#Ziff-Davis Comics

[browsethestacks]

Vintage Comic - Romantic Marriage #03

Pencils: Norman Saunders

Inks: Norman Saunders

Ziff-Davis (Mar1950)

[fhtagn-and-tentacles]

TENTACLES OF DEATH

Cover art by Norman Saunders

[monkeyssalad-blog]

Amazing Stories / February 1950 by Michael Studt Via Flickr: Amazing Stories / Magazin-Reihe - William P. McGivern / The Galaxy Raiders - Rog Phillips [Peter Worth] / Typewriter from the Future - Charles Dye / The Last Orbit - Paul W. Fairman / No Teeth for the Tiger - V. E. Thiessen / Spiders of Saturn - Henry Hasse / Tomb of the Seven Taajos - Rog Phillips / The Pranksters - Robert Moore Williams [Russell Storm] / And No Tomorrow cover: Robert Gibson Jones (cover illustrates "The Galaxy Raiders") Editor: Howard Browne Ziff-Davis Publishing Company / USA 1950 Reprint: Comic-Club NK 2010 ex libris MTP en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Stories www.pulpartists.com/Jones.html

[pulpsandcomics2]

G,I, Joe #45     June 1956

[romancecomics]

Romantic Marriage #11

[driveintheaterofthemind]

Vintage Comic - Famous Stars #01

Pencils: N/A Inks: N/A Photo: “Winchester 73” Jimmy Stewart And Shelley Winters Ziff-Davis (Nov-Dec1950)

[inky-curves]

Lars of mars #10 (April-May 1951) Cover by Allen Anderson

[jasenlex]

ISOLATED COMIC BOOK PANEL #1874 title: SPACE BUSTERS #1 - P19:6 artist: BERNIE KRIGSTEIN year: 1952

[arkdowner]

$21.39 Only! ~ Flyboy Vintage comic #2 Ziff Davis Comic Group 1952 Cadets vs. Apes Monkey..., Best Superhero Comics BUY HERE! #BestSuperheroComics,

[miroslawmagola]

Ian McKellen Magneto vs Hellion from Stan Lee Superhumans.mp4 from Miroslaw Magola on Vimeo.

Ian McKellen Magneto (Marvel Comics) vs Hellion from Stan Lee's Superhumans.

Magneto (Max Eisenhardt) is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, commonly in association with the X-Men. Created by writer Stan Lee and artist/co-writer Jack Kirby, the character first appears in The X-Men #1 (cover-dated September 1963) as an adversary of the X-Men.

Sir Ian McKellen portrayed Magneto, the Master of Magnetism in a majority of the X-Men film series, while Michael Fassbender portrayed a younger version of the character. Ian McKellen Magneto in X-Men, X2: X-Men United, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Wolverine, and X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Ian McKellen is recognized worldwide as Magneto in the X-Men films and Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies

20th Century Fox obtained the film rights to the characters in 1994, and after numerous drafts, Bryan Singer was hired to direct the first film, released in 2000, and its sequel, X2 (2003), while the third installment of the original trilogy, X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), was directed by Brett Ratner. In March 2019, Marvel Studios obtained the film rights to X-Men after Disney acquired 21st Century Fox. In October 2020, the films in the X-Men series, along with the Fantastic Four films, were rebranded as Marvel Legacy movies on Disney

Magneto was ranked by IGN as the Greatest Comic Book. IGN (Imagine Games Network) an American video game and entertainment media website operated by IGN Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, itself wholly owned by j2 Global. IGN is now also distributed on mobile platforms, console programs on the Xbox and PlayStation, FireTV, Roku, and via YouTube, Twitch, Hulu, and Snapchat. #magneto #IanMcKellen #XMen #X2 #StanLee #JackKirby #film #Gandalf #BryanSinger #MichaelFassbender #BrettRatner # Hellion #IGN #Disney #Marvel #MarvelComics #character #Sir #MasterOfMagnetism #trilogy #movies #j2Global #Legacy #MindForce #Game #playstation #Youtube #Television #seriesnetflix #Netflix #hobbit #SuperHumans #marvelcinematicuniverse #marvel #Videogames #entertainment #xbox #comics #media #Metaverse #Global

[comicbookhistorians]

Often not discussed, but still fascinating is when William B. Ziff hired #superman co-creator Jerry Siegel as Art Director of the short-lived Ziff-Davis #comic line of 1950. Siegel fared a bit better than Shuster during this time. Some titles of those magazines would be used later by other companies like #GIJoe, Amazing Adventures and #HeMan. https://www.instagram.com/p/CXfhuWRL0SU/?utm_medium=tumblr

[browsethestacks]

Vintage Comic - Christmas Carnival

Pencils: ?

