Cody’s Comic Corner is thrilled to be the first to bring you this all-new, never-before-seen production photo from the set of 2016’s Gambit featuring Channing Tatum!

Sharp-eyed X-Men fans will surely recognize this image as depicting Gambit’s enrollment in cowboy basketball boot-camp (see Uncanny X-Men 267, true believer)!

I do not have an eBay account.  I have never had one, because I am not allowed to have one.

In the vast marketplace that is the Internet, eBay is usually my last resort, to procure items I cannot easily acquire elsewhere.  I’ve successfully bid on one eBay item, and that was back around 2006, borrowing the eBay account of a friend (with his knowledge and permission, thank you).  It was for a complete set of the four-issue Flex Mentallo miniseries, written by Grant Morrison and with art by Frank Quitely; at the time these issues were quite rare, since they were out of print due to being tied up in a trademark infringement suit between DC Comics and, of all entities, the Charles Atlas company.  It was the very rarity of these issues that taunted me and tantalized me — was simple scarcity the only thing between me and this story?  And so I lay in wait, watching the minutes tick by before I made my move, neatly swiping the auction out from underneath the other bidders with seconds to spare.  After all, what were they doing bidding on comics that I’d already decided were mine?  Clearly, I wanted them more.  And to this day, I can still remember that rush of victory, which — if I’m honest — made the actual acquisition of said comics seem secondary in comparison.  To call it a dangerous sensation would be a gross understatement, and relying on the kindness of others to bid on my behalf helps maintain a useful barrier between myself and… well, financial ruin, most likely.

This weekend, in the course of my travels through the Internet, my thoughts turned to the eleven-issue Marvel run of Gargoyles comics.  In my youth, the Gargoyles TV series captured my imagination like nothing else.  Like Batman: The Animated Series, I loved and respected these shows because, even as a fourth grader, I recognized that these so-called “cartoons” did not patronize me.  They didn’t talk down to me.  They took me seriously, and showed me what a story could be.  Gargoyles ran the gamut of just about every mythology there is — sure, it had cyborg assassins and dystopian futures and clones upon clones, but it also dealt with Arthurian legend, Shakespeare, Anansi, pantheons from Greek and Egyptian myth, even freaking Cu Chullain.  (When was the last time your children’s Saturday morning cartoons taught them about Irish mythology.)  One episode featured the alien that inspired the moai on Easter Island.  Not to mention some of the best @#$%ing examples of time travel to be had in modern fiction.  Meet me in person and give me a caffeinated soda and I will talk at you about that episode with the Archmage until you politely excuse yourself and wriggle out of a bathroom window.

Thus, I made note of an auction for a complete run of these hard-to-find comics from 1995, starting at a mere $10 for the lot.  Clearly this seller didn’t know what they had — one of these issues can go for $20 easily, and the only other auction on eBay with a complete run offers a buy-it-now option for $125.  All this and early Amanda Conner art, to boot.  Did I need them in my life?  No, of course not.  But, well, they’d be nice to have, wouldn’t they?  And if they’re right there, after all… Which led me to asking my husband if we had any friends with an eBay account.

And so, I did what all addicts do, sooner or later: I dragged my family into it.

In conversation with my mom, she mentioned that she has an eBay account — of course she does, she said in the tone of one who wonders why they wouldn’t, in this day and age.  So we agreed that if I kept an eye on it this weekend, she’d bid for me, and I’d pay her back.  And if it didn’t work out, well, no harm done, right?

This evening, my mom and I began a video-chat with ten minutes before the auction ended.  My heart sank when I noticed that the bids had increased from two to twenty-two over the course of the day, and then to twenty-seven as I watched.  My mom signed on, ready to place her bid when I gave her the word.  My dad even joined in on the action, pulling up a chair and providing his strategy: he thought I should wait until one minute left, to give us a chance to post a counter-bid.  I wanted to play dangerously and wait until thirty seconds, if that.  We noted that we still had four long minutes to go — what else were we going to talk about to fill the time?  The tension rose as the red timer inexorably ticked away the seconds.  At fifty seconds, we made our move, which was instantly countered.  We bid again — Dad said we should let it go, Mom asking me how high I was willing to go.  As high as it takes, obviously.  She and I were both caught up in the rush.  We bid again.  Too much, of course.  But I can still justify this.  And then… it was over.  No harm done.  Clearly, the other bidder just wanted these Gargoyles comics more than I did.  No shame in that.  In this modern age, rare comics aren’t actually that hard to find if you look hard enough, and they’ll turn up again.

