As *spoon* as Arch comes back from vacation Hepcat will still be Hepcat. 8 8

[Hepcat]

Merry Xmas to all my furry and not-so-furry friends posting on this board!

 

 

Edited December 25, 2017 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

13 Oct 2017 14:29 #1223 2017-10-13T18:29

 

Here are my ten favourite toys from my childhood years. I limited my selections to only those toys I either had or really coveted but never managed to obtain as a kid. Accordingly I rejected a bunch of really cool toys from that era that I'd love to have today simply because I just don't remember being aware of them at the time, e.g. Ideal King Zor, Kenner Give-A-Show Projector, MPC Pop-Tops, Ideal Godzilla Board Game, Hamilton's Invaders, Marx Prehistoric Times Playset, etc, etc.

Here then in rough order is my list:

MY TEN FAVOURITE TOYS FROM MY CHILDHOOD YEARS


1. Mad, Mad, Mad Scientist Laboratory




2. Monogram 330P/LM Ferrari 1/32 Scale Slot Car Kit

 

3. Aurora Bride of Frankenstein Model Kit

4. Nash Skateboard (wooden with steel wheels)

 

5. Lionel HO Electric Train Set with Launching Helicopter and Bobbing Head Giraffe Cars

 

 

6. Revell Rat Fink Model Kit




7. Duncan Imperial Spin Top

8. Marx Three Keys to Treasure Bagatelle



9. Hasbro Marble Maze

10. Kenner Rocky & Bullwinkle Presto Sparkle Paint Set

 

 

 

Edited January 1, 2018 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

Continuing the list of my favourite toys from my childhood years:

11. Parker Bros. Monopoly Game





12. Cox Spitfire with .049 Thimble Drome Engine





13. Topper Johnny Seven O.M.A.





14. Mattel Creepy Crawlers Thingmaker




15. Milton Bradley The Deputy Game




16. Coleco Power Play Hockey Game



 

17. Eagle Electric Canadian Football Game

 

That 1962-63 version of an electric football game was the one I actually played but it was very crude compared to this beautiful Grey Cup Game that Coleco (which acquired eagle in 1968) produced in 1970:

 

18. Ohio Art Ring Toss

 

 

Honourable mention goes to two items that didn't make my list because I wasn't sure they could be properly classified as toys:

Standard Plastics Creature-Wolfman Monster Wallet




Peacock Crayons



These crayons of course needed the accompaniment of colouring books. I remember admiring Shari Lewis and Deputy Dawg colouring books at the News Depot in downtown London but I can't say for sure whether these were colouring books I actually had.

 

 

 

[Hepcat]

Here in alphabetical order are scans of a baker's dozen of my favourite DC covers from my collection cover dated 1967:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Hepcat]

The curtain coming down on the past year prompted me to look back at the "significant" events of my own life from the year that ended fifty years. I completed tenth grade in the spring of 1967, and it was a year of further refocusing away from the things of my childhood to the things that would occupy my interests in my early adult years. (And here I'm not talking about the girls aspect because that's the obvious one.)

During the school year I maintained the study habits I'd developed at boarding school in Kennebunkport, Maine the previous year. I was equally good at both number crunching and the humanities and I was put in the grade eleven "brain" class. That meant we were the class out of eight at the school "privileged" enough to take an extra credit, either Geography which I took or Spanish, in addition to English, French, Latin, History, Mathematics, Physics and Phys-Ed. My single minded focus was to get the best marks in the class (which I succeeded in doing in grade twelve). I was quite simply a bookish nerd and hung around at school with the other nerds. The prodigious feats of info absorption of which I was capable such as memorizing word-for-word several pages of definitions from the back of my science textbook now make me cringe when I think back on it. While I suppose my academic aptitude probably served me well into my adult life, I can't say it was a happy time in my life. It was simply nothing but a grind.

One happy side effect of my devotion to my studies though was that I had all exemptions from my final exams meaning that I finished the school year in May a couple of weeks earlier than most students. Most of the summer I spent hanging out on the street or at Thames Park with the other neighbourhood kids including the girls. I had the best radio, a really large strap-held transistor radio with which we listened to CHLO in St. Thomas which was the local Top 40 radio station! By then of course I was much too old and sophisticated to play baseball like some little kid.

