The Horror Of Party Beach

That's right, everybody! Get ready to do the Zombie Stomp with the way-out Del-Aires, while bearing witness to a strange invasion from the sea by unusual monsters looking for blood!

Anyone who is even remotely tuned in to the goofier (read "joyous") back alleys of popular culture, is probably familiar with this movie. Long story short, actor and industry gadfly Del Tenney decided to try and cash in on the surf culture craze of the early 1960s and the drive-in draw of monster movies at the same time by making a monster-in-the-surf film; not in sunny California where Gidget was shimmying with the Beach Boys, but in the chilly waters of the Atlantic off the New England coast! It was touted as the first horror musical (which is inaccurate because the infamously dull The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies beat it to the punch by months.) The movie has been dismissed as one of the worst movies of all time, and ravaged by everyone from Leonard Maltin to Stephen King, but darn if it isn't fun enough to survive. 

In 1989, Indiana Junk Rock band Sloppy Seconds included an homage to the film on their album Destroyed, and a decade later the movie gained cult film stock points when it was featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Click to watch trailer for The Horror Of Party Beach.

Great, you might say. That's all neat-o and everything, but what am I doing here, on this blog thingy, reading about it? Well, it just so happens that in 1964, a fumetti-style photo comic of the film was published by Warren Magazines, the gang that gave us Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, and other horror-themed comic titles. This over-sized photo comic essentially breaks the film down into stills, tweaking a few things here and there. For example, in the comic version you can see someone has gone through and painted big scary piranha teeth into the mouths of the monsters. In the actual film, the creature's mouth is full of mollusk-like protuberances that make it look like it's walking around with a mouth full of hot dogs. 

I have a copy this here publication, and thought, since we're dealing with actual horrors and dangerous weather here in the upper Midwest, why not try to bring a little levity and joy into things. Should you be so inclined, the entirety of the The Horror Of Party Beach comic is available for download here, to peruse at your leisure.*

*Note about the files: The magazine was scanned in single page jpeg format. The download is an uncompressed file folder containing the jpegs. 

Ghosting The Waves with The Phantom Surfer!

Howdy from the not-so-Great White North! 

Aside from the usual extreme temperature advisory (we're supposed to have wind chills at or around -35 degrees Farenheit over the next 48 hours), we're also currently under siege by our own government. This isn't a political blog in any way, shape or form – if anything this is my one surcease from the constant barrage of all of that – but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention it. 

The current luau status: unlikely.

Long story short, there's a lot of reasons folks here in Minnesota are staying inside right now. And, of course, what so often happens here during the most brutal depths of the winter months, at least for me, is that I start romanticizing and longing for the warmer days of summer. 

Well, I can't move May closer to January, so the next best thing (I guess) is to try to invoke a sense of the warmer climes with a bit of summer-related ephemera. And today's comes in the form of a haunting surfer story from Ghostly Tales #71, published in January of 1969 by Charlton Comics.

Aside from the obvious signature on the Jim Aparo cover above, there are no credits to be found in this comic. The story in question, " The Phantom Surfer", is clearly illustrated by Steve Ditko. Whether he wrote the script for it as well, I have no idea. 

The story is ok for what it is. It has characters making odd choices and the ending has sort of a fun conclusion (I almost said "twist") that you can predict the second Larry decides to surf out to impersonate the mythical phantom surfer. Ditko's art here is fine. It's not my favorite period of his. I enjoy a lot of his early pre-Marvel work for horror and dark fantasy titles like The Thing and This Magazine Is Haunted, and of course the initial runs of Spider-Man (whom he co-created) and Dr. Strange (whom he created). In my opinion much of his work that followed appears sloppy and amateurish and the characters he created for DC Comics like Hawk & Dove, The Creeper, The Question and Shade, The Changing Man are silly half-baked embodiments of Ditko's worldview or oddly complicated notions rather than competent or interesting comic book characters. 

