Hey, Robert Ableman listens to Cub!

It wasn't something I was expecting to see in a comic book, least of all in the pages of Mayor Good Boy Turns Bad, the third installment of Dave Scheidt and Miranda Harmon's Mayor Good Boy series, about a talking dog mayor of a small town. 

Early in the book, Robert Ableman, the father of the book's heroes Abby and Aaron Ableman, is shown going through his record collection. When Aaron interrupts him, Robert clutches the album he's holding to his chest defensively and holds it there for several panels. As you can see above, it's a Cub album, specifically their second album, 1995's Come Out Come Out.

For those of you who don't know, which I assume is most of you, or at least most of Mayor Good Boy's young readers, Cub was a Vancouver-based all-girl band in the 1990s, their sound defined by simple, lullaby-like pop punk rock tunes with sing-songy lyrics that could be either extremely charming or somewhat cloying, depending on your level of cynicism. They self-branded their style as "cuddlecore." As a teenager, I loved them unconditionally, my favorite song being "My Chinchilla" from their debut album Betti-Cola, which was either a cute and innocent love song...or an ode to an actual pet chinchilla. I interpreted it as the former. 

In an earlier panel, we see Aaron holding two other albums, They Might Be Giants' 1988 Lincoln and The Cure's 1989 Disintegration, so perhaps Robert came to Cub through They Might Be Giants, who covered "New York City" from Come Out Come Out on their 1996 album Factory Showroom. At any rate, we can agree that Robert has pretty good taste in music, and a worthy record collection. 

This isn't the only Cub comics connection, or the only reason they might be mentioned on a comics blog. The cover art for Betti-Cola was from legendary cartoonist Dan DeCarlo.

Now the only question is who on the Mayor Good Boy team is the Cub fan, Schedit or Harmon? Or both? 

Meanwhile...

There's plenty of new Caleb-writing-about-comics content on the Internet today, just not here at Every Day Is Like Wednesday.

I have a review of Craig Yoe's awesome anthology Comics About Cartoonists at Las Vegas Weekly. It's just what it sounds like: A collection of comics covers, strips and gag-panels from a who's who of the greatest cartoonists in comics history, the subject of each being the cartoonists themselves (Some are autobiographical, some simply feature cartoonists as their protagonists, as in a Jack Kirby-drawn romance comic).

Speaking of Yoe, I have a review of The Art of Betty and Veronica, which he co-edited with Victor Gorelick, at ComicsAlliance. (Do click on that link, even if you don't want to read all my words about the book; it's well worth skimming just to see all that great art from the likes of Bruce Timm, Norm Breyfogle, Dan DeCarlo and others).

And, finally, at Robot 6, I wrote about Incredible Hulk By Jason Aaron Vol. 1, which is where the above image is taken from (I'd tell you who drew it, but I have absolutely no idea who drew it; there were something like 19 credited artists contributing to the comics it contained).

I don't know that the above sequence is the best part of the entire Hulk book, which has a lot of cool stuff in it, but I was pretty excited when that one character pulled out an adamantium chainsaw. Why doesn't the adamantium chainsaw guest-star in more books, or even have its own book at Marvel yet? They could call it Adamantium Chainsaw. If there is a more bad-ass title for a Marvel comic book than Adamantium Chainsaw, I'd sure like to hear it.

Three things I learned from Dan DeCarlo's Jetta

I have a short Q-and-A style interview with comics historian and editor Craig Yoe about Dan DeCarlo, Jetta and Dan DeCarlo's Jetta (IDW Publishing), his new book collecting all three issues of the series and a bunch of pin-ups by 37 artists.

In addition to being a nice little bit of recovered comics history, an entertaining read, a collection of great comics art and a source of hours of Googling enjoyment scanning the home pages of the contributing pin-up artists, it's also a very educational book.

For example, here are three things I learned from it:


1.) Once upon a time, a "#1" on the cover of a comic book was seen as a deterrent rather than an enticement to buying a comic book. Jetta was only published for three issues, but those issues were numbered #5, #6 and #7. Why was that?

According to Yoe, "Many of [Jetta publisher] Standard's comics, like Jetta, began not with a number one issue, but with the number five. This was a ploy to fool newsstand dealers into thinking that it was a solid title with a track record."

Given that comics today are often relaunched, and publisher's occasionally go to great length to get a "#1" on the cover, I thought that was a pretty telling detail about how much the selling of comics has changed in the last fifty-some years or so.



2.) Betty Cooper cosplays as Black Canary. As you can see from the above image, a piece of original art DeCarlo drew for Will King. That's actually only half of the image, which is spread across two pages of Dan DeCarlo's Jetta, but I could only fit half of it on my scanner. DeCarlo drew Betty in Black Canary's original costume, so the other half has her high-heeled black boots with the pirate-y cuff, with DeCarlo's signature beneath it.



3.) Before Willie Lumpkin had The Baxter Building on his route, he starred in his own comic strip. Yoe includes a page of four comic strips in his introduction to the book. The first three are try-out strips form a newspaper syndicate, and the fourth one is the one above (which I've cut from it's four-panel horizontal strip format to make it fit better on a vertical blog like this). It's called Willie Lumpkin, and was published through Publishers Syndicate around 1960 or so. Look how young Willie was! (You can see a few more examples of the strip here).

Valentine's Day Special: I love Cub

“My Chinchilla,” from 1993 album Betti-Cola. This is by far my favorite love song of all time.



“New York City,” from 1995’s Come Out Come Out. Another great love song. (And yes, They Might Be Giants did cover it.)



“My Flaming Red Bobsled,” also from Come Out Come Out



“Freaky,” from 1996’s Box of Hair.



What does now-broken-up Vancouver-based band Cub have to do with comics exactly, aside from some of the imagery in the above “Flaming Red Bobsled” video?

Well, here’s the cover of their debut album Betti-Cola, from Canada’s Mint Records:



Hey, is that…



Yes. Yes it is.