It's OK if Mommy and Daddy fight, as long as one of them is in costume.

I know I collected the other 30th anniversary holographic covers, but this one might be the strongest: from 1992, the Spectacular Spider-Man #189, "The Osborn Legacy" Written by J.M. DeMatteis, art by Sal Buscema.

This probably seems longer ago than it actually was, but a married Peter and Mary Jane Parker are on edge, since Harry Osborn is full-on Green Goblin again and is taunting them, and he knows Peter's secret identity. Harry also kidnaps his extended family: wife Liz, son Normie, brother-in-law Mark "Molten Man" Raxton. Normie is too little to realize how creepy his dad is being, in full Goblin costume; but Liz and Mark are terrified; worse, Harry now seems stronger than Mark.

While Mary Jane goes to stay with Aunt May (under the white lie of having had a fight with Peter) Spider-Man tracks Harry down to his childhood home, Norman Osborn's house. Harry, for his part, wanted to live up to his father's legacy but not make the same mistakes, like ignoring or hurting his loved ones; and in his defense, Normie seems into it. Catching the family at dinner, Spidey has to sit down with them while Harry plays up his "happy family" that Peter doesn't have. A fishing expedition that Peter doesn't bite on, but Mark attacks Harry, and gets slapped down again. (Mark had activated a Spider-tracer that led Peter there.) Normie sides with his dad, as Harry turns hard on Liz; then hits Spidey in the back with a Goblin-glider since Spidey has to take the hit to protect Normie. Harry then attempts to snap Spidey's neck, saying he's too paralyzed with guilt to risk hurting anyone. Refusing to live in fear, Spidey rallies, punching out Harry and resolving to live with whatever happens.

In a "high-tech straitjacket" from the Vault, the cops take Harry away--still in full costume--but he takes a moment to proclaim he knows Spider-Man's secret identity.


Spidey is left, alone, standing in the street at the end here...actually, I think he stands around a lot in this one; but still a good one. There would be a bit to go before Harry was killed off, but he would be back years later after "One More Day," and a ton of things have happened to him since...
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I swear, that exchange does make sense in context.

We're opening with Destro and the Baroness here, but the big star of this particular issue of G.I. Joe is...Megatron? From 1993, G.I. Joe #139, "Realignments" Written by Larry Hama, pencils by Chris Batista, inks by Stephen Baskerville, Chi Williams, Don Hudson, and Chip Wallace. (I don't know who inked what, but the art is noticeably stronger some pages than others.)

Megatron is currently blasting the hell out of Destro's shape-changing castle, since the Decepticon believes he was lured there on false pretenses, thinking the castle was a Transformer. Said castle is currently occupied by Cobra Commander and his forces, and the former used-car salesman is mentally scrambling to come up with a deal to get him out of this one. Meanwhile, Cobra ninja Slice is suspiciously overseeing the medical treatment of his "ally," Scarlett; after she was stabbed by Snake-Eyes last issue. Slice still isn't buying her heel-turn, and since Snake-Eyes's cut was so precise it looked far worse than it actually was, he may be right.

Cobra scientist (and possible double-agent) Dr. Biggles-Jones isn't impressed with the energy-inefficient Megatron's tech, and takes a potshot at him with her own "hyper-velocity rail gun." Megatron actually is impressed by that one, and Cobra Commander has his angle: a deal is struck, a trade of Cybertronian technology for upgrades to Megatron. Elsewhere, Destro, the Baroness, and Hawk arrive at Cobra Island; and meet with "Cobra Commander," actually, a disguised Zartan. Destro and the Baroness don't recognize the revealed Zartan until he takes his old form; he had upgraded to a new design with his 1993 figure, which I don't think is as popular as his more traditional look. Zartan tells them Cobra Commander took the late Dr. Mindbender's cloning vat, which would be useless without said doctor, unless mmmmmmaybe he left a disk behind to revive himself...

