Foreward into the past.

So thanks to Roel for pointing out my “forward/foreward” typo, which was dumb of me specifically because 1) I had the book right in front of me and it’s spelled out there, and 2) I had to correct myself when I typed the same word in an email, so I do know how to spell it. Ah, well, it wouldn’t be Progressive Ruin without any typoos.
Anyway, I’ve been going through some old CD-Rs and DVD-Rs of old files, and finding some oddball stuff. Like, here, enjoy a full box of Spawn POGs (or SPOGs) that I had at some point for sale on the eBays:

And here’s this thing, a blank template I created from the first Eclipse issue of Miracleman :

…that I eventually used to make this post .
If you want a full-size version of this template for your artistic shenanigans, just drop me a line and I can email it to you. (Sorry, it’ll get hotlinked to death otherwise.)
Oh, and another thing…I’ve recently been reading Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema’s “Intelligent Hulk” storyline from the early to mid-1980s, leading up to the Hulk’s banishment to the Crossorads in #300. I started reading Incredible Hulk with #293, which is pretty much right at the final act of this story which more or less began around #270.
For about 2 1/2 years the status quo of the Hulk had changed from what everyone basically “knew” (either from the comic itself or from the TV show), which seemed like it was taking at least a slight risk. Even at the end, changing the Hulk back into an even more brutal, even cruel, version of the character was a little startling. It definitely laid the groundwork for following writer Peter David’s ten years of various versions of the Hulk, and pretty much the Hulk ’til today. (Not to leave out interim creator Al Milgrom, who was the fella what actually brought back the Grey Hulk before David got his hands on him.)
But what I thought was interesting, after Mantlo demonstrating repeatedly over the course of the storyline, that even with Banner’s mind controlling the Hulk’s body, he could still fall into a Hulk-ish rage if he wasn’t careful. This groundwork for Banner eventually losing control was put down sporadically, but not, like, overwhelmingly, and the danger of the old savage Hulk returning seemed…at least preventable.
Then Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars came along, where a whole gaggle of Marvel’s heroes vanished at the end of one of their issues, returned at the beginning of their next issues, and we were all extolled to read the 12-issue Secret Wars series to find out what happened to them between those installments.
In Hulk’s case, he came back with a broken leg and a bad attitude, suddenly a lot more cranky and violent than he had been just a month ago. Obviously things went poorly for ol’ Jadejaws during his Secret Excursion, causing his further mental decline.
However, reading it now, as a whole, rather than just the final few issues as I had originally…the pacing is off. Having so much of the Hulk’s decline happen elsewhere felt like something of a cheat after following the story in his own book for so long. Yes, everyone reading Marvel was expected to read Secret Wars , but even if you were planning to, the nature of the series meant that by the time you got to Hulk’s problems there, the actual Incredible Hulk book would have moved on into its new direction. A part of the story’s development had been excised from the main book, put into another writer’s hands in another series, and then deal with those repercussions back in Hulk . Ah well, that’s the Marvel Universe for you.
To be fair, #300 was looming ahead, so a change to the status quo was going to come anyway. And realistically, how much more of “Banner is or is not losing control?” plot events did we need? It would have been nice if we’d got more of Mantlo’s Intelligent Hulk, but it’s enough that he basically changed what a Hulk story is for…well, all time.