I shared a 1917 infographic about aviation with you last week that shows how far we’ve come in nearly a century, and now I’ll share an advertisement from an earlier edition of the same newspaper that reflects the passage of time in an entirely different way—for it’s filled with the names of famous people whose patronage is supposed to make us desire a product—and 98 years after their fame, I have no idea who any of these people were!

Time doesn’t always erase the famous. After all, last year I showed you an 1898 ad for Vin Mariani in which the product was touted by the likes of Jules Verne, Emile Zola, and Alexandre Dumas. But as for these famous men and women, who thought that “Peps possess a real germ-killing quality” in the November 7, 1914 issue of The Graphic, I don’t recognize a single name.

Do you? Take a look at the ad below, and then tell me whether—without doing online searches—the names carry any meaning for you.

Give up? I did.

But here’s what I learned from my own Googling. (more…)

We all remember why Peter Parker decided that with great power came great responsibility, right? It’s because way back during his first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man decided that “from now on I just look out for Number One,” and let a common criminal get away …

… resulting in … well … you know how that decision turned out. Bye bye, Uncle Ben!

And it was all Peter’s fault.

But if you’d first encountered Spider-Man via his second appearance, you would have found a subtly different origin path. (more…)

Earlier this week, I looked through the July issues of various magazines I own from the mid-19th through the early 20th Century in search of something appropriate for a 4th of July post, and came up empty.

I was sure there’d be a suitable essay or cartoon in the July 7th, 1917 issue of The Graphic—after all, there was a war on, so surely there’d be patriotism on display—but no. Oh, the newspaper’s pages were filled with some nice pictures of Woodrow Wilson and the War Cabinet, and a few over-the-top rants against Junkerdom, but nothing beautiful or funny or poetic or uplifting. And so … no July 4th post.

But I did find something intriguing—a large page of charts and graphs published under the collective header, “When We All Take to the Air: Post-War Propositions for Commercial Aeronautics.”

Check below to see Lord Montagu’s ideas for how to divvy up airspace, the estimated annual cost of running a London-Paris air route, and the distances covered in one hour by different methods of transportation of the day.

Note the warning that with the coming age of non-military aviation, “there may be a revival of smuggling.”

Please forgive the imperfection of the scanning. I don’t own a scanner large enough to accommodate the magazine’s 15.75″ x 11.25″ sheets, and so had to create this image out of two scans. I hope you enjoy it anyway!

Another month gone by, another batch of dreams, these with guest stars such as Anthony Bourdain, Public Enemy, Steve Martin, Julie Schwartz, Harry Morgan, Tommy Tune and more. Here’s what I tweeted last month, perhaps delivering some sort of rough poetry because of their proximity to each other.

JUNE 2012

I dreamt Dan Perez regaled me with wild tales of his UK road trips, especially the troubles he got into in small villages not on any map. 29 Jun

I dreamt I attended my first George Formby Society convention, but there was a Russian there who would only talk, talk, talk about trains. 28 Jun

I dreamt I drove through Denver, numbers popping up on objects as though I was in a video game. They vanished to musical notes as I passed. 28 Jun

I dreamt I visited a fortune teller and asked, “Will I be tried for murder?” But I had no memory of killing, so my own question confused me. 27 Jun

I dreamt I wandered Texas with friends in search of BBQ, but wherever we stopped — no BBQ! Just lots and lots of old people line dancing. 27 Jun

I dreamt I played catch with Anthony Bourdain and his kid using a huge jawbreaker. Later, I decided to bake them my grandma’s mandel bread. 27 Jun

I dreamt I was chased through a forest by tiny flying robots. But before I either was caught or got clean away, I woke. So — no ending! 26 Jun

I dreamt I owned a trumpet which, when blown, opened a gateway to another dimension. I peered across, but woke before stepping through. 26 Jun

I dreamt I helped the Stark kids escape, which involved pushing an evil dwarf off a cliff, then pushing a great stone on top of him. 26 Jun

I dreamt an old HS friend went into an Apple store while I waited out front, and never came out. Eventually, I looked inside. He was gone. 25 Jun (more…)

A few weeks ago, I was bemoaning the fact that the world seemed to have forgotten EC Comics artist Bernard Krigstein, a thought brought about by two (then ongoing) Heritage original art auctions of complete comics adaptations of Ray Bradbury short stories.

“Mars is Heaven!” illustrated by Wally Wood was expected to bring in between $30,000 and $50,000, while “The Flying Machine” by Krigstein was estimated to go for anywhere from $7,000 to $9,000. This imbalance seemed odd to me, not only because Krigstein was once held in such high regard, but also because Bradbury considered “The Flying Machine” to be “the single finest piece of art-drawing I’ve seen in years.” Not that I have anything against Wally Wood, you understand, it’s just that until I saw those predictions, I’d assumed the two artists were held in equal regard.

Now that the auctions are over, though, I’m feeling a little better about it all.

So how’d those auctions turn out?

“Mars is Heaven!” sold for $54,687.50, and “The Flying Machine” went for $27,500. Which means that while Heritage, at least based on its initial estimates, predicted that the world would value Wood over Krigstein by a ratio of approximately 5-1, the actual ratio turned out to be 2-1.