Megatron is upgraded to his "Generation 2" tank form here. (I have one, from a yard sale, deep in this crowd shot from a decade back!) Per the GCD link, this was the first part of a four-part crossover, even though it doesn't have a big cover blurb for it like you would expect. (Snake-Eyes gets big billing, although he only appears briefly in this one to give Destro the stink-eye, as it were.) I couldn't say if the crossover was Hama's idea, but as usual, he's able to take it and keep the regular plotlines running. Also, if you came to this issue cold (as I mostly did!) you might be curious why Destro and Zartan seem to be working with Hawk and G.I. Joe here; but this was well over ten years into the book's run, and many of the traditional alignments may have been altered by then. More than likely because Cobra Commander was a double-crossing backbiter; you can bet his partnership with Megatron wasn't going to last.
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I kinda made this for someone, but didn't stop me from playing with it.

I wanted to slap together another miniature comic book spinner rack, and I reckoned Sally of Green Lantern Butt's Forever could use one! (Shoot me a PO Box or something, and I'll slap it in the mail!)


Hmm. I told Dale I'd mail him one some time back, but he's used to me mailing things whenever I arbitrarily decide to...
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80-Page Thursdays: Justice League Quarterly #4!

We've looked at a lot of issues from this series, and I just picked up several of them that I'm not sure I'd read before. Or maybe they weren't that good, and I just didn't remember? Let's see! From 1991, Justice League Quarterly #4, with stories by Will Jacobs and J.M. DeMatteis, and art by Darick Robertson, Marshall Rogers, Jason Pearson, and more. And then I wrote this up, forgot to do any scans, and blogged most of the other issues already!

This one opens with an Injustice League story, as the increasingly sad team tries to rob a cult leader, without losing their recent "good guy" status. It goes about as well as you would expect! Likewise, Ice's date with Guy Gardner is a disaster, although in a twist it's not Guy that wrecks things, but Ice! Or rather, Ice possessed by a demon. That story features a couple supporting characters from the 1988-92 Dr. Fate series, for whatever reason.

Lastly, we get a series of strips with Marshall Rogers art!...for stories about Power Girl's cat. A crime syndicate had implanted the cat with a bug, in the hopes of getting information from the JLE's embassy to sell; and instead didn't even get any funny cat videos out of the deal. I don't know if these three-page strips were originally intended to run somewhere else, but they were burned off here.

I'm pretty sure I've read it, even if I haven't blogged it, but JLQ #1 may be the only issue of the series besides #3 that's a single story throughout, and that's what I prefer for this! I need to find a new copy of that, but I still have some other ones to blog over the course of the year, that are probably as blah as this one.
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"Brunch."

Ah, the Magus! Well, that was pretty much inevitable, given the additional head that came with Adam Warlock. And we discuss his new outfit next time, but I just went back through the blog to see if we had any scans of his old outfits, and we didn't. So take a gander at the Ron Lim cover for Infinity War #6, and man, is that a lot of purple. The Purple Man said, "Too much." Only Prince and maybe Bruce Banner in the 70's wore that much purple. And I think that outfit was only a slight update from the Magus's own 70's duds; but how great would it have been to also get his evil afro head?...no, just me? All right, then.

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His big purple mug was on the back cover, it's not a surprise reveal.

We've checked out a couple of these before: in 1998, Marvel did a batch of team-up annuals, often with odd pairings. Deadpool/Death. Machine Man/Bastion. Alpha Flight/Inhumans. Generation X/Dracula. We looked at X-Men/Doctor Doom and Hulk/Sub-Mariner, and today we've got X-Man/Hulk '98, "Call of the Wild" Written by Terry Kavanagh, pencils by Chriscross, inks by Caesar Antomattei, Keith Williams, and Hector Collazo.

I don't think I had this issue back in 1998, and looking back I don't think I was reading X-Man or Hulk at the time. Maybe on Hulk: this might've been right around Peter David's last issue but before Joe Casey's last issue of the series. Bruce Banner was on the run from the military for the millionth time, while carrying the guilt of his wife's death and the recent spinal injury of Rick Jones. Meanwhile, Nate Grey was struggling to make a living deforesting the woods in France. Something had happened, in some other X-book, that affected Nate's telepathy, so he couldn't understand the language now, which is mostly played for laughs; except now he couldn't Jedi-mind-trick his way across borders...

