HAPPY HALLOWEEN 2008!

I wasn’t thinking ahead this year and have nothing meaningful for you for Halloween.  Add to that the fact that I have a nasty cold and I am not really in the mood to do anything too elaborate.  So here’s a YouTube video that features something from a special I saw again and again on HBO called The Worst Witch.

Enjoy…I hope.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUhuPn8_d0Q

So the question becomes what does this clip have to do with comic books?

Well…

  • The music was composed by Charles Strouse, who also composed the music for It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman in the sixties.
  • Tim Curry was in The Shadow, which also starred Sir Ian McKellen, the once and future Magneto.  He also was initially cast as the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, but that didn’t work out for some reason.  He eventually got to play in the Bat Universe when he voiced Mutro Botho in an episode of Batman Beyond.  Also, the Rocky Horror Picture Show was adapted into a comic book back in 1990 by Caliber Comics.
  • Fairuza Balk, who plays MIldred Hubble, was the voice of Penny, John D.’s girlfriend in the Justice League episode Only a Dream.
  • Diana Rigg’s role as Emma Peel on The Avengers was part of the inspiration for the “new look” Wonder Woman back in the sixties.

Ok, that last one was reaching, but you get the idea.

I loved this special as a kid.  I was ten in the fall of 1986 and my family had just moved back to the Allentown area and this is one of my clearest memories of that first fall back in Pennsylvania.  It’s kind of dated now and it is interesting to see Fairuza Balk playing a good witch in this special when she would go on to play a very bad witch in The Craft but still.  Good memories.

And is it me or is Tim Curry trying to turn into Mick Jagger at the end of this song?

Happy Halloween, everyone!

More to follow…

YOUTUBE TUESDAY (10/07/2008): SUPERMAN COLLECTION

Welcome to YouTube Tuesdays, a newish feature here at the Fortress where I take one day out of the week to showcase something I found on YouTube that I felt I just had to share.

Take that however you want to. It’s YouTube Tuesday because, well, they sort of rhyme.

I rarely get envious of another person’s collection.  That sort of thing just isn’t in me for some reason.  I am much more concerned about the junk I have.  I can appreciate when someone has some cool stuff, though, and this video shows one bad ass Superman collection.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwmykVgkUMM&feature=related

There’s a lof of stuff in there.  The video seems to cover the same material over and over again, but it is still all about some awesome.

That’s it for this week.  I’m sure I’ll have something to say tomorrow.

More to follow…

GETTING MY FIX: COMIC WEEK 10/01/2008

Welcome to Getting My Fix, a weekly feature here at the Fortress where I, like many other comic book bloggers, tell you what I bought this week.

I mean everyone else does it so why shouldn’t I?

We’ll start with the comics I bought for me.

Now that is one amazing cover.

I have not read this latest issue of Supergirl yet but I am looking forward to it.  I don’t think I am alone in thinking that this title has had some serious problems over it’s nearly three year publication history and this is where things might really turn around.  Not that I disliked the last few issues, but with everything I have read about this new direction I have high hopes.

Especially with New Krypton coming up.

Continue reading GETTING MY FIX: COMIC WEEK 10/01/2008

YOU KNOW, I THINK IT WAS RIGHT ABOUT HERE…

…that DC really went wrong in the nineties

DC sure had it rough circa 1991/1992.  They really did.  Thanks to Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen and others Marvel and then Image were both doing a bang up job of attracting readers new and old.  The art was flashy, the hype was huge and DC had a hard time keeping up. 

Continue reading YOU KNOW, I THINK IT WAS RIGHT ABOUT HERE…

THE FORTRESS ARCHIVES: DIRECT CURRENTS #9

I have a lot of neat stuff packed away here in the Fortress.  From time to time I will pull them out and share them with you.  These are the Fortress Archives.

This time out I present Direct Currents #9 from October or so of 1988.  Direct Currents was a free magazine put out by DC Comics and distributed to comic shops to hype whatever DC was publishing that month.  It was a flimsy little thing and the “articles” were not even remotely in depth, but it did it’s job of letting you know what was coming out when, so there’s that.  Before the Direct Currents “magazine” DC had run something similar off and on for years, but those were on a week by week basis in the comics themselves. 

I would occasionally pick these up at the Comic Vault in the early nineties but I didn’t hang on to them.  Actually I cut them up for the covers and such when I would plaster my bedroom walls with comic book stuff, but that’s beside the point.  Some years back Chuck, my dealer at Titan Games and Comics, had a bunch of these sitting around and gave them to me for free because no one else wanted them he knew I would like them.  This is why I shop at Titans.  Chuck gives me the hook up from time to time.

This issue was interesting mainly because it was pimping the then upcoming Invasion! event.  Invasion! is my all time favorite DC crossover ever.  There is no question of this, so when I was going through some thing the other day this caught my eye.  Here’s the cover.

Continue reading THE FORTRESS ARCHIVES: DIRECT CURRENTS #9