Showing posts with label Jewish super heroes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jewish super heroes. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 25, 2024

A Marvel 80s Hanukkha for 2024

Now this one here I retrieved from my fan art archives. It's the only Jewish culture and ROM crossover piece I've ever come across and unfortunately I still don't know who the artist is because I sure would have a few questions for him or her about it. The four or five of you who will see this posting probably aren't old enough to recognize the little "girl" here. She's an android from this late 80s sitcom called Small Wonder. This artist had a quite a vivid imagination. Well, Happy Hanukkha whoever you are. 
 

I really wanted to close out the year with some original fan art of my own so in honor of the first night of Hanukkah I came up with this sketch card a couple days ago. There ofcourse are a number of other Jewish characters from Marvel Comics such as Moon Knight and Alpha Flight's Sesquatch but I decided to use the ones that I think worked best for this gathering around the menorah scene. Please spare a thought and maybe even a prayer for the hostages still in the terrorist Hell hole of gaza who will be missing their second Hanukkah in a row now. Bring Them Home Now!


January 18th Update: Tomorrow will be the first day of phase 1 for the ceasefire for the hostages deal. Let's hope it holds and eventually results in the release of all the hostages in the coming weeks from those hamas bastards. 


Anyways, on a much much less serious topic . . . images of these new Marvel Legends action figures have turned up yesterday on social media. At exactly 20:20 in this presentation video we get a detailed look and description of the ROM figure.


Friday, March 1, 2024

The Official Handbook of The Marvel Universe issue 9 re-covered sketch card

Hopefully you're familiar with the 80s Official Marvel Universe Handbook series? Anyways, here's issue 9 for you to reference  . . . 
https://viewcomiconline.com/the-official-handbook-of-the-marvel-universe-issue-9/

What I did here was replace the characters on the front page cover with characters on the page page cover with the one exception being ROM whom I just repositioned on the front cover. Interestingly enough as I was working on this labor intensive sketch card I realized that Sabertooth was completely absent from the cover art for issue 9 despite having his profile in the issue. I've had this issue since the early 80s and I'm just noticing that for the first time. His profile shares the same page (15) along with Israel's Sabra. I'm thinking that might have been some sort of over site at the time. Anyways, I decided to add him to the mix. 



March 30th Update: Well I thought I was gonna have to finish up this month with out anything else to update this posting with when by chance I came across this gorgeous gouache painting of The Mad Thinker with his awesome android by Dan Orgil which also happens to contain a ROM Easter egg. A reference to ROM the events in 14 and later recapped in Captain America 311. In a description attached to this illustration Orgil goes on to say that he likes to give a little love once in a while to non A list characters. Thank you Dan we appreciate that and you taking us on a little trip down Marvel 80s memory lane. 
 

 March 22nd 2025 Update: This is the latest update from when I originally published a posting that I've ever done. For some reason this just hit me for the first time after literally all these decades! And this is coming from someone who was an art major and who's owned ROM 14 since I was a teenager. I'mreally curious to know if this was Buscema or Mantlo's idea but I suspect we'll never get the answer to that.

July 18th Update: Time to showcase some newly discovered public art! For years I've had this love hate relationship with the city of oakland, or Wokeland or Oaklandistan as I like to call it. But since the October 7th terror attack in Israel, I just simply hate this town for the antisemitic and crime ridden urban Hellscape that it is. But even so, once in a while you will actually find something cool.
 

Monday, February 6, 2023

Sabra vs Captain America and new ROM in The Microverse fan art


The sketch card you see below was originally done by artist Erik Roman. I liked it, but at the same time I felt it was missing something and that it had the potential to be turned into a great ROM and Micronauts cross over fan art piece.


A number of photoshop tools and some borrowed elements from some Micronauts fan art of mine (see link) from many years back was all it took to give this sketch card a digital upgrade . . .
 


 These are a couple of a few unpublished pages having to do with stories about Israel's premiere super hero Sabra on the farcebook page of writer Matt Yocum that was posted back in 2013. It turns out they were pages that Yocum pitched to Marvel in order to give more exposer to artist Jake Bilbao in the hopes they would hire him for a Wolverine story Yocum wrote. However, despite the quality of Billbao's work Marvel instead hired Yocum to write a Sabra story. Matt Yocum is a United States Air Force veteran with a history of deep ties to Israel both in a personal and in a professional capacity. The Sabra story that Yocum wrote was a fantastic 8 page Astonishing Tales (digital only unfortunately) feature which was beautifully illustrated by Brazilian artist Adriana Melo.

