ROMO The WolfBoy - Production Blog 6
All aboard the TIME MACHINE! (It's a while since we've done one of these)
Going through some of the most recent pages posted, I’m about to - somewhat indelicately - lift the skirts and bare my ankles for all to see on some of the sneaked-in references (call them homages if you will, but no, not ‘swipes’, never ‘swipes’, missus), that are busily - if not perhaps lazily - at work behind the scenes.
In reverse order then, as that is the very nature is it not, of Time Travel…
First Stop:
Marvel Preview magazine (Curtis, April 1976… I’m all of 12 years old)
Specifically this page, which came to mind so forcefully that I could not resist a sneaky recreation of one particular panel from it. Look to ROMO page 173, from just this last week, and you’ll be sure to recognise which one:
Val Mayerik on the art duties there, and with Doug Moench on script, in their splendid 2-issue adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Hound of the Baskervilles. Evan as a kid (I was Welsh)… hang on, no, that was a typo. Even as a kid, I was disappointed once the following issue appeared, to find it mostly inked by hands other than penciller Mayerik’s own - a common practice then-as-now, generally down to the Dreaded Deadline Doom that was and is so prevalent in the factory-like, production- line nature and pace inherent to the Marvel Method. ‘Method’? Madness, I say! There was always something extra special about Val Mayerik’s febrile, shivering linework.
Of course, now that I’ve dug up the cover image to that same issue, I can see that Ken Barr’s excellently atmospheric and terrific painting there is equally as influential.
Further back now - a few small steps for ROMO (to page 166), one gigantic leap for the rest of us, plus a banana boat voyage to the Dark Continent of deepest Africa:
Artwork by the indefatigable Russ Manning, one of the sharpest delineators there ever was. It’s Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, of course, meeting his match among the hairy ape-men from the hidden city of Opar (and where they tread, can their glamorous Queen, La, be Far-So behind?). This is about the closest I mean ever to come to including an outright copy of someone else’s artwork. But then, the image in blue shadow across the mid-page there is all but burned into my central cortex.
In later years, the many-hands-grasping-out-of-the-darkness became so much of an oft-revisited cliché of sorts within Mike Mignola’s Hellboy stories (and when he wasn’t being grabbed out of the darkness, he was busy falling through a collapsing floor), that I actually gave up on following the series. Maybe Mike too was bitten hard by the selfsame scene as seen here - within comic book circles, it’s not outside the bounds of possibility. The above page may be found, among a great many others, in this gem:
The TARZAN GIANT-BOOK, from Williams Publishing (UK) back in 1971 (when I was all of 8 years old). An absolute treasure and one of my most favourite possessions: still-surviving, if in a lot more distressed (er, let’s instead say pre-loved) condition than the above. If you ever see a copy, whatever state it’s in, snap it up, sharpish. My blue hairy first love, Pan-at-Lee, might also be found there in its pages - a very confusing first four-color crush for me. I’m still looking for that hairy girl, complete with her own prehensile tail, with which - I mean, whom - to satisfy my nascent lusts.
Although I must admit, on reflection, that I’ve come quite close! (Hello, Vyla! X)
Back, Holy Man, back… a single page in ROMO, to 165 now, and to Her Royal Majesty:
Just one of a whole series of life-size (let me repeat that, LIFE-SIZE) figurines, many of which appeared in the form of cut-outs as part of a far-travelling exhibition on the unknown origins of cinema, The Forgotten Showman: and featuring as its principal Robert Paul, the UK’s own true pioneer in film (forget those foreign Frenchies, the Lumière Brothers: Jeanny-come-latelies they were, for those truly in the know, when it came to inventing cinematic language. Even when it came to fellow countryman Georges Méliès' most famous Trip to the Moon, Paul had got there first!).
Others from the same show include:
Eugene Sandow, celebrated bodybuilder, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of his era.
Illusionist Walter R. Booth (who may yet feature in a future adventure alongside our own dear ROMO, as these figures are all pretty much contemporaries of his). And, er…
Persimmon, a winner of the Grand National (Life Size, I tell you!). I say thee ‘neigh’!
These images went down so well that Bradford’s National Science and Media Museum commissioned 6 more of them - to be permanently installed in their cinema as part of a mural on the wall, in the bit where punters wait to go on into their screening, and possibly putting them right off their popcorn (filthy habit anyway). The museum then closed for a comprehensive and long-term refurbishment, not too long after their installation, so heaven knows whether there’s any sign of them still there…
Still , here’s one last look at another pioneer of cinema, Germany’s Lotte Reiniger:
(That’s a terrible rabbit, tho, Lotte.)
I’ll close out our little trip in today’s Time Machine with a glimpse into the very near future. See if you can spot When, Where, How (and Who!) this next image homage makes its appearance within ROMO’s pages, in the following week, er, or three:
The ‘King’ of Comics, Jack Kirby (of course), from March 1963 - I wasn’t even born!
yeah, they made such an impression. smart stuff, and keepers for sure x
Fantastic illustrations, and that Sherlock Holmes comic... I had or hopefully still have it, somewhere in one of many, many boxes.