Grapplers Delight

 I'm what one would probably refer to as a casual fan of professional wrestling these days.  I was a massive fan as a child, what with Vince McMahon's national expansion of the WWF hitting at just the right time during my childhood (I was 10 in 1984), but by that time I was already watching whatever NWA/AWA syndication package was being broadcast to the Cincinnati market pretty religiously due to my grandparents' (Dad's parents) interest in it during weekend  Saturday morning visits to their house.  That, and my mother's stepfather's (who would be my....Step- Grandpa?  Mom's family has always been confusing) interest in attending local indie wrestling promotions' events every weekend in the Lucasville, Ohio area, in which I would tag along with.  We also attended a lot of co-ed roller derby that was put on there, too....in a dancehall/bar/roller rink located next to a double screen drive-in movie theater.  The establishment was basically two metal Tecumseh pole barns merged together at the sides with a bar located dead center in the middle where the barns met, with one barn serving as a dancehall and the other a roller rink.  On Friday nights, they'd run wrestling in the dancehall, and on Saturdays it was roller derby in the rink.  Step-Grandpa was a bar band guitarist who played every drinking establishment on the Ohio side of the River from Higginsport east to Portsmouth and Ironton, which is how he was aware of the events being held.   Step-Grandpa was a pretty fun guy to hang out with.

An amusing 1970s marquee from the  Scioto Breeze Drive-In

I couldn't find any contemporary photos of the dancehall/roller rink, because I believe it may have been torn down at some point in the 1990s, which also would've been around the last times I would've watched a movie at the neighboring Scioto Breeze Auto Theater.  It was double feature of Robert Rodriguez's DESPERADO and Clive Barker's LORD OF ILLUSIONS.

As for why I took an interest in pro wrasslin', it's kind of a no brainer...I was a young comic book nerd, and the mixture of kayfabe soap opera melodrama, theatrical personalities, and colorful ring attire translated to my brain as "real life superheroes".

I was definitely more of a fan of Jim Crockett Promotions syndication package when it finally hit the above-mentioned Cincinnati television market around the same time as McMahon's expansion.  Through it I discovered and became a huge fan of Dusty Rhodes, Magnum TA, the Road Warriors, the antics of Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen....and the Midnight Express and their manager, Jim Cornette.  It was my love for it that later contributed to my decision to swear allegiance to Ted Turner's WCW, of which I was a HUGE fan.   I joke all the time that I'm a veteran of the Monday Night Wars, and our side lost....

The reason why I consider myself a "casual fan" of the sport these days is due to the outcome and aftermath of the Monday Night Wars.  I haven't actively followed the WWE or any other national promotion that's cropped up since, due to simple lack of interest in the product.  It's sad that one of the few moments the WWE has held any interest for me was the "SOUTHPAW WRESTLING" parody segments they produced about a decade and a half ago...I kinda wish they would've ran with that a little bit longer.  I tried TNA/IMPACT/whatever they called themselves really early in their game, back when they were running it as a weekly satellite cable pay per view, and admittedly I was getting it for free due to "burnt" dish box access cards.  AEW sounds like a trainwreck from the start that I thankfully avoided.   Recently, though, I have gotten back into the swing of things by watching Billy Corrigan's NWA after they secured their Roku Channel deal and watching it regularly....and I'm enjoying it immensely.  Not all the angles and gimmicks work, but it reminds me of the product I enjoyed in my youth, only with slightly better production values.  I also love watching local live indie shows...the cheaper the promotion, the better.  The goofier the angles and gimmicks, the better....and NWA POWER reminds me of that,,,,again, only with slightly better production values.

I have, however, remained nostalgic for the sport as it was presented during my youth even if my interest in the contemporary product has waned.  One of my personal wrasslin' sweet spots was Cornette's Smoky Mountain Wrestling (produced from 1992 to 1995).  I spent way too much time and effort creating homemade DVD-Rs of the entire show (taken from YouTube rips) just so I could revisit it any time I wanted to.  I've bought a ton of WWE documentaries featuring promotions and stars of my youth.  I watch a lot of DARK SIDE OF THE RING.  I buy a lot of vintage merchandise (action figures, promotional items, comics books) I find amusing.