…and yet.  Hours later, I can’t help but look back and wonder about my strategy.  Should I have had my mom wait until ten seconds remained?  Five?  Oh, this is so damnably difficult to coordinate by proxy.  Which, of course, is entirely the point.  It’s not the kind of thing that one can approach rationally, particularly with a sickness as well-honed and refined as my own.  This doesn’t feel like defeat, exactly.  It’s certainly not going to keep me up at night.  But what is it about the canker that prompts one to keep prodding it with one’s tongue, though there’s no good that can come from dwelling upon it, much less anything like satisfaction?

To make matters worse, my mom said it was fun.  And you know what?  It was.  It unexpectedly turned into a fun family bonding activity.  Immediately afterwards, she asked me if there were anything else I wanted to bid on while we were at it.

And that is the story of why I don’t have an eBay account, because I’m not allowed to have one.

GUESS WHO’S GOT HIS VERY OWN EXCLUSIVE ED LUCE WUVABLE OAF SKETCH VARIANT EDITION OF SECRET WARS #1

HERE’S A HINT: NOT YOU

BOOM

In preparation for the upcoming deluge of Secret Wars titles, including Jason Aaron’s Weirdworld, I decided to brush up on an obscure niche in Marvel lore: Skull the Slayer.  Touted by the trade paperback as “LOST meets The Land That Time Forgot,” we follow Jim Scully, a disgraced Vietnam vet wrongly charged with his brother’s murder, when his plane ventures through the Bermuda Triangle and crash-lands in a prehistoric jungle populated with dinosaurs, cavemen, alien corpses, robots, and an alien/pharaoh/sorcerer called Slitherogue.  It’s good fun!

But the first issue, written by Marv Wolfman and illustrated by Steve Gan, definitely wins the award for Most Engaged Narrator – but unfortunately, narration in the remaining seven issues of the short-lived series is virtually nil!  Check it out:

Pilot #1: “Heeeyyy!  Watch it, Sid.  You’re flying a plane — not a skateboard!”
Pilot #2: “Don’t tell me, Marc.  Tell the controls.  They’re stuck!  Something’s happened!  They’ve gone crazy!”
Narrator: “But don’t worry about it, friend — you’re not going to live — so why aggravate yourself more than you have to.”

The narrator also has a vested interest in reminding Scully and the reader exactly what he’s missing out on back home.

Narrator: “But before the plane ‘Nureyeved’ into the bog, Scully found himself thrown out like a ‘Glad-Bag’ full of human garbage.  Out of it for sixteen hours.  Hey, man — got good news and bad news for you: Bad first: you missed The Tonight Show with special guest host, Joey Bishop.  Good news: you’re gonna keep missing it.”
Scully: “Oh man — ohhhh maaann!  Gotta stop drinking reality.  Wwooooeeee!”

So I don’t know what “drinking reality” means?  But anyway later:

Scully: “Guess this is it — back to the primitive — the jungle man lives again!  There’s no one else alive here, and if I’ve figured everything correctly, there won’t be any human life for 222 million years.”
Narrator: “Time enough to have seen over four billion re-runs of ‘I Love Lucy,’ kid.”

Haha, okay!  But then it gets real hardcore real fast as Scully singlehandedly takes on a Tyrannosaurus Rex!  While he’s bashing the dinosaur’s head with a rock(!!!), the narrator is keeping his 1975 copy of the TV Guide close to hand: “You’ve always wanted to be a hero, haven’t you, Scully?  Always wanted to be ‘James Bond,’ ‘Napoleon Solo,’ ‘John Steed’ to the rescue.  Always wanted to be the big honcho, didn’t you?  How dies it feel playing king of the hill now, Scully?  Damn good, doesn’t it?”  And soon, when Scully spears the dinosaur in the face(!!!), “Rexy rears up — and Scully goes with him.  He doesn’t have much of a choice.  Holds on like he did in ‘Nam.  Without whimpering.”

So rad!  But don’t worry, cats and kittens, because Jim Scully isn’t going to let some narrator hog all the good lines, as he swings himself onto the Tyrannosaurus’ neck: “Wanna dance, precious?  Then again, I’ve been out of it so long, I probably don’t know the latest steps!  Hey — you don’t have to hold it against me, you know.  It wasn’t my fault!”  And the dinosaur is all RRRRRROOOOWW, but then Scully is like, “Okay — you asked for it, honey.  I’m through with blind dates from this point on” as he spears the Tyrannosaurus in the eye!

