Friday Night Fights, Ladies Night: You picked a fine time to hit me, Lucille

Lucille, you won't do your sister's will
Lucille, you won't do your sister's will




You ran out and married
But I love you still




Lucille, please come back where you belong
Lucille, please come back where you belong




I've been good to you baby
Please don't leave me alone




I woke up this morning
Lucille was not in sight




I asked my friends about her
But all their lips were tight




Lucille, please come back where you belong
I've been good to you baby




Please don't leave me alone




Well, I woke up this morning,
Lucille was not in sight




I asked my friends about her
But all their lips were tight




Lucille, please come back where you belong
I've been good to you baby
Please don't leave me alone




Lucille, baby satisfy my heart
Lucille, baby satisfy my heart
I played for it baby
And give you such a wonderful start






Now fire it up and read it again!:



All panels are from Peanuts by Charles Schulz, reprinted in various volumes of The Complete Peanuts, published by my good pals at Fantagraphics.



This Halloween, I'll be sitting in my pumpkin patch, waiting for the Great Bahlactus to rise up over the patch and bring candy to all the good little boys, girls, and bulls of the world.

Friday Night Fights, Ladies Night: Oh Gwendy, Gwendy left me alone/Hurt so bad

Friday again? That can only mean one thing: Larry and Balki! Oh wait, no...that actually means it's Bahlactus's Friday Night Fights, Ladies Night! And what better time to bring out our ultimate fighter? Some say her hair is made of satin, that her laughter can make the bitterest enemies kiss and make up, and that if you throw her off the Brooklyn Bridge, she'll just bounce back and knee you in the bollocks. All we know is, she's called Gwen Stacy:






All panels tonight (and in yesterday's post, for that matter) are from Amazing Spider-Man #69, written by Stan Lee, storyboarded by John Romita, finished by Jim Mooney, lettered by Sam Rosen

The last time anyone tried to toss Bahlactus off a bridge, he just ate them.

Friday Night Not Fights, Ladies Night: H+I 4Ever

Okay! It's Friday and you know what that means, buckaroos: Friday Night Fights! I've been trainin' my fighters all week, setting them up with reps on the speed bag, drinking raw eggs and wrasslin' Wonder Dog, and now I'm ready to let loose, Hilary Swank style! Let's ring the bell and let the fights begin!

What's that? Friday Night Fights is postponed?

Well, poop.

Huh. So, if it's not Fight Night, then I guess I have to show some ladies not fighting, right? Some women being friendly and pleasant to each other instead of trading punches, huh? Hmmm, I think I know a couple what fits the bill poifectly:

Ivy loves Harley.

All panels are from Harley and Ivy #1-3 (June-August 2004), scripted and co-plotted by Paul Dini, pencilled and co-plotted by Bruce Timm, inked by Shane Glines, colored by Lee Loughridge, lettered by Tom Orzechowski

And, Harley loves Ivy.

Yes, even when our cheerful couple of criminal cuties have a falling-out, you just know there's a reconciliation on the horizon:






Yup, that's our larcenous lassies! These gal pals never let the world get them down, and they're always gonna be the best of friends forever. And...

...and...

Sheesh, Friday Night Fights is boring when there's no fights. Um, Miss Ivy, could ya...


Poifect. Thank you, goils!

Bahlactus has declared/Never turn the other cheek/And he said with might/Get ready to fight/I'll be back again next week!

