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I did forget about Daredevil!  Looks like Stan was back with Ol' Faithful in '64.

I was heavily irradiated after I was hit by a van.  They used to x-ray me three or four times a week.  They told me there was a chance it would fuck my shit up on down the road.

Unfortunately, the only superpower I seem to have picked up is the ability to annoy people with Horso talk.

It worked.

And your ability to go without sleep. Your superhero persona should be named Insomniac.

I prefer "Insomino."

Too close to "Inseminate".

Or even Inseminoid.

Don't forget Goiter's greatest power, the power of laziness!

That's more a birthright than a power.

Surely it was amplified by the radiation.

Believe it or not, it was tempered by it.

Can we get another round scheduled soon?

I may be moving to Japan.  It's a start.

Are you going to Ninja school?  That would be awesome.

I already have a black belt in Yoshukai.  I don't want to compromise its purity by mixing in another martial art.

It only took James Bond a week or two to become a ninja in You Only Live Twice.  Must be pretty easy.

First we must shave you.

Japanese proverb say, "Bird never make nest in bare tree."

There needs to be more James Bond comics.  I remember an excellent adaption of "For Your Eyes Only" tacked on to the back of my "Return of the Jedi" weekly comics when I was a kid.

I'm going to drop "Thor" and "Punisher MAX"

I've been buying them absently and out of obligation...but they are unreadable crap now. Say what you will about JMS but his Thor had interesting back characters, situations, and fun fights. Now I can't figure out what is going on or even tell who anyone is. And Punisher...blech...

I want to support the medium though so I'm thining of replacing those two with "Red Robin" and "Green Lantern Corps"

When I was a kid I was all about Marvel, now i'm thinking of buying nothing but DC stuff...oh the times...

I'm thinning my pull list out too. I just started reading Thor on this arc, but as soon as it's done, so am I. Also thinking of dropping Batman: Streets of Gotham, Uncanny X-Men and Captain America.

I'd definitely recommend picking up Green Lantern Corps, but you'll either have to pick up the last couple issues of Green Lantern or wait a while, because yesterday's issue was part two of the GL books crossover "War of the Green Lanterns" (part 1 was in GL and part 3 will be in GL: Emerald Warriors, and so on, no idea how long it's supposed to last).

Still debating on dropping The Flash, what with Flashpoint about to start and all.

I was looking at old Avengers covers, and I came upon #24. It reminded me a lot of the cover to the last issue of the original Squadron Supreme limited series. Have a look:

I figured the Squadron Supreme's cover must have been an homage, but there's no "X Artist After Y Artist" tag. Maybe it's just one of those comic cover tropes. A small group of people surrounded by a large group of people seems common enough. There's plenty of comic covers where the heroes are backed up against the wall, too. (The first Uncanny X-Men issue of the "Days of Future Past" storyline comes to mind. And Batman #9. It's not like I think the X-Men cover was inspired by the Batman cover just because there are two people standing on their guard with a wall behind them.) It's different enough, I guess, that maybe the Squadron Supreme cover wasn't inspired by the Avengers one. The Avengers cover is more dynamic, but it's hard to be more dynamic than Kirby.

I was trying to think of other covers like the two above, but nothing was coming to mind. Then I thought of an issue of a comic I remembered from my youth, but I couldn't remember the title. It's one where four characters are on the cover, but instead of being surrounded by people they're by a field of white. Somewhere on the cover is the word "VOID" in big letters. I remember this because I cut the word out and pasted it over a picture of my ex-stepfather. (My mother had just divorced him a couple weeks prior. I also cut out and pasted a monster face over his face. I hung it on my wall for a while. When I look back at it. seems like an overreaction.)

I thought maybe it was a Avengers West Coast issue, but turns out it wasn't. I had a heck of a time finding covers for Avengers West Coast, since coverbrowser.com cuts off when they stop calling it West Coast Avengers. Looked for a page on coverbrowser.com for Avengers West Coast. Ended up having to go to Mile High Comics and find the covers that way.

