Watch Out for 'Em

This article is from the June 15, 1986 issue of Amazing Heroes.

Note that this otherwise in-depth article calls the series "The Watchmen."  Do you think that someone at DC thought the title should've begun with a definite article, and not be one word?

See you on Monday, fellow Actioneers!  I leave it entirely in your hands.

  

Pucker Up, Don't Blow

For the past few decades I've been accumulating (among other things) bookmarks of many castes, including many fibrous rectangles not created as bookmarks.

Recently I tracked down the provenance of this one.

Turns out that there was a 1934 pamphlet, published in all seriousness, on this topic.  Someone came across it at a garage sale or some such, and pitched it as a camp classic, looking for those who went to the 1974 flick The Great Gatsby, no doubt.

The book was mentioned in the March 20, 1977 New York Times.  The text below:

Osculation. If you were a kid hellbent on becoming a man back in the 1930s, you had a problem: How should you go about exchanging a few goodnight kisses with your date with all the finesse of a Clark Gable taking on a Joan Crawford? The movies offered you few tips, for in those days the Hays Office kept the cameras from peering too close. You might, as thousands of other Depression‐Age kids did, see an ad in a pulp magazine and write to the Franklin Publishing Co. of Philadelphia for a copy of “The Art of Kissing” by one Hugh Morris.

 

Last year Dave Wagner, a Madison, Wis., newspaperman, came across a yellowed copy of the 1936 book at a garage sale. Convinced that “the kisses of love, the only kisses worth considering,” are now on “the endangered list of American customs,” he persuaded Doubleday to reissue it in paperback, with not one word changed, embellished with 45 art deco‐style drawings by Emanuel Schongut.

 

The new edition contains all the step‐by‐step directions a young man—or young woman, for that matter—needs to know to indulge in one of the most pleasant rites of courtship. The publisher categorizes the book as “humor” for its earnestly erudite discussions of kissing games, the French soul kiss, the vacuum kiss, the dancing kiss, the surprise kiss. Feminists may have stronger words for its pronouncements that man “must he the aggressor ... taller than the woman ... for he must give the impression of being his woman’s superior, (mentally and physically).”

 

The book’s republication will be celebrated during lunchtime next Friday at Doubleday’s store on Third Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets. Everyone who buys a copy (at $1.95) will be rewarded with a kiss by one of the two models (male and female) engaged for the occasion. To arms, Americans, to preserve one of our most cherished rites!

... And here's the reissue's cover.  Happy mucous-membrane meetings, fellow smoochers!  See you Thursday.

   

How Big Was It?

You tell me.

This article's from the January 7, 2022 Tulsa World.  PS as far as I know, the boneheaded idea to sell Bigfoot Hunting Licenses never made it into law.

See you next year!

What You Wanted for Christmas

Forty years ago, anyway.

Did a lot of you campers yearn for tech treats like this one?  I had to settle for a single knife-switch splitter, plus a simple signal duper (one input to two outputs).

This ad was in the November 1982 issue of Video Review mag, which I read semi-religiously.

  

Homey Traditions

Hero Homes

Valhalla, the idealized afterlife home for Norse warriors, is known from 10th- and 13th-century epic poems of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The general depiction involves daylong battles followed by nights of drink and feasting. Lesser known is the tradition that only half of eligible combatants enter Valhalla; the others have been chosen by the goddess Freyja for her own battlefield, Fólkvangr. Nevertheless, all warriors will rise to fight alongside Odin during Ragnarök.

***

According to tradition, King Arthur was slain at the Battle of Camlann by his son-nephew Mordred. This historical conflict took place AD 537.

Later narrators Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory say that after being gravely injured at Camlann, Arthur was borne away “to the Isle of Avalon to be cured of his wounds.” Folk beliefs, written down beginning in the 10th Century, proclaim that Arthur will return “to save Britain in its darkest hour.”

This legend was not only held among the “lower” classes. In 1554, Philip II of Spain married Mary I of England, and swore that he would resign the kingdom if Arthur should return.