Friday Night Fights, Ladies Night: This Post is Rated PG for P'Gell

Cast yer peepers on any one of those girlie posters advertising Frank Miller's Will Eisner's The Spirit (coming this Christmas to a theater near you...oh what a surprising gift from Santa!) and when you're done oculatin' and screw your eyeballs back in, you'll notice something's missing. Sure, there they all are: Sand Serif, Silken Floss, Plaster of Paris, Rory Gilmore, Deadly Little Miho, Gerard Butler, The Professor, Mary Ann...but is there a poster to commemorate the Spirit's deadliest, smartest, most successful antagonist? And I'm not talkin' about that guy with the striped gloves here. Because no: the greatest foe the Spirit has ever faced ain't in the movie: P'Gell, as beautiful as she is deadly and as deadly as she is...well, you get the picture. Even tho' she's not in it. It's prob'bly just as well...I can't think of a single contemporary actress who could adequately personify the wily, dangerous, breathtaking P'Gell. Despite her appearance in the modern-day Darwyn Cooke version of The Spirit, P'Gell's character is from a time gone, when femme fatales roamed the Earth like herds of fatalely things. No, you have to go back to the divas of yesterday to capture the essence of P'Gell: Marlene Dietrich, or Miriam Hopkins, or maybe Jane Greer:


Or, hey! Let's do something revolutionary...let's not cast a real or imaginary movie. Let's just go straight to the Master, Mister Will Eisner, to show just how deadly the female of the species is:


All panels from The Spirit section, May 25, 1947,
by Will Eisner and members of the Eisner-Iger Studio

"...Really," bemoans P'Gell in the splash panel to this Spirit adventure (see the original pencils and inks here), "what is there about me that simply invites trouble! (sigh)" I dunno, Miss P'Gell, you're purty and all, but you certainly look like the sorta dame Mama Bull told me to keep the heck away from. Aside from the fact that you're smokin'...you're also holding a cigarette. Well, what is she gonna do to our hero Denny Colt, the eponymous Spirit? Blow smoke in his face until he goes into a coughing fit? Uh uh. P'Gell is both more elegant and more physical than that:


P'Gell must have seen the movie Casablanca...heck, she probably inspired part of it...to quote Rick Blaine, she's a firm believer in the maxim "I'm the only cause I'm interested in." Which means that not only the law-enforcer Spirit but her criminal competitors are sure to fall foul of her forceful redecoration schemes:


P'Gell's not whistlin' Dixie (whatever that means). She must also be an adherent to the Gospel of Emily Post, for she makes sure the Spirit gets second helpings:


You tell 'im, sister.

P'Gell. Strong enough for a man, but hotchy motchy, whatta woman.


Bahlactus: his city screams. It screams "Don't eat me!"

Friday Night Fights, Ladies Night: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Up Through the Roof of the X-Mansion

Well, howdy y'all, sugah pies! An' you, Bahlactus. Now set yo'self down in the rockin' chair on the porch an' Ah'll spin yo' a li'l yarn that's 'bout as thrillin' as the hound dawg who went down to the fishin' hole an'...

No. No dialect. Let's start again.

Long before Rogue of the X-Men was a bouncy, curvy, big-haired, magnolia-drawled superhero:




Even before she was Anna Paquin with a bad dye-job, a slightly-too-tight leather catsuit and a diminishing character arc:




Even way before the comic Rogue started taking Paquin's fashion advice:




But not before Rogue was growing up with her mute musical mama on a backwater New Zealand beach:




...she was an angular, nasty, wicked, evil, all-around bad girl who made her debut in Avengers Annual #10 by attacking and incapacitating Carol Danvers, once known as Ms. Marvel:



Panels from Avengers Annual #10 (1981), written by Chris Claremont, penciling and coloring by Michael Golden, inking by Armando Gil, lettering by Joe Rosen


So is it any wonder that when honey-drawled Miz Rogue comes a-knock-knock-knockin' on the front door of 1407 Graymalkin Lane, Salem Center, New York, looking to join up with those misfit mutants of mirth, the X-Men, that she receives the cold shoulder?




Nobody wants her on the team. Not regal, strong-willed, bathrobed Storm:


Panels from Uncanny X-Men #171 (July 1983) written by Chris Claremont, breakdowns by Walt Simonson, finishing and inking by Bob Wiacek, coloring by Glynis Wein, lettering by Tom Orzechowski


Not blue, fuzzy future Catholic priest Nightcrawler:




Not even Mary Sue Kitty Pryde is keen on the idea:




So, then, how do you think X-Men hanger-on Carol Danvers is going to react to the news? (Here comes the Friday Night Fights part, folks!)




