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Demon in a Blue Dress

Okay, the two sites have little in common, but each has a narrow focus. Between the two they should offer something fun.

The first is Monsterblog!, which bills itself as "a tribute to the Monster comics of Jack Kirby." The site's focused on the monster, horror, and sci fi tales that (along with westerns and romance titles) were Marvel comics' staples before launching the Fantastic Four and the parade of heroes that soon filled the 1960s. Many of these titles persisted into their age of heroes, though after a while they became more and more a case of reprints. The only deficiency in the site's direction is that it sticks solely with the tales illustrated by Jack Kirby, ignoring (at least) Steve Ditko's work in the same era. Still, if you want to stroll the covers of the early Marvel Age - monsters and heroes - there's always the Silver Age Marvel Comics Cover Index, which among other things is a fun way to see what was out on the newsstands and spinner racks at the same time from '62 until the start of '71. (That's not the second site I was referring to, though.)

The second is a bizarre collection of modified covers (mostly from comics) from a site focused on trans-gendered people. A smaller collection of them would have been more amusing, but if one follows the occasional link to the story, or traces the site back to its roots, it quickly becomes clear that there's a fetishistic drive behind these pieces. Oh, well... it's a big world out there and people get... excited about some strange things. I recall hearing once that there was a magazine once dedicated to fiction about women turning into giants, and that one of the key ingredients to the prose pieces they accepted was the tearing of the clothes as their bodies grew huge. (I believe it was part of a recollection heard on This American Life, one of my favorite, ongoing radio programs. I don't recall the particular show's hook where the magazine was mention, but I think it's in there somewhere... even if it was too incidental a point to be indexed .)

Thanks to Crypt Leak for spotting the trans-gendered cover gallery, btw.

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