TreasuryCast #2 – Limited Collectors Edition C41: Super Friends

TREASURYCAST #2 - Limited Collectors' Edition C41: Super Friends

Rob welcomes guest Luke Daab (composer of our theme!) to talk about LIMITED COLLECTORS' EDITION C41: SUPER FRIENDS!

Check out images from this comic by clicking here!

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Opening theme by Luke Daab: http://daabcreative.com

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13 responses to “TreasuryCast #2 – Limited Collectors Edition C41: Super Friends

  1. This was such a fun episode. The love and excitement you two have for this book radiated off you, traveled through the sound waves, and burst from my phone’s speaker like the Atom himself!

    And speaking of the Atom and so many other superheroes I finally get to see Alex Toth render, oh my god that art is gorgeous! Beyond gorgeous, it’s beautiful! Beyond that–to borrow a line, “I wanna take it behind the elementary school and get it pregnant.” Toth’s 1970s Justice League is freaking incredible, not to mention the statue shots of all the friends who had worked with the League up to that point. The page with Wendy looking for more Lady Leaguers reinforces my dream project to write a team-up of Supergirl, Black Canary, Hawkgirl, and Mera.

    Great job on another terrific episode. And seriously, I’m having very untoward thoughts about the art in this book!

  2. Just started listening and I wanted to mention this before I forget: There is a great 80 min. Alex Toth documentary on three Space Ghost/Dino Boy DVD. There are also 3 very fine Toth collections:
    Genius, Animated: The Cartoon Art of Alex Toth
    Genius, Illustrated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth
    Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth

    Highly recommended!

  3. FYI: Wendy & Marvin return to TV in 2017 as recurring characters on the upcoming NBC sitcom “Powerles,” where they will be played by Kate Micucci and Josh Fadem.

  4. Wonderful, yet again. I never had this one, and damned if you don’t have wanting to find it somewhere. All of that great original artwork by Toth in the framing sequences and the cartooning tutorial in the back sound completely awesome.
    This is fast becoming my favorite F&W podcast. Can’t wait until you cover some Marvel treasuries as well.
    (By the way, I see the pronunciation of my last name is giving you and some of the guys on the network problems: the first syllable is pronounced like bow, as in bow and arrow, and the is like, well, the word ‘are’ with an “sn” in front of it, i.e., it *doesn’t rhyme with ‘snare’ – accent’s on the first syllable.)

  5. I grew up in the era of the Tresaury Books but I always shied away from this one. Having read the Suoer Friends comic I thought this would be too ‘all ages’.

    Now I realize my mistake. The Toth pages you posted are glorious and make me want to find this to own now. And a Toth-rendered Supergirl!! I don’t think he ever drew her anywhere else. As you say, the heroes being friends, laughing, and being proud of each other is a sentiment sorely missed these days.

    And the reprints being from JLA and not the Super Friends comic make this that much greater.

    Lastly a request. Can you post the Toth closing credo somewhere? I want to post that on my office door.

  6. FYI: If you want to read the Toth’s short story and his discussion of TV animation and don’t want to hunt the treasury down, you can read both in volume 1 of the Superfriends trade paperback that DC published several years ago.

  7. First off, yes, I do hate Marvin.

    But I love this treasury, and this episode! I really can’t add much that you guys didn’t gush about, but it’s just fantastic. I picked it up close to 30 years ago at my first comic shop, after drooling over it in old comic ads for the previous decade and a half. The Toth artwork is spectacular, and the JLA reprints are fun. Luke’s right, you do have to put on your DC Silver Age hat to fully enjoy these tales, but it’s worth it.

    For those of you turned on to Alex Toth’s art by this, there is a great full-length tale featuring Superman and Batman, drawn by Toth, in Superman Annual #9 from 1983.

    For anyone interested, I wrote an article on this Super Friends tabloid for Back Issue magazine issue #61, which was published in tabloid/treasury size. So it’s very meta!

    Chris

  8. A METRIC tonne! Wow, that’s 10% more than a U.S. ton!

    I only very rarely caught Marvin and Wendy on TV and my main experience of them was from a Super-Friends coloring book I had.

    Great to hear Luke on a podcast. He’s a Treasury Edition himself.

    1. That Super Friends coloring book is the greatest coloring book of all time. The art is 100% on model to the Toth designs. It’s just gorgeous.

      Chris

  9. Another Treasury Edition that merits the name, thanks to the original Toth art and it’s being a proto-trade of noteworthy JLofA stories. I love that cover, and happily have it on both my Showcase Presents Super Friends volume and as painted over by Alex Ross for the color trade (which reprinted the vignette and Toth animation editorial.) So glad they did the League retrospective that places Martian Manhunter and the lovely heroines in a context of being at least honorary associates of the Super Friends (aside from J’Onn secretly being El Dorado the whole time, of course.) By the way, I see the Super Friends as a seperate “club” from the JLA, as they had their own base and expanded roster. They really only had the four core members in common, with occasional overlap from GL, Flash, Atom & the Hawks. In retrospect, it was sort of a joint task force between the League and the Global Guardians.

    Time for another of my trademark unpopular opinions: I find the old Gardner Fox League stories to be an inane slog, but I get a big kick out of E. Nelson Bridwell’s Super Friends stories. Neither is going to win prizes for plotting and the villains in both tend to suck, plus Bridwell was obviously influenced by Fox. However, Bridwell’s heroes have more distinct personalities, there’s a greater sense of lighthearted fun, the art is better, and I adore the hammy attempts at world building.

    Finally, for the record, I’m not some slabber who is first at the door of a comic shop on Wednesday morning to select the most pristine possible copies. I even stopped bagging and boarding my new comics about fifteen years ago, just throwing them en masses into long boxes or loaning them out to friends who I know will read them on the toilet and won’t ever give them all back when they’re done. My complaint about Treasuries is they can’t handle standard reading stress without falling to pieces, much less the more rough and tumble reading of my youth. I just find them cumbersome and weak. I was an early adopter of trades for the same reason– they’ve got a square spine with strong glue and I can kick the crap out of most of them without their being blown to bits. Meanwhile, black & white magazine of the seventies and eighties were more flexible than trades, so I’ve got a lot more of them still intact, too. Whoever starts an Epic Illustrated Podcast, please keep me in mind!

  10. Another great episode Rob. I missed the Superfriends era – I don’t think the cartoons were ever shown in Irish TV – but I remember the JLA stories from the Showcase Presents volumes. My only recollection of Wendy and Marvin was seeing Marvin getting punched in the face in an issue of Kingdom Come, and having them be part of the Titans Tower backroom staff in the post Johns’ run, where Marvin was mauled to death by a demon dog (who had been disguised as a Wonder Dog). Guess some DC writers did not like Marvin!!!!

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