Monday, February 26, 2007

I paid 50 cents for what?!

Shopping at the comic store Saturday was tricky, as both my daughter and my nephew were with me. Elizabeth immediately picked up a comic that had Superman fighting a gorilla on the cover. She then proceeded to wander about the store, unintentionally walking out of my field of vision something like 800 times. Meanwhile Cameron was completely overstimulated by all the colorful comics and just couldn't pick anything out. I ended up getting him a handful of Transformers back issues I stumbled across while riffling through the 50 cent bin. Between the bargain bin search and trying to keep track of the kids and half-listening to an argument my sister was having in the game store (which shares space with the comic shop) I ended up getting a tad bit distracted. So when I got home I found that in addition to JLU, Transformers, Young Heroes in Love, Groo the Wanderer, and a bunch of crappy bronze age Marvel mags, I had unintentionally purchased this:

Two quarters I'll never get back.
Man, this thing is like a time machine. Extremely wordy narration boxes, Liefieldian pencils, a villain with ill-defined but world-shattering powers. It's like half the comics I bought in college distilled down to one book.

But it's the cover that kills me. In particular, Nightcrawler. When Spider-man does that spread legs thing it works, because his costume isn't designed like Borat's swimsuit. That pose and that costume work together in perfect harmony to emphasize Nightcrawler's package, or rather his comic code-approved lack of package. Which only confuses me more. It's like this cover is trying to remind me that Nightcrawler has no genitals.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:46 PM

    You mentioned one upbeat thing in this post: Groo.

    Groo is the eternal awesome from which all fantasy descends.

    (What can I say? I never could choke down Lord of the Rings, but I never missed an issue of Groo).

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  2. Anonymous3:38 AM

    I read Excalibre for many years and enjoyed the Celtic/English angle which made a difference from the American X-Men lark.

    AND in the early days it was written by Chris Claremont - how about that!

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