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Poll: Legion of Super Pets


Poll: Legion of Super Pets  

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If there is one thing that unites jazz fans young and old, it is our love of the Legion of Super Pets.  

Beppo the Super Monkey first appeared in Adventure Comics in the late 1950s.  By 1962, all four of the Super Pets had been introduced.  

They have gone in an out of vogue, as far as comic book publication goes, but they have steadfastly remained in the hearts and minds of hardcore jazz fans over the decades.

Who is your favorite, and why? For me, it is between Beppo and Streaky.  I will have to deliberate a bit more before I choose.

Edited by Teasing the Korean
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I've never heard of such a thing and could care even less.

So my write in candidate is Coltrane the Super Dog. I'll give you an example, but let me say up front that this dog never once fell for the "pump-fake" trick with the tennis ball in the back yard.

He really liked to play with a tennis ball on the couch, wherein I would extract it from his mouth, tease him with it, then throw it off the opposite chair, or off the wall so it would head down the hallway to the front of the house and he would give chase. One time, I got it out of his mouth and, having twisted him around so he couldn't see what I was doing, put the ball behind my neck, so it rested on top of the couch, pinned by my neck against the wall behind it. 

I then showed Coltrane that I didn't have the ball, and that he should go find it. He went thru the couch looking for it, checking around my legs. Then he systematically went from left to right on the floor, searching the objects on the floor, each chair in succession, and then checked down the hall. No ball, so he came back to me, jumped on the couch, looking at me and pretty much saying with his eyes, "you had it last, what did you do with it?"

Now, he resumes searching on the couch, and he looks at the top of the cushion and spots the ball, diving for it and triumphantly pulling it out from behind my neck.

For the rest of his life, every single time that I pulled that trick on him, he always jumped on the couch back and first checked behind my neck for the tennis ball. 

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9 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

You seriously named your dog Coltrane? 

No, he was given that name by the Humane Society of Fort Lauderdale. My wife and I had been married about two years and were, collectively and individually without a pet for the first time in a very long time. Her 23 year old, two-time cancer surviving kitty had died suddenly about a year before, and my beagle, Bailey, had finally succumbed to some sort of cancerous growth on one of her legs.  I wasn't sure I was ready for another pet so my wife went to the Humane Society on her own and walked thru the kennel, the only dog that reacted to her was this odd looking black & white dog, built like a wedge, with a curved tail. . When she looked up at the name and saw "Coltrane" she thought this was kismet and brought me down to see him the next weekend. I couldn't help but agree with her and we put down a deposit.

It would take four years or so to find out he was a Karelian Bear dog and that was only because we got a catalog in the mail with one on the cover, and I said to her "does that look like your son?"

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I'm voting for Krypto. As someone who follows the fiction quite closely, it's worth noting that while all of these characters have persevered to some degree, Krypto in particular seems immune to the Modern Age de-mystifying of superhero comics (I think Krypto's little moment in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" is still one of the saddest moments in comic history). 

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18 hours ago, ep1str0phy said:

I'm voting for Krypto. As someone who follows the fiction quite closely, it's worth noting that while all of these characters have persevered to some degree, Krypto in particular seems immune to the Modern Age de-mystifying of superhero comics (I think Krypto's little moment in "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" is still one of the saddest moments in comic history). 

I am not familiar with the story you reference.

My era of DC comics is early- to mid-60s via the comics that my older brother had.  The Legion of Super Pets was featured to varying degrees during this era.  I bought some DC comics in the early 70s, but I did not generally like how the artwork had evolved at that point.  

Has DC ever done throwback issues, featuring new stories but art styles associated with earlier decades?  

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3 minutes ago, Rooster_Ties said:

How many different kinds/colors of kryptonite were there? I vaguely remember there were several.

Green, Red, White, Gold.  There may have been blue also.

Red always affected him differently: rainbow Superman, third-eye-in-the-middle-of-his-forehead Superman, but the effects were always temporary. Hence, the LSD analogy.

Edited by Teasing the Korean
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16 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

I am not familiar with the story you reference.

My era of DC comics is early- to mid-60s via the comics that my older brother had.  The Legion of Super Pets was featured to varying degrees during this era.  I bought some DC comics in the early 70s, but I did not generally like how the artwork had evolved at that point.  

Has DC ever done throwback issues, featuring new stories but art styles associated with earlier decades?  

In terms of throwback issues, there have been plenty of recent tonal homages to Silver Age hysterics in particular, though I don't think many of them have invoked classic art styles without at least a little bit of irony. 

In terms of capturing a Silver Age spirit, Grant Morrison's work with Superman in particular (e.g., All-Star Superman) is fantastic. The artists Morrison tends to work with are conscious of classic art styles, though the sometimes lean toward the hyper-stylized and grotesque. 