You can see that my copy is in pretty rough shape. Some of the pages couldn't be scanned straight on because of how deteriorated the spine is, but please do enjoy this spooky, summery surf tale via Steve Ditko and magazine host Mr. L. Dedd. I've included the ads from this particular issue because I thought they might be enjoyed as part of the nostalgia of the reading experience.

Surf's up!

Manga! Part I

This past May I was able to check off a lifelong ambition to visit Japan. My wife and I spent 10 days traveling around the island, riding bullet trains, climbing a mountain, eating ramen and, of course, enjoying the pop culture.

Since I love comics and classic animation, I've always enjoyed manga to a degree. It's like when you say you like comics; that covers a lot of ground. But people have a tendency to think that "I like comics" means you're in line for every comics IP movie that comes out, and have a pull box filled weekly with the latest Marvel/DC/Image titles. Yeah, I like manga, but not indiscriminately. Like American comics, I have a yen for the older stuff. I like the older style(s) of art, the silliness of comics that didn't feel the need to compete with the New York Times Bestseller list as far as content, and could just be a periodically (pun intended) amusing diversion from everyday life. 

There is a great chain of manga shops in Japan called Mandarake (Mahn-da-rah-kay). We visited one in Setagaya-ku, Tokyo. It was genuinely overwhelming. The place was in a sub-basement and was huge, filled with rows and rows of bookshelves packed with manga. Obviously, not being able to read Japanese, it was even more so. Another astounding thing about the manga at Mandarake, is how inexpensive most of it was. Most of the books I'll be showcasing here were between 200 and 400 yen, which is about $1.41 to $2.82, per book! 

With exception of the Astro Boy and Super Jetter magazines I picked up at a vintage shop. But more about that later.

First off we have Doraemon. Doraemon is a robotic cat from the 22nd Century who travels back in time to help out Nobita, the child who will become the grandfather of his inventor. It's fun, funny stuff. Lots of site gags. It was created by Fujiko F. Fujio and is huge in Japan. If you go to department stores or stop at the ever-present banks of gashapan machines, you're bound to see some Doraemon merch somewhere. I know people say Astro Boy is the Mickey Mouse of Japan, but in all honesty, I saw much more Doraemon while out and about than I did Astro Boy. 

In a similar vein we have Gaikotsu-kun, or "Skeleton". It's another whimsical manga from 1966, by George Akiyama. Akiyama, I guess, is known in Japan as a controversial manga artist who, after this, his first comic strip, did some more dark, taboo-themed material. If I understand the translation, the skeleton in question is actually the grandfather of the boy in the comic. He's come back to make sure his son and grandson are taken care of. There are a lot of site gags, as seen here with the dog stealing his bones and burying him. 

Next we have, of course, a staple, a manga version of Ultraman. This was produced in conjunction with the television series, and this particular volume (#2) is from 1968. It what you'd expect from an Ultraman comic: Ultraman battling giant monsters. The cartooning is amazing and dynamic! I believe the artist on this is Daiji Ichimine. Look at the giant bat-starfish monster rising out of the ocean above! It attacks oil tankers, and, as you might guess, causes a lot of fires.

To be honest, when I found this next one, I thought I'd happed upon an El Santo themed manga. Not the case. It turns out it is in fact titled Masked Shinigami, Wrestling Villain Series (per Google translate) and the character on the cover is NOT El Santo, el Enmascarada de plata, but Silver Faced Reaper. It's a fairly brutal comic, as you can see from above. No punches are pulled (tee-hee) in depicting brutal ring violence. There's another motif I've noted in some of the manga I purchased, which is animal abuse. There's some of that in a number of the Osamu Tezuka works I've picked up, as well as this one. Fairly graphic as well. 

This next one is admittedly a little different from the others. It's by Ichiro Iijima, and one of his Black Punch Complete Works volumes, titled "Gorilla Marriage". It's a number of Twilight Zone/ E.C. Comics-esque horror and sci-fi stories with an albeit more adult content. Some are downright upsetting, particularly the last story in the collection, about a chef who is trying to please the odd taste preferences of some new employers. The Gorilla Marriage story itself is fairly tame. It hypothesizes a world where gorillas have evolved to the level of humans and are integrated into society as such. It highlights the difficulties one might encounter engaging in a gorilla/human relationship. Bizarrely, it's not as lewd as the cover suggests.

