The enormous 871-page hardcover 1994 Scientology Handbook features over 700 insane and strangely haunting illustrations that promise positive effects in today’s turbulent society. The ultra-saturated photographs use vivid, heightened colours in a traditional comic book format to help navigate the reader through a world rampant with conflict, drugs, illiteracy, crime, terrorism, immorality… the list seems endless. “To have any decent future at all, you need to know this manual for living and use it.” The actors and sets were photographed in the early ‘90s on full-sized sound stages belonging to Golden Era Productions in Riverside County, California. Next door to the sound stages lies a computer facility with an uninterruptable power supply so when the rapture happens you will still be able to get onto America Online and check your email.
 

“I spent a few hours and read the entire Scientology Handbook. It gave me a sense of knowingness I’ve never had before. I knew that I was prepared for any situation in life and I’d know what to do. I began applying the technology from the book and now I’m considered a miracle worker and someone who knows what she’s doing. All my life I’ve tried to help people, but now with The Scientology Handbook, I can really help them!”

We hope you experience the same results as K.J. shared in her Amazon customer review.
 

 

 
Many more after the jump…

 
This biting, and brilliant, comic strip satire goes to show the inherent fallacy of any state-sanctioned “War On A Noun.”

It’s the work of the British musician and artist Darren Cullen, and you can find more of his output at the site Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives.

 
Real life villains get the “Legion of Doom” treatment by Brazilian designer and illustrator Butcher Billy.

Artist’s statement:

Some might say all art is a reflection of the times we live in.

If back in the day comics and movies were pretty naive and faced only as pure escapism, today’s fiction has to evoke reality to create something truly meaningful… and frightening.

This series is an experiment where a dictator, a psycho, a murderer (sometimes they are the whole package) or even a suspicious figure from real life is mashed with a comics bad guy - strangely related some way or the other with his counterpart.

The depressing thing? Realising that if the comic book supervillains were actually the ones threatening real life, the world wouldn’t be such a bad place.

See more of Butcher Billy’s designs here.

 

 

 

 

 
Via Nerdcore via Butcher Billy

 
Roger Mellie - the Man on the Telly first appeared as a cartoon strip in Viz magazine, a Derek ‘n’ Clive piss-take of more mainstream comics, set up by brothers Chris and Simon Donald in 1979.  Like many of the Viz cartoon characters (Sid the Sexist, The Fat Slags), Roger Mellie was rude, obnoxious, foul-mouthed, sexist, racist with serious drink and drug issues. A CV like that today would make Mellie perfect TV fodder.

According to the ever reliable Wikipedia, Roger Mellie was:

Born Roger Edward Paul Mellie in 1937 in North Shields, Roger was educated at Fulchester Mixed Infants, Bartlepool Grammar School, and the Oxford Remand Centre. Roger was hopeless at school, and was bottom of the class for every subject. He began his broadcasting career as a cub reporter on the news with Robert Dougall and shot to fame doing genital mutilation routines at the London Palladium. He was soon recruited by Fulchester Television, and became a popular TV personality. He also established his own production company, MellieVision, and it snowballed from there. He now spends most nights in Acton, where he often stays at his favourite lap-dancing club until gone three in the morning. He now lives in Fulchester with his 17-year old Thai wife, and 15 Staffordshire Bull Terriers. Roger is quite a colourful character: He has had five past wives (Two of which were ‘accidentally’ murdered), is an undischarged bankrupt; a convicted rapist; a hopeless alcoholic; a right-wing bigot, and a recovering cocaine addict, among other things. On one occasion in 2006, while requiring a liver transplant (due to chronic alcoholism), Roger became a hit-and-run driver: he ran over and killed a motorcyclist without stopping, later receiving the dead man’s liver for himself, then celebrating the successful liver transplant with a booze-up at the nearest pub.

In 1991, Mellie made the jump from comic strip to TV series, with Peter Cook providing the voice to the foul-mouthed TV star and Harry Enfield as everyone else. It works in places, but like many of Cook’s straight acting roles, there is a sense that Mellie would have been better if Cook had improvised more. But then that would have been Peter Cook and not Roger Mellie - the Man on the Telly.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Peter Cook Hosts TV’s Punk Revolver

 
More bollocks from Roger Mellie, after the jump…
 

 
This is the moment Paul McCartney met comic book hero Jacky Kirby in 1975. It was at the Forum, Los Angeles, where McCartney and his band Wings, were booked to play three concerts. This was Macca’s first time back in LA since touring with The Beatles. Wings had just released Venus and Mars, which contained the track “Magneto and Titanium Man”, a song inspired by Marvel’s X-Men created by Kirby and Stan Lee. The pair met backstage at the Forum, where Jack presented Macca with a line drawing:

Then around the corner came Paul. “‘Ello Jack, nice to meet you.” Jack gave Paul and Linda the drawing which they thought was “smashing.” Paul thanked Jack for keeping him from going bonkers while they were recording the album in Jamaica. It seems that there was very little to do there, and they needed to keep their kids entertained. Luckily, there was a store that sold comics, so Paul would go and pick up all the latest. One night the song “Magneto and Titanium Man” popped into his head. The thing about Jack was that within a few minutes you felt as if you were best friends, so Paul too was soon laughing it up with Jack as if he had known him for years.

