Okay, I remember two things: this comic had the wall-busting Kool-Aid Man, oh, yahh! The part I'd love to see again, which I may have squashed beneath these covers alongside the silly battle against the Thirsties (which is pretty serious business when you've got nothing to drink), turns out not to be in this comic, as my memory attempted to generate initially: features discussing solar panels and computers, innovations of the 1980's I was seeing for the very first time. Ha! Sorry I got these things mixed up, but I'll address this one in a future post. I thought surely we were all going to school to figure out how to be part of that futuristic tomorrow of America. Technology! So exciting to a country kid. I tried to imagine: I'd be an adult in the distant year 2000. Wow. What would the world be like, I wondered? (I'm starting to think the comic where I found those features may have been Radio Shack Science Fair giveaways. I've since figured out ...

So the movie going public has met Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man, as well as the Black Widow (and, quietly in Thor this summer, Hawkeye), all gathering in the Avengers movie coming next summer. Two characters I foresee appearing in any future sequels of that movie are the Vision and the Scarlet Witch, who you may never have seen or heard about before. You're welcome to click on my blogs from this summer and meet them in their original stories!A couple of days after reading the origin of the Scarlet Witch---my last comic books for the foreseeable future---I am struck by a similarity with the origin of the Vision.The Vision, after the last epic new telling of his origin, married the Scarlet Witch in Giant Sized Avengers #4, 1975. In 1979, new writers Mark Gruenwald and Steven Grant plotted the origin of the Scarlet Witch. The mystery of her parentage---and twin brother Pietro's---was a regular Avengers sub-plot in the years leading up to these issues, which were #'s...

In the 1950's, the racks were full of cowboy comics; Will Eisner's Western Picture Stories was tied for the first, along with a book called Star Ranger, in 1937. Television and the movies had a cowboy "hay day." By the mid-70's, they were mostly being reprinted rather than produced in first runs; Marvel's Westerns usually carried great covers! Steve Englehart, while writing the Avengers superhero comic in 1975, decided to visit those thrilling days of yesteryear, with a time travel story featuring Thor, Hawkeye, and Moondragon on the trail of Kang the Conqueror. As Hawkeye had discovered, Kang figured taking the 20th century would be much easier if he started in the 19th century. This story, in AVENGERS #142 and 143, had an old-fashioned train robbery. Thor and Moondragon disguised as passengers, anticipating the attack, mostly fended off by Two Gun Kid, the original Ghost Rider (or Night Rider), Kid Colt and a very Indian-costumed Hawkeye. The next half...

So what I'm going to do is tell you a thing or two about these stories, which are just good enough storytelling to make me smile. Tomb of Dracula was not only very different from any other comic book before it, but it was also a surprise success, sparking off a trend of ghouls and goblins and things stranger still, like the Man-Thing. How could you write a comic book with a villain as its "hero"? For one, you don't white wash him as a hero, though in his own mind, while he is not good, he is eternally justified and dedicated to survival. Once you give him an enemy like Blade, and stay far away from the rest of the super-hero world, you have an international hunt for a timeless killer, a ruthless warrior and haunted soul, with little to save his intended victims. But what will save Dracula from himself? My first vote went to the story where the vampire hunters created by Archie Goodwin in issue three, descendants of the the novel's Victorian protagon...

Hey! Got to go weekly a while. Lots of original comics to write, original fiction to draft, original pages to draw, pitches to craft for companies next summer.

The mystery woman known only as Mantis traces the steps to places in her memories, asking questions and attempting to find people she remembers, throughout the Vietnamese capitol of Saigon. To her increasing despair, she is told she could not have been at one house when she thought; it was built but two years ago. No one in her past can be found. What future, then, awaits this woman, if everything before her now-deceased lover was a lie? Hawkeye the Archer asks the Vision about her story even while helping Thor and Iron Man in their support of her quest. He tells of the finely-attuned, mystically-aware, aloof adventuress who came here, swearing angrily that the Libra of the Zodiac crime-lords is not her father, while he told her of the Priests of Pama, who he found while blindly staggering away with her in his arms after her mother’s murder by her uncle. The mystery of the Star Stalker and the arrival of Kang the Conqueror both further suggest she is someone...