75 Years of Lois Lane | The '70s

75 Years of Lois Lane | The '60s

75 Years of Lois Lane | The '50s

75 Years of Lois Lane | The '40s

75 Years of Lois Lane | The '30s

On this day in 1938, Action Comics #1 was published. It was, of course, the first appearance of Superman, but it was also the first appearance of another famous character who will likely not get as much attention in the celebration. To help remedy that, for the next several hours, I give you a pictorial, decade-by-decade history of Lois Lane.

By "pictorial" I mostly mean that I won't be commenting on the events of each decade, but feel free to do that in the comments and I'll join in there.

Tarzan A to Z | Opar

Tarzan 101 | Tarzan at the Earth's Core

Celebrating Tarzan's 101st anniversary by walking through Scott Tracy Griffin's Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration.

After Tarzan and John Carter, Edgar Rice Burroughs' most recognizable series has to be the Pellucidar saga. He started it in 1913 with At the Earth's Core, which he wrote for the pulp mags after the Tarzan and Carter sequels, The Return of Tarzan and The Gods of Mars. Griffin includes a relatively long chapter on Pellucidar in Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration, tracking the series as well as the whole Hollow Earth concept made popular by the guy who discovered Halley's Comet and of course Jules Verne.

In At the Earth's Core, wealthy mining industrialist David Innes funds a drilling machine invented by a crackpot named Abner Perry. On the machine's first run, the two men wind up stranded in the underground world of Pellucidar, a place populated by prehistoric-like people and creatures including cavefolk, lizard-men, and telepathic pterosaurs. Innes escapes at the end, but is forced to leave behind Perry as well as the beautiful princess Dian he met during his adventures. In the sequel, Pellucidar, Innes returns to the world to rescue his friends.

After Tarzan and the Lost Empire, Burroughs wanted to tie Tarzan into the world of Pellucidar, but before he wrote Tarzan at the Earth's Core, he wrote another Pellucidar novel, Tanar of Pellucidar to get the setting ready for the ape-man's arrival. In Tanar, an inventor named Jason Gridley discovers a new radio frequency that's hosting Abner Perry's distress calls from Pellucidar. Gridley doesn't make it to the Earth's core until he teams up with Tarzan, so the bulk of Tanar is about what Gridley learns from the broadcast: that through a series of adventures Innes and his caveman friend Tanar had been captured by pirates, but that Tanar escaped to let Perry know what was going on.

In Tarzan at the Earth's Core, Gridley recruits Tarzan to help him rescue Innes. Because Burroughs had been told by a bookstore employee that books with aircraft on the covers were popular sellers, the author had Gridley and Tarzan take a zeppelin to Pellucidar. Burroughs was mostly foiled in his plan though by cover artist J. Allen St. John, who rightly preferred a cover scene of Tarzan fighting some gorilla-men. But St. John did put a monoplane on the back cover (seen at the top of this post), so hopefully they got a few extra sales out of that.

Griffin covers the rest of the Pellucidar series, which includes seven Burroughs novels and one, authorized sequel from the '70s, Mahars of Pellucidar by John Eric Holmes. And because Tarzan takes a group of Waziri warriors with him on the rescue mission, Griffin also takes the opportunity to include a chapter on Tarzan's history with the fictional tribe and the use of natives in general in the Tarzan stories.

Tarzan A to Z | Nkima

Tarzan A to Z | Maureen O'Sullivan

Review (and Interview and Mention) All Monsters

Hartley Holmberg from Vancouver's The Hartley Show attended Vancouver Comicon and spent a lot of time with Jason talking about Kill All Monsters. It's a fun interview and Hartley seems to have liked the book.

A bunch of other reviews have been coming in too. My pal Ken hadn't read the entire first volume yet when he wrote this post for That F'ing Monkey about KAM's being in Previews, but he's one of our biggest supporters and says about the part that's appeared online: "The story is full of that fun team dynamic. For some reason it reminds me of the adventure groups in a good table top RPG. [...] Jason Copland’s art is beyond words. The organic design of the beasts is offset by the mechanical battle suits. His line work is so clean and precise that you’ll spend time just taking in all the details."

Kris at Deeply Dapper also likes the book and calls it "only the bestest comic book ever."

CT at Nerd Lunch has a super-nice review and writes, "While May has done a great job at setting that scope, fleshing out the characters, and delivering the dialog, Copland balances that with dynamic, two-tone art. It's got a grittiness to it that is needed, but still clean enough to be able to tell what's going on. The action scenes come across well and Copland is able to display the weight needed to show these are behemoths battling over the city." He also draws a comparison to Thundarr the Barbarian, an influence I hadn't consciously been thinking about, but absolutely affects the world. I loved that show so much as a kid and recently revisited it with my son, so there's no doubt that that's in there from a world-building perspective.

Comic Bastards has a nice, thoughtful review that's complimentary while not completely so (which is perfectly fair). Some of the fights ran a little long for their taste and I get the feeling they would have liked some added emphasis on the monsters, but they seem to like the human characters and the robots and the way that the Kill Team's machinery isn't perfect. And of course the art. Overall, it's a very positive review and I'm thrilled to get it. I do want to respond to the criticisms - not to defend against them, but just because acknowledging them in more detail will help solidify some of the lessons I learned from writing KAM - but this post is already long enough, so I'll do that later.

And finally (for now), the Great and Powerful Cal at the Canadian Cave of Cool wrote a fantastic review that proves he and I were separated at birth by praising the things I'm most proud of about the story. He loves the art too of course, but it thrills my heart to read his appreciation of the world-building, the mystery, and how the story doesn't explain every single thing.

While it's not technically a review, SF Signal was nice enough to mention the Kill All Monsters Kickstarter in their Crowd Funding Roundup and call KAM a "kickass webcomic." Ken also wrote another wonderful post about the Kickstarter for That F'ing Monkey.

As I'm writing this, the current Kickstarter total is a little over $5500, due to folks helping to spread the word like that. I'm in shock, to be perfectly honest. Thank you again so much to all of you who've shown support either through pledges or just by telling people. Jason and I are amazed and humbled.

And thank you to all the folks above who reviewed the book. I know of at least a couple of more reviews that will be going up this week, so I'll keep doing these roundup posts as long as people are willing to write about the book.

One last bit of KAM-related information: I noticed that the UK comics retailer Forbidden Planet has Kill All Monsters available for online order. I have no idea what that means exactly for our order numbers, but it's a great sign.

Tarzan A to Z | Lambert