Otherwise, Nick Marino’s final paragraph sums up my sentiments exactly.

I’m a huge Falcon fan, so getting this short story stuck in the middle was a nice surprise. I know it’s supposed to be a continuity-free context, but I just can’t shake the fact that this Falc / Spidey team-up makes next to no sense in the Marvel U. The first time the two met was when Falcon went off to prove he could be tough without Captain America and tried to take down the fugitive Spider-Man on his own. Plus, this Sam we see here is a huge jerk and that doesn’t really jive with his character. To top it off, the dialogue in that story was really disorienting (though it was ambitious at times, I’ll give it that).

But my impression of this issue was the opposite – an excellent beginning and end with an okay story sandwiched in the middle. If Marvel put out one of these a month (especially with the cartoon content like this issue) I would buy them, without a doubt.

Tobin and Coover are also both working on the ‘Age of the Sentry’ mini coming from Marvel soon.

I don’t know if the three-panel strips have any, but the longer ones (as contained in the digest-sized paperback that came out a couple of weeks ago) have Green Goblin and J. Jonah Jameson as adults, as well as assorted background characters (such as a supermarket clerk and security guard in the one where Wolverine tries to buy cereal).

The Mini-Marvels story previously appeared in the first Mini-Marvels comic book special several years ago, and in the recent (still on sale!) digest.

I found the Falcon story to be fun. However, like a lot of recent out-of-continuity Spidey stories, his joking personality is overdone. I remember it originally being a defense mechanism, taunting the bad guys he was fighting so they’d get pissed and make mistakes. I don’t remember many team-up stories where Spidey was so flip with the person he was partnering with.

I’m with you on the rest, for the most part. The Falcon/Spidey team-up was fine but that’s about all. I have no idea when it could have taken place either, but that’s alright. After all, the first page said explicitly not to get hung up on that stuff. Heh. The Mini-Marvels bit was fun, but I was also sure I’d read at least part of it before. Was it online? I’m curious — was this the first time a “grown up” (Green Goblin) appeared in one of Chris G.’s Mini-Marvels? I can’t remember seeing one before, but I may have missed a strip here or there.

I don’t know what I would have given ‘Best of the Week’ though. None of the handful of books I bought last week really blew me away.