Because of that, and taking into account that Bradbury’s “Mars is Heaven!” is a far more beloved story (even though I always preferred “The Flying Machine”), I’m much less miffed on behalf of Krigstein.

(And if all this now piques your interest in his unique style, and you’d like to see more, check out this post-EC tale “The Desert Rat,” which manages to cram 73 panels into a single 4 page Stan Lee-scripted story!)

Yesterday, as we were moving vast quantities of assorted cheeses from our non-refrigerating refrigerator into ice-filled coolers—we had no power due to the thunderstorm; perhaps you were in the same situation—I remembered an article written more than a century ago in which someone from the U.S. was gobsmacked that the French had more than one kind of cheese. I wanted to reread the piece … but that was easier said than done.

I love reading magazines from the late 1800s and early 1900s to see how things really were back in the day, and whenever I visit a used bookstore, the first thing I check out is whether any bound volumes are for sale. I couldn’t recall which of many old magazines I owned had printed the piece; all I remembered was that it was in a magazine that printed its stories in two columns per page, rather than just one—which left out all those volumes of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. I started with an 1852 volume of The National (nope, not there), then dove into The Cosmopolitan from 1902 (not there, either), before finding what I was looking for in the October 1878 Harper’s.

In Marie Stevens Howland’s article “Butter Stores in Paris” (strange how I only remembered the cheese, but not the butter), she was amazed that in France, not only did shoppers get to choose more than one kind of cheese, they didn’t have to live in fear that it would be terrible. She wrote:

One thing sure to surprise the American in Paris is the almost endless variety of the cheese. Here, our only idea of that article is generally the huge ‘factory cheese’ of the groceries. It has no special name, cheese to the average citizen meaning this only. He has to taste it before daring to buy it, for the name conveys little notion of its flavor or quality, and it may be mild or strong, rich or poor, though the price is the same. In Paris, no one dreams of tasting cheese when buying it.

More than one kind of cheese? Astonishing! (more…)

So there I was at 9:00 p.m. last night , once the 100-degree temperatures of the day had dropped to the 91 degrees of twilight, watering our recently planted thujas in the hopes they’d survive what now seemed an Arrakis-like environment, when there was a flash of light, and eventually thunder.

What was this? I’d known nothing of an approaching Friday night storm, but just in case it was only a tease, I finished watering the four thujas—the count from light to sound told me any storm was still 13 miles away—and then I checked online.

Where I discovered that we had a 70% chance of a severe thunderstorm within the hour, with heavy rains, hail, and winds reaching 70 miles per hour threatened. So I didn’t bother doing any other watering beyond those saplings, but instead settled on a couch in the living room, looking forward to reading John Scalzi’s Redshirts.

And then the storm began. And then the lights went out. And then the heavens really opened.

And then we heard a tree come down.

After an hour, it all subsided to a standard rainstorm. And in the morning, this is what we found.

First, the view on the street. This is what you would have seen had you come to visit us, as a neighbor’s tree dropped and closed the road.

Here’s what now blocks the driveway, preventing you from reaching our front door. (more…)

Someone took a look at my Twitter icon last night and said, “Hey, that doesn’t look like you!” Well, it did … once. Or who knows, maybe it didn’t, and perhaps only Marie Severin thought so. Because that’s how she drew me back when dinosaurs still walked the Earth and I left my job in the Marvel Bullpen.

Here’s the long-ago going away card she cooked up when I quit to become a full-time freelancer.

I can sometimes grow melancholy if I look too closely at the signatures on the card, since so many—Dave Cockrum, John Verpoorten, Archie Goodwin, for example—are gone.

Of course, many are still with us, such as my wife there in the upper right corner, and even good old (seemingly immortal) Stan Lee in the upper left corner.

But that’s not the only signature-festooned card I received during my time at Marvel … (more…)

Irene and I discovered Volt Restaurant several months ago, and were taken with both the menu and its setting in a 19th Century mansion in downtown Frederick, but waited to eat there until we had an event worthy of such a meal—our celebration of the 38th anniversary of the day we met. (Which also happens to be the 38th anniversary of my first day working in the Bullpen at Marvel Comics.)

So on Sunday, we drove over to the imposing brick mansion, built in the early 1890s, which now houses Volt, for the seven-course kitchen tasting menu, which once the various amuse bouche were added in, actually came to ten courses.

While we were in the same room as the open kitchen, so we could look over and watch the cooking and assembly of each dish, we weren’t seated flush against where the chefs performed their magic. That privilege belonged to the seven diners (that night, anyway; I believe up to eight can be serviced) at Table 21, who were taking part in a 21-course tasting menu.

What follows is an embarrassingly incomplete description of the meal, for I forgot to snap a photo of the menu, and the one currently up on the site represents an earlier iteration. When I get my hands on the current menu, I’ll update what follows, but for now … (more…)

Thirty-eight years ago this morning, a guy looking something like this …

… woke in the Brooklyn apartment he lived in with his parents and took a bus to a train to 575 Madison Avenue for his first day on the job at Marvel Comics, where he met a women looking something like this …

… after which one thing led to another.

And they lived happily ever after.

The end.