Inks: ?

Ziff-Davis (1952)

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Howard Days, Derleth Christmas Card, Tolkien Society Seminar

Robert E. Howard (Orthosphere): Considering that he died at thirty, Howard’s literary accomplishments can only impress.  Stylistically, he operates at a level many ranks above that of the typical pulp writer.  His vocabulary includes a rich lode of Latin and Greek derivations and likewise of English archaisms.  Brought up, from age thirteen, in the small and isolated Texas town of Cross Plains, in Callahan County, in the middle of the state, Howard almost miraculously overcame a lack of educational resources and acquired a reserve of knowledge in history, literature, myth, and folklore that would shame the modern holder of a college degree in any of those subjects.

Science Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): Ever since the Pulp Revolution started, the main kickback has always been from the older set who think it exists to erase their past when it exists for the exact opposite. The whole reason the movement sprung up was because of those who began looking into the past and were finally discovering what Fandom was actually doing was rewriting and destroying what came before. They were doing it for their own gain, chasing out anyone who wanted what they had mere years earlier.

Gaming (Monster Hunter Nation): I talked about this in the last blog post about the Yard Moose Mountain Mega Shooting Weekend, where I had shooters from all over the country coming to my place for three days of pistol training, about how one night I ran a one off RPG session for 17 of them, and by some miracle it actually turned out good. When this got posted about on Facebook right after, a whole bunch of gamers asked how the hell do you run a game that big and not have it suck, so here’s how we pulled it off.

Tolkien (Breitbart): “The Tolkien Society has announced that the theme of its 2021 Summer Seminar, held July 3 – 4, will be ‘Tolkien and Diversity,’” reports the Daily Wire. Here’s a sampling of what Woketard Tolkien Fanboys  can expect — you know, those whose lives are so empty, this is how they choose to spend a weekend: Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings. Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Antiracism.

Robert E. Howard (Adventures Fantastic): This past weekend was the 2021 Robert E. Howard Days. After last year’s cancellation, it was a much needed gathering. And while many of the regulars weren’t able to attend, the number of first time attendees made up the difference. The gift shop sold out of almost all the books they had in stock.

Awards (DMR Books): John Bullard is a good guy doing Crom’s work over at the Robert E. Howard Foundation (REHF). The other day, John sent me the list of REHF award recipients for 2020 and 2021, which were announced at Howard Days in Cross Plains a week ago. I should note that Corona-chan canceled last year’s Howard Days, so the 2020 awards were handed out this year. Check ’em out below. I’ll post my comments below that.

Fantasy (Goodman Games): Linwood Vrooman Carter was born on June 9th, 1930 in St. Petersburg, Florida. In the august company of his fellow Appendix N authors, Lin Carter is a figure both of high esteem and some controversy. As an editor and critic, he is indispensable, most notably for his role in editing the landmark Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (BAFS), which ran from 1969-1974 and re-introduced such luminaries as Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgson, and Clark Ashton Smith to the fantasy-reading public.

Pulp (Pulpfest): Today we celebrate the 125th birthday of TIME magazine’s “dean of science fiction writers,” William Fitzgerald Jenkins — a.k.a. Murray Leinster. An avid inventor who also happened to have a knack for writing wonderful speculative science fiction, his career spanned much of the 20th century.

Fiction (Realms of Night): In the early 1980s, Zebra Books published a four “issue” anthology series bearing the title Weird Tales and the stylized logo familiar to fans of the pulp greats who were published in The Unique Magazine. Weird Tales has been called the magazine that never dies, but most would agree it’s had a largely beleaguered existence since the late 1950s. It has appeared at various times in a newsstand digest format, a full-size traditional magazine format, and — perhaps the most successful post-Golden Era run of the magazine — a very nice perfect bound magazine during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Comic Books (National Review): How can you not know who Neal Adams is? He gave the world the modern Batman and Joker! Revived Green Arrow and the X-Men! Created the first Black superhero for DC, the John Stewart Green Lantern!

Robert E. Howard (Dark Worlds Quarterly): “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (Weird Tales, December 1936) by Robert E. Howard is the point at which adventure fiction and horror meet. The story was found in a trunk with a note to be sent to Farnsworth Wright in case of the author’s death. This is according to Glenn Lord who published the first version of the story in The Howard Collector #16 (Spring 1972). Lord gives us a little preamble with:

RPG (Modiphius): We’re delighted to announce that Conan The Adventurer arrives in print! This latest sourcebook for the Conan Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of RPG is available now on Modiphius.net and coming soon to a retailer near you. Here are the details on this fascinating new sourcebook which is also available in PDF format on Modiphius.net and DriveThruRPG.com.

