by Erin Nicole
Welcome to October on the Shattered Lens!
Here’s hoping this month finds you with joy, family, friends, fiends, ghouls, and ghosts!
Today is also the start of the Shattered Les’s annual horrorthon! Sit back, enjoy the reviews, the art, and the music videos, and have a great month of ghoulish fun!
by Erin Nicole
by Erin Nicole
Happy October! When my family lived in Oklahoma, this abandoned barn was near our house. Lisa always said it was haunted and maybe she was right! The last time I drove through the town was three years ago and the barn was still there. Still abandoned. Maybe still haunted.
76 years ago, in Fawcett’s Captain Marvel Adventures #79, Tawky Tawny made his first appearance.
Who was Tawky Tawny? He was a humanoid Bengal tiger from India who spoke perfect English and who simply wanted to come to the United States so that he could learn about American culture. Though Tawky Tawny is friendly and intelligent, everyone panics when they see him because he’s a humanoid tiger who talks. It falls to Captain Marvel (in the days before D.C. bought the character and changed his name became Shazam) to track down the Tawky Tawny and discover what is going on with him.
Luckily, Captain Marvel discovers that Tawky Tawny means well and just wants to get to know people. Captain Marvel gets him a job as a tour guide at a local museum.
Created by writer Otto Binder and artist C.C. Beck, Tawky Tawny soon became one of Captain Marvel’s most important supporting characters. He even got his own origin story when it was revealed that Tawky Tawny was a normal tiger until he was framed for murder. A local shaman gave Tawny a serum that allowed him to stand upright and verbally defend himself. For the rest of Captain Marvel’s run, Tawky Tawny was the hero’s best friend. While Captain Marvel was the beloved hero, Tawky Tawny was the outsider who never lost his positive outlook and his intellectual curiosity.
Fawcett subsequently sold Captain Marvel and all of his supporting characters to DC Comics. Unfortunately, DC has consistently proven themselves to be inept when it comes to bringing Tawky Tawny into their continuity. Still, Tawky Tawny endures as a symbol of hope and optimism.
Previous Great Moments In Comic Book History:
Artist Unknown
This steamy cover is from 1939.
by Jim Steranko
This cover is from 1978.
Artist Unknown
High heels, lingerie, and a dead body in the tub. It doesn’t get more pulp than that.
From 1928 to 1932, Broadway Stories featured articles, stories, and pin-ups that all centered around the backstage world of Broadway. Below is a sampling of the covers of Broadway Stories. Unfortunately, the identities of the artists responsible for the covers are unknown.
January, 1928
February, 1928
December, 1928
January, 1929
May, 1929
July, 1929
August, 1929
September, 1929
January, 1930
September, 1930
June, 1931
February, 1932
by Howell Dodd
The cover is from 1952.
One evening, four years ago, I went for a walk around the neighborhood. Two blocks away from the house, I saw that something that I hadn’t seen before.
This run-down RV was parked against the curb.
The closer I got, the more obvious it was that the RV had seen better days. The tires were flat. The windows were broken. Though the picture above may be blurry, you can see that some of the back paneling was forcefully removed from the vehicle.
The front of the RV was not much better. The hole in the windshield was probably made by a rock many years previously and I wondered who had thrown it and why. The orange ticket was a notice that the RV would be towed if it wasn’t moved but I knew that the RV had only been sitting on the side of the street for an hour or two so I wondered when the ticket had been taped to the glass. The ticket itself was from the city but the line for the date had been left blank. The license plate said “Go By By.” Someone had once probably loved traveling in this RV.
Because the side door was missing, I took a peek inside.
I didn’t go inside, though.
The next morning, I went outside to check on the RV and it was gone. I guess the city towed it away but I didn’t notice any tow trucks in the area the night before. Ever since that evening, I’ve wondered who owned the RV and why it ended up parked off the side of the road.
Previous Moments:
by Harry Barton
I guess this is the true story of how Castro came to power.
Through the Shattered Lens 