Daily Batman: Knee-wobbler

via.

There it is again.

Daily Batman: We hold these truths to be self-evident

via Comically Vintage on the tumblr.

Don’t listen to the crackpots, kids.

It happens: “Friends without benefits” edition

via.

Happens all the time.

Daily Batman: Breaking up is hard to do

via.

Do not question why Batman has so many Linda Ronstadt records.

Tell the whole cotton-picking town

via Jacque Nodell’s wonderful sequential crush on the blogger.

“Nobody Wants a Girl Auto Mechanic!” Career Girl Romances #66 (December 1971), Charlton Comics.

Daily Batman: Batman and Robin love a gay party

He’s just waiting for them to go so he can start listening to “Little Orphan Annie” on that radio.

Daily Batman: Batman has a socking in his stocking just for you

Daily Batman: Sock ‘im one for ol’ Santa

via.

Santa is a bloodthirsty punch-monster. I’ve always said that.

69 Days of Wonder Woman, Day 3: Clothes make the (wo)man

The original Wonder Woman costume must surely rank high in the list of all-time great, iconic comic hero get-ups. Is this part of what puts me off?

Costumed (or semicostumed) heroes such as Wonder Woman and Superman, rather than the villains they fought or the outlaws rampant in crime comics, were the main objects of the Catholic Church’s early [1938] criticism of comic books, censure that began to take the form of a serious campaign against comics.

Bishop Noll explained that the NODL [National Organization for Decent Literature]* objected only to Wonder Woman’s costume. “There is no reason why Wonder Woman should not be better covered, and there is less reason why women who fall under her influence should be running around in bathingsuits,” Noll wrote.

(Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008. Print. 75-78.)

I did not save a lick of info related to this pic, but from the moment I saw it, I thought she was about to turn in a circle and transform in to Wonder Woman. If you can help with credit, please do!

I guess it’s true that I never liked her costume much, but I’ve never found it any more all-that-scandalous than those of usual dat-ass suspects such as Power Girl, Emma Frost, or Huntress. (God, I hate Huntress, and there is nothing mysterious about it. She sucks. You will not be seeing a “__ Days of Huntress” around here, ever.) I don’t think I ever gave Wonder Woman’s outfit much thought in print … but I did contemplate it onscreen, watching the Lynda Carter television series. The TV Diana had so many great wardrobe changes, not only with that wonderful spinning-into-Wonder Woman sequence, but with gear tailored to her various missions: remember that slick diving suit?

Separate from my later feelings about Wonder Woman as a comic hero, as an early television role model I had nothing but full esteem for the character, in particular her outfit. I can remember sitting on the tacky rose-patterned velour daveneau on which I’d been conceived and on which I took my afternoon naps — and, depending on where we were living, sometimes slept at night on the hide-a-bed as well (very strange experience, since my parents were extremely up front with me about the couch-conception thing and seemed to find it heartwarming; I had more mixed feelings) — in the early afternoons before I even started school, watching syndicated re-runs of the program and being wowed. If I picture Lynda Carter in a blouse and blazer speaking confidently to a male coworker, I can still vividly feel kid-sweat from playing after lunch melting the sofa’s scratchy, worn fabric in to faint little clumps under my legs. She was so glamorous that she wore earrings everywhere. Everywhere. I loved that shit.

This is definitely a non-issue. The outfit has nothing to do with me shying away from Wonder Woman for the last mumble-muffleth years. Asked and answered!

In any case, Wonder Woman’s costume recently underwent a redesign. That’s her new look up there. I don’t really care one way or the other. I guess I’m a little wary and disappointed, as always, by tampering with classics, even ones of which I’m not a fan — and, in the same way that I was slightly rankled by the initial reinvention of Kate Kane as a Jewish lesbian in the Batwoman comic (Why not make her deaf and HIV-positive, to boot? How unforgivably uninclusive of you, Non-PC D.C.!), I feel not-just-vaguely pandered to. Then again, I like the new Batwoman line now and I am hunky-dory with the matchup of Renee Montoya with Kate. So maybe the costume redesign of Wonder Woman will be another in-my-face situation. Tough to gauge since I don’t know if I’ll come out of this project wanting to read her or not.

Longtime fans, what do you think of the change?

*more on those guys soon.

Daily Batman: Robin’s nest is dynamite

via holywowbatman on the tumblr.

Hey. Sometimes a stick of dynamite is just a stick of dynamite.

Daily Batman: Big Chief Talks-With-Fists

via batmanpunchingpeople on the tumblr.

If you know the provenance of this panel — like, its backstory and the issue in which it appeared, etc — please, please don’t tell me. I want it to stay exactly like this. Because this? Is gold.

Daily Batman: We hold these truths to be self-evident

via Comically Vintage on the tumblr.

Don’t listen to the crackpots, kids.

Daily Batman: Why? … Why?

In Batman’s nightmares, he is not well-liked and he doesn’t understand why.

I had troubling, thickly plotted nightmares last night but too much was going on immediately after I woke that I didn’t have time to make a note of them. The last dreams like that I can remember happened while I was subbing for the Scamps, and I told them about it the next day:

I dreamt that my daughter was being held in this large industrial building and I was using the stairs to get to a certain floor before the elevator, and a dude started pursuing me and I turned around and first wrestled him, then kicked him down a short flight of stairs, then ran briefly down after him for, you know, “suresies” and threw him over the edge and heard him come down all wet and broken on a landing several flights below. I totally did not even lean over the rails to check on him after that because I was only focused on getting the kidlet and getting out.

