2a. “Teenage…Mutant…Ninja…TURTLES???” WTF?
2b. What’s with all these Three-Adjetive-And-A-Noun books? Everyone knows TMNT is the best!

3. I can’t believe Timely is jumping on the super-hero bandwagon. Everyone knows the future is paved with Westerns and Romance.

4. Neal Adams is starting his own comic book line. Imagine – like five or six books by Neal Adams every month. SWEET!

5. NEW Fun Comics? These aren’t newspaper reprints, like you’d expect from a comic book, just a bunch of newspaper rejects. Jeez, didja see that “Dr Occult” from a couple of kids (KIDS!) from Cleavland – Seegul and Shooster? It’s no wonder they can’t do anything in a real publication.

6. BREAKING NEWS: National bought out All-American – at this rate, there’ll be only two big comic companies left. MAKE MINE DELL!

7. Man, someone graffitied my cave wall. And that looks nothing like a bison, BTW.

8. I just got Flash 105. What happened to 1-104? I never saw them.

1. What’s with this Chris Claremont broad turning the X-Men into a love-fest soap opera? Hey, babe, they’re X-MEN, not X-WOMEN. Marvel should get that Jo Duffy guy who writes the Punisher to put the testosterone back into my favourite group of mutants.

2. How dare they call Richard Ryder KID Nova! He isn’t Nova’s kid brother, he’s the real Nova.

3. Who is this Donna Troy person? Wonder Girl is Wonder Woman as a teen, not her teen sidekick. Don’t those guys at DC read their own comics?

4. I know issue #2 of Infinity Gauntlet just came out, but here is how it is going to end (spoilerz): Thanos kills everyone except Captain America, and when he is defeated everyone comes back to life. Didn’t we see this (except better) done already with Michael Korvak?

5. So, Spider-Man is a clone, and the real Spider-Man isn’t married to Mary Jane? But, the Evolutionary War proved that the clones were faked. If Marvel wanted to destroy the marriage, they should have gone with something a bit more believable. Like magic.

Theno

Your comment about giving up on a pyramid because of its mangled art was funny!

In case you’re interested: Yesterday, even as I said I thought this line of argument could only go back as far as when newspapers first began publishing satirical cartoon sketches, the thought crossed my mind that we could talk about Neanderthals, tens of thousands of years ago, sneering at those uppity Cro-Magnons with their pretensions that painting a picture of a deer on the wall of a cave is an achievement worth bragging about. But I decided that other forms of “visual art” are not the same thing as “comics” and “cartoons” as we know them today . . . Egyptian hierogylphics didn’t even occur to me, though.

But that’s only what any sensible reader would say!

Although if the team had actually kept more of the “name” superheroes around, then the detail that the new HQ was in Detroit, instead of in geosynchronous orbit, would have been trivial. But instead we were asked to believe that a barefoot thief named Gypsy and a breakdancer named Vibe were, just by being residents in the same neighborhood as the new HQ, perfect material for the JLA. (Talk about lowering your recruiting standards!)

Pisthetairos — while I’ve vaguely heard of the Yellow Kid, I didn’t identify the name “Truth Magazine.” You definitely went back further than I expected anyone to do. I suppose the only way to go back further would be to complain that editorial cartoons and caricatures of a few centuries ago are degrading the solemn tone a newspaper should have?

“Hey, who chiseled this sideways bird on my wall? Any idiot can see that the sequence is supposed to go “eyeball, squiggle, guy with his arms out, eyeball, crocodile, EYEBALL,” not “eyeball, squiggle, guy with his arms out, eyeball, crocodile, BIRD!” Geeze! That’s it, I’m not looking at this pyramid any more. They’ve lost me as a customer forever!!”

When is Ronin 6 coming out??

A New Universe? Boycott these comics! If they start selling well, Marvel will cancel Spider-Man! I called it!!!!!

New Gods? I can’t believe DC is publishing this blasphemy. There is only one true God, whihc is our lord and savior Jesus Christ and I’m boycotting DC until they stop publishing these satanic comics. No wonder sales are in teh toilette if this is the kind of thing the high and mighty DC editors think will sell.

If I’d been alive in those days, I might have said:

“No, I don’t remember that — not if you mean ‘when writers could and ALWAYS DID’ wrap it up in one issue. Back in the 1940s, Captain Marvel fought the Monster Society of Evil in a 25-chapter storyline, didn’t he? Stan Lee is still looking downright terse compared to whoever-the-writer-was of that old epic out for so long!”

If I’d seen that on the Internet around 1987, I would have said something like this:

“Huh? Are you under the impression that Batman making mistakes, and sometimes getting shot full of holes because of it (even by cops!), is a bold new idea? Why do you think that? Anyway, we didn’t get to see every hour of every day of his first year on the job, so he was probably fighting those mad scientists and vampires and stuff on some of those nights when Gordon wasn’t around to notice.”

another one that actually did piss me off back in the day was when they printed that tabloid sized book for the wedding of saturn girl and lightning lad. it was totally in continuity and those things (the tabloid sized books) were tough to find before comic shops were widespread.

This Spider-Man is just one more entry in the disturbing trend to make superheroes dark and depressing. First there was the Thing, who’s forced to live as a monster, but at least he’s balanced out by the Human Torch. Then there was the Hulk, who was not only forced to look like a monster, but to act like one as well. Now Spider-Man, who has a terrible life (as we’re repeatedly shown), gets a chance to improve it, and what happens? He manages to destroy one of the few remaining good things in his life! The real moral of that story seems to have been taken from “Superduperman” in MAD: “Once a chump, always a chump!” Then again, the creators show their contempt for super-heroes in the blurb on the first page, so I shouldn’t be surprised. Remember when comics used to be fun?

Have a good day.
John Cage

I for one am never buying Truth magazine again. And I am saddened that this is the type of thing that passes for humor nowadays. Who’s joining me on the boycott?

If you are suffering from pain in your life, can I interest you in Neo-Ibu-Prozac? You’ll still suffer, you just won’t care anymore!