Fwafe fonflif!

I saw Cerebus the Aardvark #1 on the stands in my comics shop in Monterey; I was twelve.

Moses and the Mosquito

It’s 1985, the summer after my second year in college. I wasn’t “away” at college, I’d moved out from home the moment I graduated high school. Unlike many U of Chicago students but like many others, I’d made Hyde Park my home and become more of a neighborhood guy than a cloistered student.

This one

Hello cosmos, I’m from Vietnam.

My brother’s Avengers run ended in the high hundred-teens, and I started buying issues in the 130s or 140s, so as I filled in the gap, issue by issue, and bought new ones, the Mantis story was a main focus for me.

The way underground

My kind of Old School dungeon crawl, ya punks.

Hey, I kept this post mostly SFW but most of the links in it go to a great big NOT SFW, so go ahead and click on those and lose your job, if you want.

There were a lot of other comics around during my childhood besides the ones I bought at the newsstand, spelled a wee bit differently.

Bare-chested villainy

BONUS POST: Thanks to Ed McW and his May pledge at the Doctor Xaos Patreon! It’s long past time for more Doom posting. I have the same thought now as I did when looking at this title on the racks forty years ago: what an excellent idea.

I, said the Fly

This was real.

Every so often, one can see superhero comics’ heart.

Fizzle

FOOM #11

In 1976, my first issue of FOOM came in the mail, about Jack Kirby’s return to Marvel. He actually hadn’t been gone all that long, but at that time DC and Marvel were perceived as Ormadz and Ahriman, and even that was too vague for me to process because the Marvel fanfare said nothing about what he’d been doing during his … uh, hiatus “over there,” i.e., the New Gods collectively speaking, and others.

Second-best villainy

H’m, let’s see that one again.

BONUS POST: Thanks to Larry Lade and his May pledge at the Doctor Xaos Patreon! Let’s have some fun today. I got to thinking about how much I liked some of the secondary villains when I was a kid, especially those poor orphans who showed up in Marvel Team-Up or for a half-issue beatdown in the Avengers.

Superhuman endurance

No glamor.

It’s 1966, in The Amazing Spider-Man #33, co-plotted by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, drawn by Ditko. it’s the third of a three-issue story called “If This Be My Destiny …!” which is so iconic as to have its own detailed Wikipedia page.

Kim Yale

Kim

I’d returned to reading comics in the summer of 1985. By the summer of 1986, I blush to confess, I had become an ardent letter-writer to multiple titles, a letterhack as the term went then, as well as pen-pal with several other people with the same behavioral disorder (remember: no email, no internet, no personal computers, nothin’ but paper letters and the phone, people).

MCI misdemeanors and felonies

All right, let’s get it over with.

BONUS POST: Thanks to Markku Tuovinen and his May pledge at the Doctor Xaos Patreon! Jared Sorensen once cogently explained why dungeons have doors: so the player-characters can break them down. Think about it; if you didn’t want them to do it, then you would have just put a wall there. Mind control in superhero comics is precisely the same in its purpose: so a hero can shake it off. Fully or just enough to resist doing the one single dastardly thing on which the villain’s plan hinges, either way.

Explain the Legion to me

1958, Otto Binder (writer) & Al Plastino (art)

I promise to ask this with humility and respect if you promise to answer without blithering. Blithering about the Legion of Superheroes seems to be almost a whole subset of comics fandom, comparable perhaps to Glorantha moonbats such as myself in the role-playing hobby. Jacobs & Jones’ The Comic Book Heroes, not otherwise sentimental, breaks down into slobbers about it for a whole chapter. I am sure someone out there can manage better.