Rip Jagger's Other Dojo

James Warren is one of the most important people in the history of comic books, who as it turned out never published a comic book. Rather he published magazines, larger more up-scale items which in dynamic black and white presented a somewhat more sophisticated attitude about the graphic storytelling beneath sometimes admittedly pretty garish covers. He didn't start out wanting to be Stan Lee, though he did come to regard Marvel's maven as his primary competition. James Warren wanted to be Hugh Hefner, the prophet of sexual emancipation who in many ways defined the pop culture of the 50's,60's and 70's. To that end his first publication was a Playboy-like magazine called After Hours . There were a lot of publishers who wanted to be Hugh Hefner though and the newsstands were stuffed with magazines featuring naked and semi-naked dames to quicken the libidos of America far and wide. So After Hours did not last and left Warren casting about for another way to ma...

I imagine most of us have seen Frank Frazetta's famous "ad" from vintage Warren magazines preaching the defects in the then quite common practice. I read recently that this was Frazetta's final piece of "comic art" of any kind and that it was specifically commissioned by James Warren for his magazines despite the profound loss of revenue rejecting smoking ads meant that the time. As it turns out comics were common device to sell cigarettes, so I guess it's only fair to use the format to present the counter view. Below are some vintage cigarette ads which use the comics format. Don't fall victim amigos. I am lucky not to have the craving, though I will confess to having enjoyed the rare cigar from time to time. These days I've given it all up completely.  Rip Off

The Beast of Hollow Mountain is a flick I've been wanting to see for many many years. I never caught it on television in its original form and never seemed to find it on VHS or DVD. Finally I took the plunge and picked it up on Blu-Ray (alongside The Neanderthal Man) and fulfilled my desire to see this Willis O'Brien inspired cowboy-meets-dinosaur "epic". It's a B-movie right from the start with an evident smallish budget but blessed with a lovely Mexican landscape. They make the most of the landscape and right across it many times, many many times. We have two ranchers (one a gringo played by Guy Madison) who run afoul of the local thug and cattleman and most of the movie's time is spent detailing how these two factions cannot get along all the while both seem to wish to romance a local lovely played by Patricia Medina.  Cows are missing and each side blames the other There's an obligatory kid, a comedic old man, and other long-standing movie ...

The 1934 movie serial The Vanishing Shadow from Universal has lots of intriguing details, some which are claimed to be the first ever on film such as the first ray gun on screen. It's a science ficiton yarn that does its absolute best to be as mundane as it can possibly be. The Vanishing Shadow gets its title from the main gimmick used much in the first parts of the serial, a machine which worn by the user renders them invisible save for their shadow. It's a pretty decent effect and for the company which had given the world the cinematic version of the H.G.Wells classic The Invisible Man a worthy one. The invisibility gag is an invention of a sometimes mad scientist who wavers between good and evil throughout the story but who mainly uses his inventions to aid a handsome young man fend off a predatory gang bent on making him sign over valuable stocks and  such. Also helping him is the daughter of the leader of the villainous gang who insists her father will reform and...

Steve Englehart has been pretty frank about his comic book career in interviews and on his own website and such. In the collected Coyote the book is backed up by a few issues of a short-fused project by Englehart and Marshall Rogers called Scorpio Rose. It was meant to be a trilogy but only ever produced two comic books (both of which I remember buying at the time). They concerned themselves with a Romany mystic of a unusual lengthy life and of the demon who loved her at times.  The saga was adapted and altered from scripts Englehar produced for DC for a projected Madame Xanadu series. The price for those scripts had been misrepresented to Englehart so he refused to turn them over and that was it for Madame Xanadu until some years later when we met her under the name of Scorpio Rose.  The series went two issues then Rogers was unable to finish it. Instead of getting a new artist Englehart just left it unfinished but in this collection the layouts Rogers did...

If ever want to read something weird by two of best talents in comics then I recommend I Am Coyote by Steve Englehart and the late Marshall Rogers. It's full of enticing designs, offers a constantly twisting plot, and presents the world a character like few others its ever seen. Coyote is an orphan, left in the desert by his parents for reasons we never learn and discovered by a geezer who claims to be a half-man, a creature of myth who lives in more than one dimension. Coyote is raised by the half-man and later gets a step-mother who claims to be a psychic vampire. His early life is a primitive one and he grows up a bit feral. He's at some point given access to some of the abilities of his adopted father though he himself is fully human (he says). He does this by means of Peyote.  In this story which ran in serialized form in Eclipse Monthly (in black and white) the action starts immediately as Coyote runs afoul of what is called The Shadow Cabinet which has ...