(the illustrated) dracula lives again!

a lost item from my childhood that for many years i could recall very little about beyond simple nostalgia. i can recall neither how or where i got it. despite being deprived, by the fog of time, of a title or an artist or a year, dogged net-sleuthing unearthed a book not seen in print since 1975, "(the illustrated) dracula", a black & white trade paperback comic first published more than half a century ago in 1966 (as simply "dracula") by russ jones, creator of warren publishing's popular "creepy" horror comic magazine.

preceded with a four-page introduction by famed dracula portrayer christopher lee, the comic is a faithful retelling of bram stoker's 1897 opus, condensed by otto binder and craig tennis, and moodily rendered by gold-through-bronze-age talent alden mcwilliams, whose strong draftsmanship favorably evokes his more famous contemporaries alex raymond, wally wood and al williamson. bob larkin provided the cover portrait. copies can still be found on amazon and abeBooks, so i ordered one and, after finding my nostalgia fully justified, i set about the laborious task of scanning the entire 161-page volume:

cover of the original 1966 "dracula" first edition:

"(the illustrated) dracula" was a cheap paperback printed on cheap newsprint to be sold to the hoi polloi. starkly illustrated in this unretouched scan are the browning of age, the coarse texture of the cheap pulp paper stock, the uneven and patchy application of the ink, and most challenging, ghost impressions left by ink from the facing page. before and after:

as with many bound book formats, paperbacks can be difficult to scan completely flat. even before the book arrived, in my original plan i had resigned myself to cutting the pages apart. however, despite its age, the book was surprisingly flexible and resilient and proved amenable to the considerable torsion required to hold the pages flat. thanks to the generous gutter space placed between the spine and the artwork, i was able to keep this classic tome in one piece.

the golden age of antifa comics

who can forget these four-color classics from a time when no one declared that anti-fascists were "terrorists" or that tiki-torch-waving nazis were "very fine people" ...

fast forward ...

(see also: "those were the days")

mad men

when facing off against the legendary bat-man, it helps to be just a little crazy ...

"the case of the chemical syndicate", detective comics #27, may 1939

"professor hugo strange", detective comics #36, feb 1940

"the joker returns", batman #1, spring 1940

"the murders of clayface", detective comics #40, jun 1940

"wolf, the crime master", batman #2, summer 1940

"the case of the joker's crime circus!", batman #4, winter 1941

"the clock maker!", batman #6, aug-sep 1941

"the brain burglar!", detective comics #55, sep 1941

"twenty-four hours to live!", detective comics #57, nov 1941

"a bat-death for batman!", batman #221, may 1970

"night of the reaper", batman #237, dec 1971

"forecast for tonight... murder!", detective comics #420, feb 1972

"open-and-shut case!", detective comics #425, jul 1972

"deathmask!", detective comics #437, nov 1973

then again, anyone who'd face off against every adrenaline-fueled psychopath that crawled out of the woodwork might be just a little crazy too ...

"the white whale!", batman #9, feb-mar 1942

(stories by bob kane, bill finger, frank robbins, denny o'neil & archie goodwin; art by bob kane, jerry robinson, george roussos, irv novick, neal adams, dick giordano, frank robbins, don heck & jim aparo)

making america great again

updated for today’s conservatism in the age of trump, here’s a modern version of one of my all-time favorite comic stories from psychedelic sixties underground master robert crumb, originally about a form of mental awakening.

(the original story “meatball” can be seen at “classic crumb”.)

(original story & art by robert crumb, 1967; updated by aarrgghh, 2017)

if only the shadow knew ...

... a little more about physics. can you spot the errors?

(story and art by howard chaykin, colors by jesus aburto)

where lamont cranston a.k.a the shadow a.k.a. author/artist howard chaykin talks about density, he clearly should be referring to mass. shrinking an object in the manner deduced by the shadow would actually increase its density, since the same number of atoms would now occupy a smaller volume. what would remain unchanged is the object's mass and gravity's effect on it. the ingots would weight exactly the same as they always have, which means the shadow and his cohorts shouldn't be able to handle them with just their fingers and pass them around like peanuts.

on the other hand, the shrinking machine has yet to be revealed. it's possible back in 1949 some fugitive evil nazi genius actually discovered how to warp space itself, which would allow him to shrink an object by shrinking the space between its atoms, instead of merely moving them closer together in normal space. voila! smaller ingots, same density. (same mass and weight, however.)

in any case, one wouldn't use a spectrometer to measure density. (but one can use a mass spectrometer to analyze an object's mass.) in order to measure density, one need only weight it on a scale and divide by its total volume.

from the shadow: midnight in moscow #1, may 2014.

aarrgghh!!!

one reason to check out this month's thor, god of thunder #23 — my handle gets a workout in this time-hopping, bashing & brawling smackdown. the other reason would be artists esad ribic's and ive svorcino's romanticist stylings:

(story by jason aaron, art by esad ribic & colors by ive svorcina)