And then the issue reaches its incredible climax with the dinosaur and Scully plummeting over the cliff feet-first, not bothering to pause its blind and maddened rampage – as seen here in the title page in all its glory!

Narrator: “Oughta learn to shut up, Scully.  ‘Cause T-Rex’s really mad now.  Ribbons of blood stream out of its punctured eye — but don’t worry — the next Ice Age will cover the mess.  Rex dances insanely in every direction — mad choreography on a prehistoric stage.  And when the show is over — the curtain falls!  Last minute scores coming in now.  Prehistoric carnivore: zero.  Human shlump: one.  That’s three men down — none left on the base at the bottom of the first.”

But again, the unfortunate lack of Marv Wolfman’s narration in the subsequent issues just makes this knockout first issue stand out all the more.  Maybe they just don’t make ’em like this anymore!

When thinking about comics, there’s a passage from Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to which I come back often, which I will share with you now.  In this chapter, Joe Kavalier, Sammy Clay, and their fellow young comic creators are working on just cranking out new masked crimefighter comic characters to fill out the page count of comic enough so that they qualify as magazines.

“My guy flies,” said Davy O’Dowd.  “That I know.”
Joe shot a look at Sammy, who clapped a hand to his forehead.
“Oy,” he said.
“What?”
“He flies, huh?”
“Something wrong with that?  Frank says this is all about wishful figments.”
“Huh?”
“Wishful figments.  You know, like it’s all what some little kid wishes he could do.  Like for you, hey, you don’t want to have a gimpy leg no more.  So, boom, you give your guy a magic key and he can walk.”
“Huh.”  Sammy had not chosen to look at the process of character creation in quite so stark a manner.  He wondered what other wishes he might have subsumed unknowingly into the character of lame Tom Mayflower.
“I always wished I could fly,” Davy said.  “I guess a lot of guys must have wished that.”
“It’s a common fantasy, yeah.”
“It seems to me that makes it something you can’t have too many of,” Jerry Glovsky put in.
“All right, then, so he can fly.”  Sammy looked at Joe.  “Joe?”
Joe glanced up briefly from his work.  “Why.”
“Why?”
Sammy nodded.  “Why can he fly?  Why does he want to?  And how come he uses his power of flight to fight crime?  Why doesn’t he just become the world’s best second-story man?”
Davy rolled his eyes.  “What is this, comic book catechism?  I don’t know.”
“Take one thing at a time.  How does he do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Stop saying you don’t know.”
“He has big wings.”
“Think of something else.  A rocket pack?  Antigravity boots?  An auto-gyro hat?  Mythological powers of the winds?  Interstellar dust?  Blood transfusion from a bee?  Hydrogen in his veins?”
“Slow down, slow down,” Davy said.  “Jesus, Sam.”
“I’m good at this shit.  Are you scared?”
“Just embarrassed for you.”
“Take a number.  Okay, it’s a fluid.  An antigravity fluid in his veins, he has this little machine he wears on his chest that pumps the stuff into him.”
“He does.”
“Yeah, he needs the stuff to stay alive, see?  The flying part is just a, like an unexpected side benefit.  He’s a scientist.  A doctor.  He was working on some kind of, say, artificial blood.  For the battlefield, you know, Synth-O-Blood, it’s called.  Maybe it’s, shit, I don’t know, maybe it’s made out of ground-up iron meteorites from outer space.  Because blood is iron-based.  Whatever.  But then some criminal types, no, some enemy spies, they break into his laboratory and try to steal it.  When he won’t let them, they shoot him and his girl and leave them for dead.  It’s too late for the girl, okay, how sad, but our guy manages to get himself hooked up to this pump thing just before he dies.  I mean, he does die, medically speaking, but this stuff, this liquid meteorite, it brings him back from the very brink.  And when he comes to–“
“He can fly!”  Davy looked happily around the room.
“He can fly, and he goes after the spies that killed his girl, and now he can really do what he always wanted to, which was help the forces of democracy and peace.  But he can never forget that he has a weakness, that without his Synth-O-Blood pump, he’s a dead man.  He can never stop being… being…”  Sammy snapped his fingers, searching for a name.
“Almost Dead Flying Guy,” suggested Jerry.
“Blood Man,” said Julie.
“The Swift,” Marty Gold said.  “Fastest bird in the world.”
“I draw really nice wings,” said Davy O’Dowd.  “Nice and feathery.”
“Oh, all right, damn it,” Sammy said.  “They can just be there for show.  We’ll call him the Swift.”
“I like it.”
“He can never stop being the Swift,” Sammy said.  “Not for one god-damned minute of the day.”  He stopped and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.  His throat was sore and his lips were dry and he felt as if he had been talking for a week.  Jerry, Marty, and Davy all looked at one another, and then Jerry got down from his stool and went into his bedroom.  When he came out, he was carrying an old Remington typewriter.
“When you’re done with Davy’s, do mine,” he said.

