Ken Aldred

Yup. Mine’s a reference to a protective shield, and a more obscure comic character. Both good.

Aegis would be a better classical reference.

Sorry to hear about this. I’ve always found it helps to chat on the phone with an organisation here in the UK called The Samaritans, whenever I started declining into an overwhelmed, overanxious and depressed state, before it gets too intense and out of control. ( I suspect the number given in the second post is an American equivalent.) Talk to someone there with the training and empathy to understand what you’re going through, more than once if it might help to attenuate the symptoms, as they won’t mind doing that, especially if you’re in the sort of crisis situation being implied by the original post. Hope you get through this dark period and get back to enjoying reading some comics.

When I read the Conway books again I was surprised at how little clone material there was; basically a few pages, here and there, until you get to the conclusion. But, a highpoint from a great run of Bronze Age Spider-Man comics.

No. The saga started out okay, but after a few months it felt as if the writers were making it up as they were going along and dragging the storyline out blatantly and unnecessarily, to the point where it became an unstructured, empty, frustrating and tedious read. On and on, to milk the idea for every penny. In that sense, classic 90s speculation era product. I didn't like it.

moment In England in the 70s I had very limited access to comics, just a local newsstand, and it was years before a comic shop opened, which took perhaps an hour and a half to get to. One reason I soon preferred going to the city comic marts, which would take up half the travel time by train. Because of that early conditioning a degree of isolation has never bothered me, and now that I read digitally it's become irrelevant anyway.

Would you accept a Marvel Premiere 31 instead?

Not great, but not this bad...

Straczynski + Quesada gave us "One More Day". A low point for Spidey. Share the blame.

Big Wheel’s definitely underrated.

Yup. Interesting article. Wasn't there another Star Trek episode explaining why there are so many species in the galaxy that look humanoid? IIRC, it was called "Budget Constraint" ?

Unlikely you'd have alien species that are a close match to Earth arachnids. The symbiote most likely just adopts characteristics of its initial host, so that those characteristics get retained and inherited by secondary hosts such as Eddie Brock / Venom and Cletus Kasady / Carnage.

The Comic Stack would be a simple one letter change. That would imply a very well-stocked shop, though. (There was a shop in London called The Comic Shack.) The design looks like a squarish speech bubble, which doesn't work in isolation without being associated with a speaking character.

I have a very broad interest in comics from all eras, publishers and genres, so for me there's always been the difficulty of keeping focused on one particular objective. I don't feel that I have enough time or financial resources to complete anything particularly ambitious now that I'm in my fifties, and I'd rather just be free to read anything I want digitally. I obtained pretty much all of the mainstream keys I really want years ago, before the film speculation price rises. Very different to how I started in the 70s, when I was more focused on runs, especially X-Men and Conan, rather than an unconnected range of specific issues that mean the most to me. In theory now, I'd do something a bit different, such as complete my 9.4 to 9.6 Richard Corben underground comic collection. That would be an interesting project.

The intensely euphoric dopamine highs from the many likes to those 1000 posts should be reward enough.

The Jack Kirby Rawhide Kid Marvel Masterworks is interesting. There was a trade paperback version done of it. Dynamite's earlier Lone Ranger stories were good, also collected in trade format.

That's all I did from the UK. Early nineties, I bought $1 or $2 Bronze Age or independent comics from his Specials section. Grade would be 9.0 or often better. No nightmare overgrading story to tell, in this case.

For me, the upwards trajectory starts with the introduction of Blade.

Once you get to the Wolfman / Colan / Palmer years, it’s consistently excellent.

You find stuff like this in Humble Bundle digital comics offers. Dynamite comics imprint, I’m guessing? Interesting enough in a dirt-cheap digital bundle, packaged with lots of much, much better material, but not as a physical copy at $4 in a comic shop.

Yup. At its peak, it was genius.

Great selection of covers. As a progression from the last one, I would've ended with the classic 'Middle Finger cover'. Just for fun.

I read Mad in the 80s, liked a lot of the artwork, but never found the satire particularly funny. I was much more into the UK's Viz Magazine, which, during the same period, was for me the most consistently-hilarious comic book of all time.

The comic-sized issues reprinted in the colour Russ Cochran EC Library format are the only Mad books I have in my collection. Great artwork, but the humour seemed a bit forced to me; not too surprising as I read them in the 80s with their cultural references being decades old, transatlantic and often unfamiliar as well. Mad and Panic are my least favourite Library sets from the classic EC 50s period.

A great Bronze Age series. Congrats !