A mysterious voice reaches out to the Hulk from the "dark dimension," enraging him to smash up a chunk of the Grand Canyon (Hey, it only makes it Grander.) and reveal a Stonehenge-like circle. Meanwhile, Nate checks out something weird happening at the real Stonehenge; both events are Thanos! The Mad Titan is trying to get an anchor in the real world to pull him out of wherever he's stuck, and Nate is afraid the Hulk may be tempted by "that demon," but the Hulk is nowhere near that dumb. Nate does appear to get a telepathic glimpse of Thanos's consciousness, and is terrified of him.

When Thanos turns on the Hulk and tries to squeeze Nate out of his "psi-armor," the Hulk inadvertently destroys the stone ring, freeing Thanos. Nate then armors up the Hulk, to keep Thanos in the ring while he rebuilds it, and Thanos is sucked back into whatever. Not his best showing, here. While the Hulk is not greatly affected by the experience, Nate begins to realize the earth may need him, as much as he needs it.
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TFW you have to come up with a villain, good, but not so good you'll be sad when he bites it.

We saw the ghost of today's villain a couple years back, in the Ghosts crossover annuals, but today we've got his first appearance: from 1991, Detective Comics #625, "Abattoir!" Written by Marv Wolfman, pencils by Jim Aparo, inks by Mike DeCarlo.

Though technically his first appearance, you could imagine Abattoir in the backgrounds of crowd shots of the lunatics at Arkham Asylum, since he had apparently been in there for some time, after killing 19 people and eating some of them. Here, he's broken out by some goons-for-hire, then seemingly on a whim decides to attack a rally for mayoral candidate Etchison. Bruce Wayne is in attendance, arriving with Vicki Vale: I don't think they were a couple at the time, and Bruce is cheerfully playing the layabout cad card.

Abattoir, seemingly forcing the goons to go along with his madness, kills Etchison's wife; but is distracted when Vale gets a photo of him: he may or may not believe photos steal your soul, but he's going with that. Batman gets shot in the chest while Abattoir chases Vale, then manages to use her as a hostage until he can escape. Later, in the Batcave, Bats realizes someone had to have paid to break-out Abattoir, and he thinks he knows who...

Working through the bribed orderly and the getaway driver, Batman tracks Abattoir down to the family mortuary, where they have a brawl in a pile of bones. It's a cool visual even if Batman doesn't really seem to break a sweat, or take him down: he dumps a coffin full of bones on Abattoir, and leaves him for the cops, one of whom looks savagely displeased at the idea of going in there...Bats then picks up the mastermind that had Abattoir freed: Etchison, who had changed his name to distance himself from his cousin; but arranged the whole thing to kill his wife before she divorced him, and make it look like the anti-crime candidate was standing up to crime. At least some of that seemed to be out of nowhere, but we're running out of pages, so...

Later, when Jean-Paul Valley was Batman, he would hesitate to save Abattoir, who fell to his death. But Abattoir had taken another family member hostage, and dead, he couldn't tell anyone where he was, so the hostage died. This was supposed to be a straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back moment, showing how unworthy Jean-Paul was of being Batman. I can't help but think Bruce would've gotten a pass on that one; but I also wonder if Abattoir was specifically created to be killed off later, or if he just fit the bill at the time.

Crap, maybe this post should've been Memorial Day, instead of Labor Day. Always think of those things too late...
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That's a question for Mythbusters. Or Deadliest Warrior...Both cancelled? Son of a...

