I haven’t seen the new movie, but they tell me it’s good. Personally, I’m more interested in the classic original which was not called “Mr. Peabody & Sherman” (or as I preferred to call it “Sherman & Peabody”) but rather “Peabody’s Improbable History.” Using great writing, excellent voice talent and crummy animation, these short cartoons told the amusing stories of a smart dog and his pet boy as they travel through time. Who knew in 1959 that one day these filler segments from The Bullwinkle Show would be beautifully animated in a lavish feature-length film? And who could have predicted that kids who were 10 years old in 1959 would grow up to be 64-year-old grandparents and bring their grandchildren to see a movie based on fairly minor characters they enjoyed (somewhat) in their youth? I’m betting DreamWorks did!

So let’s climb into our WABAC machine, turn back time, and listen to the classic theme song from the original series. Ah… memories. Sing along! You know the words!

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Click the link below and travel back in time!

I’ve already dealt with Smash, the British weekly comic that ran 257 issues between 1966 and 1971 that featured an oddball hodgepodge mix of British and American comics, but there’s several points of interest in this 1969 Annual edition of the title. Like, the way the cover doesn’t feature your standard symbolic, iconic image. Instead, it’s first of a three page color story featuring the characters from the humor features (Grimly Feendish, Percy’s Pets, the Swots and the Blots, Bad Penny, The Man from B.U.N.G.L.E., The Nervs, Charlie’s Choice, Ronnie Rich) engaging in a game of footie. While these kinds of crossovers weren’t unknown in British comics they were definitely pretty rare.

First up there’s a nicely drawn outing of undoubtedly the dullest stretchable hero in comics, Rubber Man, formerly James Hollis whose “powers” was actually a cruse given him by an Indian fakir.

Next up the first of two stories featuring the Legend Testers, Rollo Stones and Danny Charters who worked for the Museum of Legend of Myth in the 40th Century and traveled in time to test artifacts to discover whether the legends around them were true. People who know more than me about British artists tell me the art here was done by the series regular artist Jordi Bernet. Like Rubber Man the Legend Testers make a cameo in Albion, the 2005 limited series published by DC.

This one off science fiction story Inferno which appears to be a Spanish origin.

Lieutenant Lightning may very well be the goofiest British superhero of the 60′s, and that’s saying something. For the record his chest insignia reads “Tin”, which is the name of the future organization that emplows him.

Whenever we run out of ideas here at Comics Tunes Headquarters, we always return to the sure-fire, tried-and-true, can’t-miss-with-this show that spawned more comics-related music than anything else I’ve found – the 1966 Batman TV series. No one really knows how many bat-songs there are, but it’s a bat-load!

This time we’re presenting a real treat. Rather than the “Batman Theme” which has been na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-ed to death, feast your eyes (and soon your ears) on this: An actual record of the real Adam West sort of singing. To tie in with the staggering success of the twice-weekly TV series, this gen-you-wine 45 RPM record was actually released, along with all kinds of other bat-merch. And now, you can listen to it and (try to) enjoy it.

Click the link below and Batusi along!

You may very well consider this week’s installment of whatever the hell this is supposed a deviation from it’s designated mission station, that being to read all the comic books I’ve always wanted to read before I died. Not to mention the fact it’s a new all-time low in my over reliance on what I generously like to thin of as the cut and paste school of journal (pick a subject, do some research, collect images, read other peoples posts then do a bit of cut and pasting; rewrite and you’re done). But truthfully I am just as over fascinated with comic strips as I am comic books and that goes double for Hugo Hercules, William H.D. Koerner’s short-lived strip. It ran for five months, September 1902 to January 1903 in the Chicago Tribune and is thought by many to be the funny pages very first superhuman. Albeit one who didn’t wage an never ending battle against evil so much as wander around aimlessly sans agency or visible means of support looking for cool stuff to do. The strip itself was admittedly pretty meh; like a lot of early strips it relentlessly stuck to a repetitious single theme and rarely deviated from it. In this case Hugo getting mixed up in stock situations that require a demonstration of super strength, punctuated by his not particularly catchy catch phrase.

Not being what you’d call a success Koerner left cartooning to become a painter. In a lot of ways it’s still ahead of its time; as much as the trope of the superhuman has been, often brutally, deconstructed, no one to my knowledge has created so casual a ‘crimefighter’; maybe it’s time for someone to dust Hugo off and see what they could do with him..

I finally saw Guardians of the Galaxy and it was thoroughly enjoyable. I’m not going to review the film except to say that Marvel Studios did a great job of bringing to the big screen a bunch of characters and stories that very few people care about. This is a big departure from the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man films, which had accumulated millions of fans over several decades. It proves that Marvel’s movie department has what it takes to make a hit, regardless of the popularity of the source material. Next year: Ant Man.

And I would be remiss (and who needs that?) if I didn’t give a shout-out to my childhood friend Keith Giffen who is credited as co-creator of Rocket Raccoon. How cool is that?

WARNING: If you haven’t seen it yet, there are spoilers ahead.

The villain of the film (or one of the worst ones, anyway) is Ronan The Accuser, whom we first saw in Fantastic Four #65, looking very much the way Jack Kirby drew him, with his weird hammer-thing and that wild hat he wears. Also very cool.

Naturally I’m building up to a song. It’s the same song as the past two weeks, but this is the wackiest version of all. Enjoy Jack Sheldon singing and Benny Goodman swinging this recording of “Rocky Raccoon.”

Click the link below and swing!