Scamps in bio class action, but I chose a blurry picture for privacy.

The kids were shocked and exhilarated by this vivid story of unmerciful ass-kicking and I said it was all on their heads because they’d asked me anxiously the day before during Social Studies what would happen if the President’s daughters were ever to be kidnapped. I’d reassured them and theorized that not only would the Secret Service prevent such a godforsaken thing from ever happening, but that my guess was Michelle and Barack Obama, besides being loving parents, are pretty hardcore and good at taking things in their own hands, and that I definitely would not want to be in the shoes of an attempted kidnapper of their girls were he to be caught.

In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have told a classroom of ten-year-olds that I dreamt I straight up dropped a motherfucker, but, on the other hand, it could be part of why I had practically zero discipline problems in that class.

Talk nerdy to me: Art of the Nerd

‘Nam-native Beetle-Bailey ear-necklace update: I still suck.

But seeing me hunched over and going through a ream of paper trying to do studies inspired kidlet to grab one of her own most recent “commissioned pieces,” the last assigned coloring project she had before school ended. Speaking of Jurassic Park and bloodthirsty drawings:

When she first brought it home, knowing what a girly-girl she can often be, I asked naively, “Is your T. Rex a girl dinosaur? With lipstick and fingernails?” She gave me a long-suffering, how-sad-that-my-mother-is-Grimace-from-Ronald-McDonaldland expression and said, “Mommy. Tyrannosaurus Rex was a killer. That is blood.”

Check. It was already all cut out so we put it on a couple popsicle sticks so she could use him as part of her various paper puppet shows.

Think about it: wouldn’t every single puppet show you’ve ever seen have been improved by the introduction of a tyrannosaur? It’s like a recipe for Imaginary Awesome and you just kicked it up a notch. T. Rexes are truly the paprika in the potato salad of the toybox.

So I was trying my hand yet again at drawing Beetle. The problem is I want his shirt open to display the necklace to best advantage as well as convey how unhinged he’s become, but both the open shirt and his chest itself are giving me trouble as far as drawing them as simply but representatively as possible, and I can only imagine my plan for his right hand to be flashing a peace sign will also end in tears. Meanwhile, kidlet, like I said, went and fetched her T. Rex puppet.

She made “Blarrrghhh, Gahrrrrr, Rawrrrrr” kind of noises at me from the other side of the table, kneeling so only the puppet showed and, when that did not sufficiently distract me, she snuck up beside me and pounced, pretending the dinosaur was biting my hand (very convincing flesh-tearing noises accompanied this move), and I said, “You’re very scary, but I’m kind of in the middle of this. Why don’t you go eat a Barbie? We can play later. Promise.”

First the T. Rex turned his cap backward, then they started the arm-wrestling. If you do not understand this humorous reference and you want to get in on the cheesey action flick joke, rent Over the Top (Menahem Golan, 1987). Don’t necessarily buy it though, heh.

Kidlet danced the dinosaur away, making stomping noises with her feet to simulate his weight stalking out of the room, then stuck the puppet back around the corner and said loudly in a deep, ominous voice, “You haven’t seen the last of Tyrannosaurus Rex!!”

I said, “I’m pretty sure I have, actually.” Extinction is a bitch. But the whole exchange cracked me up and lightened my mood. She’s so wonderful. I don’t know where she came from but I’m damned lucky she’s here.

Lastly, the best thing I have ever seen, a comic panel that never fails to cheer me up:

via

Everything is right in that picture. Especially how psyched the tyrannosaur pilot looks. I told you: they are the paprika in the recipe of AWESOME!

PSA: Talking politics socially

PSA: It was actually once considered rude to hound people about political issues instead of letting them make private, independent, informed voter choices and not descend in to pointless partisan debate (which often eclipses the issues entirely, creating ever-greater time-and-breath-waste) even and especially with people you claim to call friends. A high level of closeness was required before sailing in to such conversational and public discursive waters, once upon a time. We did not post bulletins and douchey status updates about it, even. Did You Know? Oh, the bygone era of manners.

Via comicallyvintage on the tumblr.

Damn, gorilla! You ain’t got to get punchy. A simple “I disagree” would’ve probably sufficed. But that’s how it is today. Keep your elbows out and your powder dry, kids.

Daily Batman: The agony of hindsight edition

He can’t wait to go the theater tonight!

via retconpunch on the tumblr.

But soon….

“My parents are DEEAAAAAAAD!”




Yes, I know this makes me a terrible person.

Daily Batman: Bat-plug edition

via Joetace.

I know it’s baffling, dude, but it’s really important to try new things.

Daily Batman: We hold these truths to be self-evident

via Comically Vintage on the tumblr.

Don’t listen to the crackpots, kids.

Daily Batman: Aunt Agatha does not like what she is seeing

(via)

Not only are you sporting tights, you are wailing on dudes out in public like an absolute vondruke. What would your parents say?

Daily Batman: Telling concern

Villain: “Not only are you doomed, but so is everyone else you’ve touched–!”

The Atom: “Jean Loring — I’ve signed her death warrant!”

The Flash: “I gave Iris West — the kiss of death!”

Green Lantern: “Carol Ferris — in deadly danger!”

Batman: “Robin — what have I done to you?”

Telling concern, dude.