The only comic I bought in 1967 was Doctor Solar 21 and that was the last comic I would buy until mid-1972.



Nor did I renew my subscription to Warren's Eerie magazine when it expired.

What I read in their place was the local London Free Press newspaper. And we had a subscription to Time magazine which I absolutely devoured from cover-to-cover. To this very day I know who the leaders of the countries in the news such as Vietnam, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Algeria were in 1967 and even many of Canada's cabinet ministers but by a few years later I'd completely lost track with all the changes.

I continued to read for recreation. I can't recall what I was borrowing from the local library, but I took up buying and saving all the Pan James Bond paperbacks:



I wanted to be like James Bond of course with all these gorgeous women draped all over me! I didn't realize at the time how troublesome that would likely prove.

I'd lost interest in most of my other childhood pursuits although I still built the occasional model plane. I believe that the last three I built were in 1967:





Both my Monogram Ferrari 330P/LM slot car and Cox Spitfire with the .049 Thimble Drome engine just sat gathering dust, however.



TV still wasn't a big part of my life. I'd watch the televised games during the CFL season but there were no more than two or three per week and I'd watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I'd usually watch the reruns of Wild Wild West after school and often The Beverly Hillbillies and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and sometimes Bonanza or the Ed Sullivan Show Saturday and Sunday evenings but that was it. 

I did get to take the train to Montreal to visit Expo 67 in the company of twenty or so other Lithuanian kids from the London area. Everything about the trip was a thrill. I stayed at a grownup second cousin's house in the Montreal neighbourhood of Westmount and thoroughly enjoyed both the world's fair and the entire experience.



The summer of 1967 also heralded the start of my working life when my father placed me on a tobacco farm just north of Delhi in late July for a five week stretch. My horizons were further expanded when I got my trembling hands on the September issue of Playboy in the bunkhouse:



As the gatefold attraction the issue featured the luscious Angela Dorian, a.k.a. Victoria Vetri, who went on to become the Playmate of the Year:



When I got back home just before Labour Day, I had $495 in my bank account and I was fully intent on buying some of the records to which I'd been grooving on the radio. I went ahead and made the new exotic Beatles' album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, my first purchase at Bluebird Records in downtown London. I quickly followed up this purchase by acquiring the Beatles' first three Canadian albums, Beatlemania, Twist and Shout and Long Tall Sally. I then stepped outside the box in October and bought Big Hits - High Tide and Green Grass by the Rolling Stones. I was floored! I found the Stones' record far edgier than the comparatively tame Beatles' albums. Then of course there was the innovative for the time booklet of their pictures included within the double sleeve:



I wasn't entirely sure which Stone was which at the time but the brooding, mysterious Stones appealed to me in a way the Beatles did not. I went out and added Flowers to my swiftly growing record collection within a couple of weeks and then a few more Stones' LPs. By December I believe I'd bought these LP's by other groups as well:

Note the absence of bands such as the Monkees whom I knew had been created to target pubescent girls. My intent was to buy the LPs of only those groups/artists that fit my category of "serious" rock musicians. I pursued my record buying, collecting and cataloguing with the same intensity and focus that I'd previously applied to my bubble gum card and comic collecting efforts. As a result within a year I had a shelf of records far exceeding that of any classmate or kid in the neighbourhood.

I also immediately aspired to replace our family's little mono record player that had been bought used in 1962(?) with a Seabreeze stereo(!) record player with detachable speakers. But my father was adamantly opposed to such a profligate waste of money since we already had a "perfectly good" record player so I put that project on hold for the time being. It would be resurrected though!  

And now here I am today, still very much a fan of the Rolling Stones, blues-rock in general and hi-fi stereo components as well as comic mags and the other sundry kid stuff from my formative years!

Edited January 13, 2018 by Hepcat

[AJD]

Great stuff Hep, as usual. Just a few random remarks.

The Revell "dambuster" Lancaster kept me occupied all of Christmas Day in 1973. It's dated now, but it was a fine kit in its day. The "MiG 19" is an interesting story in its own right, since it never existed - I old the story in my journal a while back, since the same non-plane ended up on the cover of some Wings comics.

Ms Dorian/Vetri is a fine piece of work.

