Dawn presents: What if? 15 July, 1979 A STUNNING SAGA OF AN ALTERNATIVE REALITY! What if...Someone else had become Nova? A man exists on different worlds...the same man...yet very different men! I really like the alternative worlds concept: the different layers of existence, the twists that would make one probability the onset of different consequences... Let’s see: first we have some nice John Buscema art. We start out with a bullied character, Rich Ryder, receiving the Prime Centurion powers from a dying hero orbiting the Earth. You automatically hope the bullying doesn’t make him a bully, himself (no offense Bully). Another world, perhaps the bully gets the “Nova Zap!” Now it’s time to explore one of those twists... (art: Simonson/ Wiacek) First, we have a grief-stricken woman, her husband felled, a man’s first murder...all she wants is for the man to pay. Helen Taylor’s haunted over the next three months: there’s no breakthrough. Just as she prays for a m...

Machine Man fought against his captors, the Corporation, attempting a last minute super escape. MM's friends find his location, just as an atomic explosion decimates the area. MACHINE MAN, THE LIVING ROBOT # 9 Edited, written and drawn by Jack “King” Kirby; Inked and lettered by Mike Royers “He’s BACK!” exclaims a sonic rifle-armed soldier. “Machine Man should be a tin ghost!” So why has a truck driven up with him to Security Corps. “The reports of my destruction were a little premature!” he says, McQueen coolness evoking awe in the soldiers. He’d be happy to relate, once they drop the mechanism-shattering guns. “After all, I’ve just spent time as a hostage under threat of a variety of nasty weapons.” (He can’t help taking issue personally at times!) Now he spills it: He hops outside to demonstrate, takes the soldier into the minute. Computing “ten times faster than you can react!” the captive Machine Man calculated his distance from the atomic bomb outside the mountain...

Have a need for speed? Try this technique: draw a figure best you can in 20 minutes! My 20 minute challenge is over! I do cheat and erase just a little. Then I hand letter a message for my friend's birthday!

[IMG]http://i52.tinypic.com/ma9lkg.jpg[/IMG] (Machine Man 8, I posted pictures. Just a little word about Corporation villain) So Machine Man offers himself for the release of his friend, psychiatrist Peter Spaulding. The Corporation’s plan to build replicas of his photographed, disassembled parts is served by powerful corrosive acid spouts within the abandoned missile silo, foiling an easy race to the top on magnetized boots. What other powers and ideas will he have? What threats await him? Will his personhood be destroyed in the dissection plans of the Corporation? What would the world do with such a body as his own sold in copies to the highest bidder? Colonel Kragg’s flying over a remote area, now ordered to stop this from happening. He tracks the ski-marks left outside Spalding’s house, criss-crossing offbeat routes by which they might disappear, and spots the chopper with ski landing gear---about to take off! He will ride herd, take the pilot into custody, and find Machi...

The military that hounded Machine Man was, after all, under orders. Here in Machine Man #9, Kirby thought it'd be fun to portray the now-exonerated Living Robot walking up to the call "Batter Up!" during an on-base baseball game. Myebook - D'n'A Comics #1 As promised: the online version of DNA #1!!! Fielding goes a little better than batting---but a Machine Man's just a bit too much an advantage for a fair game!

Machine Man #8. I think Jack knew "the Corporation" and its desire to make rip-off copies of his original being was really the perfect antithesis to our creative hero. OH, I didn't think much of them at first rememberance---no colorful look, just gangsters, to my mind, just thugs---but now I understand this was the end of Jack and the Bullpen, in a way, the end of the Marvel Comic Group and Jack, the corporation, the individual. This is the last story during his time working there, before drawing storyboards for the upcoming Fantastic Four cartoon. These seventeen pages explode. There is an economy and breath taking freshness to someone who's really seen nothing like it before. If Kirby doesn't know, how will you never escape?

First, I read a friend's idea. I started laying out the figures. Here are the pencils: Next, I started using marker to get bold outlines. I experimented with a bit of white-out. I had the perfect dagger teeth in ol' Devil Dinosaur there then screwed them up trying to "spot blacks" between them in the mouth. I came back with white out and the marker and gradually restored them best I could. I replaced some of my "scratchy" lines for cross=hatching with darker, bolder lines, as my friend Marcus suggested. I spotted more blacks (the fills that provide figure density) and finished up. I'm still open to changes, though. The dinosaur is completely an homage to Jack Kirby! Here I photographed with a bit of warm light on the Spectre. For him, I used no reference save myself, and for Galactus, I referred to Ron Lim's version for details, which is pretty faithful to Kirby.