Wasn’t that magical?  Wasn’t that just a joy to read?  But as much as Michael Chabon’s writing just catches you in its arms and carries you away, my favorite part of this section, the part that sticks out so clearly in my imagination even more than Sammy’s spontaneous generation of a superhero, is Joe Kavalier hardly looking up from his work to ask about the why.  This, I think, is the most important, obvious, fundamental thing one needs to consider when writing comics – particularly superhero comics with characters who have been around for decades.  It’s not just a matter of story, it’s a matter of why this character is here and why they’re doing what they’re doing.  Sometimes I worry that there are a lot of Davy O’Dowds out there working on comics today.

I’ll probably be referencing this passage from time to time.  Just a heads-up!  In the meanwhile, for the few of you who have yet to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, what are you even waiting for?

Hey, you guys remember back in Uncanny X-Men 462 by Chris Claremont and Alan Davis, where we learned that omniversal majestrix Opal Luna Saturnyne’s personal guard, the “Executive Action Committee,” consists of alternate-reality versions of some of our favorite X-ladies as hot dudes?

Let’s see how each of them rate on the ol’ Hunk-O-Meter:

Marvel Boy: His name is probably Ray-Ray.  While we can be grateful that Rachel’s stupid “raver-girl” costume was relatively short-lived, I think, for some reason, it’s actually much cuter on a dude. 4/5
Polaris: I am embarrassed to say that it took putting that “Las Vegas cocktail waitress by way of the Shi’ar Empire” outfit on a man to make me realize how demeaning it really was. 3/5
Psylocke: Wow.  Speaking of demeaning, right?  Uh… I can definitely see what they were going for, but, um… there’s maybe a little too much going on here.  2.5/5
Rogue: I love thinking that Rogue would go full-on sideburns if she had the option.  I hope he also has a confederate flag tattooed somewhere upon his person. 2/5
Kit Pryde: Now this dude I definitely wouldn’t kick out of a nighttime training session in the Danger Room.  Accessories aside, you can definitely tell he puts a lot of effort into making sure his hair looks that nice. 5/5
Storm: UGH.  GOD.  Alan Davis, you are capable of better than this!  He-Storm should be lithe and imperious and look like a back-up dancer from a Lady Gaga concert. 0/5

Over the weekend I picked up a couple discount trade paperbacks of Chris Claremont’s New Exiles – during the phase in which Chris Claremont seemed to be quarantined further and further away from prime Marvel continuity, the end result of which was the gloriously onanistic X-Men: Forever – and there was just something so… comforting about it.  Everything you expect from a story in which Chris Claremont is given free rein, and nothing you don’t.  It’s like sitting down and having a visit with Grandpa.

“And so the Exiles encounter an alternate reality where the British empire never fell!”
“Oh hey, that’s a really cool trope, Grandpa, I don’t think you’ve ever done that one before.”
“And… and Psylocke finds herself once again assuming the role of Lady Mandarin!”
“Wow, you, uh… you sure were into it when Psylocke was brainwashed into a sexy Asian lady assassin for like three issues back in the day, weren’t you?”
“And the X-Men, led by a wheelchair-bound Emma Frost, are known in this world as Force-X!”
“What?”
“Force-X!”
“Grandpa, you realize it sounds exactly like you’re saying ‘For Sex,’ right?”
“What’sat?”
“Never mind, here, have some more soup…”

Dear reader, imagine, if you will, that you are superstar comic writer Brian Michael Bendis.  The challenge set before you is that, at times, you must write nerdy, sciency-type characters, when you yourself are not a nerdy, sciency-type kinda guy, but a mere purveyor of schlock.  So how can a writer convey that someone is a smarty with – let me emphasize – the least possible amount of effort?

What’s that you say?  “Have them dispassionately demand someone else’s blood and urine,” you say?  Well, congratulations, you are correct!  As seen here.  And also here.  And lest we forget here, and here shortly thereafter.  And here, and here, and here.  And finally, my personal favorite – “Someone, please, this man needs blood and urine!”