I probably haven't read anywhere near as many as were published, but I still feel like I've read a metric ton of DC's army guys vs. dinosaurs comics. (I just had to check my shelf for Showcase Presents: The War That Time Forgot, but didn't see it. Swore I had it somewhere, that would've accounted for a bunch of them...) And I want to say in most, if not all of them, even .50 cal machine gun fire bounces off dinosaurs like water off a duck's back. Like today's book! From 1980, Weird War Tales #94, featuring "The Eye of Hell!" Written by Robert Kanigher, art by Franc Reyes. (And a nice Joe Kubert cover!)

A fairly standard story for the title leads off: in 1943, a US tank crew on a South Pacific island faces off against a tyrannosaurus rex to save a native girl from being sacrificed. And the "50 cal. slugs are bouncin' off its hide like confetti at a Flatbush Ave. parade!" I'm not sure that those bullets wouldn't have torn up the t-rex; but it also picks up the tank for later eatin', so...The soldiers set the tank to blow, and make a run for it; the tank explodes before the dinosaur can throw it at them, and a lava flow opens up for good measure. About as traditional as a Christmas tree!

Also this issue: "Through the Past...Darkly!" A Twilight Zone-style tale from J.M. DeMatteis and Gerald Forton. Businessman Henry Geller, is accused of being Nazi war criminal Heinrich Geisen, by a concentration camp survivor. That night, Geller goes to bed, only to wake up in a WWII camp himself! Panicked, he attempts to flee, but instead dragged to "the showers..."

This isn't the deepest story, but it manages two twists on the last page, so that's something.

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80-Page Thursdays: Justice League Quarterly #9!

So the last several 80-pagers have been a bit disappointing, but I have a good feeling about today's: several brand name creators and the return of an obscure villain, in 1992's Justice League Quarterly #9, featuring stories by Mark Waid, Kevin Dooley, Paul Kupperberg, and Elliot S! Maggin; and art by Rod Whigham, Andy Smith, Dusty Abel, Dave Cockrum, and more.

The lead story, "Frenzy," features the return of mad scientist Ira Quimby, a.k.a. I.Q. We've checked out multiple comics with him over the years...yet I'm not sure we've ever bothered to scan him. Which is fine: he usually looks like a somewhat manic stringbean in goggles and jodhpurs, but today he looks like a South American man in an environmental suit. And the suit is for good reason: as the Justice League raids his secret lab in Central America, they are exposed to his newest invention, a toxin that after an hour, turns 1 in 6 people into an uncontrollable homicidal maniac! The team grates on each other as the clock ticks, and not just the usual instigators like Guy or Wally. Waid may cheat just a smidge in the end, but there's also a clever reversal.

Also this issue: a Crimson Fox story, that's about as good as any of her other stories; yet another Power Girl story where she's written as cartoonishly angry; and a Booster Gold story where he recognizes a young girl who would go on to basically save the 21st century with the power of 'capitalism unleashed.' Urg...there's also some leering at an underage girl in that one, and Booster may have destroyed his own timeline, but Dave Cockrum art!

Still, so much better than the last couple of these...and probably better than the next couple we'll get to sometime.
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"Jessica."

I finished the Netflix/Man-Thing BAF a week or two back, and my favorite of the lot is still Jessica Jones. Possibly because Krysten Ritter was great in Defenders: I wasn't much into the comic version, but her Jessica Jones was a foulmouthed delight.

Sadly, the girls didn't make it back to the "creepy newsstand," since after the summer's heat, I have to re-attach most of the magazines to it! Or I might re-purpose it into something else, but that might take a while.
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Is it weird to have to come up with villains for Dracula?

Sure, there was Blade, and Frank Drake and Rachel Van Helsing; but they were heroes: ofttimes Dracula faced off against evil, perhaps not as great as his, but evil nonetheless. And today's issue throws a disembodied brain in for good measure: from 1974, Tomb of Dracula #20, "The Coming of Doctor Sun" Written by Marv Wolfman, pencils by Gene Colan, inks by Tom Palmer.

