Coloring contest entries from the Homefront and/or Denver!

Two more entries just rolled in, and I was super pleased to see that they’re from my brother Dan Gibbons and Lake Forest, IL hometown hero Will Dugan, who goes to college in Denver with my broseph.

Here’s Will’s wonderful entry…

Sidenote: If you ever meet Will, make sure to ask him about any number of stories he has involving strippers. The one he’d told me from Vegas is particularly good…maybe not entirely true—who knows?—but a good story is a good story, dammit!

Here’s my broheim Dan’s hilarious entry (which I should mention, for the record, won’t be up for winning as it’s more of a photoshop job than a coloring)…

I recently got Dan and hooked on BSG via what we’re calling “Jim-Flix,” which is much like Netflix but features me doing the DVD sending. Dan sends me text messages and IMs here and there when stuff pops up on BSG that is crazy and/or mysterious, my favorite one so far referred to Starbuck and went something like, “Crazy and angry blonde pilot chick…are you hot or aren’t you?! I can’t tell?!” Good chuckles all around…but for the record, despite Dan’s questioning, Starbuck is officially extremely hot according to Loudest Monkey mandate.

Ok, asides aside, let’s keep those coloring contest entries rolling in!

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Contest Entries Galore!

And the coloring train keeps on rolling down the tracks!

Two new entries came in, both from the good people over at the WUMB, this first one’s from WUMBer Tomer Soiker a.k.a. Spidey_82, the first (ever!) international entry in the Loudest Monkey Semi-Annual Coloring Contest (all the way from Israel!)…

I love that Scalped cover!

And, from Clay Stooshnoff, better known to WUMBers as (._Y_.), another rad entry…

Keep’em comin’, folks!

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Damn good looking or just a time traveler?

A week or so ago, Dr. Hot Read’s Andy Serwin stumbled across a familiar face in an old Thor issue from back in 1972…MINE!

Prepare yourselves, this may blow your mind!

Here’s the issue for reference (Check your collection! Perhaps you can see this oddity in your own home!):

So, flipping through the comic, Andy came to this ad spread on pages 24 and 25…

Keen-eyed readers will spy this incredible spectacle immediately, but there at the top of the page in the center is what appears to be an illustration of me, Jim Gibbons—The Loudest Monkey himself!

Let me give you a quick comparison of some pictures, just in case you haven’t been shocked enough at this point…

Are you minds not blown?!

So, this means one of three things…
1) At some point in the future, I will travel back in time and become the inspiration for a series of fake facial hair because my ‘stache and burns are so “exciting” and “romantic.”
2) I’ve inadvertently become a living homage to 1970s facial hair fashion.
3) I am, in fact, exciting and romantic.

I’m pretty sure the correct answer is Choice 3, though I’d be pretty okay with Choice 1 as well! Either way, get a fake mustache, a van dyke and some sideburns and you can look as impressive as I do at any time!

Me? I look impressive ALL THE TIME!

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Get your time machines, we’re heading to ‘1985′

Hey folks!
So, it’s been a long Monday, but I loves ya’ll so I figured I’d post some bloggy goodness for you (Side note, all my blogs are high on fiber and will help your “passage” so you can continue flinging the poo with The Loudest Monkey!):

I read the first two issues of Mark Millar’s upcoming 1985 this weekend (yep, that’s one of the perks of being a comic book journalist—occasional advanced PDFs of books) and my initial curiosity about the book named after a year not renowned for major events has now turned to excitement. I grabbed the book free of preconceptions, simply looking to pull back the shroud of mystery around the book I knew little to nothing about before reading. So, what did I learn? It’s about 1985! (Insert your *Gasp* here) Yes, the year! Check out the preview we ran for a little more of a tease.

No, seriously, check it out quick.

So, Red Skull in the window, Mole Man looking guy chatting up the neighbor; it looks a little crazy and the first two issues remain mysterious, leaving me to bask in the craziness for months until I get my hands on the third issue. Still, Tommy Lee Edwards’ art is just gorgeous and filled me with nostalgia for the time period while reading (Ok, I was only one year old in 1985, but you catch my drift) and the slow teasing out of this idea of comic book characters in the real world through the eyes of a tween is pretty interesting. In the end, that’s what really hammered this book home for me: little dude and main character Toby.

Millar always draws me in with his plots, but he’s never written a character I connected with more. I swear, it feels like he somehow tapped into my childhood and created this character partially from me. Toby seemed that familiar to read. He wasn’t entirely me, otherwise he’d have been more that goofy-looking, peachfuzz-faced and awkwardly tall kid with glasses, but the character rang true. He’s that kid who’s more interested in his comics than his life and he’s looking for his comics to enter his reality because it’d be way more interesting and an enjoyable reprieve from the same monotony relatable to nearly anyone who was ever 13-year-old comic reader. He’s an escapist, and every comic fan can relate to that and whether or not that Skull in the window is real or not, he’s sure something is up.

