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Marvel Comics #1: 80 Years Ago The Marvel Universe Began
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101 posts in this topic

From Mark Evanier’s site:

 

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Bash Brannigan Lives!

Published Tuesday, September 5, 2017 at 3:37 AM

Tomorrow morning, Turner Classic Movies is running How To Murder Your Wife. Here's a message I posted when Showtime ran it ten years ago…

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Showtime is running How To Murder Your Wife, a 1965 movie that Jack Lemmon, it is rumored, very much regretted making. It's kind of an interesting film because it has a good, fun feeling and a lot of great performances. Terry-Thomas is quite splendid as Lemmon's "Man" (i.e., butler-valet) and Eddie Mayehoff, a very underappreciated comic actor, walks off with every scene he's in. Lemmon twinkles, Virna Lisi is stunning, the music is great…and somehow, the whole thing falls apart from a stupid story with a stupider resolution.

Lemmon plays a comic strip artist who's a confirmed bachelor. His art imitates his life and vice-versa so when he accidentally gets married to Lisi, his comic strip character (Bash Brannigan) gets married in the strip. Both creator and creation undergo changes, not necessarily for the better, and the cartoonist finally decides to murder the wife in the comic strip…only this gets confused with murdering his real wife. When the real wife runs away, Lemmon is charged with her murder…and in order to make that part of the story happen, screenwriter George Axelrod and director Richard Quine have to just ignore how the actual judicial system works. For example, it is somehow decided that Lemmon can be charged with First Degree Murder even though there is no physical proof that anyone has been killed, thereby suspending habeas corpus years before anyone had ever heard of Alberto Gonzales.

Lemmon goes to trial — and I'm going to go ahead and blow the ending in the next paragraph because it's so lame, so consider this your SPOILER ALERT…

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Lemmon goes to trial and decides that his only chance of not being sent to the electric chair is to (a) confess to a murder that never happened and (b) convince a conveniently all-male jury, in a five minute speech, that murdering your wife is a good thing. I was thirteen years old when I saw this movie and even I was sitting there going, "Come…on!" Easily one of the silliest scenes ever to appear on the screen, and I don't mean that in a good way. The whole film, if you think about it with the slightest bit of logic, is quite ridiculous and it's a testimony to Mr. Lemmon's charm (and Mayehoff and Thomas) that it's still almost worth watching…once.

Cartoonists love it, not for the plot but for the absurd life style of one of their own, and the occasional shots of comic strips and of "Lemmon's" hand drawing them. Obviously, a real artist had to be engaged to do this and when Mr. Lemmon was signed, he told the producers that as a kid, his favorite comic book was a strip called The Sub-Mariner and he wondered if they could get that feature's artist. They tracked down Bill Everett but he was then coping with too many alcohol-related health problems and he reluctantly declined the job.

Instead, they hired the great Alex Toth and his first assignment, which he did, was to whip up several newspaper-style strips that ran in the Hollywood trade papers to announce various signings and the upcoming commencement of filming. Toth was also supposed to "stunt double" Lemmon's drawing hand for some shots in the film until someone noticed a teensy problem: Lemmon was right-handed and Toth was a lefty. Alex also began arguing with the producers over something-or-other (Alex was always arguing over something-or-other) and he walked off the project. His replacement was Mel Keefer, who did all the artwork in the film and played Jack Lemmon's drawing hand.

 

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Thanks for posting.

Namor - always the gentleman - "Wreck the ship some-where, and swim back home - I'll get in touch with you later -"  lol

Is your copy an October or November?

Edited by pemart1966
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Besides Jack Lemmon’s history with Everett and the Sub-Mariner another actor has let it be known he was a fan growing up. Besides the piece below about the Superman movie part he  also mentioned to the LA Times a couple years ago about being a fan of Marvel’s original anti-hero. By coincidence he was in one of the old Creature from the Black Lagoon sequels as an actor...

 

COMICS

CLINT EASTWOOD PASSED ON 1978'S 'SUPERMAN,' WANTED TO PLAY NAMOR

 

 
RICK MARSHALL09/07/2010

We've presented a fair share of "What If?" casting stories over the years here on Splash Page, with many of them involving actors who, at one point or another, came close to playing Superman on the big screen. There was Christian BaleBrendan FraserDavid Hasselhoff, and... Clint Eastwood?

Yes, according to an interview with Hero Complex, the "Dirty Harry" star was considered for the title role in 1978's "Superman" — a role that eventually went to Christopher Reeve.

"I can remember – and this was many years ago – when [Warner Bros. President] Frank Wells came to me about doing Superman," said Eastwood. "So it could have happened. This was when they first started to think about making it. I was like, 'Superman? Nah, nah, that’s not for me.' Not that there’s anything wrong with it. It’s for somebody, but not me." 

Richard Donner's big-screen take on the Man of Steel eventually took flight with another actor, but Eastwood said he wasn't interested in the role then or later, drawn instead toward roles he felt were more "grounded."

“I always liked characters that were more grounded in reality," he said. "Maybe they do super things or more-than-human things — like Dirty Harry, he has a knack for doing crazy things, or the western guys — but, still, they’re not caped crusaders."

Superhero typecasting was also a concern, according to the veteran actor and filmmaker.

"That was part of the consideration, a big part,” he said. “Look at Reeve, he was excellent. That was a big factor. You get a role like that, and it locks you in a bit. True, I had the western genre and the ‘Dirty Harry’ role, but everybody made westerns and did cop movies; they didn’t seem as bad [for typecasting the actors]."

And in a bit of a surprise turn, Eastwood name-dropped the one superhero he was a big fan of: Marvel's sea-dwelling Sub Mariner, Namor.

"The Sub-Mariner, that’s the one I always liked," he said. "I had all of those comics when I was a kid."

Would Clint Eastwood have made a good Superman? What about Namor? 

 

 

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Edited by N e r V
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Several years ago, I tried categorizing the different periods of Marvel Mystery. Since completing such a run would be uber expensive, I thought I could get a few from each period and be content with that. Here are the periods I felt were distinct:

 1-10 - the pioneering classics - Not all 1-10s in comics are considered pioneers, but Marvel Mystery's 1-10 are right up there with Actions 1-10 and Detectives 27-37. The first anti-hero in comics and the lead-up to the battle between Namor and Torch and first crossover in comics that stretched beyond several issues was truly significant.

 11-20 - consolidating the formula, putting Namor in costume, looking for new ideas to continue the stories from the previous battle issues but not as strong compared to 1-10.      

 21-30 - odd period with a mix of war issues and horror issues. Not sure what direction it wanted to take. Burgos, Kirby, Everett are still present but are about ready to leave for war duty and replaced by lesser artists and writers.  

 31-40 - totally war-oriented covers (except for the 34) but the cover formula is still not perfected yet. Mix of Schomburg, Avison, Gabrielle and Shores.

 41-50 - classic war covers. Schomburg was at his peak and he found the formula and they gave him all the cover chores.

 51-80 - long period - getting out of war and more into crime covers and the books started thinning out with less pages and the physical size of the issues were also reduced.   

 81-92 - Schomburg has exited and the series focuses on good girl art.  

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