P.S. I wanted to acknowledge the tragic passing yesterday of the wonderful Robin Williams. His connection to comics was already explored a while back when we were spotlighting Popeye. You can see those entries here and here.

I wish I could explain how my brain works because frankly it’s inner workings are a mystery to even me. Perhaps it’s just a symptom of my ADHD driven obsessive-compulsive nature but I tend to get “over fascinated” (which is probably the most polite thing you could call it) with certain things. For example, Henry Brewster, a short-lived teen comic from 1966 drawn (and presumably written) by Golden Age artist Bob Powell, a.k.a. Stanley Robert Pawlowski. Powell is know for his work on Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Mr. Mystic and the Mars Attack cards and while those credits clearly show he was an incredibly versatile artist seeing him do teen comics is still a little strange, not to mention a bit unsettling. These comics are are drawn in a distinctive loose, scratchy style, which would make these comics oddball enough but Henry (no relation to Punky) Brewster is plenty peculiar in a lot of other ways.

Like the format; a 25 cent, bimonthly comic of entirely original material. A detail they really could have much more of; for once a cover banner readingNo Reprints wouldn’t have actually been appropriate. It seems kind of ambitious for a neophyte publisher like Myron Frass’s M.F. Enterprises whose only other title was the much maligned (for good reason) even shorter-lived version of Captain Marvel. The android version who could dissect himself by yelling “Split!” .

T hen there’s the fact Henry Brewster wasn’t yet another pressing from the well worn Archie Comics template. Sure, Henry was a standard issue All American Boy, but super strong Animal was soft spoken, literally; his dialogue was always lettered at roughy half the size of everyone else’s. Hapless Weenie was the kind of professional weirdo that you’d think the gang would avoid like the plague. The girls were sadly mostly easily defined by hair color, prematurely silver haired rich girl Melody and dark haired nice girl next door Debbie. Though Melody did develop some depth over the course of the series; in #1 she repeatedly rejects the hapless, love struck Weenie so often”Go away!” threatens to become her catch phrase, but by #6 she actually appears to be going out with him (or at least willing to be seen holding his, ew, hand in public). Which is odd seeing as how along with being a hardcore goofball who sometimes seems like he’s stolen an middle schoolers clothes as drawn Weenie is grotesque he could easily be a background character in a Gilbert Herandez Love & Rockets story.

And while the grownups in Archie Comics were frequently exasperated by the antics of the Riverdale Gang’s mostly innocent antics the adults in Henry Brewster instinctively seemed to get Henry and company were basically good kids who were just trying to be helpful. But after more or less ignoring anything specifically 1960′s (except for a story in #1 where the gang gets into a Beatles analog band called “The Baldies” which leads them, including some of the girls, to shave their heads, placing them several decades ahead of their time) this issue gets hip deep into super secret agents and supervillains.

Admittedly this was what got me over fascinated in Henry Brewster - that and this cover. I mean, seriously, what the hell is that thing standing behind Henry supposed to be? Some kind of African cat god? An extraterrestrial bent on world domination? I had absolutely no clue and ached to know, though I knew in my heart that chances were I’d never get to read it. But then I didn’t reckon with the internet; almost all things are possible with the internet.

But before they get to the super spies and villains the gang there’s a positively Scooby Dooesque encounter in a haunted house. But in this story the mysterious figure isn’t trying to scare them off because he’s searching for hidden treasure or running a counterfeiting ring out of its basement. He’s just some poor schlub testing amusement for a spook house. Though instead of wearing a creepy rubber mask for some reason he decides to dress like a minor league pre-1965 Marvel villain from a Human Torch backup in Strange Tales.

And here the gang gets involved in 60′s style super spy stuff…

And finally they face an actual supervillain, well, kind of a supervillain, a broad parody of a TV Batman villain anyway. One Tome B. Bukwurm.

He’s…well, I don’t properly know exactly what he’s supposed to be. Is he a mole man (one crossed with Professor Kelp from The Nutty Professor) or just a guy dressed up like a mole man? Albeit a mole man dressed in a Transylvanian space outfit for a showing of The Rocky Horror Show. And that goes double for his henches, who look like…mole man members of The Rat Pack? Are they a masked, themmed crime gang or do they represent an incursion by a race of subterranean creatures bent on world domination? After all that anticipation I was frankly disappointed by Bukwurm’s unnecessarily exaggerated goofiness, making me wish even harder that the creature on the cover actually appeared in the comic. Which is only when it finally occurred to me…

Bukwurm is the creature on the cover! As the saying goes, if it had been a snake it would have bit me. But this raises even more questions. Is this suppose to be one of those ‘symbolic’ covers? Or did Powell forget what the character was originally supposed to look like, or did he change his mind about his appearance after the cover was drawn?

And finally, here’s a couple more stories without any fantastic elements that manage to be quite a bit of fun.

By now you’ve probably seen Guardians of the Galaxy. I haven’t seen it yet; I’m going tonight. So please, no spoilers.

The film features, among others, Rocket Raccoon who is sort of a cross between Rocket J. Squirrel (without Bullwinkle) and Rocky Raccoon. Today we’re presenting another version of the popular song that inspired the character. It’s very different from last week’s and I think you’ll dig it the most to say the least.

Meanwhile, I hear that the film is doing very well with both critics and audiences. That’s a big victory since the Guardians are kind of a hodge-podge of Marvel characters with nowhere near the fan following of Spider-Man or the X-Men. Kudos!

Click the link below and sing along. You know the words!