Marvel should re-publish an expanded Marvel No-Prize book. I LOVED that thing as a kid. The quick n’ sloppy ’90s would provide a gold mine!

Ah, you didn’t include my favorite Mojo Jojo quote, from Los Dos Mojos, when he responds to Bubbles speaking like him (Bubbles had taken a blow to the head and thought she was Mojo Jojo.)

“I do not talk like that! The way I communicate is much different! I do not reiterate, repeat, reinstate the same thing over and over again! I am clear, concise, to the point!”

I actually won a No-Prize. It’s an empty envelope with some Marvel crap printed on it.

One mistake I recall is from Tales of Suspense 49, where Anthony Stark is called Anthony Blake. Perhaps someone was channeling their inner Thor.

I enjoyed this week’s column. I have a question to ask, so I will send an email.

Cheers,

B

Weird that they corrected “Peter Palmer” back to “Peter Parker,” but “Bruce Banner” is still printed as “Bob Banner” in some early books. (Yes, I know a retcon established Robert as Banner’s first name.)

I’ve never even heard of that No-Prize book, I would love to hear more about it.

And I was hoping for another quote from “Los Dos Mojos,” where he suddenly lapses into the Holy Hand Grenade passage from the Book of Arnaments (chapter 2, verses 9-21):

“That’s all just well enough, because in reality, there is only room enough in this world for one Mojo Jojo. One shall be the number of Mojo Jojos in the world, and the number of Mojo Jojos in the world shall be one. Two Mojo Jojos is too many, and three is right out! So, the only Mojo Jojo there is room for in the world shall be me! And being the only Mojo Jojo in the world, I will rule the world, in which there is only one Moooooojo Jojo!”

This could easily become a discussion of the greatest Mojo Jojo quotes if we’re not careful. Powerpuff Girls was so not a kiddie show.

Weird that they corrected “Peter Palmer” back to “Peter Parker,” but “Bruce Banner” is still printed as “Bob Banner” in some early books. (Yes, I know a retcon established Robert as Banner’s first name.)

I believe it was because it happened so frequently that they just said, “Forget it, leave it. We explained it, after all.”

Some of Mojo Jojo’s hand gestures came from Dr. Gori, the ape villain on the tokusatsu show Spectreman (who also talked too much).

Luis Garcia who drew that Creepy McGregor kiss is better known by his full name … Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez!

Ha, you’re right, David. I totally forgot that he started at Warren! Thanks!

Although some sites credit these Creepy tales to the Spanish artist Luis García Mozos, the official JLGL checklist, with JLGL input, credits these to JLGL.

Hi,

I just wrote a blog post about an recent event featuring comic book historian Kent Worcester on New York City portrayed through comic books and the future of comics.

http://blogs.journalism.cuny.edu/interactive2010/2009/10/23/new-york-in-comics-future-of-the-medium/

It makes perfect sense that McGregor and Lopez would use Sidney Poitier as the model for their detective. He’d just recently starred as a groundbreaking detective in “In the Heat of the Night” and its sequel “They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!”. And ironically, though the kiss in the Warren story was a miscommunication, it ties in with Sidney again as the star of “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner”, which challenged the ‘interracial’ taboo in mainstream movies.

Science knows there’s no such thing as ‘race’; there’s just the single Human Race we’re all part of. When people divide each other by false concepts (gender, ethnicity, orientation, nationality), it’s like old superstitions. Stories like these were important for pointing toward our progress together. Good story, great art, better intent!

There was also a short film on Saturday Night Live in the mid-80s in which the characters spoke like Mojo Jojo. The film was “Ponjo, Giant Dog of Tokyo” or something like that, and it was filmed using toys as the characters. I saw it when it first aired, but it was not shown in reruns of the same SNL episode.

No, those are Luis Garcia Mozos stories at Warren, as confirmed by JLGL via Kevin Nowlan to the GCD. JLGL’s first American work was at Charlton and Western (Gold Key).

