The Curse of the Weregeek.

One of my jobs at work is to lay out the company’s weekly newsletter, which involves a certain amount of back-and-forth with my co-worker Terry, who is more or less the editor (I say “more or less” because he’s also sort of reporter, publisher, and paperboy – it’s complicated.)

This morning we were debating the sequence of two stories for the Bulletin, and although I didn’t agree with his position, I said, “Well, ultimately, this is your decision.  After all, that’s why we put you in charge of the Daily Planet.”

“Absolutely!” he replied, and pounded his fist on the table.  “I want pictures of Spider-Man, and I want them now.”

Sigh.

“Actually, that would be the Daily Bugle.  The Daily Planet is Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olson – you know, Superman?  However, that was an acceptable imitation of J. K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson Junior.”

“Thank you, thank you.”

“Were you aware that J. Jonah Jameson the Third, J. Jonah Jameson Junior’s son, you know, the astronaut, actually I think his name was John Jameson, became a werewolf after he came back from his trip to the Moon?  There was this alien gem he found on the Moon, lots of alien gems in Marvel Comics for some reason.

"Of course he fought Spider-Man, his father found out and was all embarrassed at having a son with meta-abilities*, but he kept attacking his father when he was a wolf, odd bit of psychology there, and ultimately he went to another dimension where he was a werewolf all the time and it turned out he was actually a god.  He had his own comic for a while**, drawn by George Perez if memory serves, back in the late 70s.”

A brief silence followed.

“Sorry about that, I actually know all this stuff.”

“You know I’m going to have to Google all of that now, or at least the parts I remember.”

Sorry, Terry.  Sometimes I forget that the whole reason I started blogging was to avoid boring people in person.

- Sid

* This is a politically correct euphemism for “super powers”.

** Research revealed this to be incorrect – Man-Wolf did not have his own comic, but he did an extended run in Marvel Premiere, which was a showcase publication that featured a variety of interesting one or two-off pilot projects like Man-Wolf, the 3-D Man, Woodgod, Adam Warlock – Adam Warlock was a great character, although really not at all the standard superhero type, and Jim Starlin did some fabulous work with him when the character had his own comic.  Jim Starlin created Thanos as well, there’s a really brief shot of Thanos at the end of the Avengers movie, with an inside joke about courting Death, because Thanos was in love with Death, the actual personification of Death, who I did not expect to be female, but surprisingly Thanos isn’t in the next Avengers movie, the villain is Ultron, which is odd because there’s been a lot of foreshadowing of the Thanos story line, including a shot of the Infinity Gauntlet in the treasure room in Asgard in the first Thor movie, and a post-credit scene in the second Thor movie featuring the Collector as played by Benecio del Toro, so maybe they’re going to switch that to a Thor sequel, although really, the Infinity Gauntlet sequence was an Avengers storyline, even if it did pull in Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four …

...sorry, doing it again...