Comic Books (Arche-arc): Upon completing my viewing of the FALCON AND WINTER SOLDIER streaming series, I’m moved to comment on some of the parallels between Kevin Feige, founder of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Stan Lee, the founder of Marvel Comics in its crucial sixties incarnation.

Comic Books (Irmonline): I have gone into the first series run of What If? by Marvel from 1977 to 1984, with 47 issues. The title series continues to find numerous use over the years with Marvel. There is a second series that starts in 1989 and ends in 1998, with 115 issues including a #0. After that, Marvel releases a few mini-series, or one-shot stories, that go under the title What If?.

Fiction (DMR Books): I like Vikings, specifically Viking fiction. I certainly have an interest in the history, and the sagas make for dense but fascinating reading, but my first love is pure, heart-pounding adventure. I remember first learning about Vikings back in grade school, when we briefly covered the Viking explorations of the New World, the discovery of Greenland, Vinland and Viking settlements on the Canadian east coast long before that Italian explorer came along and spoiled everything.

Gaming (Game Rant): Skyrim is packed full of references to the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Its last DLC, Dragonborn, saw the inhabitants of the isolated town of Raven Rock fall under a mysterious trance-like state that was leading them to build strange obelisks, with only the faintest memory of doing so. While some The Elder Scrolls quests are full of surface-level Lovecraft allusions like this, the series’ metaphysical lore makes the connection explicit. The same can be said for Obsidian’s upcoming first-person fantasy RPG, Avowed.

Cinema (Talking Pulp): Beyond the Black Rainbow. I really dug Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy, a film that sort of came out of nowhere a few years ago that in some ways, boosted and reignited Nicolas Cage’s acting career. I don’t think that it was long-lasting but his role in Mandy proved that the dude can still bring it and excel when given the right part in a movie. Cosmatos only has one other film and, at this point, it’s already over a decade old. It’s been in my queue since I saw Mandy, however, so I felt like checking it out was long overdue.

Star Wars (Tor): The Star Wars movies are notable for spinning off into a wide variety of other media and related products, including TV shows, books, comic strips, comic books, radio dramas, toys, housewares, and other products. Since the series was largely modeled on the old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, this is no surprise, as both of those properties were also adapted into a variety of formats and merchandise, something George Lucas certainly noticed and emulated. Today, I’m going to look at two of the first Star Wars tie-in books, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and Han Solo at Stars’ End.

Pulp (Fantasy Literature): The Universe Wreckers initially appeared as a three-part serial in the May, June and July 1930 issues of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories magazine, the first publication to dedicate itself solely to science fiction. This legendary magazine started publishing in 1926, the same year that Hamilton’s very first story, “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” appeared in Weird Tales, when its author was 22. The Universe Wreckers would then, sadly, go OOPs (out of prints) for over 80 years, until Haffner Press resurrected it for inclusion in one of its mammoth Hamilton anthologies.

Gaming (Arkhaven Comics): Last month, IGN decided that the hill to die on this week was Palestine.  They printed some article on giving aid to Palestinian Children* that I didn’t care about and didn’t read because I haven’t read anything from IGN for years and I wasn’t starting now.  However, IGN Israel did read it and screamed at the corporate owners. Ziff-Davis roused itself from its dreamy lassitude and made the accurate but surprising decision that this article had nothing whatsoever to do with gaming or popculture and spiked it.

Fiction (Allied Authors): Years ago on this Allied Authors website in “A Derleth Christmas Card,” I touted an unexpected find I made in a local antique store: a series of unique Christmas cards issued by Wisconsin’s famous author — and close friend of Allied Authors — August Derleth. Unexpected, because even in his home state, Derleth’s proverbial backyard, such finds are fewer and farther between, with his fame continuing to grow.

Comic Books (AE Index): An excellent representation of EC original art in an inexpensive format. Along with full-page scans of original art, this features an introduction by Annie Gaines Ashton, exhibit introduction, and twelve short essays or personal recollections from noted EC fans. There are also four double-page enlargements of art, three successful and one blurry. The scans are mostly clear with a few soft or blurry issues.

