all her inhibitions.


Reaching the age of 18 Sarah faced the next challenge. A friend phoned her and told her about a photo shoot taking place for PRIVATE magazine in the Costa de Sol. Sarah was in two minds whether to go because on the one hand the reports in England were all very negative about the porn industry, but on the other the friend was one of the best men's magazine models at the time and she could only tell of how well she was treated.


Sarah is very inquisitive by nature and could not resist to go and she soon came to the conclusion that all of the negative reports and comments about porn had no truth in them at all. She decided to pose for more photos with famous photographer Claus Alvin Vogel from Hamburg. Even at this stage, nobody in narrowminded England thought Sarah Louise Young would become the most accepted export in the erotic business.


In March 1989 her agent visited hardcore tycoon Hans Moser alias Sascha Alexander in Hanover at VTO. Hans had been married to Teresa Orlowski since 1982, whom he had made more famously known as ' Foxy Lady '.


Sarah's agent came to Hans Moser to make some bookings for his models. When he showed Hans the pictures of his girls he replied that there was nothing of his interest except this girl he said, " What's her name ? "

" Sarah Louise Young. " Hans took another look at the picture and he booked the girl for the next VTO production. Hans had immediately spotted the possibilities of this girl just as he had done in 1981 when he had plucked the photo's of Teresa Orlowski from another agent. For four years he had been looking for another ' Foxy Lady ', and had seen hundreds of pictures of girls until he discovered Sarah Louise Young.


However a few days later the production assistant Claudia informed Hans Moser that the appointment with Sarah had been cancelled due to illness.

Hans was very disappointed, finally he had discovered the new ' Foxy Lady ' and the appointment was called off. By this time Hans´ relationship with Teresa was going down hill rapidly and at the end of August 1989 Teresa took both his business and money from him. For 3 weeks Hans wanted to destroy everything around him, however luckily his brother Siegfried was there to stop him. But then Hans recalled Sarah and phoned her agent in London telling him that Sarah had to come to Germany so as he could make her into Europe's latest porn star. However Sarah's agent declined, as he wrongly believed that Sarah would not want to leave England.


Hans was devastated. However all was not lost. Two weeks later Sarah's agent called Hans in Hanover and told him that he had met Sarah at a photo shoot, "Imagine, I told Sarah about you and how I refused your offer and do you know what she said?""Are you crazy, of course I'll go."

At the time Sarah had never even heard of Hans Moser, but Bill was quick to tell her of his reputation and showed her a couple of Hans' magazine's. Sarah was very impressed with the style and quality, but at the time she was becoming very tired of modeling, as she felt she was becoming brain dead for lack of its use and she needed more of a challenge. Her agent was reluctant to let Sarah go because she had just turned 18, meaning there would be a lot of new markets open to her with age restrictions such as America, France and Asia. So Sarah asked that if she took the job would she have the opportunity to work behind the cameras as well and Hans' reply was " Of course I'll expect you to ! " And so in September 1989 Sarah flew to Germany and met Hans Moser, one of the most influential Porn producers in Europe, who at the time was at his lowest ebb going through the most difficult, bitter and trying divorce with Teresa Orlowski.


However Hans was quick to notice that Sarah no longer looked exactly the same as she had lost a lot of weight after her illness, which had resulted in a fair reduction of her breasts. So Sarah was quickly rushed to surgery for a cosmetic correction to enhance her breasts to their natural size and beauty. The result was overwhelming. Her wonderful figure, the magical glow in here eyes and her natural charms were able to melt every man's heart and to burn every fuse just by seeing her. A star was born.


After recognizing Sarah's talents Hans decided once again to make her a star in both the business and in his life and on January the 13th 1991 Las Vegas was once again the venue where Hans Moser celebrated his third marriage. The world of pornographic productions were laying at her feet.


She co - stared with the best known actors of the scene, won many important prizes for her outstanding performances and was highly honored with a cultural prize in Spain, for her last big film ' Hamlet '.

Meanwhile her beauty can be seen on over 150 video covers.

 
Executive producer, writer, director, yes, Sarah achieved everything in the business, but as time passed by she felt more attached to the comfort of her home and her dreams of a family. She wore comfortable clothes, read many books, many of them cooking books and indulged her guests with her cooking talent. Exactly these qualities allowed Sarah to be so creative and always discover new things. As very creative in graphics, she used her fantasy symbolically and proved to be commercially competent.