Anyway, while looking at West Coast Avengers covers, I found this one:

It has a yellow circle like the Avengers cover, and it has the Scarlet Witch standing in roughly the same place in the circle. Al Milgrom drew that one, and I would think he'd credit another artist if he was patterning his illustration after that other artist. He and Frenz write "after Simonson" when they did their Beta Ray Bill-inspired cover here. Here's a comparison of that one with the original Simonson cover (from Thor #337). Maybe Ron Frenz is just a better person than Al Milgrom.

I wish I could remember the comic with the "VOID" on the cover. (I think it may have said "Enter the Void.") For some reason, I'm remembering Spider-Man and Jarvis on the cover.

Found it! It was "Into the Void," and it was Avengers #314.

I kept telling myself it wasn't an Avengers comic. I was wrong. Here's the cover:

Looking at all these covers laid out chronologically reminds me of how awful comic art got to be in the early nineties, thanks to the superstardom of people like Liefeld and McFarlane.

On that 'Into the Void!' cover, Spider-Man looks like he has to take a crap and is having trouble holding it in.  I like this added bit of "real world" feel.

I knew which comic you were referring to, Goits. Well, I didn't know the exact number, but I knew it was an Avengers comic.

I remember buying that issue of Squadron Supreme when it was on the newstand in 1986.  I was quite young.  Most other comics were still under a dollar at the time.  I handed the guy my dollar and the comic, and he told me it wasn't enough.  I thought he was trying to rip me off.  I hadn't even bothered to look at the price, because I wasn't used to comics costing that much.  You hand 'em a comic and a dollar, and you get the comic back with a little change.  

Even after I saw the price, I think I was still half-convinced he was ripping me off.  I guess I used to think news vendors had access to printing presses, or were excellent price forgers.

Marvel prices were in pretty wild flux from 1985 to 1986.  Looks the majority of titles were 65¢ or 75¢ in 1985, with specials like the Secret Wars costing a dollar.  (Did we have to pay taxes on PX purchases on the military base in Germany?  I don't think we did, but I'm not sure.)  By 1986, more were 75¢ and some (Spider-Man titles) had gone as high as 95¢.  The 65¢ ones all seem to have become 75¢.  I'm not sure what made each on cost what it did.  Page length?  Prestige? (I think the $1.25 comics were double issues, but I don't know about the rest.)

I think most DC comics were 75¢ in 1985 and 1986.  I'm not sure.

I stopped reading comics from about '82 to '87 because we moved away and the new town we lived in didn't have any grocery stores that carried comics. (We had 1 local store, and when I asked if they had comics, the owner showed me a can of Comet scouring powder). My 2 older siblilngs and I decided to each get a year's subscription to a title (FF for my sister, Hulk for my brother, Spider-man for myself). They did it mostly for support. But after the year was up, I decided not to renew. Occasionally when we went to the big city of Des Moines, I would find myself in a K-Mart or something and happen upon some racks, and I would look through and see shit like Dazzler (a mutant chick on skates) of the Savage She-Hulk, and say, "yep, nothing to see here!" The summer after I graduated high school I found myself in a Casey's General Store in a neighboring town after going to the dentist with time to kill, and I spotted the comics. I picked up an issue of X-Men vs The Avengers #4, and didn't know hardly anybody in the comic. (Dazzler was there, but didn't have the skates!) Plus they didn't fight at all. I picked up one more comic, Avengers Annual #16, with the Avengers and the West Coast Avengers and the Silver Surfer fighting in Death's realm against a team of dead heroes and villains, and I read the shit out of that comic! It was goddamn awesome. Been reading 'em ever since.

Later when I learned about back issues, I picked up the West Coast Avengers annual that preceeded it, and it wasn't nearly so good. Plus Al Milgrim did the art, and that's never a good thing. (He needs to stick to the inks)