Myebook - D'n'A Comics #1 As promised: the online version of DNA #1!!! “Firefall” Archie Stryker watches film footage of Rom’s battle with the National Guard. All the language used around him reinforces his belief: Rom’s an inhuman killer from the stars, and not tanks, not fire, nor nothing man could do would stop him from turning his death ray onto those he chooses. A Silver Star (for Valor) winner “in Korea, 1952”, the arrested burglar says: I may be a criminal--but I ain’t never killed anyone who didn’t have just as much chance of killing me!” The charges can be dismissed; a Senator, General, and an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. assure the disbelieving Stryker there will indeed be a price, and “the beauty of it is we aren’t asking Stryker for anything he doesn’t already want himself! So let us help you help us, Archie---by giving you the power to destroy that alien murderer---Rom!” Rom stands dull grey in the pale moonlight, upon a hilltop before the crater of his rebirth ...

Rom, Spaceknight #3 Writer Bill Mantlo Artist Sal Buscema Editor Jo Duffy E-i-C Shooter At first flip, this issue has all the 70s problems with flashbacks in place of developments, stretching the gruel thin, plotwise, to set up Rom’s confrontation with Stryker/ Firefall, whose training and indoctrination gets as much space as the hero. On the plus side, no early Rom cover gets further from the toy or better illustrates the Rom/ Wraith struggle than this Frank Miller/ Terry Austin piece! It’s very similar to modern middle chapters; the one complete story is the transformation of Stryer to Firefall. The emphasis on developing the villain also helps spotlight the Wraiths in a capacity other than simply talking amongst themselves and catching the Limbo train. The recaps and simplistic evil of the villains, along with the toy origins of Rom, must’ve worked together to give the impression of “kid’s book” mentioned in later letter columns regarding these early chapters. On the ...

The disguised Wraith who is director of the Laserium Corp. took a moment, when Archie Stryker attempted an attack on Rom with a laser that actually caused the cyborg pain. Quickly he contacted a police chief there in Lansing, VA, who passes notification to the others, some of whom arrive on the scene to overhear Stryker cry out that he will do anything to stop Rom from killing others. He’s seen Rom’s enormous strength, ripping off the vault door to the entrapped director. Why Stryker, who may have had to kill the director anyway in the complications of an armed robbery, would be so motivated to help when he was not attacked himself and his men were not killed, I am not sure, even though as a Wraith pawn he will become fairly interesting, soon! It is hard to set up complex characterization for a supporting cast in these 17 page stories, anyway, nor is Mantlo inclined to subtleness here. With Rom streaking skyward into the flamelit night now accused of arson, we join Steve Jackson i...

Rom #2 “Second Coming” The second city of Earth now feels the impact of Rom’s arrival, his ability to land in an area and render it so utterly surreal one’s mind struggles to calculate what to do at all. Here is the mysterious toy-being an enigma yet, not proven a force for good or ill save by the context of his own word, that aliens have secreted themselves in entire human life spans to live like us, among us, waiting for a sinister day when they can use our budding technology to relaunch their schemes on Galador and the universe at large. How could any race be so thoroughly-going evil? What is Rom’s story is a lie, a cover to some other horrible reality? Only one person, Brandy Clark, age twentysomething in quiet Nowhereville, is even privy to the question: to all outsiders, there is no personal encounter, only a meeting with a war machine at war. Was there any better analogy for what a military must bear: to be assumed an enemy for one’s ways and mission, yet to be a human ...

Haven't forgotten the origins of this blog: truth to tell, I've been either writing about the collector's item classics or working on my own original stuff, but haven't written any pastiches of both lately (just a few essays instead). Today I'm going to share some notes from over a week ago, as I began working on a Portal Immortal story with my own spaceknight who is not Rom, but possibly a creature from the land where babies communicate their pre-birth contact to their mothers on Earth. The next night, I revisited the Voidon invasion I'd planned to be part of P.I. and realized a meteor in the night is an awesome, grab-you-and pull-you close opening, and the reasons invented themselves, really. Having fun...will need a bit of sleep...if can’t sleep, write some more...love the space night world twist and the original Voidons thriller that takes up the main plot of Portal Immortal #4,5. By THIS point, I start considering making this the kick-off story for the st...

http://i51.tinypic.com/2gv3qfc.jpg Bill Mantlo C/O The Mantlo Family 1995 Miller Place Merrick, NY 11566 Listen, if you have a soft spot for ROM---whatever your Mantlo connection--- I hear he appreciates fan mail to this day. Everyone seems familiar with his car accident in '92, but as far as I know, letters are still welcome, okay? We'll see if Jo Duffy replies with a story of how ROM went from 50's style alien invader story complete with "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" enemies to the song it became...which was not bad for a former state-of-the-art toy that managed to move between 200,000 and 300,000 units before cancellation. So why am I thinking of "I Will Fly No More" off Toy Story, huh? Her editorial interest is thanked personally by Bill in a later issue; I'll finish commenting on #1, with less expectation of cracking many of his thoughts via his electronically preserved memories. Publius Enigma keeps finding memories of the memory ensconced ...