Saturday, January 14, 2017

A Month of... Celebrities in Comics, Day 14: The Public Life of the American Teenager

And now, a whole lotta celebs for your Saturday! Bob "Spay or neuter your pets" Barker! Super CONTROL spies Don Adams (or maybe Humphrey Bogart?) and Barbara Feldon (not pictured, but hey: mentioned)! Mustachioed muchacho Robert Wagner! And all on just one page! Who says this isn't the bountiful age of boistrous Bully...um...blogginess!


Panels from "Princess...American Style" in Girls' Romances #134 (DC/National, July 1968), pencils by John Rosenberger

And what the heck, we can even properly count real-life Miss American Teen-Ager Michele Patrick, especially since she actually made a comment about appearing in the comic over at Sleestak's excellent Lady, That My Skull blog! Here's the glamorous Michele and her big-ass trophy, along with a cool-ass vintage Dodge Charger!


Michele Patrick, 1968 (Photo: Alden Jewell/Wikimedia Commons)

Congrats, Ms. Patrick! I hope you said "hi" to Agent 99 for me!

2 comments:

Ward Hill Terry said...

I figured you'd just ignore the Superman vs. Muhammed Ali book as too obvious! Will you be acknowledging or ignoring ersatz celebrity appearances? For instance, I know that Curt Swan drew Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker in at least two Superman stories. A policeman who gives Tony Stark a ticket in Iron Man #12-something looked like Steve Martin, and accused Stark of being a "wild and crazy guy." I guess we'll have to suffer through Henry Kissinger a couple of times, eh?

Bully said...

Terrence, you raise an important question I haven't really addressed yet, so thanks!

My intent is to just show appearance of actual celebrities appearing as themselves. For example: there's an (unnamed) Archie Bunker appearance in Shazam! #5, but it's as the character, not the actor, so I'm not counting that. Likewise, the policeman in Iron Man #138 looks and sounds like Steve Martin, but he obviously isn't the real Steve Martin, who is not a policeman. (You can see how complicated and arbitrary this gets!)

Obvious celebrity parodies with changed names (as frequently featured in Archie) don't count, but if they retain their real names, they do. Celebs like Simon Cowell and Jennifer Lopez, who appeared as "themselves" in an Archie comic, do. A TV or movie character on the street that looks like their actor but acts like their character doesn't count. An actual celeb, or at least one that could conceivably be in the same place at the same time, does. That Charles Bronson appearance in Peter Parker isn't captioned as him, but it could be, so I'm counting it. Ben Grimm watching a TV show counts if the show and actors themselves are shown and identifiable, though. Don Rickles counts, Goody Rickles doesn't. Bob Hope counts when you see him on a movie set in Fantastic Four, Bob Hope doesn't count in Bob Hope comics.

Today, this could be the real Howard Cosell isn't invalidated by the story, so let's say that's him. Most appearances of real-life politicians or statesmen (Presidents, Margaret Thatcher, Fidel Castro, and yes, Henry Kissinger meeting with Doctor Doom) pretty much all count.

So you can see how arbitrary it is in my li'l stuffed brain! I might do a week or feature on TV/movie characters appearing, but not as a general rule. And I'm all pretty much makin' it up as I go along, so who knows? I'm just havin' some fun with it.

And oh yeah! I've got to do Superman vs. Muhammed Ali! Mainly because I want to Photoshop myself into the crowd.

Thanks Terrence!