Cover Redux!

Time for another cornucopia of Marvel Comics covers juxtaposed with the covers of the comics they were reprinted in, along with my comments about what changes were made!


First up, it's Incredible Hulk #148 and the reprint from Marvel Super Heroes #97. There's not a whole lot of difference here, the reprint features the art slightly enlarged, with the blurb on the bottom shrunk to accommodate the UPC code box... but look again, behind the Hulk logos... you can see the background got altered, with the wreckage not being quite as tall in the reprint!

Comic Reading Library: The Six Million Dollar Man (Magazine) #2!

Random Acts of Trivia #1: The Beatles!

Introducing a new recurring feature here on RAOG... Random Acts of Trivia! You see, my head is full of trivial knowledge (as I'm sure many of my readers' heads are, too), plus it helps to have features that are easy for me to prepare quickly... so here it is! Random Acts of Trivia will, as you can imagine, feature some of these bits of trivia that I hope will interest you, maybe even delight you! I'd originally considered making it a quiz, but then changed my mind. I'm hoping that I'll be able to present these in groups by category, but we'll see what happens. This first installment features trivia about the Beatles!

1. The working title for the Beatles' movie “A Hard Day's Night” was “Beatlemania.”
2. The phrase “A Hard Day's Night” was created by Ringo Starr, who apparently would come up with turns of phrase like this.
3. The working title for the Beatles' movie “Help!” was “Eight Arms to Hold You.” In fact, there was at least one 45 rpm released with that title on it, although I don't recall what songs were on the record (but for some reason, I'm thinking it was the single of “Yesterday” backed with “Act Naturally,” neither of which appeared in that movie).
4. Speaking of “Yesterday,” before Paul finalized the lyrics, the working title was “Scrambled Eggs”!
5. While the earlier Lennon/McCartney-credited songs were mostly co-written, at least by the time of “Rubber Soul,” they were mainly solo efforts. According to John Lennon, the easiest way to tell who wrote (or mostly wrote) each L/M song was to listen for who sang the lead part.
6. The album and documentary film “Let It Be” was originally planned to be called “The Beatles Get Back.” “Yellow Submarine” and “Magical Mystery Tour” didn't have working titles that were different, so far as I know.
7. The original title and subject of the song “Sexy Sadie” from the Beatles' “White Album” was “Maharishi,” but John chickened out and changed it before final recording. The song takes on a whole new meaning knowing that, doesn't it?
8. Speaking of “The White Album,” the actual title of it was simply “The Beatles.”
9. “Back in the USSR” was written as a parody of the Beach Boys songs.
10. The repeat of the second verse of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” switches the roles of Desmond and Molly (i.e., “Molly lets the children lend a hand, Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face...”). This wasn't intentional! The Beatles recorded the song, and Paul did the switch accidentally, but he didn't realize it until they listened to the playback (he'd considered it a perfect take), and planned to record a new take, but John talked him out of it, saying it'll make people think.

Cool Stuff!

It's all Green Hornet merchandise!



Coloring books!

Comic Book Ads: Ball-Band Shoes!

For the foreseeable future, I'm changing things up with the comic book ads feature... as promised, I'll be focusing on some of the ads in Fawcett Comics, especially those in the Marvel Family titles. And to really make it different, I've got them sorted so we can look at a series of ads for the same product! This time around, it's Ball-Band Shoes!

Like many of Fawcett's advertisers, Ball-Band did some different kinds of ads, and the above is an example of what I think was their first series of ads (I may be misremembering -- somehow when I uploaded these ads to Flickr, the original names got lost, so my sorting got messed up). Anyway, this series featured an appealing cartoon style, and was the longest lasting of the campaigns they ran in Fawcett Comics.