 

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

A Spaceknight and an Avenger walk into a bar...

Fan art by unknown artist, caption by yours truly


Left click to enlarge
  Don't you just hate it when you find an image during a Google search and want to know more about it but clicking on that image just directs you to an error page of some kind? That's what happened here, so I don't know who did this cartoon or what the premise is because it certainly looks like the sort of art work with a story behind it. So, I decided to come up with a caption that for me at least fit the scene.
  Also, here's some 80s nostalgia I bet most of you haven't seen before. I actually stumbled upon this years ago during a random Google search but lost the image when I accidentally closed the search window and was not able to find it again to save my life. I believe this is some sort of poster insert or possible splash page from Strange Magazine. Although the Strange art work here is original I'm pretty sure I know which classic ROM spaceknight issue was probably the direct inspiration for it...
http://berkeleyplaceblog.com/2018/06/12/rom-30-1982/

MASADA

I just wanted to open up the second half of this posting by saying that I'm not into Young Blood or anything else from Image Comics for that matter. But I do have an interest in Jewish super heroes in comics so I think this back story from Young Blood Strike Files #6 featuring Massada (code name taken from the biblical desert mountain fortress in Israel) is worth taking a closer look at. In this story a friend of Masada's goes awol (away with out leave) from the Israeli Intelligence in order to go on a personal crusade and take out an anti-Semitic hate preacher (Hashim) who is obviously based on the real life anti-Semitic hate preaching piece of pig shit louise farrakhan.


Concerned that her friend (Sibbechai) is going to get himself into some serious trouble while making a martyr out of the hate preacher she tries to track him down before he makes his move. Needless to say she has some mixed feelings about going after her fellow Jew especially if it results in saving the life of a filthy Jew hater like farrakhan . . . er I mean Hashim. Think of it in terms of Luke Cage being in a similar situation over david duke or a Mexican superhero with trump.


After a failed attempt to apprehend Sibbechai, Masada attempts to warn Hashim but he dismisses her warnings as part of some grand "Jewish conspiracy" to silence him.Ultimately she's forced to use her powers that enable her to enlarge her size (like you saw with Ant-Man in Avengers Civil War and more recently in Ant-Man & The Wasp) she manages to thwart the assassination attempt leaving the hate preacher only lightly wounded unfortunately. But as they say, haters gonna hate so ofcourse Masada having saved his miserable life does nothing to change Hashim's paranoid Jew conspiracy delusions. A bit of a predictable ending but pretty accurate none the less I'd say.



Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Legion of Marvel 80s action figure super heroes and a candid look at what's going on in America


Left click to enlarge
Recently came across some cool photos of some pretty bad ass collections of Marvel 80s themed super hero action figures. You look up there at the top and they've got the ROM Hasbro figure along Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. They even have their pet dog from the Saturday morning cartoon (probably the best of all the Saturday morning cartoons with The Hulk being a close second) can any body out there remember her name? And to the left we've got a couple nice customs of ROM and of Acroyear from The Micronauts.


This is kinda interesting. This might be some sort of concept or promo art by Al Milgrom that was never published for what ever reason. It's obviously based on the whole Archie Stryker Firefall story arc early on in the series. Curious about the two distinctively different looks for the dire wraiths.


It's certainly been a while since I've come across some new Sabra fan art. This beautifully illustrated piece comes from artist Leo David who also goes by Leo Jr. on deviant art.


