Daily Archives: May 26, 2012

Cool ‘Dark Knight’ images

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I’m still not sure how much I’m looking forward to Chris Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises.” I thought the first two films in his trilogy were good if dark but I’m afraid Nolan is creating a claustrophobic world.

Maybe it’s the expansive, hero-filled world that Marvel has created, and that I enjoy so much, that makes Nolan’s self-contained Batman (and apparently Superman) films seem so inwardly focused.

Anyway, Warner Bros. has released some cool images in the past few days. Best of the bunch is the “showdown” banner above. In case you haven’t been paying attention, that’s villain Bane on the right.

Here’s another good one.

They have a pretty dramatic, bleak feel to them, don’t they?

We’ll keep an eye on new images and, of course, we’ll see how everything turns out on July 20.

iPhoneography: The beauty of cemeteries

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There’s something about cemeteries, particularly historic cemeteries, that really suits photography. Cemeteries are places of mourning and remembrance and celebration. They’re also places where art and architecture and personal taste — of the deceased and the loved ones left behind — mix.

Beech Grove Cemetery is the city-owned cemetery for Muncie, Indiana. Established in the mid-1800s, Beech Grove is home to some of the area’s oldest gravesites.

The city’s oldest and most established families have graves and mausoleums there, but it’s also the final resting place for some of the community’s poorest residents, with an entire section of graves of people buried at government expense.

Here are some iPhone photos of Beech Grove sites I saw today.

Above: A grave with a marker but also with a statue of Jesus — holding wind chimes and other items — and personal items important to the deceased or family members.

A grave marked only by a small wooden cross with magic-marker lettering.

Peeling paint on this wooden cross.

A row of mausoleums for some of Muncie’s captains of industry.

The approach to one of the Ball family mausoleums.

The ornate front door of a Petty family mausoleum.

The stained glass window in the rear of the Petty mausoleum.

A towering obelisk marks the grave of a Muncie physician.

Monster World memories: Captain Company

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How many of us monster kids, living in the heyday of the Monster World in the 1960s, saved up our nickels until we could stop thumbing through the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland and actually order something from those Captain Company ads?

It appears there isn’t a definitive history of Captain Company online, which is too bad. I’d love to know more about the mail-order company, which was purportedly based on the East Coast and was the mail-order sales division of Warren Publishing, which unleashed Famous Monsters, Creepy and other mags on the world.

Looking around the Interwebs, though, I see a few people with some of the same memories of Captain Company.

Especially the Captain Company ads: Like their comic book counterparts for X-Ray Specs and the like, the Captain Company ads were a riot of amateurish drawings, over-eager copy and outright misrepresentations.

I ordered back issues of FM through Captain Company as well as a few other items, the details of which I’ve long forgotten. It’s possible I bought some of those little 8 millimeter films — digest versions of classic Universal horror movies — through Captain Company.

I believe Captain Company has been revived, in some form, as a merchandising arm of the new Famous Monsters. It’s not the same, of course, but neither are we.

Here are some ads, many of them collected by http://www.diversionsofthegroovykind.blogsppot.com