High in the Transylvanian Alps, Dracula is on the ropes here: starved for blood and being chased by Frank and Rachel in a helicopter and taking potshots at the vampire with wooden bullets. I'm not sure who's flying said copter, since the weather conditions are bad enough that Dracula can't turn into mist or a bat and fight the wind. Still, he finds shelter in a cave filled with treasure, and the bodies of two treasure hunters; but is disappointed since at least one of the bodies had been poisoned, and Drac can't even drink its blood.

There's a brief interlude for a flashback for Rachel Van Helsing: when she was still a child, Dracula had killed her family, intent on stopping the vampire hunter family line. Quincy Harker had saved Rachel, and then raised her. Meanwhile, in Ireland, "vampire Brand," meets his master, Doctor Sun; while the doctor's men capture Dracula and chain him up with garlic-wrapped chains. Sun had rescued one of Dracula's former lackeys, Clifton Graves, after an explosion on a yacht, and gave him an opportunity for revenge. Which is cut short when Frank and Rachel show up: they're forced to fight Sun's goons, while Graves fights Dracula, and Rachel accidentally shoots Graves in the back with a crossbow! The fight is then cut short, as Frank, Rachel, and Dracula are immobilized by Dr. Sun...who so far, seems like a brain on a TV screen. I didn't scan his appearance in Nova #25, but I was more used to Sun as a brain in a robot casing; I don't think he started out like that, though. Sun wants to duel Dracula for the title, "the throne of the lordship of vampires!" From this issue, I'm not sure he has any motive, other than that having an army of vampires at your command would admittedly be pretty cool...

The treasure cave corpses seem somewhat disconnected from the main plot line here; and it's slightly unclear that Dr. Sun appears in two places at the same time, by tele-conferencing, apparently. Rachel's story could've used a little more space, but she always makes me sad; since she was killed in X-Men Annual #6, which I read years before I ever saw her in Tomb of Dracula.
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How there aren't toys for everyone involved here, seems like an injustice.

I always think I should have more Rom comics than I do; but while I read it occasionally as a kid, the only issues I remember owning were #25 and the first two annuals. So, since I just picked up a spare, let's check out 1983's Rom Annual #2, "To Save a Spaceknight" Written by Bill Mantlo, pencils by Sal Buscema, inks by Ian Akin and Brian Garvey, Spaceknight Squadron created by Richard Konkle, with a Bill Sienkiewicz cover.

This was set before the first issue of the series, some two hundred years ago, as Rom gives chase to the Dire Wraith forces driven from Galador. While many of the sorcerous shape-shifters scatter, Rom hounds their command ship all the way to Wraithworld, and then proceeds to kick the crap out of most of the planet. Between his rage and his Neutralizer, Rom's on a pretty good tear to banish all the Dire Wraiths, but gets hit with a spell that seemingly terrifies him...

After Rom had been missing for a bit, Galador's Prime Director sets the Spaceknight Squadron out to find their missing comrade. They're a hearty bunch, although the distribution of Spaceknight powers seems to be a bit of a crapshoot: Rom got a seemingly inexhaustible death-ray, while the Squadron's Unam gets invisibility. A bit of a knock on invisibility, but in a war against shapechanging wizard monsters, it's a power that doesn't get the skulls cracked. (Technically, Rom's Neutralizer only banished the Wraiths to Limbo; but it still seems like a step up from the average Spaceknight's kit. I don't think any others had one...) Still, in the end it's Unam who is brave enough to face the mesmerized Rom, who had been hypnotized by the Wraiths to see them everywhere. Later, Rom realizes by driving the Wraiths from their homeworld, he may have spread their menace across the galaxy, and resolves to hunt them down...

This year's Hasbro SDCC Revolution exclusive had a Rom figure and a Dire Wraith, but they were 3.75, maybe four inches. I keep hoping they'll get around to a six-inch scale one someday; I might even be tempted if they managed to get out any other Spaceknights for him to team-up with. Also, I don't know if this was intentional, or if I'm just seeing it since I caught Rifftrax Live The Five Doctors last week, but the Prime Director really looks like a British character actor forced into a terrible costume...Moreover, I appreciate Sal Buscema more all the time.
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