Review (Rough Edges): There’s no sophomore jinx for the second issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY. It remains one of the most impressive, beautifully designed publications available today. The theme this time around for this oversized trade paperback is Espionage. It features a lot of vividly reproduced artwork, including both covers and interior illustrations, from a variety of the Men’s Adventure Magazines published in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, along with seven stories (mostly fiction, even the supposedly true ones) from those magazines.

Cinema (Neotextcorp): When Rhodesian writer Daniel Carney’s unpublished novel The Thin White Line ended up in the hands of producer Euan Lloyd, it fit perfectly with his ambitious plans to make a grand-scale star-studded war adventure film in the vein of Where Eagles Dare. The novel toyed with the rumor about a mysterious 1968 plane landing in Rhodesia allegedly carrying a mercenary force, and when screenwriter Reginald Rose adapted it for film, director Andrew V. McLaglen was hired to bring it to life based on a decisive recommendation from the great John Ford. The cast was loaded with heavy-hitting names such as Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris, Hardy Krüger, Stewart Granger, Jack Watson, Frank Finlay and many others.

Sensor Sweep: Howard Days, Derleth Christmas Card, Tolkien Society Seminar published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[sciencespies]

A Dictionary of Science Fiction Runs From Afrofuturism to Zero-G

https://sciencespies.com/nature/a-dictionary-of-science-fiction-runs-from-afrofuturism-to-zero-g/

A Dictionary of Science Fiction Runs From Afrofuturism to Zero-G

In the summer of 1987, movie audiences first met Robocop in the science fiction classic about violence and corrupt corporate power in a future, dystopian Detroit. But the title word is much older than that, going back at least to a 1957 short story by writer Harlan Ellison, in which a tentacled “robocop” pursues a character. The prefix “robo-,” in turn, dates at least to 1945, when Astounding Science Fiction published a story by A.E. van Vogt mentioning “roboplanes” flying through the sky. “Robo-,” of course, comes from “robot,” a word created by Czech author Karel Čapek in his 1920 play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, about synthetic humans created to perform drudge work who eventually rebel, destroying humanity.

This is the kind of rabbit hole a reader can go down in the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, a resource decades in the making that is now available to the public in an accessible form. Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower started the project years ago, when he was an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED is the best-known historical dictionary in the English-speaking world, and Sheidlower notes that it was also a crowdsourcing project long before the internet made it easy. When it was just starting out in the 19th century, he says, the OED put ads in literary magazines looking for volunteers to hunt around old books in search of particular words and their usage.

“People would mark up books, send in the notes,” he says. “To this day, it’s still how the system works to an extent.”

When the internet did arrive, the dictionary’s editors quickly took advantage. For example, Sheidlower says, at one point they were looking for early uses of the word “mutant” in the sense of a genetically mutated being with unusual characteristics or abilities. The earliest they’d found was from 1954, but they were sure earlier examples must be out there. So a freelance editor posted a query on Usenet newsgroups and quickly received an example of a use of the word from 1938.

Soon, the editors started looking for other online projects.

“This was at a time, around 2000, when there was the internet… and people were online, but it wasn’t universal like it is now,” Sheidlower says. “We wanted to do a project where people devoted to a particular field, fans, could make contributions.”

Not only were science fiction fans particularly likely to be online, but they were a valuable source of material. The world’s most prestigious libraries, where OED researchers did much of their work, generally didn’t carry back issues of pulp magazines of the mid-20th century, such as If or Amazing Stories. But many fans, it turns out had cartons full of them.

The new project, researching the history of key words used in science fiction, was written up on early blogs and sites like slashdot. Over the decade that followed, it attracted hundreds of contributors. In 2007, editor Jeff Prucher published a book based on the work, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction.

The project might seem to have run its course, but Sheidlower, who managed the project when he was with the OED, thought there was still work to be done on it. When he left the publication in 2013, he didn’t lose track of the project. Eventually, he got permission to revive it as a personal project. He continued to add terms and references, something made easier by two factors. First, over the past year, the forced inactivity during the pandemic gave him time to work. And second, staff and volunteers of the Internet Archive have uploaded more than 1,000 science fiction pulp magazines, making their entire contents accessible and searchable online.

The May 1939 cover of Amazing Stories, one of the earliest magazines exclusively focused on science fiction

(Robert Fuqua / Ziff-Davis Publishing via Wikimedia Commons under public domain)

Elizabeth Swanstrom, co-editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies and an English scholar at the University of Utah, says the dictionary is “a fantastic resource” not just for fans but for scholars interested in the history of science and technology.

“It’s not uncommon in science fiction to see ideas that are being explored later being put into actual practice” she says.

