Travel down some backroads of your mind and check back in Thursday, fellow time travelers!
Monday, August 04, 2025
WELCOME TO ANTHOLOGY AUGUST!
Travel down some backroads of your mind and check back in Thursday, fellow time travelers!
Thursday, July 31, 2025
Super Clothes #10 - More PJs
The above size 8 set is from a concern identified as PCA on the label.
This size 10-12 set, with the same central image, is from a company called Allison.
This yellow set which gives away the Super Secret is labeled size 7.
Monday, July 28, 2025
Great Fun Nearly Ruined by Poor Production
I’ve read a dozen or so books by Kevin J Anderson. I lo-oo-ove his Dan Shamble books. The only one of his many tie-ins I’ve read was his take on Superman’s origins, which did not impress me as to being sanguine with the “true” roots of Superman. Review here.
When we hosted Anderson in 2019 for SoonerCon 28, he was very friendly, witty, and insightful in person. I bought ALL of the Shamble books from him, and he signed each one.
And, I’m an original Kolchak Kid, having watched Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak in 1972’s The Night Stalker and 1973’s The Night Strangler on ABC’s Movie of the Week. So when Anderson plugged this comics hardback, I immediately ordered.
Came to find out there is one comic-book tale of Kolchak and Dan Shamble in a crossover tale, several alternate covers, and two text pieces.
I am NOT disappointed with the art or storytelling. But the editing-proofreading of this project is VERY disappointing.
The first tale is the Kolchak-Shamble crossover comic story,
titled “Unnaturally Normal.” It’s a lot
of fun, although the basic plot and most of the characters are transferred from
a nearly identically plotted tale, “Wishful Thinking,” in Anderson’s 2018
collection of Shamble shorts, Services Rendered.
Read Shamble’s speech balloons circled here. Somebody repeated the same words in BOTH balloons. It’s a sure bet that in the script for this page, Shamble IS NOT saying the same thing twice!
The first text piece, featuring Kolchak, is called “On the Wrong Bigfoot,” written by Richard Dean Starr and Matthew Baugh. Everything seems OK with it. It’s a fun first-person piece in which our favorite reporter and the long-suffering Tony Vincenzo have some interesting encounters with several aspects of conspiracy culture.
The second text piece, called “Digital van Helsing – The
Fate Worse than Death,” is by Anderson and Guy Anthony De Marco. Like the other tales, it is fun to read. BUT … the presentation is amateurishly inept!
In several places we have what looks to be a rewording which
includes TWO word choices. The one above
can’t decide what to do concerning breakfast— to “think about” breakfast, or
“contemplate” it, so we got BOTH!
Look at the above page. See all the circles? In each place there’s a random insertion of the numeral 1 and a bracket, thus: 1}
This happens ALL OVER this last story.
Don’t you HATE it with the medium ruins the message? Ta-ta, see you on Thursday.
Thursday, July 24, 2025
While the Sky Falls, It Will Talk to You
This article is from the September 3, 2023 Tulsa World.
Monday, July 21, 2025
I Hope So Too
MY APOLOGIES for the missing ending of the article's text. The file is supposedly "corrupted" and that issue of the paper has gone to recycling heaven. OOPS.
Thursday, July 17, 2025
It's a Super World
In this Page 2 editor's note from the same date, World editor Jason Collington tells his own autobiographical tale of Super Inspiration.
This strip is from the July 15, 2025 World.
Monday, July 14, 2025
Superman Meets Mr Atoz
This juicy compendium is from the July 6, 2025 Tulsa World. (I don't know a finer newspaper in Oklahoma.)
Thursday, July 10, 2025
In Other News ...
Above is the article as scanned from the June 28, 2006 Oklahoman. Following are pix taken for the article.
Here I am showing off some issues in the Comics Closet.
This is a copy of Superman #158, which introduced (among other things) Nightwing and Flame Bird.The above photo WAS NOT in the article, but it's me in 1963 with the same issue of Superman #158, when it was new.
Here's a separate photo of the box, which can be studied in depth here.
Monday, July 07, 2025
The Trek -- or Pants -- of Theseus
Philosophical thought experiment: Does an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object? Apply the “ship of Theseus” concept to Trek or other franchises. How much can be changed before it's not Star Trek, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, or another cherished nerd franchise?
