Sunday, February 24, 2008

Another Freakish Mutation

I'm having a pretty busy week for pretty much everything around here, which means a light week for the ol' blog.

Still, since I have a few spare minutes, let me favor you with a panel out of Iron Man #71, from 1974. I've already plumbed the Joe Stinson Collection for a slavering green paunch-bellied ape-spider tripod and a yellow Kryptonian mantis-bird-bat-dragon; here's a purple, spotted giant cockroach demon, courtesy of the Yellow Claw and his incredible collar. (The monster breathes radioactive flames, by the way, but I haven't scanned that page.)
(Please click to enlarge.)

"Don't you ever get bored with your unreal world?" Iron Man asks.

It's a question I've had to face many times myself.

2 comments:

Isaac said...

Pedantic Update: I've been looking at that panel for a while now, and the more I look at the perspective (depicted and implied), the more trouble I'm having with it. Iron Man is gigantic, isn't he? He's only a little smaller than the cockroach. Or maybe the Yellow Claw is only a couple of feet tall. The problem is in the placement of the floor, I think. To imply the kind of depth that the image wants, and a vanishing point up near Iron Man's chest level (as the left wall implies), the floor would need to slope upward more (as it moved toward the back of the room). Maybe it's a dungeon with a tilty floor, and Iron Man's a lot higher up than the bug.

Curse you, George Tuska! I have other things to be doing right now, but the puzzle of your linear perspective confounds me!

Mike said...

Iron Man's question recalls one of my (rueful) favorite lines from Ghost World the movie, when Seymour says to Enid, "I hate my interests." Though it's not the interests themselves so much as how one chooses to indulge them that's at issue...