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I thought Kirby’s Captain America collection might be my first-ever trade paperback, but it’s never returned to its low on Amazon after I wishlisted it—surely a subject of future discussion, once I’ve worked out the mechanics—so I impulse-bought the Eternals instead. The King was frighteningly prolific, and without his readers having to accuse him of being on acid. These days, of course, over-achievement mandates drug tests. Chris and I had between us at least issues #1 and #8, the latter featuring the character of the “reject” (the original artist’s depiction here), whose self-loathing super-deviant origin was, it now occurs to me, totally ripped off by Joss Whedon for his Groosalugg in Angel.

Nothing. Gaiman’s Caped Crusader story is clever, but I don’t think it was enough, because we were watching 44.6 last night about a shop in Taiwan that evolved beyond the easy copyright infringement on the mainland with amalgamated character goods featuring such fanciful transplants like a Hello Kitty head on ドラえもん’s body and a Batman’s on Superman (which reminded me of Grant Morrison’s Most Excellent Superbat and makes more sense, I suppose, than the dead guy who’d result from the other way around), and still dreamed of meeting the Man of Tomorrow instead. He was demonstrating his “heat breath” and burned my cheek, whereupon I reminded the big indestructible oaf—my impression of Frank Quitely’s depiction—to do like a thermostat and switch his setting to COOL for me. Another super-poweree showed up and played Snow Miser to his Heat, and their clash of oral jets created a localized weather disturbance. It began raining inside the building, the moisture forming off the surface of the ceilings themselves, and I knew it’d get worse, so I warned everyone in the office to flee. The doors were locked by the mounting meteorological pressure from outdoors, and I ran upstairs to an open skylight to access the roof and a sprawling metropolitan vista.

Chris and I were discussing this site (where, on the second page, there’s a burger remarkably described as “five-thirds of a pound”) and only I remembered a Jack Kirby comic from our youth where one of Captain America’s vile foes killed a starved prisoner by treating him to a fabulous meal.

It didn’t fit back into Final Crisis as well as it left, but so what. I love that the metatext has got folks thinking meta-phorically: first Mandrakk is Mandrake, and now he’s Alan Moore. Maybe Frank Miller, if you compare All-Stars. Merryman in Limbo, crazy-ass Ultraman—it’s taken a while, but I’ve finally gotten over the name; he shows up on no less than the twelfth page of ウルトラマンs on Google Image Search (but not without stopping at this), and even then it’s not a picture with the upside-down shield and clever FedEx-like negative space—that’s right, I got my end of Animal Man. Thanks, Grant.

I finally found a comic book store in the vicinity (seems they’re zoned out of neighborhoods whose only purpose is raising smart Asian kids), and though the proprietors seem friendly enough, I’m a bit concerned they stocked only one with the cover I like, and on the day of release. But hey, at least I can return to the same lovely rut routine from ten years ago—an ish of Grant’s, a draught of Dew and thou—except now I’m preserving it for looks-back in another decade.

Of course, what’s different in this particular period between eras is the potent blogosphere (annotations used to come by way of Usenet), which fortunately has yet to succumb to the one-liners of Facebook and YouTube sideshows, offering at least enough literary criticism to produce some brilliant takes on each installment:

At that moment, Talky Tawny’s descent — not keyed as a commentary on superhero decadence or the past saving the present or anything, but just existing as something that is — the comic seemed to adopt a peculiar dream logic, or maybe a free-associative arrangement of otherwise discordant DCU elements, past and present, that tapped something surreal behind the histories and continuities involved. I think that’s as good a way to go with an Event like this as any – hit hard on how the DCU shouldn’t work, but must, and couple a dispassionately ‘realistic’ visual approach with catastrophic subject matter.

I can’t believe I found the one Bloom County strip from the book Ron Giveon brought to our dorm room that will forever illustrate my feelings toward gift-giving:

…Speaking of things that scared me (and I suppose because it succeed before, it always will), these ridiculous three-headed aliens from Challenge of the Superfriends did, I’m not sure why, and that’s again probably the source of the fear. Their episode has been more than mercilessly taken down, but there’s no mention of the creepy way they fell on their (?) butt at the end, creepy because anything that deviated from the usual stiff Hanna-Barbera animation stood out as so lifelike. And it’s not like they were sent packing to another dimension or something. Maybe it’s those tiny heads; after all, three of them had to fit on their shoulders.

Finally, some straight talk.