I Just Sold Your Mother's House

After the break, check out the latest episode of Comic Books Are Burning In Hell!

It's Eric Stanton, porno, Mark Millar, and something else that I can't remember right now.

Comments

[Joe McCulloch]

Comments/clarifications:

*One of the trickier points of exhibiting potentially "obscene" cinema in the '50s is that community standards, for the most part, would essentially dictate what material was actionable. The result was a lack of predictability, and a premium on regional distributors who'd know the territory into which a film would enter.

*In addition to the webs coming out of Spider-Man's wrists, Stanton also claimed that "Aunt May" was named after his own Aunt Mae. The quality of her wheatcakes are unknown, but this allegation does, at least, suggest that the involvement of Ditko's end of the Spider-Man collaboration was deeper than simple illustration right from the beginning.

*If I have given the impression that Stanton *never* illustrated genitalia or explicit congress, please forgive me; he certainly did, though even much of the later work I've seen (and Stanton was active into the 1990s) tended to hew to the devices of his '60s and '70s output - perhaps for personal ease, or even out of nostalgia.

*Eros Comics, in the early '90s, released three short comics' worth of Stanton/Ditko collaborations: Sweeter Gwen, Confidential T.V., and The Kinky Hook, the latter of which Stanton hasn't (to my knowledge) ever specifically noted Ditko's involvement with, though... come on. Ditko not only inked that thing, he obviously lettered it, and honestly seems to have scripted potions too - the jokes, the diction, even the character names are Ditko, Ditko, Ditko. Interestingly, Taschen dates Kinky Hook to 1972, which means Ditko was either still in contact with Stanton after their studio broke up, or Stanton sat on the story (or was unable to sell it) for years after it's conclusion, possibly due to its being about as sexy as laying bareback on a heap of bricks. (Or Taschen fucked up the year.)

*In the illustration I describe with the husband being hung by his wrists from the ceiling, I neglected to mention that he 's hung by a fireplace so that flames are singing his bare ass. Comic Books Are Burning In Hell regrets this omission.

[Tim Hamilton]

That was great. On Matt's suggestion I'm reading my first Mark Millar comic ever, Star Light. This pod cast reminded me that the third issue is sitting on my table next to my bed. Unread now for a few weeks. I keep saying to myself, "Just wait for the Graphic Novel collection. Or not."

Next time I'm at a party I can now tell people in depth about the (Partial) history of Porn comics that Steve Ditko's studio mate drew.

Fist Bump!
Tim Hamilton

[Spencer]

Been listening for a few months now, and this is one of your guys' very best episodes yet; fascinating discussion all-around.

Also, this essay (which draws heavily from Umberto Eco's "The Myth Of Superman") relates quite nicely to Matt's ideas about MPH and villians...as well as the topic of perpetual consumption of comics/media:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/no-dads-cuckolds-dead-fathers-and-capitalist-superheroes

"Supervillains like Lex Luthor and the Joker are the true protagonists of these tales, in the sense that they are the ones who seek to act in the world in order to achieve goals; superheroes in contrast exist not to do things but to stop things from happening."

"Superman has to fight to preserve the status quo in order to sustain the continuation of his own narrative; when superheroes fail to do so — when they, as in Watchmen, seek to actually change the world rather than simply protect it — their stories become narratives with climaxes and logical endpoints and thus exhaust themselves. Superman can perpetuate his endless, decades-long run only so long as he completely defies narrative closure — that is, so long as nothing either good or bad is ever allowed to happen."