Endnotes & Digressions:

1. Words, pencils and inks by Mike Russell; inks and colors by Bill Mudron.

2. In possibly related news, Roland Emmerich's disaster-movie spectacular "2012" opens today (Friday the 13th, 2009) in theaters everywhere. (My Oregonian colleague Marc Mohan didn't like it very much, but I thought it was so over-the-top that it became kind of stupidly awesome. But then I have a soft spot for disaster cheese. See endnote #4.)

3. If you'd like a print-rez, stand-alone version of that "Lava Tornado!" movie poster, you can download that bad boy right here: [ JPEG ] [ PDF ]

(If you tack it up somewhere, by all means feel free to e-mail me a photo.)

4. Readers may be interested to learn that the rooster in the above comic is an actual disaster-movie reference. He appears in 1980's trash classic "When Time Ran Out..." -- simultaneously one of the best and worst disaster movies ever made. (Here's a review of the film at CoolCinemaTrash.com.)

Strictly speaking, "When Time Ran Out..." is pretty dismal: Producer Irwin Allen's last big-screen outing is a cheap-looking, small-scale flop about a pair of resort kings (William Holden, James Franciscus) and an oil-driller (Paul Newman) who come to blows when a fake-looking volcano lays waste to an island resort. But the movie also has this weird, soapy charm -- it's like an episode of "Dynasty" where everything bursts into flames -- and in its way, it's the purest distillation of the Irwin Allen formula.

All Allen's disaster-movie elements are here: the lurid love triangles; the ham acting, particularly by James "Lil' Heston" Franciscus; the lousy effects and oddly placed science-fiction elements; and, of course, Ernest Borgnine. And there are some hilariously strange aberrations -- like Pat Morita doing somersaults into a lake of lava, and Alex Karras (that's right, Webster's dad) getting wiped out by a tidal wave while chasing his champion cockfighting rooster around during an earthquake. Plus, Jacqueline Bissett, Veronica Hamel and Barbara Carrera are possibly the three sexiest disaster-movie heroines ever.

Here's a YouTube clip with some "When Time Ran Out..." disaster "highlights" -- including the bit with Karras and that damn rooster.