A lot of fun was had by all. And just last week I had fun when coming across this treatment of the “ship of Theseus” idea again!
Thursday, July 03, 2025
We'll See About This One
Monday, June 30, 2025
Well, SOME of the Truth
If you wish to know more about the ARRB and its (lack of) findings, I encourage you to read the five-volume Inside the ARRB by Douglas Horne, one of the staff members. Horne chronicles the cowardice and insight of several board members of higher rank than he was, and the attempts of some to make sure that no boats were rocked.
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Cards from the Past
This is a 1978 sweepstakes come-on from RD. No, we never won anything from them.
We were with Cox from when they first hung cable in OKC (around 1979????) until around 2000, when their incessant rate hikes chased us away. We were NEVER late in our payments, however inflated.
Monday, June 23, 2025
Worlds of Tomorrow!
After the
end of Star Trek’s run, Gene Roddenberry pitched several projects to
the TV networks—to be honest, it was one idea, continually redressed. All were
set on a future Earth, in the aftermath of a planetwide war. The TV-movie Genesis
II aired in 1973, and starred a 20th-Century man awakening
in 2133 in an Earth populated by splintered outposts of mankind. A reworked
version, Planet Earth, aired in 1974. A third telefilm based on the
concept was broadcast in 1975. Its title—Brave New World.
Miranda is the daughter of the sorcerer Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. When some mariners are shipwrecked on their barren island, she begs her father to save them. She eventually marries one of the refugees, the prince of Naples. In the play’s final scene, she addresses the crowd who is celebrating the nuptials:
O wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,That has such people in't.
Some pop groups have given the phrase “Brave New World” a sarcastic spin. Jimmy and the Boys’ 1981 “Brave New World” narrates a society populated by genderless workers whose mindless activity feeds the machines of progress. “Brave New World” by the Tender Violent Chords, from 1982, looks forward to spaceships and satellite eyes that watch the world without emotion.
Some “new worlds” aren’t that great. Aldous Huxley’s dystopian look at a fascist future, the 1932 novel Brave New World, was a satirical riposte against the utopian dreams of H.G. Wells. In the future of Huxley’s tale, bottle babies and strict social castes are the norm. Technology’s sole aim is to keep the lower classes occupied so that the upper castes may indulge their government-sanctioned fancies. Huxley’s satirical title was a direct reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
- Iron Maiden (heavy metal, 2000)
- Toyah (new wave, 1982)
- Styx (rock, 1999)
- Moskwa TV (synth-pop, 1987)
- Fuzzy Logic (jazz-funk, 1995)
- New Model Army (punk, 1985)
- Hawklords (space rock, 2018)
- David Essex (pop, 1978)
- The Bongos (new wave, 1985)
- Genetic Control (2005, punk)
- DDT (alternative, 1983)
- Ana Christensen (alternative. 1990)
- Steve Miller Band (rock, 1969)
Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 foresaw a future in which independent thought is stifled through the suppression of books and learning. Bradbury originally said that the book was conceived in reaction to the McCarthy hearings’ chilling effect on free speech. In 2007, he revised his opinion to say that the book’s allegory also applies to mass media’s effect in reducing consumers’ interest in reading and literature.
Some of the current organizations that claim to be working on a wonderful future world are the World Future Society; the World Future Council (offices in Hamburg, London, and Geneva); and the Future Worlds Center (based in Cyprus). Don’t forget the Association of Professional Futurists, or the World Futures Studies Federation, founded in 1973. Or our own Future Society of Oklahoma!
Monday, June 16, 2025
Time to Get Stoned
Thursday, June 12, 2025
WATCHPANELS, Part the Eleventh
WATCHPANELS
One compulsive reader’s observations ...
after gazing into Watchmen for the umpteenth timeYup my friends, it's hard to believe that it's been a year since we discussed Chapter Ten of Watchmen.
Part the Eleventh
All right, I’ve got photons in my teeth and my wrist brace on ...Why, it’s a VEIDT-OUT!
Thanks for stopping by. Only one chapter left!
copyright © by Mark Alfred