I took an interest in Jim Cornette as a kid due to that old rule of thumb:  He's a guy that I loved to hate.  I applied the same philosophy my paternal grandfather did with people he inexplicably liked:  "There's something wrong with that sonuvabitch, but goddammit, I like him."  Later in life, I came to discover we shared some mutual interests:  comic books and superheroes.  Part of my nostalgia driven interest in the sport involves listening to about a half dozen podcasts produced by former wrestling icons, and the best of which IMO are Jim Cornette's two entries in the category:  The Jim Cornette Experience and Jim Cornette's Drive-Thru.  I find him to be a genuinely funny guy who just happens to be very passionate about professional wrestling.  And, I get a kick out of listening to him wax nostalgic about comics...

Rawhide Kid #114 (Marvel, August 1973)

I recently acquired a copy of Marvel's RAWHIDE KID #114 because I had learned that, like me, a young Jim Cornette had some letters published in comic book letter columns.  I had about a half a dozen letters printed in my youth...for those below the age of 30 who might be reading this: the letters column of a comic book was pretty much a combination of social media and message board forums for comic book fandom prior to the existence of the internet.  The one thing Jim received out of the deal was something I coveted as kid and was never awarded:  the infamous Marvel No Prize, basically an empty envelope, potentially autographed by creators, which was awarded to readers for being...well...really obsessive fans of Marvel Comics.  As silly as it sounds, these were very much in demand amongst fans...and some graded autographed examples of them have commanded some ridiculous prices on the secondary collectors market.

This thing is selling for around $8,000.

Edit:  Submitted for the reader's pleasure:  The Jim Cornette action figure I recently ordered directly from JIMCORNETTE.com that Jim personalized for me.

Be sure to check out Jim's website by clicking the banner at the bottom of this page for all kinds of fun Cornette-centric stuff (my good deed for the day: free advertising).

The Math Ain't Mathing...

 

Examples of the first version Marvel's iconic Silver Age "Corner Box" trade dress

Admittedly, my comic book collecting tastes have always been a bit...eccentric.  They've always been dictated by my own...quirky...sense of personal aesthetic, simply put: I just dig what I dig because it amuses me on some level or I find it creatively stimulating.  Sometimes I just like something because of how weird or odd I find it, fully aware that I'm probably the only person in existence that sees the absurdity.  Case in point:  That little corner of the early Marvel Age where a unique Silver Age blend of humor, romance, and teen soap opera comics inhabited:  PATSY WALKER, it's spin off PATSY & HEDY, MILLIE THE MODEL, and it's sister publication MODELING WITH MILLIE.  Oh, and let's not forget the (short-lived) forgotten KATHY THE TEENAGE TORNADO.

Patsy Walker #106 (Marvel, April 1963)

Kathy #23 (Marvel, June 1963)

I've always had a soft spot for these Marvel Oddities, books that had been in publication since (in some cases) the end of the 1940s and the Golden Age of Comics, that just happened to be in the room when the Marvel Age of Comics was just dawning after the 1961 publication of FANTASTIC FOUR #1.  I particularly enjoy Stan and the gang's efforts in the next coming years attempting to "reformat" these titles so that they would emulate the superhero books in hopes of achieving the same profitable success in other genres.  This reformatting consisted of basically taking storytelling and visual elements from the superhero books and applying them: slightly more..."realistic" art styles, serialized soap opera melodrama, and hyperbole filled prose.

A couple examples of the reformatting that I was speaking of

And, here's a couple more

In 1957 Marvel (Atlas) lost its distributor, so they cut a deal with distributor Independent News, which owned and distributed DC (National Periodical Publications). That deal supposedly significantly limited the number of titles Marvel could publish. In 1968, Marvel changed distributors to Cadence Distribution and started publishing many more titles.  I've heard a couple different stories concerning the details of this deal:  All the sources I've found say that limit was 8 titles a month, though occasionally they note that it was 16 bi-monthly titles.  But....the math doesn't add up if you do a headcount...

