Groovy Age Spotlight On...Gil Kane "In the Rough(s)!" All of Groove-dom knows that Gil Kane was the main cover-man at Marvel in the early-to-mid 1970s. Here are a bunch of cover roughs/preliminaries (which yers trooly scrounged from all over the interwebs) for some famous (and not-so-famous but still pretty cool) Kane kovers that Made Ours Marvel during the Groovy Age!
Yeah, Groove-ophiles! Let's (bubblegum) rock a bit with The Archies! When I was just a Li'l Groove, The Archies were my absolute favorite thing! The comics, the cartoons, and the records were a huge part of my daily life (well, the cartoons were just on Saturdays, but ya know what I mean). I had no idea who Ron Dante or Toni Wine, who made up the "real" Archies, were. Being a naïve little kid, I believed it was really my favorite cartoon characters singing those songs! (Even if the speaking voices Dallas McKennon, Howard Morris, John Erwin, or Jane Webb in no way matched the singing voices. What did I know?) And yeah, I watched every version of the cartoons from The Archie Show and Archie's Funhouse right on through--gulp--Archie's TV Funnies and U.S. of Archie! Anywho, my love for The Archies' music started with the music segments on the cartoons and led directly to the first single, "Bang-Shang-a-Lang"/"Truck Driver", then right on to the albums Everything's Archie and The Archie's Greatest Hits--which I still have to this very day!
Here are two of my favorites by The Archies--not their biggest hits, but two, imho, of their best and most endearing: from Everything's Archie "Circle of Blue" and from The Archies' Greatest Hits "Seventeen Ain't Young". (If you like even more cheese than Ol' Groove, you can scroll back to the beginning of each song; if not, I skipped the "Dance Lessons" for ya...)
More bad news, Groove-ophiles. As you've no doubt heard by now, Groovy Age letterhack-turned-professional writer Martin (Pesky) Pasko passed away at age 65 this past Sunday night (May 10) of natural causes. Pasko's pro career started with a short horror tale, "Package Deal" in Creepy #51 (December 1972), although most news outlets claim his first pro job to be the Private Life of Clark Kent back-up, "The Pizzeria Peril!" in Superman #277 (April 1974). Pasko had another job, "The Great Cross-Country Cloud Race," come out that same month in Strange Sports Stories #6...check it out...
No matter which comic anyone wants to claim as Pasko's "first," the fact remains that Pasko proved to be a solid, entertaining, powerhouse of a writer who provided not only thousands of comics fans but also millions of TV fans with decades of wonderful entertainment. Besides some 30 years of classic comicbooks from a wide variety of comicbook publishers, Pasko also wrote and/or story edited over two dozen live action and cartoon shows, including Groovy Age classics like Thundarr the Barbarian and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, right on up through Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, Roseanne, his Emmy-winning work on Batman: The Animate Series, and the fan-favorite Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Besides being a first-rate writer, by all accounts, Pasko was a first-rate friend to folks like Alan Brennert, Paul Levitz, and many others. To all of Pasko's family, friends, and fans, our most sincere condolences. Hey, Kids! Comics from 50 Years Ago!
Special thanks to Mike's Amazing World of Comics and Grand Comics Database for being such fantastic resources for covers, dates, creator info, etc. Thou art treasures true!
Note to "The Man": All images are presumed copyright by the respective copyright holders and are presented here as fair use under applicable laws, man! If you hold the copyright to a work I've posted and would like me to remove it, just drop me an e-mail and it's gone, baby, gone.
All other commentary and insanity copyright GroovyAge, Ltd.
As for the rest of ya, the purpose of this blog is to (re)introduce you to the great comics of the 1970s. If you like what you see, do what I do--go to a comics shop, bookstore, e-Bay or whatever and BUY YOUR OWN!