Agreed about the Stones v The Beatles, though I continue to enjoy both. The difference is especially true for the Mick Taylor years. The first few bars of the Animals House of the Rising Sun never ceases to amaze, and The Kinks are sadly underrated. In a coincidence, "Death of a clown" was playing on my iPod while I was reading your post!

Was the 1967-72 comic buying hiatus your only one? I didn't buy a book between 1977 and 1987, and had a shorter layoff around the turn of the century. My current collection dates from 2005.

[Hepcat]

16 hours ago, AJD said:

The Revell "dambuster" Lancaster kept me occupied all of Christmas Day in 1973.

 

Ironically I bought my own Revell Dambuster over the 1966 Xmas holidays at McCormick's Hobbies on Oxford Street in London!

 

16 hours ago, AJD said:

 

The "MiG 19" is an interesting story in its own right, since it never existed - I old the story in my journal a while back, since the same non-plane ended up on the cover of some Wings comics.

 

Huh? The MiG 19 existed:

 

 

It just didn't look anything like the model kit Aurora first issued in 1955. I must admit though that the Aurora model kit looked way cooler with the long tail section with the horizontal stabilizer at the top!

 

16 hours ago, AJD said:

 

Ms Dorian/Vetri is a fine piece of work.

 

 

Here then is another CGC friendly pic of the delectable Ms. Dorian:

 

16 hours ago, AJD said:

 

Agreed about the Stones v The Beatles, though I continue to enjoy both.... The first few bars of the Animals House of the Rising Sun never ceases to amaze, and The Kinks are sadly underrated. In a coincidence, "Death of a clown" was playing on my iPod while I was reading your post!

 

Coincidentally I just posted these two lists on another forum in the last couple of days:

Favourite Bands

1. Rolling Stones
2. Doors
3. Animals (Eric Burdon and)
4. Beatles
5. Cream
6. Who
7. (Peter Green's) Fleetwood Mac
8. Jethro Tull
9. Kinks
10. Blondie
11. Butterfield Blues Band
12. Yardbirds
13. Led Zeppelin
14. Traffic
15. Ten Years After
16. Creedence Clearwater Revival
17. Jimi Hendrix Experience
18. Junior Walker & the All-Stars
19. Zombies
20. Spirit

Favourite Kinks' Tracks

 1. Days
 2. All Day and All of the Night
 3. I'm Not Like Everybody Else (1994 live version)
 4. Don't Forget to Dance
 5. Low Budget
 6. Till the End of the Day
 7. A Well Respected Man
 8. (Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman
 9. Sunny Afternoon
 10. You Really Got Me
 11. Lola
 12. Apeman

 

16 hours ago, AJD said:

Was the 1967-72 comic buying hiatus your only one? I didn't buy a book between 1977 and 1987, and had a shorter layoff around the turn of the century. My current collection dates from 2005.

 

I bought comics for only three months or so in 1972. It wasn't until 1979 that I returned to collecting the comics of my younger days full tilt. Until 2000 or so I bought a few new comics periodically as well as back issues but I don't think I've bought any new comics since 2000. My buying of even back issues has been at a low ebb in the last five years since I've had other financial demands recently. But I'll be back in a full accumulation mode sooner or later since my interest in comics has stayed keen.

 

Edited January 14, 2018 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

2 hours ago, AJD said:

 

Agreed about the Stones v The Beatles.... The difference is especially true for the Mick Taylor years.

 

Mick Taylor is actually my least favourite fifth Stone. Quite simply the only Stones' album on which he was fully featured that I really like was his first one, Sticky Fingers. I didn't like the next three from Exile to It's Only Rock 'n Roll at all.  Here's how I rate the Stones' albums from the 20th century:

1. Flowers
2. December's Children
3. Rolling Stones Now
4. Sticky Fingers
5. Beggars' Banquet
6. Let It Bleed
7. Their Satanic Majesties Request
8. Some Girls
9. Steel Wheels 
10. Between the Buttons (U.S. release)
11. Voodoo Lounge
12. Dirty Work
13. Out of Our Heads
14. Tattoo You
15. Black and Blue
16. Emotional Rescue
17. Aftermath (U.S. release)
18. Bridges to Babylon
18. England's Newest Hitmakers
19. 12 x 5
20. Exile on Main Street
21. Goat's Head Soup
22. It's Only Rock 'n Roll
23. Undercover

 

 

 

[AJD]

1 hour ago, Hepcat said:

Huh? The MiG 19 existed:

 

 

It just didn't look anything like the model kit Aurora first issued in 1955. I must admit though that the Aurora model kit looked way cooler with the long tail section with the horizontal stabilizer at the top!

