I don't know if other comics bloggers hit this wall, but sometimes, when trying to mine a vein of old issues for comedy, I might hit something or have an idea that seems good, but might have been done before. Maybe it's talking about a specific character or issue or scene, or maybe it's a joke that seems funny, but you might have heard before. For example: the cover to Conan the Barbarian #108, I believe by John Buscema and Ernie Chan, the interior art team. Read the blonde's word balloon:
Yes, if only there was something Conan could drop, in order to run faster? I wouldn't be too disparaging of Conan in that situation...
A silly joke, but even though I went with it anyway, I had a vague notion that I had seen that bit somewhere before. Bully? Sims? Perhaps an old issue of Wizard, when they had enough staff to be funny? (Too soon?) I poked around on Ask Cerebra for a bit and still didn't find it, so why not? If anyone has made that joke before, please let me know, and I'd appreciate not feeling senile today.
In the same neck of the woods: I was flipping through the old Red Tornado limited the other day: art by Carmine Infantino, who I knew from Star Wars comics long before I read the Flash, and story by Kurt Busiek, who has gone on to a ton of stuff I've liked. I was going to run the little one-page origin recap of Reddy, since I felt I owed him for giving the poor android slightly less crap than I give Hawkman, or slightly more than Aquaman, to see how the pecking order runs...
Inks by Frank McLaughlin, from Red Tornado #1. Not a bad little series, with some amusing sequences of the Justice League of America, in particular Superman, being utter assholes. For some reason, this is one of maybe half a dozen or more DC mini's that I have three out of four issues of: the Demon (with Matt Wagner), Steve Gerber and Gene Colan's Phantom Zone, Mark Waid's Metamorpho...shoot, I know there's more floating around here somewhere...
Anyway, directly opposite of the above page in his own comic, they still ran Red Tornado's house ad, which wasn't too bad:
Which reminded me of something else, that may or may not have occurred to me before someone else brought it up: in the first series of DC Universe Classics figures, Metamorpho was the "Collect & Connect" build-a-figure, and Red Tornado one of those to be collected. How cool would it have been to get a disassemble-and-reassemble Red Tornado? It would've been a surprisingly comic-accurate action feature, and completely unobtrusive!
I think someone, probably on the message boards, beat me to that idea, although I couldn't say who or where. And it's entirely possible there's a completely reasonable reason why not, too. (It might not cost out compared to Metamorpho, it's too difficult to include the cape in a build-a-figure, it would turn the entire RT figure into a choking hazard...)
So, now I've got an entire post that may or may not be unintentionally plagarized. Huh. On the other hand, I've got a post with Conan and Red Tornado. And at the end of the day, that's something.
2 comments:
When I did my first (short-lived) blog, I was also reading through the ISB's archives, and I kept seeing strange coincidences between what I wrote and what Chris Sim's had written years earlier, even though I hadn't read it until then. Kind of disheartening, and maybe subconsciously the reason I focus more on movies than comics now (I read far fewer movie-related blogs).
Don't worry, I get that feeling all the time. Some jokes are just pretty universal.
That Conan cover DOES just cry out to be mocked anyway.
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