Did you all get a load of the insanely juvenile twitter tirade that trump went on last weekend? My God he went after every body from Oprah Winfrey to Hillary (yet again) to the FBI (also yet again) and even his own National Security Advisor for daring to publicly acknowledge the fact that russia fucked with the 2016 election. What the Hell is wrong with this guy he really reminds me of one of those eccentric James Bond villains. I mean what ever happened to the days where we argued about emotional issues like same sex marriage and abortion instead of fundamental facts such as something like if the world is round or flat.
I some times feel like trump supporters live in this alternate reality where all this crazy shit coming from The White House is some how normal and that the internet some how provides some kind of bubble between realities where these trump supporters can communicate with non trump supporters who see all this crazy shit like from this past weekend as the crazy shit that it is. And I say all this as someone who disdains the radical left and is well aware that they inhabit another kind of alternate reality that is largely devoid of facts. All these anarchists, communists and 911 conspiracy moron social parasites who glorify every islamic terrorist as a freedom fighter and every 3rd world tyrant as a defender against "American imperialism" fuck them to.
Rather it comes from CNN or FOX news, we should all care about the truth above all. And don't just care about the facts that fit into your comfort zone have the courage to accept all the facts surrounding a given issue rather you like them or not. Remember all those women's marches addressing gender equality issues right after trump took office last year? CNN covered em quite a bit and that's fine with me the protesters had a lot of legitimate grievances both toward trump and with society as a whole. But CNN dropped the ball on an important fact that FOX pounced on. Did you know that one of the main organizers of the marches was a convicted palestinian terrorist (rasmea odeh) who was freed from an Israeli jail in a prisoner swap and later lied on her entry visa about her criminal record in order to get into the United States? She got busted last year and in a plea deal to avoid jail time in a federal prison she agreed to deportation.
If you care about America, then trump's unwillingness to accept the fact that russia fucked with our election should bother you every bit as much as Obama's inability to utter the words "radical islamic terror". But if you only have a problem with one and not the other, well then you're just a hypocrite not a patriot. You can't have it both ways on that matter.
But getting back to you trump supporters, I just don't get you people. How long can you people keep looking at yourselves in the mirror and telling yourselves that a lie is the truth? Rather it's petty shit like the crowd size at his inauguration ceremony or the accusation about Obama having wire tapped trump tower that he promised he'd provide proof of but never did I mean seriously where is your breaking point when it comes to your intelligence constantly being insulted? Remember "alternative facts"? I mean seriously WTF!? Are you capable at all of being at least somewhat objective when you look at and analyse what comes out of trump's mouth or on his twitter account or is it just easier for you to write off all the criticism of trump as simply just "left wing media spin"? What happened to critical thinking!? And it's not just my fellow Americans who are guilty of this, some of my friends in Israel are just as overly simplistic in their thinking just because trump is not Obama.


Yes, critical thinking. Like the kind that allows me to see at least a couple of bright spots in the trump administration despite my loathing for trump himself. Nikki Haley, who was not shy about her sharp criticism of trump during the election and probably still doesn't like him much on a personal level today never the less has been hitting it out the park as the United States Ambassador to the United Nazis, or just U.N. for short. The U.N. is a deeply flawed organization loaded with self interest agendas, hypocrites like you wouldn't believe and almost complete ineptitude and it's well past time we had an ambassador who called em out on all of that in plain language.
And if you're a trump supporter that read the original ROM series did you learn nothing from Bill Mantlo's writing? The dire wraiths didn't have twitter but they had their shape shifting powers and sorcery to distort the truth to others. Based on what you know about the ROM character just ask yourself, what would the greatest of the spaceknights think of president trump? Or Mantlo for that matter if he still had his health today? Let that sink into your brain for a while.

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Captain America vs nazi scum david duke


It seems appropriate to open this posting with this bad ass Sabra splash page (Patrick Zircher) from New Warriors 59 that I've been looking for an excuse to post for a few months now.


I gotta say I'm a bit embarrassed to admit I only recently learned about a twitter feud between Chris Evans and the piece of shit Jew hating trump supporting kkk nazi asshole david duke going all the way back to February of this year. Talk about missed by the mainstream media! I'm not gonna bother to post the actual tweets here because they're easy enough to find through a Google search but suffice it to say the feud started over duke expressing his disapproval of the sort of women Chris Evans has been known to date. Being the classy guy that he is, Evans responded to duke's white supremacy fueled ramblings with some heart felt and thoughtful rebukes as opposed to the more straight up ad hominem attacks I would have unloaded on duke.
Now that being said, I certainly hope the obvious irony here isn't lost on any of you. Captain America, who is a virtuous symbol of American idealism is a character that was created by a couple of Jewish guys. And as you all know he's been fighting his entire super hero career against every incarnation of nazi ideology from the 3rd Reich during WW II to Hydra and The Red Skull. So now you've got Chris Evans, who as a person seems to be almost as virtuous as the character of Captain America he plays. Who also happens to have had a series of heated twitter exchanges with a real life nazi based on their ideological differences. Chris Evans may only be a regular guy in the real world but he's no less of a hero then the Avenger he plays so very well.