But the business was changing. Price wars began to make big budget productions practically impossible and the market became flooded with low budget and private productions. And the opening of the eastern block made the whole situation even worse. Actresses / actors from the east swamped the market for lower fees and the situation became intolerable for Sarah who being far too sensitive for the business could not stand to work with people who hated the work but only done it for the money and who had absolutely no respect or compassion for either themselves, each other or the business. This all lead Sarah to decide it was time to quit performing in front of the camera and so she began working on a new future, without her husband Hans Moser, from who she is now divorced.


Yep, she was a big star over here in Germany when I was old enough to rent porn videos. That shows you what an old geezer ( and old pervert ) I am. Also, she was the first one who made porn videos for a price that horny teenagers like me could afford. I mean, new tapes. Because back in those days you could buy used porn videos at the video store but those were watched hundreds of times and only seconds away from combustion.


Not only was Sarah Louise Young the first porn actress to agree a fee of $1,000,000 for a single film, in 1992 she also opened her first sex shop in Hanover, and named Sarah Young Erotic Markt, there would eventually be eleven such shops located in various German cities. I think there might have been one in Stuttgart but with all the movies she starred in and the ones she produced Sarah Young was very present in german video stores and sex shops around the time I was old enough to watch her movies. By the time she lived in Spain she also had one of the first adult magazines that were sold together with a videotape. Which in Spain were sold at newsstands next to comics or newspapers. Yes, some countries do not hide their porn under the table like it´s something to be ashamed of.
 
Even if Sarah is from England she got the greek look down to pat with the curly hair and even the nose. I know because when I was in middle school there was a greek girl I liked in our class who had a well developed body for her age. And we had a very busty form mistress I had the hots for.


Back to Sarah Louise Young there were rumors she planned on becoming a lawyer but nothing that was confirmed. She made a lot of her movies in Spain because they were so hot she had to shoot them outside of England.

As far as her movies go the list would be too long to include here and you can find it on the internet but THE YOUNG ONE is the best of the best.

Sarah Louise Young is one of my all time favorite pornstars and with all the porn movies she made that were adaptions of famous stories like HAMLET, DECAMERON and NIKITA it´s kind of strange that she never did a porn version of Wonder Woman when she looks so much like her.


And with that we´re going seamlessly into the video section of this post. Watching Sarah Young tapes was kind of expensive for a young strapping lad at his sexual prime with no disposable income so because this was before the internet when you could find naked women 24 / 7 I had to rely on the tv for hot babes and one show I watched - and taped - religiously was THE GRIND. Because it was on so early I always had to program the vcr to tape it ( ask your father, no, better ask your grandfather what that means ) and in some instances I even came late to school because of this.

One of these days I´ll have to do a proper post on Mtvs THE GRIND. There are much more videos on YouTube now then when I first planned on doing the post so I had to look through a lot of them. But I think I found a good one which not only has a halfway decent picture quality but also some of the hot dancers who were the reason I watched the show. You´ll have to fast forward a bit for the part from the beach ( 4 : 26 ) and Brooklyn ( 10 : 15 ), in fact the first girl who appears in the Brooklyn part with the cut off shirt was to blame that I came late too school one day. Another time I was sad because there was a bit with her in an episode where you could see her naked boobs in all their teenage glory underneath her shirt for a fraction of a second or at least her bra ( you can see by the way she´s dancing how that happened ) and I erased that part by mistake. But the episodes where they were at the beach or at Las Vegas were these nubile sexbombs with booming bodies wore only bikins were simply the best.



Times really haven´t changed that much as this unknown rumpshaker could have given the flexible GRIND dancers a run for their money.



Speaking about bikinis, another source for hot women on tv was the sports channel of all things who started showing bikini contests. Only after midnight of course but when they started showing THE BIKINI OPEN series, which starred bikini models like Pamela Paulshock, Sandi Da Silva, Dawn Waggoner, Bibi Nguyen and Patricia Ford ( check out this gallery ) it was one of the greastest moments in my life. I have to do a long post about that one day since I have found someone´s top ten bikini model video on YouTube. Here is the first one which started of the ground running. The best part is the Miss California Bikini Contest ( 1 : 05 : )



which featured such hotties like Pamela Brown, Bridget / Brooke / Michelle Thompson, Julie Fulkerson and Mercedes ( no last name ).


