“Nova” means “explodes and dies”

In writing about webcomics and the development of superhero characters through use, I had a weird flashback to 1976.

So we’re cuttin’ alllll the way back to my tween-teen transition and the siren call of a new title at Marvel: The Man Called Nova, by Marv Wolfman and John Buscema. I bought it, and if memory serves, stuck with it for about a year.

Spider-Schlep

In one of the letter columns in the late-80s Question, Denny O’Neil refers to Peter Parker as a schlep, and always having been one. That’s Yiddish, and a little confusing because that precise word is a verb meaning to lug something inconvenient, but here, and as I’ve often heard or used it, it’s short for schlepper, meaning an inept, stupid person.

Super bad

Meet the Plutonian. Kiss your ass goodbye.

It took a lot of working out the context in my mind, but I’m finally ready to look at a very interesting species of comics villain.

Mind in the gutter

Sorry, not a smut post this time.

I like him anyway

This was my favorite character in the exact mid-1970s, age 12-13. Why? That’s a question that gets more interesting the more I try to answer, and also less and less easy to answer,

Puh-leeze!

I usually don’t blog what-happened-just-now style, but right now it fits. Today (Nov 29) featured the second time in a week, and in my whole life, that a working person who happened to be black addressed me – 50ish, white – as “boss.”

Hitting bottom

Grrr! Fear me! Is anyone listening?

In stories, there is just about nothing worse than the evil of evil failing to be evil. This post concerns the supervillain whose single contribution to comics is to provide the gauge of bad-guy quality with its lowest indicated reading.

The book that wasn’t there

The earliest issue in my inherited stash

Dr. Strange, the Hulk, Namor, and the Silver Surfer? Someone had some balls to propose a super-group with these characters; if they could ever find a common sphere of activity and a collective identity, that’d be the end of super-heroing and super-villaining for anyone else. But that line-up didn’t last past its own set-up, and settled instead into Strange, Valkyrie, and Nighthawk in a sort-of recap of the early Thomas Avengers, with the Hulk showing up frequently.