Maybe more up your alley would be the work of the late Darwyn Cooke, who (in addition to working on The Spirit) penned one of the best modern DC stories about the Silver Age of comic books: The New Frontier. Cooke, like Bruce Timm (whose art style was adapted into the lauded DC cartoons of the 1990s and early 2000s), favors clean, bold lines and streamlined character design. To me, this stuff is as wonderful to read as it is easy on the eyes.

More recently, Tom King and Mitch Gerads have collaborated on some really interesting mashups of vivid, Jack Kirby-style art and modern, more realist storytelling. Some of this stuff is too self-conscious for its own good, but at its best (as it was through most of their Mister Miracle miniseries), it's really great pop art. 

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The barber shops I went to on Saturday mornings didn't have Marvel. They had DC (mostly centered around Superman & Co.), Archie (before there was "Mary Ann or Ginger?", there was "Betty or Veronica?") and Sgt, Rock.

Now, when you went into the drug/grocery store (and the grocery store was NOT a supermarket) to buy baseball cards and comic books, good lord, they had all kinds of stuff, those horrible Harvey comics, but also a Dell title or two that could be good for a ride, there were even some kind of romance-y type stuff for girls, although I never saw a girl reading the,. Or anybody else for that matter. But there they were anyway.

Marvel really didn't have a lot of market penetration in this world, although, yeah, Spider Man and Fantastic Four, yeah. But they were kind of "upstarts" and I don't recall seeing them in the barber shop.

I know what was in the barber shop - the Look magazine that had the Beatles thing. I asked my barber if I could tear the pictures out to take home and he told me to go ahead, to get those communist Beatles out of his shop.

Remember this?

5q4eebih6rg41.jpg

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39 minutes ago, JSngry said:

The barber shops I went to on Saturday mornings didn't have Marvel. They had DC (mostly centered around Superman & Co.), Archie (before there was "Mary Ann or Ginger?", there was "Betty or Veronica?") and Sgt, Rock.

Now, when you went into the drug/grocery store (and the grocery store was NOT a supermarket) to buy baseball cards and comic books, good lord, they had all kinds of stuff, those horrible Harvey comics, but also a Dell title or two that could be good for a ride, there were even some kind of romance-y type stuff for girls, although I never saw a girl reading the,. Or anybody else for that matter. But there they were anyway.

Marvel really didn't have a lot of market penetration in this world, although, yeah, Spider Man and Fantastic Four, yeah. But they were kind of "upstarts" and I don't recall seeing them in the barber shop.

I know what was in the barber shop - the Look magazine that had the Beatles thing. I asked my barber if I could tear the pictures out to take home and he told me to go ahead, to get those communist Beatles out of his shop.

Remember this?

5q4eebih6rg41.jpg

Well it might be a regional thing as in Philadelphia Marvel was everywhere and in the neighborhood I grew up in (blocks away from Connie Mack Stadium) every corner store had a spinner rack or magazine bookcase full of the entire Marvel line from '62 to '66 when I was 7 to age 11a nd already collecting. I spent every dollar I could on Marvel comics and Ace science fiction "doubles." I was not allowed to read comics, which made a collector out of me. . . I'd buy them and hide them, at one point at a neighboring friend's bedroom. When I was 9 in '64 my Dad said okay, if you want to waste your money on that trash. . . and the next day he was shocked to see a stack of them in my room, retrieved from hiding places. 

In comparison to Marvel to me DC seemed vapid and uninvolving. I did like Green Lantern because of the Gil Kane art. . . but that was it. For me it was a Marvel world. It was quite an adaptation to at age 11 move to Africa for nearly six years. . . comic books were few and far between.

Edited by jazzbo
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36 minutes ago, Teasing the Korean said:

Unfortunately, yes.  A terrible look. 

Not on my bedroom wall it wasn't. In a world bereft of colors and textures (unless you went out into the woods, but that was not in my room), it was easy to look at that and see a different perceptual sensibility than the one I was otherwise being presented with (and presumably, being indoctrinated into).

5 minutes ago, jazzbo said:

Well it might be a regional thing as in Philadelphia Marvel was everywhere and in the neighborhood I grew up in (blocks away from Connie Mack Stadium) every corner store had a spinner rack or magazine bookcase full of the entire Marvel line in '62 to '66 when I was there and already collecting.

Yeah, I would indeed think that there was indeed a "regional difference" between Philadelphia and the East Texas nexus of Gladewater/WhiteOak/Longview...even Shreveport(which to it's credit was a real city at the time.

A "regional difference" indeed! :g

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Well of course there were regional differences, cultural differences. . . I sure learned that living in Texas over 32 years and doing some traveling within the state. I should have been clearer that I was thinking of regional distribution differences--Philly had distributors for every kind of reading product that was stapled or bound. . . areas of Texas possibly had a less inclusive system of distribution. There's a lot of miles and gasoline in between.

Edited by jazzbo
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