That was me at 12 or 13. I remember running around my mostly under-construction neighborhood back in suburban Atlanta, being sure that mystic forces were leaving TVs on inside these “For Sale” houses instead of lazy painters working on their final coat and that the “strange” influx of crows on my street had to be black magic and not the presence of trash-filled, construction dumpsters in every fourth driveway.

Reading 1985, I could really relate to Toby and, more than any amount of alien invasions or superpowered slugfests, that drew me into the series. I could step into the main character’s shoes in a way that, try as I might have, I just couldn’t with last week’s Kick-Ass. Now, that may simply have been due to the fact that Kick-Ass hero Dave Lizewski listens to the Goo Goo Dolls, or that my pudgy ass back when I was 13 would have been better suited to the semi-delusional, daydream tendencies of Toby than squeezing into a wetsuit underneath my clothes everyday (though I did look smashing in my swim team speedo—a dream of pale, undeveloped fleshiness). Either way, the gorgeous art and relatable character has me excited to see more of 1985 just to spend more time following the young hero’s adventures, and the continuing mystery behind the book is a bonus as well.

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The Best of the Bunch: Week of 2/27/2008

What’s a comic book blog with some weekly book reviews?!

Well, when you’re readin’ the Monkey you’ll get The Best of the Bunch!

If you grabbed books this week, you don’t need me to tell you that good reads were in abundance. Between perennial crowd-pleasers like Geoff John’s Action Comics and Justice Society of America, and Ed Brubaker’s Captain America and Daredevil (not to mention an exceptional kick-off to volume two of his Icon series with Sean Phillips, Criminal), but the book that really rocked my week was JSA Classified #35.

Much like last week’s Superman Confidential, I grabbed this issue because it was written by B. Clay Moore. I picked up Hawaiian Dick—Moore’s awesome Image series—last year and was amazingly pleased to find it was exactly the type of book I was hoping it’d be after seeing the cover, and I’ve checked out as much as I could by Clay since. I heard about the Superman book from Clay when I did an interview with him last fall for a Columbia Missourian article about professional comic creators in and around Kansas City. I was jazzed to read Confidential and really enjoyed it, but in the end, I’m not a big Superman guy. However, when I heard he was doing a three-issue arc on JSA Classified starring Wildcat, I was ecstatic!

Seriously, as far as I’m concerned, Ted Grant is the preeminent badass of the comic book world, because he was the first and he’s still kickin’…

…The coolest thing about the beginning of this arc, is it asks exactly that; why is Ted Grant still wearing the whiskers after all these years? GL poses the question and tells Ted that his old gyms in Gotham are looking a little fishy. So, Ted jumps on his bike and heads to check it out and maybe reaffirm for himself why he hasn’t retired. He punches people and the plot thickens—I could keep telling you what happened or tell you why it was awesome. I’ll opt for the latter.

The dialogue’s tight and rings true of a down-to-Earth, graying boxer in a cat suit constantly outshined by his superpowerful teammates and without sounding as ridiculous as that description of the hero. The plot isn’t overwhelming after one issue but allows for punches aplenty and has more than enough room for chances to analyze what keeps this golden age hero going. Reading the book, it felt like it was written exactly for my tastes and was enjoyable from first page to closing cliffhanger, and that’s just the writing.

Ramon Perez’s art was…well, let’s just say I want to paste it up all over my white and extremely boring apartment walls. He captures the essence of why Wildcat is just flat-out cool in the opening fight sequence and emphasizes every cool jab and hook throughout the book. And the scenes where Moore juxtaposes Wildcat’s past with his present, Perez deserves a callout just for drawing that awesome image of Wildcat punching a ‘20s classic boxer through the seat of a chair…

…Other than the above-mentioned books, I have to give a call out to Blue Beetle. Seeing Jaime Reyes dawn the Ted Kord Beetle costume after 24 issues was just plain awesome…

…and this whole issue was a slam-bang, drag-out action extravaganza. Great stuff!

Lastly, I loved X-Men: Legacy. I’m a big X-Fan, and seeing such an interesting exploration of the easily-clichéd “Xavier might not be perfectly altruistic” theme was really a treat.

Ok folks, that’s it for this week’s bunch, and hey, feel free to email me any questions or comments at TheLoudestMonkey@gmail.com!

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