 

 

You are right, of course. What I should have said was "the MiG-19 depicted by Aurora bore no resemblance to the real thing". More in my journal here.

1 hour ago, Hepcat said:

Here then is another CGC friendly pic of the delectable Ms. Dorian:

 

 

Google is my friend.

 Though the story is not without a twist!

 

 

[Hepcat]

It was fifty years ago this month that the Creeper debuted in DC comics:





An interesting detail was the mention of Commies in the very first panel of the story:





To this point of the Silver Age at DC there had been considerable reluctance to finger Soviets or Communists as enemies. Julius Schwartz's titles in particular would very annoyingly label spies as being agents of an unnamed foreign power. "Why not name the foreign power, Julie?"

Robert Kanigher though continued to be just as oblivious to what his fellow editors were doing on this subject as on every other. He did on occasion feature Reds as the enemy both in his war comics as well as in Wonder Woman:











For once I'm with Robert Kanigher here.

While Archie, Dell and then Gold Key were even more weak-kneed than DC when it came to portraying Commies as a menace, other comic companies were considerably less reticent. Ace for example published this Atomic War title just fifteen years earlier in 1952-53:


1




3



4




Fiction House, Standard and many others published a virtual riot of comics based on the Korean War:

Atlas published war comics such as these as late as 1959:







In fact Stan Lee showed no reluctance to portray the Reds as villains well into the sixties. Sue Reed's mention of beating the Commies in the space race features prominently in the origin tale of the Fantastic Four: 





Here are another couple of examples from 1962 and 1965 respectively:







The war comics at Charlton continued to feature Americans battling Commies right through the sixties:


24



26



21



26



51




And this was not just in the war comics but throughout the entire line:


2



1



17



21




22




Here from Space Adventures 40 is a page that's a particularly good example:





And over at Harvey they published this one in 1966:





All very cool indeed in my opinion!
 
(The larger scans above are all from my own collection.)
 

Edited February 1, 2018 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

My complete collection of romance comics:

 

Pretty pathetic, eh?

[porcupine48]

2 minutes ago, Hepcat said:

My complete collection of romance comics:

 

Pretty pathetic, eh?

Quality.

[Brandon Shepherd]

19 hours ago, porcupine48 said:

Quality.

Great collection! Quality over quantity, neat covers. I've been wanting to collect silver/bronze romance for some time but I only see a few copies here and there, almost always in poor shape.

[Duffman_Comics]

On 2/4/2018 at 7:14 AM, Hepcat said:

My complete collection of romance comics:

 

Pretty pathetic, eh?

Well, you have two more Romance books than me, so I think it's a spectacular collection!

[Get Marwood & I]

On 31/01/2018 at 3:38 PM, Hepcat said:

17



21



 

Gorgo...

[Hepcat]

6 hours ago, Duffman_Comics said:

Well, you have two more Romance books than me, so I think it's a spectacular collection!

 

I also have this one although I'm not sure it strictly fits into the romance genre:

 

Edited February 5, 2018 by Hepcat

[Hepcat]

On ‎2‎/‎4‎/‎2018 at 4:31 PM, Marwood & I said:

Gorgo...

 

Scans of my two favourite Gorgo covers from my collection:

 

Edited February 6, 2018 by Hepcat

[Get Marwood & I]

1 hour ago, Hepcat said:

 

Scans of my two favourite Gorgo covers from my collection:

 

Niiiiice!

I like the pence copies better though Hepcat 

 

[Duffman_Comics]

Gorgo fan here, and although this isn't part of the eponymous run I still think it counts:

 

Edited February 6, 2018 by Duffman_Comics

[Hepcat]

9 hours ago, Marwood & I said:

Niiiiice!

I like the pence copies better though Hepcat 

Gorgo is so cosmopolitan. that he knows no national borders. He's truly a citizen of the world.

7 hours ago, Duffman_Comics said:

Gorgo fan here, and although this isn't part of the eponymous run I still think it counts:

There's no such thing as too much Gorgo.

 

 

Edited February 7, 2018 by Hepcat