Marvel 1963 in-house ad announcing their "Corner Box" branding

Let's count, shall we?  Well, there's the superhero titles, which serve as the foundation for the House of Ideas:

Fantastic Four, The Amazing Spider-Man,...hell, let's even include The Incredible Hulk Volume One, even though it only lasted six issues before cancellation and the Hulk moving to Tales to Astonish....and speaking of that book, there's the four reformatted horror/sci fi anthology books: Tales to Astonish (Ant-Man and the Hulk), Strange Tales (Dr. Strange and Agent of SHIELD), Tales of Suspense (Iron Man and Captain America), and Journey Into Mystery (starring the Mighty Thor).  And, to round things up, there was X-MEN, The AVENGERS and DAREDEVIL.  Total books: 10

Let's not forget the war comic, SGT. FURY and HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS and the three ongoing Western titles that survived into the Marvel Age:  KID COLT: OUTLAW, THE TWO GUN KID, and the RAWHIDE KID.  We'll even throw in GUNSMOKE WESTERN, a title that only lasted about a year into the Marvel Age, cancelled after 77 issues in July of 1963...  Total books: 15

...then there's the three ongoing titles of reprinted material:  MARVEL TALES, FANTASY MASTERPIECES, and MARVEL COLLECTORS ITEM CLASSICS.  Total books: 18

Finally, there's the above mentioned books: KATHY, MILLIE THE MODEL, PATSY WALKER, MODELING WITH MILLIE, PATSY & HEDY,...and we'll acknowledge the parody/satire book NOT BRAND ECCH!, simply due to the fact it launched in 1967, a year prior to Marvel's 1968 change in distribution.  Total books published by Marvel on a regular basis between the years of 1957 and 1968: 24

No matter how hard I try, I can't get the math to work.  The number of actual titles won't allow for either the limited "8 monthly titles" or "16 bi-monthly titles in constant rotation" part of the equation to be possible.  The only way for this to be possible is if a portion of the titles were on a monthly schedule, another portion were on a bi-monthly schedule, and YET ANOTHER portion of the titles to be on that weird "nine times a year" (roughly every six weeks) "semi-monthly" schedule that Archie Comics seemed to be in love with for decades.  And then it would have to happen SEEMLESSLY with no margin for error or delay.  And, just by looking at the cover dates on a range of Marvel books across the decade of the 1960s...this can't be the case.  Everything appears to have been like this:  the majority of the titles appear to have been monthly for the majority of the timeframe, with a about a half dozen that were bi-monthlies.  If the "everything was on a different rotating schedule" notion I mapped out above were true, then editorial deadlines and printing schedules would have been a logistics nightmare.  Especially if Stan Lee is "Marvel Methoding" all of this in collaboration with his artists.  No wonder Stan was depicted as being something akin to a hyper-dramatic cokehead most of the time in the comics, because that's what it would have taken to even come up with as much of clusterfuck of a working schedule as this would have been.

I've always felt that this was a pretty accurate depiction of how Stan Lee's Marvel Method worked

I have a couple weird conspiracy theories brewing.....

Let's say that Marvel was bound by this deal.  It makes sense on one hand and illogical in the other.  DC seeking to basically control their competitor's market share by controlling the amount of product they can sell kinda makes sense, even if it tempts some sorta anti-trust regulations.  It insures that the guys across the street ain't ever gonna outsell you...and you make money in the deal, too.  They have to pay you to get their product to market.  But,...limiting the amount of product limits the amount of money you can charge them, cutting your own throat profit-wise.  So, it's my opinion that if the deal was in place, either Marvel wasn't abiding by the terms and/or DC wasn't enforcing them.  Everyone was still making money in the end.

Or,....this may be a gentle bit of ribbing/ propaganda towards the "Distinct Competitors", aka DC Comics.  Stan Lee made the whole thing up.  "Well, True Believers, we'd love to give you more of the Marvel Comics you all love, but the Man keeps tryin' to keep us down.  Excelsior!"

If so, it just makes Stan Lee look that much more clever.  An absolutely brilliant master at the art of self-promotion, always building a cult of personality around himself....and I mean that in the best way possible, because I absolutely adore Stan (the reasons why I'll probably get into in a future post).

The Times They Are A'Changin'...

 Here's a critical theory for you:  The most imaginative attempt at capturing the American youth counterculture demographic that the comic book industry made was also a spectacular failure at doing so....