The hottest women on tv are of course from Spain and Latin America so I picked a clip from the venezuelan comedy show A QUE TE RIES ( you will laugh ). In this recurring part of the show employee Navarrete implores secretary Sabrina to talk with the boss to give him a raise. Because of his manly charms ( ??? ) Sabrina can´t resist him but only agrees to do so if Navarrete does a little role playing which gives the voluptuous actress the chance to appear in various costumes - here they re - enact Raiders of the Lost Arc. Naturally the boss appears at the most opportune moment and Sabrina puts all the blame on Navarrete who ends up getting fired. 



And we´re going from Venezuela to Puerto Rico with actress / model / tv presenter Maripily Rivera giving some beauty advice on the red carpet.



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As promised here are a more DC covers by the great Gil Kane. Because I didn´t want to do another covers only post I also started looking for some of the interior art and - as usual - I found that much material that this will probably have to be split up into two posts. We´ll see how far we´ll come.


It´s been a while since my last post and I spent the time with going over some of my old posts, preparing stuff for new posts and health problems.

On Sunday I was so tired from lack of sleep that I slept almost the whole day and Today before going to bed I made the mistake of eating a tuna sandwich before going to bed so I spent most of the day on the crapper, in my bed with stomach cramps or sneezing since I seem to be also nursing a cold. At the moment I feel a little better because I drank to cups of tea but while my stomach feels a little better my nose is still doing it´s best impression of a fountain and I go through handkerchiefs like wildfire. I haven´t eaten anything Today but at least I get to lose some weight this way. I have already lost a few pounds as I´m starting to loose my pants which were very tight. So with my nose running and a slight headache I´m trying to finish this post while the internet seems to get slower and even slower and my laptop keeps nagging me about doing a re - start now.

For this post I have selected a few DC covers from Gil Kane from the period I´m more familiar with so there will be no classic DC stuff and there will also be no GREEN LANTERN covers since I have decided to give them a post of their own. There were also a few strange and weird covers of series I didn´t know he had worked on ( like the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN cover above for which I could not find any interior art ) but I kept most of them for a different post with all of Gil Kane´s WTF covers.


So let´s get going. DC COMICS PRESENTS 62 has Superman teaming up with the Freedom Fighters and the art is by Irv Novik and Dave Hunt.


Sadly I could only find this small part of a page from the issue.


Another great cover by Gil Kane for SUPERMAN 390 guest starring Sean Connery . . . I mean Superman´s best pal, Vartox. Is it just me or do people kick the bucket more than usual every time he´s around ? 


This kicks off a three part story by Cary Bates, Elliot S Maggin, Curt Swan and Dave Hunt and you can find some more interior pages at Deejay Dayton´s BABBLING ABOUT DC COMICS website. By the way, the blog has moved so if you want to read the newest entries using the following link.


Speaking about Deejay Dayton´s BABBLING ABOUT DC COMICS, he also has some interior pages from BATMAN 382 guest - starring Catwoman.


The story is by Steve Mitchell with art by Rich Hoberg and Rudy Nebres.


Sometimes Gil Kane only did one cover of a series like THE FURY OF FIRESTORM THE NUCLEAR MAN 30. The interior art was mostly done by Rafael Kayanan. I didn´t find any pages from issue 30 but you can sample some of his art from issue 26 and 27 on THE WATER AND FIRE podcast.


Fun fact : it was in this series that Firestorm first encountered Felicity Smoak from ARROW, behaving like a giant dick. COMIC BOOK RESOURCES has a whole post about the first appearances of the supporting cast where you can read all about how Firestorm ruined Felicity´s life - repeatedly.


A DC series Gil Kane did a few covers for is the first CHECKMATE series.


This and the following incarnations of the book have been on my reading list for quite some time and who knows, now that DC has as good as openly declared intellectual bankruptcy I might even get to read it.


CHECKMATE 17 written by Paul Kupperberg was part 5 of THE JANUS DIRECTIVE which crossed over with SUICIDE SQUAD and MARTIAN MANHUNTER. The art was done by Steve Erwin and Al Vey and while I couldn´t find art from the issue Siskoid from YOUR DAILY SPLASH PAGE has the splash page from issue 21 also done by Steve Erwin and Al Vey.


