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Born This Day: Lewis Carrol

The looking glass

Lewis Carroll (Jan. 27, 1832 – Jan. 14, 1898) was the pen name of(Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), an English logician, mathematician, photographer, and novelist, who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel.

After graduating from Christ Church College, Oxford in 1854, Dodgson remained there, lecturing on mathematics and writing treatises until 1881. As a mathematician, Dodgson was conservative. He was the author of a fair number of mathematics books, e.g "A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry" (1860). As a logician, he was more interested in logic as a game than as an instrument for testing reason. link

The Cheshire Cat


Advice From A Caterpiller


The Walrus And The Carpenter All art © Dean Motter (1975)

The drawings of Alice are from the 1975 portfolio, “Alice.Alice..Alice…By Dean Motter—wonderland in ten regions”, published by Iconoclast Imageworks and distributed by the fondly remembered Bakka Book Stores in Toronto.

I stumbled across this tucked into the upper shelf of a now long-gone book store before Motter had started to make his mark in the comic book field.

Air Force Unveils New Ray Gun

Mars Attacks! © Current Copyright Holder

The ray gun shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they are about to catch fire. Apart from causing that terrifying sensation, the technology is supposed to be harmless — a non-lethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons.

Anyone hit by the beam immediately jumped out of its path because of the sudden blast of heat throughout the body. While the 130-degree heat was not painful, it was intense enough to make the participants think their clothes were about to ignite.

Beauty Blaze & Polar Man © DC Comics

The system uses electromagnetic millimeter waves, which can penetrate only 1/64th of an inch of skin, just enough to cause discomfort. By comparison, microwaves used in the common kitchen appliance penetrate several inches of flesh. Link from Live Science

Stan Ridgeway's "Ring of Fire":

Born This Day: Discoverer of Krypton

Morris William Travers (Jan 24, 1872–Aug 25, 1961), was an English chemist who, while working with Sir Willam Ramsay in London, discovered the element krypton (30 May 1898). The name derives from the Greek word for "hidden."



It was a fraction separated from liquified air, which when placed in a Plücker tube connected to an induction coil yielded a spectrum with a bright yellow line with a greener tint than the known helium line and a brilliant green line that corresponded to nothing seen before. link

To make a long story short, after Phantom Girl finds an ancient tablet at an archaeological project on a little island in the Atlantic Ocean in the 30th century, the LSH split into two teams & set off in Time Bubbles to Earth & Krypton's “remote past” to investigate “The War Between Krypton and Earth”.



As it turns out a group of Kryptonian scientists set up shop on Earth because they were persecuted back home.



Too bad the uninhabited Earth had already been colonized by the Vruunians who had established a town called Atlantis. After the "Civil War of the Legion" that saw the two teams taking sides with their new friends, came this inevitable ending after Brainiac 5 uses "artifical evolution" to turn the Atlanteans into mermen:

LSH & Superboy © DC Comics

Cringe At The Sight of B'wana Beast!

© DC Comics

Who'da thoughts that we'd ever see an animated B'wana Beast? He shows up at aboout the 2:15 mark in the clip below. Until then you can enjoy Zatanna's antics.

Launched This Day: 1st Atomic Sub

image

One this day in 1954, the first atomic submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, was launched at Groton, Connecticut. All vessels previously known as "submarines" were in fact only submersible craft. Because of the nuclear power plant, the Nautilus could stay submerged for months at a time, unlike diesel-fueled subs, whose engines required vast amounts of oxygen.

Nautilus demonstrated her capabilities in 1958 when she sailed beneath the Arctic icepack to the North Pole. Scores of nuclear submarines followed Nautilus, replacing the United States' diesel boat fleet. After patrolling the seas until 1980, the Nautilus is back home at Groton. link

Arctic Submarine Timeline

Atomic Submarine has just been released by Criterion(!) in a nice, new boxed set called "Monsters & Madmen" along with The First Man Into Space, The Haunted Strangler, & Corridors of Blood all under a beautiful cover by Darwyn Cooke (we highlighted another of his Criterion covers HERE).

The DVD Journal has reviewed the set and has this to say:

"The Atomic Submarine (72 minutes, Criterion no. 366) is to James Cameron's The Abyss what It! The Terror from Beyond Space is to Ridley Scott's Alien. When a nuclear-powered submarine, the Tiger Shark, sets out to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances near the Arctic Circle, its fearless crew finds itself besieged by electrical storms, an Unidentified Floating Saucer, and lots of hairy tentacles."

"There's something sublime in the hairy eyeball's "telepathic" baritone introduction to Arthur Franz: "So, Commander Holloway, as you Earth inhabitants would express it, we meet ... face to face!" Let's not forget the bombastic narrator ("Adapt a complicated guidance system to a huge ballistic rocket, convert it to a water-to-air intercept missile? It was foolish, it was insane, it was fantastic! But it was their only hope. And the Earth's only hope!"). And the Theremin-heavy musical score adds to the cheese factor with "electro-sonic" gusto."

Tomorrow’s Fear Becomes Today’s Nightmare!:

Steranko's Stolen Art

Characters © DC & Marvel Comics; Art © Steranko

As soon I scan this art a similar piece turns up at the center of a ‘stolen art’ controversy. Read Jim Steranko’s open letter at The PULSE:

"Likewise, I did NOT give Harry and the school the FOOM Poster original to sell or give away. It was Harry's understanding that his unique pop-culture collection be FOREVER maintained in his name. Instead, the institution has NEVER used the material for any significant purpose, except to sell it off, which is unreasonable, disgraceful, and unethical. What was to be a LIVING TRIBUTE to one of the founders of the Golden Age of Comics became a travesty, smearing the school and those involved with the scum of greed, lies, and hypocrisy."

The stolen art was reproduced as a color poster for Marvel’s “FOOM” (Friends of ‘ol Marvel) but I received the above piece on the envelope that contained one of Steranko’s two volumes of “The History of Comics”—both highly recommended if you can find them anywhere.