Forever People #1 (DC Comics, March 1971)

I've always been of the opinion that Jack Kirby's THE FOREVER PEOPLE was not only Kirby's attempt to reach out to the counterculture demographic, but was also his attempt at doing a little bit of speculative social commentary.

House Ad for a 1988 revival of The Forever People

How it succeeded: Even though the Forever People of Supertown were oppressed and pursued by "the Man" (translation: Darkseid), they were depicted as a multicultural god-like evolutionary end result of youth stereotypes that resided in a world where the hippies won the Generation Gap. 

How it failed:  Kirby was in his fifties when he created the Fourth World and was just a little beyond the age range to seem relevant....I mean, he kinda understood, but couldn't quite identify with the audience.

Harvey #1 (Marvel, 1970)

Another spectacular failure at trying to do this is Marvel's short-lived Archie clone, HARVEY.

Archie #214 (Dec. 1971)

I love Archie clones...especially the weird, goofy, and more imaginative ones.  ARCHIE Comics itself had an odd take on the counterculture during it's heyday...it's main product was teen humor, attempting to sell to a roughly 13 to 21 demographic, but just couldn't figure it out.  Any depictions of youth counterculture were mostly exaggerated stereotypes used as comic relief.  The presentation reminds me somehow of how hippies were depicted on DRAGNET, flamboyant caricatures of laziness and ignorance.  It's like the editorial gang over at Archie were like, "We don't get these kids today, but it seems ridiculous enough to make fun of."  Humor driven by ridicule at their expense, so to speak.

Marvel's approach with HARVEY came from a different angle.  It worked because it appears that they decided to embrace the movement and create satire from within.  Marvel wasn't laughing at the hippies, they were laughing with them.  Harvey Hooper and his gang of friends live in a world where they'd won the revolution, brother....now let's make fun of how ridiculous it all seems.  This approach can be credited to none other than Stan Lee, who's credited for scripts and Stan Goldburg on art.

 Goldburg would soon join the ranks of the aforementioned Archie Comics and continue to work there in the Dan DeCarlo-influenced Archie "house style" that had become the norm there starting in the late 1960s.

One of the reasons why I think it failed as much as it succeeded, like Kirby's FOREVER PEOPLE, lays with the fact that Stan Lee, just like Jack, was a man in his fifties.  Unlike Jack, Stan couldn't make the connection due to not being able to identify with the target demographic, but because he thought he still was the demographic.  It comes across like an elderly man attempting to talk jive and sound hip and relevant to the youth.

It's an interesting and valid attempt, though.  It's just in my opinion Stan, the master of promoting and personalizing his relationship with his readership, which made him more identifiable creator (and the leader of a cult of personality), was just a little pretentious, a little delusion, and a little bit full of himself.  I find it hilariously ironic that a guy that had a very admirable mastery of hyperbole would fall victim to such character quirks.

HARVEY lasted six issues and was gone by late 1972 and now collects dust in comic shop bins.  I keep hoping that Disney or Marvel will somehow find a way to utilize the character.  We need characters like Harvey Hooper these days, satirically showing us how ridiculous we can be.

Antici.........pation.

 A brief post about yet another eBay purchase...

Photo by me of Maysville, KY's Russell Theatre

I'm what you might call a casual Rocky Horror fan.  I attended around 300 screenings during my college years, because it was a pretty fun and trippy thing to do on a Friday and/or Saturday night.

My ROCKY HORROR collection might seem a little obsessive...I own an original one sheet...

....the entire 2000 Vital Toys line of action figures...

...the soundtrack on CD and vinyl...

....this thing...

The 2017 live television remake

...and, about every instance of physical media the film has been released on, going all the way back to it's VHS debut.  They do have a tendency to do a new release about every five years  marking a new milestone anniversary, hence why I own around four different Blu-Ray releases at the moment.

And, for years I've owned the three issue Caliber Comics comic book mini-series from 1990.  If you're unfamiliar with Caliber Comics, then know they're the publisher responsible for bring James O'Barr's THE CROW to print...

....though, you're probably more familiar with the film starring the late Brandon Lee...

Long story short:  I was trolling around eBay and ran across new copies of the complete miniseries for a decent price, and figured I could always use an extra set.  For what, I don't know.  Possibly just to gloat about it on my blog.