In some cases, science fiction authors are also scientists who bring real research developments into their writing. Others alter the culture’s understanding of new technologies even without technical expertise. Swanstrom notes that the author William Gibson created the idea of cyberspace back in 1982 and helped found the cyberpunk genre, despite not knowing a huge amount about how computers work.

“The terminology that came out of that genre really shaped culture, and continues to do so” Swanstrom says.

Isiah Lavender III, a professor of English at the University of Georgia and co-editor of the science fiction journal Extrapolation, says the dictionary could help in the academic analysis of issues like the social and economic issues reflected in authors’ depictions of robots. He notes that Čapek’s original robots were essentially enslaved beings with human-like thoughts and feelings. Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, introduced in 1941, could be seen as reflecting slave codes or the Jim Crow laws that still constrained many black Americans’ lives at that time.

“Having these origin dates in mind can help a student or scholar build a framework to analyze something like the concept of the racial ‘other’ where robots and androids (as well as aliens) are stand-ins for oppressed peoples,” Lavender says.

Lavender notes that the dictionary quotations, derived largely from mid-20th century pulp magazines, don’t reflect the diversity of the science fiction world. Many current black science fiction writers, such as Nalo Hopkinson and N.K. Jemisin, don’t make an appearance.

“From the little bit that I have explored in the dictionary, it comes across as a tool that supports a monochrome future envisioned by the golden age editors of the SFF magazines,” Lavender says. “So it’s problematic in that way.”

Nalo Hopkinson speaks at the 2017 Hugo Awards, a ceremony honoring science fiction works, at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland.

(Henry Söderlund via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 4.0)

Sheidlower acknowledges that the dictionary is limited in the authors and terms it references, but he argues that this is a product of its mission: documenting the “core” vocabulary of science fiction that turns up again and again, both in stories and in the real world.

“When writers do more ‘interesting’ things, it becomes harder to include them in what is meant to be a study of the core vocabulary,” he says. “Samuel Delany is quoted a number of times when he’s writing about the usual space-travel stuff, but not much when he goes out of that range. There’s only one quote from [Delany’s dense, stylistically complex] Dhalgren, for example, but a lot from Babel-17, just as the OED has ten times more quotes from Ulysses than from Finnegans Wake.”

In general, Sheidlower says, to qualify for inclusion in the dictionary, a word must either be adopted widely within science fiction or become part of the broader culture. “Ansible”—a word for a device allowing faster-than-light communication coined by Ursula K. LeGuin—makes the cut because other authors also use it. Jemisin’s “orogenes”—people with the ability to control tectonic energy—do not because it’s a concept unique to her Broken Earth trilogy. Similarly, “Wookiee” is in the dictionary because Chewbacca is a familiar cultural figure, but dozens of other named alien species from the Star Wars universe that you can learn about on Wikipedia (or Wookieepedia) don’t merit entries.

Of course, it’s easy to find deep dives about nearly every science fiction universe on Wikipedia or elsewhere on the internet. Sheidlower says the dictionary’s mission is different.

“A dictionary’s not an encyclopedia,” he says. “There’s a reason for encyclopedias and there’s a reason for dictionaries.”

The dictionary is a streamlined way to see how terms have evolved over time, and read historical quotations that illuminate their meaning. It also links many of its quotations to the Internet Archive, where readers can see their context and even read the entire story.

Sheidlower says the dictionary, which he is continuing to update as a hobby, is still a work in progress. He anticipates expanding into related fields such as gaming, comics and anime. He also hopes to systematically add entries and quotations from books that have appeared in the ten years since the original phase of the project wrapped up. While Sheidlower has been doing most of the recent work himself, he is looking for volunteers to help out with tasks like checking citations, looking for quotations and drafting entries.

“I do hope there will be interest here,” he says. “For now, I’m still doing everything myself but the system does allow for other people doing that work.”

#Nature

[pulpfest]

Tonight, we'll bid adieu to FANTASTIC ADVENTURES. It's late 1952 and the pulp magazine is fast becoming an endangered format. Young readers have left the pulp market for comic books. Adults have turned to the convenience of the paperback book. Both kids and grown-ups are watching more television. Here's the November 1952, with front cover art by the talented Ziff-Davis artist Robert Gibson Jones. https://www.instagram.com/p/B7md4T7hgBI/?igshid=1296srfvtct58

[driveintheaterofthemind]

Vintage Comic - Sparkie #01

Pencils: ? Inks: ? Ziff-Davis (Winter1951)