Gil Kane also did more than one cover for the WONDER WOMAN comic.


Here is the splash page for issue 314 by Dan Misking and Don Heck and you can see more interior pages at BABBLING ABOUT DC COMICS. Again.


Somehow when I think of Don Heck I always think about his Marvel work on AVENGERS or IRON MAN and totally blank on the fact that he also worked on DC´s FLASH, TEEN TITANS and JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA.


And I want to end the first part of this with THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERBOY which I remember reading in Ehapa´s SUPERBOY reprints.


I couldn´t find any full pages from the issue but SISKOID`S BLOG OF GEEKERY has some interior art by Alex Saviuk and Kurt Schaffenberger.

The story with Sunburst went on for a few issues but I don´t remember if I ever got to read the big finale. We didn´t always get consecutive issues.


So in this post we have all the series where Gil Kane DIDN`T do any interiors and in the next post we will have beaucoup de Gil Kane art. As usual there are a few websites and links I have to mention which I could not fit into the post. I didn´t find any art from CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN for which Gil Kane did the cover but JAMES THE SHERMAN has a nice collection of original art from the series and the SECRET ORIGINS PODCAST talks about CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN and FURY in their 12th episode. Pat Broderick was the main cover artist for THE FURY OF FIRESTORM and FIRESTORM FAN has posts on him revisiting the covers for issue 1, 4 and 7 that include the original covers and the new inks.


So we will continue this topic soon but not in our next post because even if that post would be a Gil Kane post it would probably be a Marvel post.


We start Today´s birthdays with the Queen of Body Doudles, Shelley Michelle who turns 54 Today. Shelley became famous as the body double for Barbara Streisand in The Prince Of The Tides, Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman ( she sure needed it ) and Kim Basinger in My Stepmother Is An Alien although I don´t know if Kim really had need of Shelley´s services.


Shelley also was in a few movies as an actress like Bikini Summer where she co starred with a few playmates. If you like " playmates go to the beach and take their bikinis off " movies it is a good and entertaining movie but sadly the trailer is not safe for work so I can´t post it here.

Also celebrating her 54th anniversary is Jennifer Rubin, who debuted in Nightmare on Elm Street 3 : Dream Warriors, the first movie from the franchise I saw in a movie theater ( yep, I´m really an old fart ). I remember watching it in a really tiny theater with a very small screen but after 15 minutes I was so enthralled by the movie I completely forgot about it. You can find a lengthy analysis of the movie on RIVERS OF GRUE.


In the movie Jennifer Rubin appeared with the mother of all mohawks.


Horror fans may have seen her on tv shows like The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Crypt and tv movies like Twists of Terror where she showed some skin. She appeared naked in The Wasp Woman, Saints and Sinners, Stranger by Night, Bitter Harvest and A Woman, Her Men And Her Futon.

One year older is Eddie Murphy and since I couldn´t find One Night Only and all my bookmarked music videos have been erased here is Beverly Hills Cop which was still the best before they screwed up the formula.



Alec Baldwin turns 58 Today and while you probably expected me to post a video from his comic related movie The Shadow I´ve got something even better : his appearance on the show El Hormiguero promoting Torrente 5. 



Our next birthday is Hollywood legend Doris Day who celebrates her 92nd year. She appeared in a plethora of movies but my favorite is Pillow Talk.


Doris really was a great actress because she pulled off the shy and quiet wholesome housewife / Mom when she had the hot body of a playmate.


If you haven´t seen the movie check out MAKING NICE IN THE MIDWEST´s entry on Pillow Talk and Kimberly Truhler at GLAM AMOR takes a look at Doris Day´s stunning outfits in that movie in The Style Essentials - Doris Day makes a Statement in Jean Louis for 1959´s PILLOW TALK .



Today would have also been Marlon Brando´s birthday who was in the good Superman movies. Since I already posted the Making Of of the Richard Donner movie here´s a little video showcasing Superman´s more weird and strange powers from the comic which they thankfully didn´t use.



My last cartoon video was in french so to make up for it here is The Yellow Mark from Blake and Mortimer. You can find a lot of other videos of this on YouTube and I would be appalled if this is news to Terry Hooper.



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