1. I hereby call for a moratorium on jokes based on the 70s Marvel Comics title Giant-Size Man-Thing. Yes, we all can’t believe that Marvel actually published it either. But, after nearly 30 years, we’ve all heard just about every variation on the joke there is, and, really, it needs to stop. I know, what with the movie opening soon on an airplane near you, that the temptation is there to drag the joke back out again, but you need to resist. Besides, once J.M. DeMatteis used the joke in an actual issue of the 90s Man-Thing series (out of the beak of Howard the Duck, no less), it’s come full circle, and there’s nothing more to add.
1a. But if you have to wrap your hands around a Giant-Size Man-Thing (har har), make it issue #4, with the absolutely heartbreaking “The Kid’s Night Out” by Steve Gerber, Ed Hannigan, Ron Wilson, and Frank Springer…it’s one of the few comic books to make use of extended text pieces in such a way that it doesn’t drive you crazy. Plus, there’s a great Howard the Duck back-up.
2. I read a post on a message board (you can probably guess which one) where the person claims that you could read three consecutive pages of any comic that Grant Morrison has written and “correctly extrapolate” (that person’s words) every other comic Morrison has written. Um, there must be some other “Grant Morrison” writing comics, because that doesn’t describe the one I’m thinking of. You can look at St. Swithin’s Day and extrapolate The Filth? You can read Animal Man and extrapolate Kill Your Boyfriend? You can read G.I. Joe European Missions #3 and extrapolate The New Adventures of Hitler? Okay, in all fairness this message board poster was probably exaggerating to make a point, that Morrison does like to repeatedly explore certain themes, but, you know, that’s what writers sometimes do. Deal.
2a. A Grant Morrison bibliography.
3. Speaking of Morrison, there was a letter in the most recent issue of New X-Men in which the letter writer complains that the issue with a solo adventure of Xorn appears to contradict the later revelation about that character. All I can say is that this letter writer has apparently never heard of the concept of “the unreliable narrator.”
4. Non-comics-related Mac OSX joke: it’s a shame that Apple Computers didn’t advertise their new GarageBand software with the very obvious tagline “Rock out with your Dock out.”
5. I was going to post more on Rich Tommaso’s 8 1/2 Ghosts, but Bill Sherman beat me to it. Go read his review, and mentally insert my voice saying “yup, he’s right” after every sentence.
