I demand some consistency from my 20-year-old trading cards.
Here’s probably my favorite trading card image of Galactus, drawn by Art Adams and taken from the 1991 Marvel Universe set from Impel:
That’s a nice, imposing image of Galactus, there…is it just me, or does it have a little Moebius feel to it? Also, Adams did a handful of other very nice cards for this set, including one of Absorbing Man that, at the time, former employee Rob was trying to corner the market on, or something. He had, like, dozens of the damned things. I still have no idea why. Probably best to remain blissfully ignorant.
Anyway, back to the Galactus card…the characters in this set were given power ratings on the card backs, and here are the Big G’s:
And that’s all well and good, I suppose. I get the “stamina” thing, since he’s gotta eat a planet every few days or his blood space-sugar gets dangerously low. And his agility is low, presumably due to his size, so he’s probably not going to be doing any pirouettes. But let’s take a look at the stats from his trading card the following year:
It looks like Galactus took some dumb pills because his intelligence stat dropped a couple of points. Or maybe because he maxed out the first set of stats, they readjusted the scale to get a more accurate reading. Or maybe they’re just making this crap up off the top of their heads. Whatever.
But get a load of the speed stats on both cards. With his speed score maxed out, and his agility score as low as it is…this guy’s going to be tripping over a lot of footstools and walking into walls. And given that he’s already wearing a hat pretty much designed to keep you walking through doorways sideways, this is seriously a disaster waiting to happen. Keep him out of the china shop!
In other mostly non-Galactus news:
- Pal Dorian is celebrating his 5th anniversary of blogging this week, kicking off with pics of some of his favorite men, and continues with a look at the first comic he ever read. So congrats, Dor! Thanks for keeping at this blogging thing for as long as you have…if it weren’t for you, pal, I don’t think I’d have as much fun as I do with this site.
And by the way…Dor’s Uncomfortable Plot Summaries post just keeps going and going and going…I keep seeing new links to it pop up all the time. Even from people who actually get the Rocky joke. He was even on the front page of the Internet Movie Database, for God’s sake. And Neil Gaiman his own self was a good sport about a joke at his expense that, er, I may have been involved with. Dor’s shown me his traffic stats, and he’s getting some crazy-ass numbers….that post is probably the single most popular thing ever generated by someone in the comicsweblogosphere. You’d think some of the bigger comics sites would have noted it by now.
So again, congrats to Dor for five years of blogging. He’s a swell guy, so give him your best wishes!
- Over at the great Flash fan site Speed Force, there’s a brief discussion about how the continuity-heavy Free Comic Book Day offering Blackest Night #0 is intended to preach to the converted, rather than grab readers new to comics. And, yes, there’s that, I’m not disagreeing…but the last time I worried about a continuity-heavy FCBD offering from DC, JLA #0, the girlfriend’s nieces ate it up. So I’m not going to worry too much about it this time. No, it’s likely not going to make kids come in every Wednesday and get the latest installment of the crossover…but I’ll settle for kids popping in once in a while to buy a comic or two because they enjoyed the free comics they got.
- P-TOR shares a dream he had about me and Neilalien. A dream…or a nightmare?
