SPECIAL EYEBALL UPDATE: the eye surgery went well, despite looking like this for a few hours after the event:
After a post-op check-up on Thursday, it looks like I’m well on my way to healing up and being back in stereoscopic action before you know it. However, it is going to take some time for that eye to clear up as it heals from the recent medical intrusions. So, in the meantime, since having one good eye and one eye’s vision temporarily obscured is a bit distracting, if not outright headache inducing, you may catch me at the store looking a little something like this:
Look, it was either that or squeezing my right eye shut for hours at t time. I mean, yes, I know, it’s good enough for Popeye, but friends, I am no Popeye. I’m not really much of a Nick Fury, either…more “nearly forgotten David Hasselhoff TV version” than “far cooler Samuel Jackson version.”
Anyway, thanks for all your good thoughts and well-wishes, here, on Twitter, via email and otherwise. I appreciate it all, and I should be back into regular blogging action next week.
Another reader-contributed monster from 1967 Gold Key comics:
I think we’ve all felt like The Big Alvin, some days.
I find myself trying to figure out his head. Or “heads,” apparently. I’m going with the idea that the little blue head is his real head, while the purple and yellow heads are actually just the decapitated noggins of his previous (and seemingly larger) victims piled up there. Otherwise, if those are living parts of The Big Alvin, those upper heads are always kind of gnawing on the lower heads, and no wonder he’s always cranky and shooting at all things.
Then again, maybe the heads are detachable and can fly around and stuff, and they just kind of perch there when at rest. I mean, surely that’s not beyond the capabilities of The Big Alvin. Also, the bottom head has a pierced tongue, it seems. Or teeth on its tongue. Ew.
There is also the question of those appendages on the top head. Now those two longer appendages appear to be some kind of insectoid legs or antennas or whatever. But that middle bit, with the brush-like tip. Some kind of sensory organ, maybe? And it’s hard to tell from the drawing, but it’s either glowing or it’s shooting out tiny quills. Maybe it’s doing both. Again, this is The Big Alvin we’re talking about.
And while I’d like to think the markings shown the body actually indicate that his body is at least partially translucent, and what we’re seeing are his internal structures and skeletal systems, and not just tattoos or something, because wouldn’t that be a lot creepier? That weird spiral-y digestive tract, where the swallowed victims just spin around into nothingness? Weeeeird.
Plus, he’s way bigger than planes. So I’m not sure why he’s also need to shoot everything, too. Unless it’s just to save effort and wear on his monopod trying to get to people to kill them, and would rather just off ’em from a distance.
Also, according to the cube-square law, a creature of that size would be crushed by its own weight. The Big Alvin sneers at our puny Earth physics, of course, so don’t count on that to bring him down.