Left click to enlarge
So let's close out this posting with another match up that's a little less ideologically charged. Hopefully most of you remember the classic ROM vs The Herculoids 4 page sketch story arc from Ron Joseph a couple years ago. Some other artist on deviant art did a fantastic job of coloring the last page. Hopefully we'll get to see the other pages in color in the not so distant future.

The original uncolored Ron Joseph pages....
https://www.deviantart.com/art/ROM-vs-THE-HERCULOIDS-inks-pg01-545293978
https://www.deviantart.com/art/ROM-vs-THE-HERCULOIDS-inks-pg02-547745355
https://www.deviantart.com/art/ROM-vs-THE-HERCULOIDS-pencils-pg03-544320568
https://www.deviantart.com/art/ROM-vs-THE-HERCULOIDS-pencils-pg04-05-544320573

Sunday, June 5, 2016

You know a Mantlo and Buscema fan was just in Greece and Israel when you see pics like these

Left click to enlarge
This is not Sparta, this is Athens. Sporting my ROM t-shirt in Greece may not be quite as epic as King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans holding off thousands of invading persian scum at the Hot Gates of Thermoplyae or even the naval campaign the Athenian general Themistocles carried out against the persians in that war effort but I still think it's still kinda cool.

Left click to enlarge
And this is Israel's eternal and undivided capital Jerusalem. And that is a copy of Incredible Hulk 256 which is the first appearance of Marvel's premier Israeli superhero Sabra. Written by Bill Mantlo and penciled by Sal Buscema in 1980 which was a better time in history for comic books as IDW's Micronauts #1 and ROM "the" spaceknight 0 issue have proven to us once again. Here's a little something else from later that day in Jerusalem  . . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww-PSW4afKw


A real life Sabra
Also wanted to give a big thanks to deviant artist nikoskap for doing this awesome Sabra fan art during my time in Greece. Niko lives on the island of Crete which I unfortunately didn't get a chance to visit but at least we were able to communicate electronically while in the same time zone for a change which was nice. Thanks for this great surprise which I'm honored to post here and for standing with the people of Israel. Sabra is a fictional character ofcourse but in the real world there are many brave women in Israel putting their lives on the line for The Holy Land and it's people. Military service in Israel is compulsory, 3 years for men and 2 years for women. Left click the image to magnify.

On a side note here I wanted to say something about podcasts these days. Is it just me or do they ALL suck? Some of the plane service had Wi-Fi and at one point I tried to listen to some podcasts having to do with the sort of thing we comic book sci-fi nerds are into and everyone I tired to listen to was boring as Hell. In fact it's been years since I last heard one that was any good at all. At one point I tried to give a listen to some having to do with The Suicide Squad and then one having to do with Free Comic Book Day and it was all about as much interesting as watching your computer buffering a video stream.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Captain Marvel guest appearence, nuff said!

Here's another great cosmic team up that would have been right up there with The Silver Surfer and Rom . . .well almost as great. The artist who I lifted this awesome Captain Marvel rendering from doesn't appear to be responding to comments left under their work so I didn't even bother to ask about using it. So the best thing I can do is to make sure this artist gets due credit is to leave a link to their deviant art page. I guarantee you'll be blown away with the work you see there especially when it comes to the Marvel Cosmic, Transformers and Masters of the Universe illustrations: http://espeng.deviantart.com/gallery/

Left click to enlarge
Here's another sort of team up I would have liked to have seen back in the day when Marvel didn't suck like it does now.

Just a heads up folks, Bill Mantlo's birthday is November 9th. I'll be sending his brother Michael copies of some of the latest fan art that I've drawn. If you have anything for Bill rather it be some fan art of your own, a b-day card or even a donation (you'll make the check out to Michael) I'll be happy to include it with my package for the mail.

 Speaking of B-days I'd like to extend a happy birthday weekend to one of my most regular commentators Joseph who turned___ yesterday.

After having read some of your comments earlier today and then taking a second look with fresh eyes I finally realized this is a fake. Sorry folks looks like we got bamboozled that is not an actual copy of Rom spaceknight #8 that Rahm Emanuel is holding. How could this have happened!? To me, the photoshop ninja.