Mixed Lot Of Recent Pics

The pics seen below are a grab-bag of figure pics shot in late September and early October of this year, and cover a small range of subjects.

The pics at the top of the batch, and the quartet immediately below, are from the long-delayed continuation of the Spanish Civil War anniversary pics I started back in July to commemorate the 70th anniversary of that war's beginning.

The first two are of former Spanish Republican soldiers who fled to France in late March-early April, 1939, just as the Nationalist forces under Generalissimo Francisco Franco(still continuing in his valiant fight to remain dead, as of this writing)were putting the finishing touches on their victory over the Republicans, and thousands of Republican refugees, civilian and military alike, headed into south-western France to escape the wrath of their Nationalist countrymen.

There, many of these refugees were crowded into internment camps by the French authorities, a condition with which left-wing Austrian and German refugees would become familiar in October, 1939, when the French government tossed them into internment camps as well, and, finally, French and foreign Jews, when the Vichy government packed them in, on its own initiative, in late 1940-early 1941.

The quartet below are pics of a Spanish Republican guerrilla in action along the Aragon front in north-eastern Spain circa 1938.

The pic below those is a birthday gift portrait of a friend of mine that I couldn't resist posting here, because I like the colour scheme match of hair and clothing I did in it.

Finally, the last two batches, which are kinda inter-mixed, depict, in the man with dog photos, one of the worst aspects, for any dog's human, that is, of walkin' a dog, while the other is my take on an aspect of the GI Joe Adventure Team mythos, the Adventure Team Administrator.

For those of you un-familiar with the GI Joe Adventure Team line, it came out in 1970 as a response to pressure from parents' groups and the like who were concerned about GI Joe's previous incarnation as a WWII-era American soldier, sailor, marine and pilot, and felt that such toys contributed to encouraging kids to be violent and war-like.

Whatever one thinks of that now, it resulted in 1969 and 1970 in a complete transformation of the line.

The GI Joe Action Team, once having consisted of an Action Soldier, Sailor, Marine and Pilot, as well as an Astronaut and six Action Soldiers of the World(made up of, respectively, a German Stormtrooper, Imperial Japanese Soldier, British Commando, Australian Jungle Fighter, French Resistance Fighter and Russian Soldier), and a Green Beret and Marine Jungle Fighter in 1966-67, became the GI Joe Adventure Team, consisting of an Adventure Team Commander(one European-American, the other African-American), a Land Adventurer, Sea Adventurer, Air Adventurer, Adventurer(who was African-American, as opposed to the other team members, who were European-Americans), Man of Action(a code-name for a re-worked version of the GI Joe Action Soldier) and an Astronaut(in the first two years of the AT 's existence only), and, in 1975-76, two super-hero characters who were added to the AT in its final years, Mike Power, Atomic Man and Bulletman the Human Bullet.

It was also in the last year, 1976, of the AT's US and Canadian existence that the only two "enemy" characters, The Intruders, a race of super-intelligent aliens who physically resembled Neanderthal Men, in the GI Joe line's history appeared.

Anyhow, the AT went off on all sorts of exciting adventures, hunting white tigers, capturing pygmy gorillas, solving spacewalk mysteries, and so on.

But, in recently thinking about the AT mythos, it sorta hit me that the AT, which, at its height, consisted of only 10 members, must have had more people than that overseeing the day-to-day operations of the team, making sure that bills got paid, equipment was maintained, and so on.

Hence, drawing on this idea, plus a pic I took about 4 years ago called GI Joe, Action Bureaucrat(now lost, alas), which depicted a Joe of the Action Team era heading into work, served as the inspiration for this series, called Adventure Team Administrator, 1974, which is when I figured the pic would have taken, if the AT had ever existed, and which depicts him, briefcase in paw, walking into one of the AT's several regional head-quarters around the world.

Whew!!!! All that palaver, just to introduce a photo-set!!!!!

Almost as exhausting to write it, as it is to read it, I'm sure.

Anyhow, hope y'all enjoy the pics.