Slowing Down #pascalcampion

Joe Rosenthal Allen Ginsberg at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "City Lights" Bookstore, North Beach, San Francisco 1959

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

The only water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past--

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--modern--all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of your railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

-- Allen Ginsberg, "Sunflower Sutra" 1955

Frank Miller drew this...

I honestly don't know whether to cry laughing at how bad this looks or just give up drawing since it seems like no matter how many duck/Disney artists have offered to make covers the publisher is always going to make a bad choice in the eyes of other artists and fans.

Honestly I feel so... Disappointed...

What…what… what is happening with his butt

His round, cute, beautiful duck butt?

It looks like a spread of white French fries

Look I love Uncle Frank, I'm a Miller apologist, I'm that guy on the message boards who argued that Dark Knight 2 was a misunderstood work of brilliance, actually.

But this is rough

I'm the other guy who argued in favor of DKR II (well, of the colors on DKR II, actually).

the Forsythe Chronicles

Grappling for story devices, Jughead's real name was once Frothingham. Though not much used, It would get codified as Forsythe by 1962 at least.

Seemingly, given these two stories were published a month apart in 1968, they came in with some stated premisea to establish and reiterate it and try a concept.

Foreshadowing the magical hat pin of a decade later and then another half decade later after that, the mere mention of his name sends the girls in an uncontrollable passion, key difference that Jughead is not into it.

A bit curious too, a flashback in the Little Archie -- though a false flashback, mirrors the manner Mr. Weatherbee convinces Jughead to take his given name in a story a decade later. One other thing to note on the Little Archie -- in that narrative universe, Miss Grundy's name is something other than Geraldine.

The various edicts and attempts by Weatherbee or Grundy to have the formal name of Forsythe ends in defeat.

There is something notable in the teaching staff calling you by your nickname, or nickname of sorts. I think back to seventh grade with this -- mixed feelings with one teacher. It seemed kind of a stilted informal-ness and chumminess a tad unbecoming.

New Adventure Comics #19-22

(Vol 2 No 7-10)

(1937)

DC, 1937 Series

Covers by Creig Flessel.

Features include Captain Jim of the Texas Rangers by Homer Fleming; A Tale of Two Cities adapted by Merna Gamble from the Charles Dickens novel; The Adventures of Steve Conrad by Flessel; Captain Quick by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson ? and Sven Elven; The Monastery of the Blue God by Wheeler-Nicholson and Munson Paddock; She, adapted by Wheeler-Nicholson and Elven from the H. Rider Haggard novel; Ol' Oz Bopp by Russell Cole; The Vikings by Wheeler-Nicholson and Alex Blum; Don Coyote by Ray Burley; Sandor and the Lost Civilization by Fleming; Detective Sergeant Carey of the Chinatown Squad by Joe Donohue; Federal Men by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster; Dale Daring by Bill Ely; Laughing at Life by Vin Sullivan; The Golden Dragon by Wheeler-Nicholson and Tom Hickey; Nadir, Master of Magic by Ely; Chikko Chakko by Ellis Edwards; Cal 'n' Alec by Burley; Jonah Jones by Whitney Ellsworth; Shifty Smith by Cole; and G-Woman by Tom Cooper ?.

Note: Features listed are mostly 2-4 pages each, though there are a few stories of 6 or 8 pages; I've omitted a number of shorter pieces.

24.05

I know it’s not hard to point out reactionaries hypocrisy when it comes to like safe spaces or hug boxes or whatever but genuinely how much of an echo chamber do you have to exist in for you to think this is a reasonable thing to say

reblog if attacking fascism is really the hill you want to die on

this is literally like one of the most justified and honorable hills you could die on??? lol??

Quick someone reply with the gif™️

Always reblog this if you are cool

Cover to Interlac #256 intended to look like an old dittoed fanzine. I mailed out 20 copies of Lac #256 this afternoon: 2 international, 6 priority, and 12 media mail.

It really feels like an old zine. Wonderful.

Happy May Day all. Solidarity and all that jazz.  For your brain, some history on May Day and how it came to be: 1. The Zinn Education Project:  May 4, 1886: Haymarket Tragedy

2. IWW Historical Archives:  The Brief Origins of May Day

3. NPR : What is May Day? For the most part, the opposite of capitalism

More and more I find myself falling into old photos. 1909, around the corner and down the street. Things haven't changed much. The gingerbread trim is long gone - that was a short-lived burst of whimsy. Nobody wanted to paint that often.

I think about a spring day and the clop of horses hooves. The sound of freight trains pulling into the yard three miles yonder. Horse shit and coal smoke and the swish of ankle length dresses.

Radio was still a decade away. A slow evening could be spent with a book angled to receive remnants of sun through the tall windows. Someone's piano filters in from across the street. By the Light of the Silvery Moon, probably, or Meet Me Tonight In Dreamland.

Yes. Looking at old photos always makes me wonder about the people who lived there and then.

Francisco Rodríguez (Chilean, 1989), Shadow and Dog, 2022. Oil on canvas, 170 x 140 cm.

Groo the Wanderer #34: The Amulet

by Mark Evanier; Sergio Aragones; Phil DeWalt and Stan Sakai

Marvel/Epic

Duane Bryers - March/April 1961 Hilda Calendar Illustration - Brown & Bigelow Calendar Co. - American Pin-up Calendar Collection

Johnny Dynamite:

Explosive Pre-Code Crime Comics—The Complete Adventures of Pete Morisi’s Wild Man of Chicago

Yoe Books, 2020

Collecting the 1950s stories by Pete Morisi, with introductions by Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty, who reprinted some of these stories in the back of Ms. Tree in the 1980s.

24.04

The Sandman Presents: Deadboy Detectives #1-4

(2001)

DC, 2001 Series

Ed Brubaker, Bryan Talbot, & Steve Leialoha. Covers by Dave McKean.

24.05

When panels are mostly there to be eradicated, while getting paired with unmatched and incredible inking skills…dear fellows, may I introduce to the greatest of all time, Mr. Alex Niño.

This was originally published as “…And in Death There Is No Escape!” in             DC’s House of Secrets #109 in 1973, the scans above are from the translation appearing in 1975′s Horror #34, published by Williams-Verlag.      

And while this post is a bilingual joint, I’m generously adding two links to my writings on Alex Niño: in English at The Comics Journal, and in German at Der Tagesspiegel, you’re welcome.             

Folks, that comic is a pure delight.

Batman / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #5, written by Matthew K. Manning, art by Jon Sommariva (pencils) and Sean Parsons (inks)