I LOVED that Super Dictionary when I was a kid. I remember making my parents read it to me before going to bed instead of, you know, an ACTUAL story. I can only imagine how excited they were to be reading me the freakin’ dictionary, especially one as…descriptive…as that one.

In Amazing Spider-Man #17, Liz Allen’s father is addressed as ‘Mr Brant’. I always thought that was funny. Stan seemed to forget whose father he was. And Anna Watson was named Watkins the first time she appeared.

On the subject of Poitier and interracial kisses, Tym above mentions Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. The only kiss in that film is just barely glimpsed in a rear-view mirror. Supposedly that was all the studio would allow. Which is really silly when you realise that a year or two earlier, Poitier had kissed a White girl in Touch Of Blue, and the camera zoomed in for a tight close-up. (It was a very long and passionate kiss as well.)

Another great column as alway, Bri…

I’m grateful that the 800-plus page ASM Omnibus restored the Super-man typo for authenticity! I just pretend that Doc Ock would mockingly call Spidey “Super-Man” having never seen a superhero before. As for Peter Palmer, the captions just reflect a narrator’s gaffe, like the ones that show up on YouTube!

After reading about the Spider-man errors, I remembered to check out my Pocket Books collection (the first Spider-man volume I have actually had since I was in HS in the late 70s). Sure enough, they STILL had those errors in them (you’d have thought that the 2nd editor would have spotted them, but…okee-doke ^_^).

(and I think Marvel should definitely do an expanded version of the No-Prize book…they have a partial reprint of the original in The Marvel Vault)

That García-López art is just superb

I always wanted one of those damn No-Prizes as a kid. Then they changed the rules, you couldn’t just point out a mistake, you had to come up with some way to explain the mistake. And no, I don’t mean something like, “And then the letterer was in a rush and misspelled the name.” No, you had to explain the mistake within the context of the story, and that was just too much for my 10 year old kid brain. By the time I could pull it off I think either Marvel wasn’t giving out No-Prizes anymore or T.M. Maple was taking up entire letter pages and winning them all or something.

One more thing, has anyone noticed that, on the Weather Channel’s morning show, Wake Up With Al, that Al Roker has stolen the use of the term “No Prize” for some viewer contest he runs? Quesada needs to kick his lawyers in the pants and get them on the ball here!

Hi Tym S!
You wrote, “When people divide each other by false concepts (gender, ethnicity, orientation, nationality), it’s like old superstitions.”
There are distinctions between people from different cultures & nationalities tho’. My wife and i are different races/ethnicities/cultures and are different genders. There are plenty of differences that could divide us, and there is much that we can learn from each other. So, i don’t think that those are ‘false concepts’ but realities that we can use to either learn from and honestly discuss, or let them divide us. If we believe that there are no differences, we fall into a trap just as real as if we believe that we are totally foreign to each other.
Just my thinkin’
DFTBA

“No, those are Luis Garcia Mozos stories at Warren”.

Right. I’m from Spain, Luis Garcia is an artistc completely different from Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, I’m afraid.

Here you can find many thing about THIS Garcia (this is also my last name. In fact is the most common last name in Spain):

http://www.tebeosfera.com/1/Portada/edicion/0018.htm

Yeah, those Creepy stories are definitely Mozos, not Garcia-Lopez.

“…this is a subtle mocking of the way the characters on Speed Racer talked…”

This has me a tad confused. Obviously, the Speed Racer cartoon’s original language was Japanese. I don’t know if the original used any funky Japanese speech patterns. Perhaps the English translation wasn’t that great. Maybe something got lost (or unintentionally added) in the translation.

Loved that No Prize book. Bought it for a buck in a back-issue bin. I bought it, back in the day but it went the way of I-Don’t-Know-Where.

The BEST one was Captain America, making a speech, facing down a villain. “Only one of us is going to walk out of here alive …” Cap sez. The next panel, he’s delivering a two-handed blow and exclaiming “…AND IT WON’T BE ME!” (Which is funny for several reasons, the first of which is the obvious. Nextly, he sounds more like Bucky-Cap, who is not Cap but obviously Bucky, aka Bucky-Cap, aka the Winter Soldier, which is a TERRIBLE name for a superhero or even a house-pet. Thirdly, it reveals COMPLETE EDITORIAL INCOMPETENCE.)

