Thursday, May 17, 2012

The Phony Return: Senses-Shattering!!

No, I'm not back, True Believers!  I'm posting this from my desk at work while I'm waiting to do... more work.   According to my contract, I get off at 4:30pm (kind of weird mandating something so personal in a legally binding contract, but there you have it) but I usually have to stay for an hour or two post-time for meetings and plannings and all that kind of fun stuff.

At lunch today I decided to look up the phrase "senses-shattering," which was a particular favorite of Marvel hypesters back in the 1960s and 70s.  Why would anyone in his or her right mind want his or her senses shattered?  Why was sense shattering considered a draw?  There are no answers to these and other idiotic questions, but my random interest in "senses-shattering" led me to a hilarious blog where someone named Tom the Bomb deconstructed classic Marvel books before disappearing into the desert like a mirage or an Oliver Stone hallucination of something Jim Morrison would have hallucinated sometime around May 2009.  Our loss.

A senses-shattering loss.

In other news, the kindly Sagawa Transport gentleman delivered a couple of boxes to my apartment last night.  One contained Al Williamson Archives Volume 1 and 2 from Flesk Publications.  Wow!  Flesk (with the help of Mark Schultz, who also compiled their hefty and impressive Al Williamson's Flash Gordon:  A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic and wrote the most informative and ultimately heart-breaking overview of Williamson's art career to provide context for all the gorgeous art) presents full-color reproductions of Williamson's sketchbook pages, unfinished artwork, completed works unpublished elsewhere.  If you love the masters of comic book illustration these slender books are a must-have.  If you just love art, you need to at least look at them sometime.  Sorry, but no one touches mine.

The other box contained one of those Dark Horse Star Wars books, the ones with all the old Marvel stories.  By no coincidence, this book features some Williamson artwork, too-- the first part of Star Wars #50, "The Crimson Forever."

It was a very Al Williamson kind of day.

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