Thursday, March 05, 2009

Charlton Notebook: Hot Rods and Racing Cars #117

The whole 'hot rod' genre was running on fumes and bald tires by this point, but this is still a very entertaining read. I'm about as far from a gear head as you can get, but I really dig these stories that seem to pin the world's future on the outcome of some backwoods race. The folks at Charlton have tried their very best to use racing as an analogy for life's challenges. The first story "Born Loser", has some good oval racing action mixed in with a dysfunctional father/son relationship. There a rather charming story (which I actually found to be quite educational) about restoring a Model T. The finale "Magic Gloves" is a morality play about having too much faith in superstition. It's all pretty silly, but these pages demonstrate that Jack Keller is a master storyteller.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have several of these hotrod maga LR. What I love most about them is the 60's big engine n' burnin' rubber talk. Like you I'm not a gearhead, but I love reading phrases like "big slicks smokin", "hit the binders", "haze the hides", "in the weeds" etc. Sometimes I don't know what they are talking about but it sounds cool, the slang of a mostly bygone era. Jack Keller went on to sell cars. He knew his stuff.