I always wanted a No Prize and agree Al Roker should be sued, on general principles.

Was Superman a Spy…der-man?

@ rolly:

I haven’t watched Speed Racer, but I’m pretty sure what happened. Dialog in another language is likely to be longer or shorter in translation. If the translation is shorter then the character’s mouths are going to move longer than the speech takes. So that this doesn’t happen, dubbers would have the characters repeat themselves to fill in the time. This is something that has happened with all sorts of dubbed shows, but Speed Racer may be a particularly egarious example.

A few Spidey writers over the years have dusted off that “Peter Palmer” gaffe and used it in a story. There’s at least once instance of Peter thinking up an alias on the spot and ends up with Palmer as a last name. IMO it also seems to be poking fun at The Incredible Hulk television show where David Banner would just use different last names as he drifted from town to town.

Why don’t these guys bother to think up a GOOD alias with a different first name?

My favorite entry from the No Prize Book was the panel from Avengers #2 where Rick Jones reminds the Space Phantom badly posing as the Hulk that he turns back into Doctor Donald Blake. I believe they even retconned that moment as Rick noticing the Hulk’s toes (3 of them in a rare Kirby goof) and deliberatly tricking the Space Phantom. Uh yeah, I’ll just blow *someone else’s* secret identity to protect yours. LOL.

Never seen that Killraven series before. Might have to check that out…

That Lex Luthor page from the dictionary is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Oh, that dastardly Lex Luthor! He took 40 cakes! Bad, evil Lex Luthor!

Lovely art from Garcia =)
Great Powerpuff girls info (Mojo Jojo!)
and Oy…it’s Peter PALMER, SUPER-MAN!

=D

Someone definitely needs to write the adventures of Peter Palmer, The Steeltacular Super-Man….

Though, I will say using a different last name can be a better alias than first name for the simple reason that if your name is Peter, and someone yells out Mark, you wont naturally react. So if you use your own first name as part of your alias it removes an entire layer of possibility for you to screw it up.

And Ted has the right of it where it comes to Speed Racer. When they dubbed Mach GoGoGo to create Speed Racer, they did their best to match spoken words to the movements of the animated characters’ mouths, which went a mile-a-minute and in much greater amounts than any neccesary dialogue for any given particular scene.

“One more thing, has anyone noticed that, on the Weather Channel’s morning show, Wake Up With Al, that Al Roker has stolen the use of the term “No Prize” for some viewer contest he runs? Quesada needs to kick his lawyers in the pants and get them on the ball here!”

Marvel’s claim to the phrase may have expired, especially if they never trademarked it.

Jose-Luis García-López or Luis Garcia Mozos – whoever drew it, that’s some gorgeous artwork.

@ Ted

Thanks for trying to be helpful. But the thing is, it’s a cartoon. From the 60′s, no less, which means that the lips aren’t going to match the voices for the majority of screen time anyway. They probably never matched in the original Japanese either, for all I know. The odd thing is, we insist that the dubbed version and original match, when the languages and cultures are vastly different. That cracks me up.

That Luis art is really amazing. Like I would really consider framing it and hanging it.

the lips aren’t going to match the voices for the majority of screen time anyway.

It depends what you mean by match. If you mean that the movement of the lips wont match the words, then absolutely they wouldn’t have matched, probably even in the original. However, I was more specifically talking about the lips moving for the same amount of time as the dialog takes. It’s one thing to have the lips say “watermelon watermelon watermelon” for five seconds to match five seconds of dialog, it’s much more noticable for the lips to say “watermelon” for five seconds to match one second of dialog.

A better question is why they didn’t just recut the thing. It might have been a hatchet job but it probably would have been less noticable. Either way it’s certainly odd.

I loved the way Mojo Jojo talked, but didn’t he gradually stop talking that way?