Yeah. Just about like that.




One punch! One punch! Oh wait, Rogue's comin' back around to get her licks in...




Whoa, that went about as well for the South as the Siege of Vicksburg. (Look it up, history fans!)




So, every time from that point onwards, whenever you read Rogue bein' all cute and coquettish and giving you that honeydripped accent of hers and lockin' lips with the detestable Gambit, just remember: the South's most famous heroine goes down like a pack of cards when she's hit by a former US Army Major intelligence agent turned Kree superheroine turned binary-star-powered adventurer. As do we all. As do we all.

Still, that's no reason not to like the little swamp rat. She takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin', y'all. As Phil Harris once sang: "That's what I like about the South."




Bahlactus would never hit a lady.

Friday Night Fights: Self-destroyer, wreck your health/Destroy friends, destroy yourself

This is the final week of Friday Night Fights—Classic Edition!!! presented, as always, by the Inimitable Bahlactus. The past eleven rounds of FNF have been all in black-and-white, and in the spirit of stepping into the monochrome ring with the fightin'est, black-and-whiten'est, righten'est comic there is, I've pulled out the 1986 Scott McCloud classic aptly titled

DESTROY!!

PARENTS BEWARE!

(it says on the front)

This comic book is exactly what you think it is: 32 pages of meaningless, overblown violence, mayhem and destruction! (Plus one Naughty Word)

And, up below the bombastically immense title on the cover:

THE LOUDEST COMIC-BOOK IN THE UNIVERSE!!

It only cost $4.95 in 1986, but this comic book is huge. How huge is it? It's fourteen inches tall and eleven inches wide...twenty-two inches across when you open it up. It is so huge I can sit entirely inside it.



It is so large I couldn't fit it into my scanner. So yes, you are looking at photographs of the comic book here, not scans. Don't sue me, Mister Understanding Comics McCloud!

The plot? Well, such as it is: The Red Basher has gone berserk in Manhattan, destroying everything in sight, and only Captain Maximum can stop him. So, you're likely to get several pages of angsty discussion and conversation over what's eating the Red Basher, huh? Not in a comic book called DESTROY!!, baby!:



The mega-sized pages and McCloud's crisp distinct inkwork are perfect for displaying the most intense and violent fistfight in the history of comics. Well, at least the most destructive:



Remember that Justice League issue where Batman laid out Guy Gardner with the famous "one punch"? That's child's play. With one punch, the Basher sends Captain Maximum flying from the Wall Street district on Manhattan's south end straight uptown to Rockefeller Center: as a character screams, "a total of more than four miles!" And, right into the Time-Warner Building, too!



Say goodbye ("Bye bye!") to most of New York's most famous architectural wonders, as the Flatiron Building, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal, and Chrysler Building get smashed into rubble during the mighty brawl!



Because once big superpowered guys start hitting each other with buildings, it's sorta like potato chips...it's hard to stop!



From there on the fussin', the feudin', and the fightin' (not to mention the SHOUTIN') start to get a little outta control:



My goodness. It's getting mighty violent in here.



All good things must of course come to an end:



(Granted, that's a pretty macabre panel, but hey, it was published in 1986, when we still could think blowing up New York was fun to look at.)

Anyway, the punchline, in the final two panels?



So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The ultimate black-and-white Friday Night Fightin' comic book. Graphic novel literature at its finest, and a masterwork of visual narrative fiction that simply must be experienced in the original big-ass format to be appreciated. That, my dear friends, is the magic of...DESTROY!!

(Buy your own:


...and read about DESTROY!! on Scott McCloud's website.)

Bahlactus is big, yeah yeah yeah. He's not small, no no no.