Author: Michael Bailey

YOUTUBE TUESDAY (11/04/2008)- ELECTION DAY EDITION

So it is Election Day here in the states, though frankly people have been voting for weeks so it kind of feels anti-climactic.  Call me old-fashioned but I’m big on things happening on the day they’re supposed to happen.  Voting early is kind of like opening your presents on December 15th, but then again if you have millions of presents to open you would probably want to get started early.

Anyhoo, I have a few politcially minded YouTube videos for you this Tuesday, the first is a classic from several years ago.

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

Ah, Cartoon Network.  Remember when you did funny stuff like that?  Or this?

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

Go ahead, say it.  “Solomon Grundy want pants too!”

You’ll laugh every…single…time.

Maybe General Zod would make a good President.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YbIxLhhsyo

Or Lex Luthor.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFHGnA98jDE

All right, both of those are horrible choices.

In any event I am off to vote.  I guess this is the part of the post where I am supposed to implore you to do the same but that seems preachy.  So vote, don’t vote.  It’s really up to you.

More to follow…

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

FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY

I didn’t write a post today. I did produce a page for this blog that you can find on your right under the Fortress of Baileytude Pages section.

A few years back I found this site that listed every crossover to all of the major event books of both Marvel and DC. I copied the info, edited it in a Word document and SHAZAM I had an instant piece of reference. So I thought I would take that out, dust it off and put the DC books here.[1. The reason I didn’t post the Marvel crossovers is that they have disappeared.  Apparently that file didn’t get transferred.  Oh well.  Like goes on.]

Seemed like a good idea to me.

Here’s a direct link to the page in case you were curious.

At some point I’ll put the info about Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis and eventually Amazons Attack and Final Crisis, though the last two will actually seem like work.  Especially Amazons Attack, which was awful.

For now, here are the big DC events and the books associated with them.

Enjoy.

More to follow…

 

Footnotes

I’M BACK

Or maybe this post should be titled, The Sort of New, Kind of Different Fortress of Baileytude, as that would be more accurate.

Well, the week or so I took off was nice and I won’t promise daily postings, but for now it seems I have returned because this part of my life is tanned, rested and ready to talk some comics.

Actually two things brought me out, one of them being the release of not one but two episodes of Views From The Longbox last week.  I got in a groove of prepping the show notes the night before and then actually posting them the next morning and it felt right.  Looking at my schedule next week I believe I can do the same thing for this blog and while what I have to say may not be epic in scope I figure a little something is better than a whole lot of nothing.

The other thing that brought me back to this blog is something occurred to me while I was at work today.  I am not reading a whole heck of a lot of new comics lately.  I just can’t afford them at the moment and that fact doesn’t sadden me as it might have  a year or so ago.  It’s actually quite liberating. 

Continue reading I’M BACK