Friday, June 20, 2008

the assassin bug

No nostalgic or philosophical musings today, just a tip of the hat to one of the Great Moments in Comic Book HistoryTM: Captain America engaged in a life and death struggle with the VW Beetle that crashed though the window of his third-story Brooklyn apartment:

(from Captain America #222, June 1978; by Steve Gerber, Sal Buscema, John Tartag, and Mike Esposito)

Was it meant to symbolize the American auto worker's sense of anomie as the industry attempted to cope with the flood of cheap, fuel-efficient imports?

Or was it another example of a writer jettisoning all pretense of plausibility in order to shoehorn an ill-considered "clever" idea into a story?

(Since it is the late Steve Gerber we're talking about, it could go either way.)

Tin Machine - Working Class Hero (from Tin Machine, 1989) - I've noticed that revisionist music historians have tried to make the claim that Bowie's Tin Machine phase was anything other than a embarrassing failure of colossal proportions. These revisionist music historians are out of their flipping gourds, as this mutilation of a beloved John Lennon track clearly illustrates.

Jimmy Edwards - Love Bug Crawl (from Rockin' Bones: 1950s Punk and Rockabilly, 2006) - After his agent stopped taking his calls, Herbie was forced to paint himself purple and hire out as a contract killer in the late 1970's in order to fund his illegal fuel additive habit. A high-pitched "BEEP-BEEP" and the tinny hum of a four-cylinder engine revving up was the last thing many a snitch or mob rival heard before being cut down by a sub-compact angel of death.

5 comments:

Bully said...

Brilliant. Someone needs to Photoshop this into Captain America versus Herbie, the Love Bug.

Anonymous said...

wow, maybe it does have more than meets the eye, interesting to say the least though.

Will said...

I guess Steve Gerber saw "Take The Money & Run"

bitterandrew said...

Either that, or The Car.

TheMadBlonde said...

No, no. Tin Machine was worth it just for "Stateside."