The Plight Of Silent Sam

 This story from the March 1949 issue of Gabby Hayes Western Comics, is presented with the presumption that it is currently in the public domain. This is a well-worn issue, the previous owner apparently decided to re-staple it, presumably after the original staples came out? I don't see any evidence of oxidation or holes that would indicate as such, so I guess it's possible that it was just originally bound in the wonky way it is; which is fine for reading, but not great for scanning purposes, so forgive the slight cropping you might see at the edges of panels.

I did my best to position things so all of the text was visible, at least.

I hope y'all enjoy this taffy-fueled comic western mishap!

Haunted Hot Rods

I was, and still am, I guess, a monster kid. I think I have shared before the story about how one fateful afternoon in the 1980s I was exposed to Tod Browning's Dracula, and my mind was suitably blown and primed to seek out monster movies, and related ephemera, from that point forward. Of course to present that as the moment I was introduced to monsters in the pop cultural sense, would be inaccurate, because I had by that point, already been toddling around in Incredible Hulk t-shirts since I was in diapers, and had had a shoe box full of Masters Of The Universe figures–a large number of which were monsters of various sorts. 

As I grew older, and my interests diversified, monsters (more so than straight "horror") stuck with me. And as I got into comic books, and later music and other things, I found these amazing overlaps in the spheres of the Venn Diagram of my hobbies. There's surf music about monsters?! There are comic books with monster stories?! I quickly grew to favor supernatural comic book characters like Deadman, Ghost Rider, Werewolf By Night and Swamp Thing, and scoured the weekly TV Guide for listings of monster and sci-fi movies on AMC (back when they were more akin to what TCM is now, than a version of early 90s HBO). Fortunately the late 80s/early 90s burgeoning basic cable market was flush with shows like Werewolf, Forever Knight and Monsters, and the Universal Monsters were back in vogue, popping up in everything from toys to Doritos packaging.  

As I pursued these various interests I found that the offerings to discover were often unilaterally declining in quality the more recently they were produced. Straight-to-video horror might have a certain outsider charm to it, but something like Galaxy of Terror or Creature didn't seem to hold a candle to Creature From The Black Lagoon or The Mad Ghoul. I don't like gore if it's the focal point of a movie/comic/novel, I don't enjoy films about groups of people, often teenagers or thirty-somethings playing teenagers, being systematically butchered in novel ways by some psychopath in a mask. I also don't have time for parodic material that doesn't respect the source. Was I whole-heartedly obsessed with The Misfits when they crossed my path? You bet! But metal that glorifies senseless brutality, not so much. 

Yadda yadda yadda. My brand of horror has always been more Hammer Films, Boris Karloff, EC Comics and Famous Monsters of Filmland than Fangoria, Rob Zombie and the hyper graphic Twisted Tales. That isn't to say there isn't a great deal of contemporary horror stuff that I greatly enjoy, but prior to the 1970s the idea seemed to be providing entertainment, not entrails. I like a bit of fun with my fear and there's lots of great stuff buried in the past if you dig for it. I've dug out a 1964 issue of Pete Millar's Drag Cartoons magazine to share today. It's a quick little hot rod monster mash produced by noted animation designer and cartoonist Alex Toth. Page 3 is a little faded but still reads just fine. Note the resemblance of the Monster in this strip to Dick Briefer's design for the creature in his Frankenstein comics (pictured below).

Cartoonist Dick Briefer had two different creature 
designs for two different iterations of his Frankenstein comics,
one humorous and cartoony, one menacing for straight horror
stories. The above is a panel from a horror-oriented 1954 issue.

 I'm not a gearhead by any measure; both of my grandfathers were career body men for various dealerships, my appreciation, however, is more or less confined to the aesthetic appeal of vintage car body design and the George Barris TV car creations, hence why I have the source material for this here post.

Enjoy.

Fedora The Explorer

Here's a little comic I made.