This entry concludes our look at some Hero Homes of myth and history. Remember, the greatest Hero of all wants to come home ... into your life.

Merry Christmas!  See you Monday.

  

Super Homes!

 Hero Homes

            Fans of DC’s Silver Age are familiar with Superman’s Arctic Fortress of Solitude. Only super-muscles could lift the giant Golden Key to its door.

(When unused, the Golden Key was supposedly a directional marker for airplanes.) The Fortress held trophies from super feats; separate rooms dedicated to family and friends (including a decoy Clark Kent room); a lab full of exotic equipment and experiments; an armory (including the Phantom Zone Projector); and the miniaturized Bottle City of Kandor, which Supes had sworn to restore to normal size.

Many tales involved Fortress visitors ignoring safety protocols—firing a weapon or releasing a dangerous critter from Superman’s Interplanetary Zoo.

 Superman #187, from 1966, was an 80 Page Giant reprinting many Golden Age tales. The cover proclaimed “A Super-Scoop! Superman Unlocks Secrets of the Fortress of Solitude!” These stories included previous locations for Superman’s retreat, including underwater and the outskirts of Metropolis (for public tours, no less!).

PS I learned about the Fortress and Kandor at an early age.  I was 6½ when this photo was taken, holding the now-classic Superman #158.

PPS and here's a cheat sheet.

See you Thursday.

  

Singin' 'bout Home

 Hero Homes

 Images of homecoming still move us today, as reflected in pop songs like

·        The Beatles:  “Two of Us”—“on our way back home”

·        Tom Jones:  “Green Green Grass of Home”

·        Ed Sheeran:  “Castle on the Hill”

·        John Denver: “Take Me Home, Country Roads”

·        Grand Funk:  “I’m Your Captain”—“I’m getting closer to my home”

·        Simon & Garfunkel:  “Homeward Bound”

·        Bruce Springsteen:  “My Hometown”

·       Bon Jovi:  “Who Says You Can’t Go Home”

Hope you make it back home before curfew!  See you Monday.

  

Phoning To Or From New York?

Hero Homes

The ending of E.T. The Extraterrestrial shows him reunited with his folk.  

We never learn what his “home” is like in the 1982 movie, but an authorized tie-in called E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet was released in 1985.  It depicted E.T.’s homeworld as a lush green paradise.  

1999’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace included a brief shot of three members of E.T.’s race cheering for Queen Amidala.

One Hero Home is a real-world location! 177A Bleecker Street in NYC may sound innocuous, but a quick Google Maps search will reveal that Dr. Strange’s lair, his Sanctum Sanctorum, is an actual place.

            Inuit beliefs across far North America include the paradisical afterlife Qudlivun, and several places of misery and pain, Adliparmiut and Adlivun.

 See you Thursday, fellow seekers!

  

On Their Way Home

 Hero Homes

There’s a mounted statue of Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia, in Prague. He’s the “good king” of the Christmas song. Although he died in AD 985 and was declared a saint soon after, he’s not necessarily at rest. Folk legend holds that if the Czech Republic is ever in mortal danger, the statue will come to life, leave its pedestal, and raise an army to defend his homeland.

            Beethoven, Strauss Jr, Borodin, Sibelius, and Smetana are just a few classical composers who composed works in honor of their homelands.  And don’t forget compilations of folk music like those of Liszt, Brahms, Vaughan Williams, or Folkways’ Anthology of American Folk Music.

            The source of the name “Camelot,” in tradition a fabled headquarters for King Arthur, is unknown. The place was first so designated in the 1100s by Chrétien de Troyes, and in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. Folktale and poesy transformed it into a castle-town hosting the Knights of the Round Table and a wide-ranging court, as depicted in the 14^th-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Other theories hold that the name derived from Camlann, supposedly the site of Arthur’s final battle. 

Only in the 1970s did Camelot gain a reputation as a silly place.

See you Monday!