Sunday, August 20, 2006

A plea for help to the Comic Blogosphere!



First of all, a big thanks for the link to When Fangirls Attack! If you stumbled over here from there, on behalf of Male White Corporate Oppressor Comics, welcome aboard! We'll be talking about the new 'Dr. Light vs. the Female Green Lantern Corps' maxi-series today...No, seriously, welcome, and I don't know what's coming up next either. So, I thought I'd take a second to ask for help.

Conveniently, this ad was in the aforementioned issue of DC Presents with Enemy Ace. Since I'm old, I had a record player as a kid; and since my folks are a bit square (Mom, Dad, sorry!) instead of listening to Zeppelin or Foghat or whatever 70's people listened to, I had comic books on record. "The Action 'Comes Alive' as you Read!" To be honest, I probably didn't have a lot of choice. In the town I grew up, there was one radio station, and all I remember besides 'it sucked' was that it seemed to play a lot of Anne Murray.

(No cable, four channels at best, crappy radio, and of course no internet, but you could buy comics at four different locations within walking distance of my house: two grocery stores, a convenience store, and a weird little grocery that always had the black-and-whites like Savage Sword of Conan . Thinking about it, I'm not sure if this is 'progress.' I seriously wonder if you can comics within 80 miles of this town now.)

An old friend of mine once said, if I had listened to Zeppelin as a kid, I would have become a guitar player. So, by that logic, if my parents had gotten me 'real' records, I might have become a rock god instead of a comic blogger.

Mom, Dad, I don't, and can't, thank you enough. Seriously. Probably saved me from a 'career' in prog rock, at least. At best, I'd be a 'guitar hero' playing the county fair circuit...

The above four issues were condensed on one record, and while I didn't have the accompanying comics to read along with, I listened to those stories, without exaggeration, probably hundreds of times. I grew up in northern Montana in the seventies, and for those of you used to deluges of information and media, it would be like living in a sensory deprivation tank. Except that someone keeps tapping on my tank and asking what the hell's wrong with me. Suffice it to say, I had a lot of time to listen to those stories and play with my Legos and my Megos.

Today, I still have that record squirreled away somewhere, and eventually tracked down copies of the adapted comics.(I have the record version of the Fantastic Four one, which was probably edited to match the audio version, and the new lettering looks like it was done with whiteout and a sharpie.) Whenever I read them, my poor brain can still piece together the sound effects, dramatic declarations, and breathless narration. And, to be honest, what I remember of those records is doubtless a bazillion times cooler than what they actually sound like. But that's not good enough! Has anyone seen these, in MP3 format, for download? Anyone?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Blogger is acting a bit weird, so hopefully this doesn't post twice, but try here: http://scarstuff.blogspot.com/2006/02/
power-records-amazing-spider-man-and.html

There's also a bunch of Power Records stuff at the Power Records Project group on Yahoo Groups. (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/powerrecords/)