For his earliest work at DC (1975), Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez was credited as just “Garcia Lopez.” I would think any work he did at Warren before 1975 might also be credited as Garcia Lopez, though I’m not certain.

@rolly

“They probably never matched in the original Japanese either, for all I know.”

Probably not. Anime has been fairly loose about lipsync from the first TV cartoons down to the present day.

Ted – reducing a half hour show to 20 minutes to fix lip sync would be a lot more noticeable than just having the characters speak idiosyncratically.

Yeah, but then you’d get ten more minutes of ads. I’m suprised that wasn’t reason enough for the networks.

Mojo Jojo and Chim-Chim have nearly the same hats….I think more than his speech patterns were influenced by Speed Racer.

I remember Kurt Busiek picking up on the Palmer and Watkins gaffs from early Spider-Man issues and having Peter Parker use the name Peter Palmer as an alias in Untold Tales of Spider-Man #7 and having Aunt May refer to Anna Watson as Anna Watkins as an early sign of her failing health (which necessitated a blood transfusion in an early issue of ASM).

Have a good day.
John Cage

There really shouldn’t be any “debate” over whether that art’s by Jose-Luis García-López or Luis Garcia Mozos. Not only does it not look like Garcia-Lopez’s art at any known stage of his career, but as can be seen at http://lambiek.net/artists/g/garcia_luis.htm, Mozos was working from 1973 to 1980 for the French magazine Pilote in a style similar to the Creepy piece, and has continued to work in a similar vein for (primarily?) Spanish publications since then. Garcia-Lopez started working for DC in 1974 – drawing in a style not at all reminiscent of Mozos – following periods working in Argentina and drawing for Charlton. They’re just not the same person, and as far as I can tell David Frankel’s comment is based entirely on the partial overlap between their names.

In David Frankel’s defense, that misidentification is out there. I’m pretty sure the source is Richard Arndt, who did an index of Warren Magazines http://www.enjolrasworld.com/Bibliographies%20by%20Richard%20Arndt.htm and who thought those were JLGL stories. From there it briefly got into comics.org and my own http://sites.google.com/site/joseluisgarcialopezchecklist/ until JLGL (through inker Kevin Nowlan) corrected it. So I suspect David is referring to Arndt’s Warren bibliography or other places dependent on it.

@jefhamlin: Thanks for that clarification. I didn’t actually attribute the mistake to Frankel (nor do you say I did). I just said that that his comment was “based on” the name overlap, without saying who did the basing-on – but I can certainly see why someone might think I said that.

Peter Palmer.. Oh god, does that mean there’s ANOTHER clone running around out there?

[...] here to read [...]

Yes, I did, Luis Garcia Mozos, who misunderstood McGregor’s script, and drew in the comic’s first interracial kiss. Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, is a generation after mine.
A greeting.
Luis Garcia Mozos.
PS. Excuse my English.

I own the marvel No-Prize book and as others have mentioned the only real problem with it was the 32-page length (minus intro). Even back then it could have been longer. My favourite bit is Captain America’s “Only one of us is walking away under his own power… and it *won’t* be me!”

Another No-Prize Book favorite….in a story Hercules moves the whole Island of Manhattan. Beyond how even Hulk with a wedgie strong this would have to be to move all that mass, when he puts it back Herc puts it in backwards, with the Battery facing the wrong end.

John Byrne made reference to the “Super-Man” line in SPIDER-MAN: CHAPTER ONE, where he has Doc Ock say something like, “You may consider yourself a super-man…” But since “Bob Banner” led to the Hulk’s full name being Robert Bruce Banner, why didn’t Spider-Man’s full name become Peter Palmer Parker?

Maybe when Stan used the name Peter Palmer, he was subconsciously thinking of Peter Palmer, the actor who played Li’l Abner in the movie version of Al Capp’s daily strip.
And I read somewhere that Doc Ock calling Spidey “Super-man” was actually him being sarcastic and deriding the neophyte hero. And that Pocket Books Spidey volume also has all the non-hyphenated “Spiderman”s in Amazing Fantasy 15.