 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Hockey Puck…Jack Kirby Meets…Don Rickles

 
Via Scheme 9
 

 
Comrade Vladimir Putin has proven himself to be more than just Ruler of All Russia (surely Prime Minster? - Ed.) - a dab hand at judo, a master of swimming, an ace shot, a singer, and excellent at going topless in public. It is, therefore, no surprise that some wag (surely Right Wing Capitalist Lackey? - Ed.) has a comic strip, poking fun at VP and his idiosyncratic ways. The strip comes at an interesting time, as Putin, who has had the highest approval rating of any world leader, may stand for re-election as President in Russia’s 2012 elections.
 

 
Bonus strip and Putin sings video after the jump…
 

 

 
These wild illustrations by Gojin Ishihara are from Japanese children’s books published in the 1970s.

The illustrations are from the Illustrated Book Of Japanese Monsters and various educational and entertainment-oriented publications for children.

 
More wildness after the jump…

Back around 1990, there was nothing in the world cooler than the NES. Michael Jackson tried with the “Dangerous” album. Macaulay Culkin tried to steal some attention. But outside of lingering buzz from Michael Keaton’s Batman, there was NOTHING in the world of the prepubescent male that could usurp the importance of the Nintendo, especially now that Super Mario Bros. 3 (aka God’s Latest and Most Important Transmission to Mankind Since the Angel Gabriel Dictated the Qu’ran to Mohammed in a Cave) was out.

That was why we were suckers enough to watch The Wizard with Fred Savage, collect Nintendo sticker books and eat Nintendo cereal. Hell, I didn’t even HAVE a Nintendo and I still did all that stuff just to compensate!

Then there were the Nintendo comics, published by a young Valiant press, later to become famous for resurrecting the Key superheroes (Magnus, Turok, Solar, etc.) and making them edgy and getting them video game contracts.

Comics Alliance reports on those lost gems:

The Super Mario Brothers aren’t just the stars of this week’s biggest video game release on the Wii, nor were they simply the heroes of one of the most disastrous films of the 1990s - they were also comic book legends.

Well, legends might be pushing it, but brothers Mario and Luigi certainly have some comic book credibility to their name. TRsRockin.com has an extensive rundown of the plumber brothers’ many comic appearances, including a lengthy Valiant Comics run.

There are some definite gems among the Valiant work, including a story titled “Beauty and the Beach” found within the pages of “Super Mario Bros.” #4. Mario, Peach and Toad wash ashore on a mysterious island filled with Toadstools and secretly ruled by King Koopa himself. Things go south when a volcano threatens to erupt, prompting the selfish Koopa to flee the scene while Mario and his pals save the day. It’s really cute, if only for Toad’s hilarious swim trunks.

Ah. Set adrift on memory bliss.

(Comics Alliance: Remembering The Super Mario Bros.’ Surprisingly Cool Comic Books)

Dangerous Minds friends Century Guild announce the release of “The Fracture of the Universal Boy,” a new graphic novel by Michael Zulli, years in the making. Zulli was a regular artist on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic and is well-known to the 4-color literati. Century Guild proprieter Thomas Negovan blogs about the new book here:

Speaking of focus, the kind of focus that makes electrons shudder, imagine being at the top of your game for decades.  Say, being one of the go-to artists on something as seminal and powerful as Neil Gaiman?

This song is practically the story of my life. It might be the story of yours, too!

(From Art Brut vs. Satan)

Supernatural investigators are a time-honored tradition in genre fiction. Sherlock Holmes, Randolph Carter, Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Kolchak the Night-Stalker, Harry D’Amour, Harry Dresden, John Constantine, Fox Mulder. It’s as important of an archetype as, say, the cowboy.

Which explains why, as with cowboys, Italy has appropriated the tradition and made it vaguely more gay and better-dressed, specifically with Dylan Dog. I saw these comics for the first time in Rome in 2004, in Archie’s Digest-format, where they stack them at newsstands along with, well, the cowboy comics. The eponymous character is a macho detective in a black blazer and open-collared red shirt, with a sidekick who is, um, Groucho Marx. Literally. Why, I have no clue. (Also, his boss is named “Inspector Bloch” in an homage to Robert Bloch, Lovecraft protegee and author of Psycho.) All of the stories are pastiches of American movies or fiction, usually with more violence and boobs.

It all works well enough that apparently Hollywood is counter-appropriating it and making a film version, called “Dead of Night,” with Brandon Routh, directed by, um… the guy who did Snakes on a Plane. Actually, that might fit perfectly, now that I think about it…. Fun!

Over the weekend I saw a talk by Canadian cartoonist Seth, whose work I’d heard about for a long time but hadn’t gotten around to actually reading. His stuff is great?

Bryan Talbot is the man who invented modern comics. But you’d never know, because he’s one of the most unsung artists in the field.

Talbot’s Luther Arkwright comic started off in the mid-seventies as a pastiche of Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius character, but by the time Talbot had completed the series in the eighties, he’d ended up laying down the template from which Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis and the entire Vertigo line of comics sprang from. Talbot borrowed not only from Moorcock and the British New Wave (of science fiction) but also film techniques like Nic Roeg’s use of cross-cutting, ending up with a particularly potent mix of subject matter, characterization and technique that would inspire practically the entire next twenty years of “mature readers” comics.

(Warren Ellis on Luther Arkwright: “[It’s] probably the single most influential graphic novel to have come out of Britain to date… probably Anglophone comics’ single most important experimental work.”)

Arkwright is an albino assassin who drops out in the sixties, gets stoned, activates his psychic powers, ends up in a parallel England where Oliver Cromwell’s rule never ended, attains enlightenment in a tantric sex ritual, and is charged with leading a revolution against the brutal Puritan regime. Somehow it’s a lot more complicated and cosmic than that?