Covered 365: Day 94

Finally things are looking up around here. If you think that I would have yelled at you about Red Ryder you are putting it too strongly. That cover would not make my list but I am impressed by the artistry. My two complaints would be (as usual) no real story, and in this case that it is too cartoony – at first blush I thought of Calvin and Hobbes.

Did you mean to say that you _were_ the original art for Teen Confessions #94?

Let’s get the slam-dunk #95 pick of Marvel Tales out of the way and move on to other topics:

The runners up:
Adventure (gotta love the Japanese and German officers)
Journey Into Mystery
Strange Adventures (simple, but the composition is perfect and the 3D effect is dizzying)
Wonder Woman (if you are going to go with the big/striking for TTA #93, you’ve got to go for the Incredible Wonder Woman origin cover here)
X-Men (Kane does it again)

Beyond the top picks, #95 calls for some special awards:

A Walt Special: I Love You

Double Up Bizarre: Doom Patrol (return of the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man – and we wonder why there aren’t more DC collectors…)

Totally Lame First Prize: Superman (Huh what? And who wants to read this?)

Totally Lame Second Prize: Sensation (“Your secret is out, Diana Prince! Without your glasses you are Wonder Woman!” How did we win WW II with officers like these? Those guys from Adventure would have mopped the floor with this clown. Instead Princess Diana went to all that trouble to save him, and is now huge and green skinned and the butt of countless John Byrne double entendres.)

@Chris Elliott, I can see how this confusion might arise – I did intend to refer to WW #94, which is of course the origin of the Incredible Wonder Woman. Recall in that issue that Wonder Woman had to save Steve Trevor, who had been freediving near the Bikini Atoll, from being incinerated by a nuclear test detonation. Because of exposure to the blast, subsequently our beloved princess would transform into a gargantuan, green, and even more pneumatic creature whenever she became frustrated that she couldn’t remember where she parked the Invisible Plane. (Which happened a lot, because, like, it’s invisible.) Hilarity ensued.

Also recall that due to oxygen deprivation from the freediving, Trevor became deranged, took a leave of absence from the military, and began a disastrous folk-rock career. I’ll never forget the scene where he screams at the audience, “My name’s not Snapper!”, and storms off the stage. It wasn’t until the early seventies that DC revisited this storyline, with Trevor upbraiding the lowly Gomer Pyle in his office just as Billy Batson happened to walk by. Similar to Phineas Gage, Trevor’s brain damage from the earlier oxygen deprivation had made him permanently irritable, and he screamed at Pyle, “WHAT IN GOD’S NAME DOES ‘SHAZAM!’ MEAN!” The proximity to Batson caused Trevor to “steal” the linkage to Superm- I mean Captain Marv- I mean Shazam! and summon the Big Red Cheese. Hilarity ensued. Later of course Trevor learned to control the linkage via the Nega_B- I mean Phantom Zone Bracelets, until Wonder Woman complained that the bracelets were a trademark violation, and Billy Batson convinced Earth’s Mightiest Mortal that non-traditional symbioses couldn’t work in the long term.

I understand from listening to a recent authoritative podcast that in the current storyline, it’s been revealed that Trevor is not actually dead for the time being. Also it was pointed out that someone named Chris can be hard on the author of Covered 365 – I assume the reference is to you, so please tone it down a bit.

WW #98 is instead the “new” origin of Wonder Woman (not to be confused with the Incredible Wonder Woman), where it is revealed that she and her identical twin had been forced to journey from Paradise Island to the Ottawa River with the haunting directive, “There can be only one!” There they carried out the ancient Amazonian log rolling death match. I think all the children who bought WW #98 on the newstand (maybe two hundred kids) were permanently scarred by the chant of the spectators:

“For she goes birling down and down the white water
That’s where the log driver learns to step lightly
It’s birling down, and down white water
A log driver’s waltz murders girls completely.”

As Wonder Woman’s slightly less wondrous twin falls and is crushed/drowned, her last haunting murmur of

“La valse du journalier assassine complètement des filles”

was both a tip of the hat and also another gesture indicating that DC is an AMERICAN publisher and would continue to stick with the AMERICAN language. (Quite forward-looking of them I would have to say.)

Suffice it to say that #98 will not be a cover pick both because of this despicable storyline and also because it’s a pretty lame cover.