One thing that always bugged me about the early Jurgens run; did he just forget that Jake Olson's EMT partner was a drug dealer? I mean, he includes these scenes where the guy is pretty clearly stealing drugs from the hospital, selling them on the street and plotting to pin the whole thing on Jake… then there's the…

"Marvel has gotten really bad at keeping their backlist in print."

I gave the American version a go but I couldn't really get into it. Same deal with Spacey's movie version of State of Play.

Seconding the PAD Hulk recommendation. It's been a couple of years since the last Visionaries trade but I hope they've not been discontinued.

Iron Man: I like the David Michelinie/Bob Layton/John Romita, Jr. run, which was collected in the omnibus format earlier this year.

Are we approaching the saturation point?

I've been reading his Captain Britain run with Alan Davis. It's hard to believe this is the only time he ever wrote a Marvel character, and it's really too bad, because it's pretty terrific, definitely one of my favourite runs on any comic ever.

They're both pretty ill-defined. Sinister's power (I think) is complete control over his molecular structure, so he can change his shape, size and density, regenerate from almost any injury and so on.

I'll tell you what; one of my favourite creative runs on X-Men was Alan Davis's tenure as writer on both of the main comics in the late-1990s. He had an Apocalypse story call "The Twelve" that they could pretty easily adapt.

Yeah, they were pretty annoying. I've seen a lot of people say, "Well, that's how kids really would behave in that situation," but it honestly doesn't make them any less frustrating. I think it's pretty clear why writers don't tend to write "completely realistic" characters, especially kid characters.

The thing about the villain in Pinocchio (the Coachman) is that he gets away with his scheme; he turns all these kids into donkeys and sells them to the salt mines and the coal pits, and we never learn what he does with the ones that can still talk.

Don't forget Michelinie and Layton on Iron Man, and Louise Simonson on X-Factor and New Mutants.

I honestly can't even begin to imagine how Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum actually happened. It seriously boggles my mind to think that somebody in editorial looked at Loeb's scripts and thought, "Yep! That's another world-beater!"

I think he was created (or maybe bio-engineered) by Mojo to be the ultimate action movie star, or something like that.

Since my first exposure to the character was through the Kurt Busiek/George Pérez run on Avengers, I've always thought of the character as Warbird, which is odd because the character's been around since about 1968 and had that name for maybe six years at best.

Obviously, the title is being handed over to Steve Englehart, who will finally realise his thirty-year-old plan to move Daredevil to San Francisco and add him to the cast of the West Coast Avengers.

One wonders if JMS's work in comics has completely exhausted all the nerd good will he earned with Babylon 5.

"Outcast" was actually one of the last Redwall books I read, so I was bit older reading it than when I started on the series. As a consequence, it really struck me how the "goodbeasts" of the Abbey treat Veil as "typical vermin" because he's different from them (I'm pretty sure they named him "Veil" because it's an…

What is this song trying to do, anyway?

If a guy shoots Dan DiDio, it's Mark Waid.