I thought the Skrulls who turn into cows were the first Skrulls ever in Fantastic Four #2? Did they do that twice?

So, translating from Bizarro speak, you mean you don't want a Bizarro Spambot gimmick account to exist, but you really feel like making one anyway?

Spider-Woman is part of the perennial Avengers cast? Wasn't she a Bendis innovation?

I mean, it was kind of a stupid idea to give Miller All-Star Batman and Robin in the first place, but I'm not sure I get why the fact that it sucked meant that the whole All-Star concept couldn't be used anymore.

Sigh. I actually find that I don't really care about the X-Men not being available to Marvel, because I think the X stuff never fits very well with the non-X stuff in the Marvel Universe. Fox keeping the Fantastic Four and related properties upsets me more, because the Fantastic Four are so much more central to the…

no, I mean, I kind of enjoyed it at times, too. Kirby is just full of ingenious ideas, and it's cool to see the whole Marvel universe slowly taking shape. It definitely works better to read it an issue at a time, rather than trying to do a bunch at once.

What I love are the team books that had to work around ridiculous continuity introduced in the main book. The Morrison/Porter JLA, for instance, had to figure out ways to deal with electric blue Superman, Hippolyta as Wonder Woman, and Walter West Flash.

I have to say that, having forced my way through the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four up to Galactus, it's really hard going. So happy I gave up on it and read the Waid and Hickman runs instead. Perhaps this makes me a philistine of some sort, but I just have a really hard time with the silver age stuff. Like, there's tons…

I read someone else say, and I think it's right, that Hickman's real strength is in characterization, rather than "big ideas," as much as he clearly wants to be a big idea guy. That seems right to me, although I'll note that I didn't really understand the reveal of Tony's motivations at the end of Avengers. What was…

So, hearing people get excited about Secret Wars caused me to decide to read through, well, all of Hickman's Fantastic Four and Avengers runs. I liked them a lot!

Comic books, ladies and gentlemen!

Are they, though? Isn't Yorick pretty self-evidently a variation on a motif that goes back to the original Johnny Storm and Peter Parker? I mean, I realize that Vaughan does other stuff with Yorick, in terms of him being depressed and suicidal, but I'm not really sure I bought that stuff - admittedly, I (temporarily?)…

He's pretty much said years are the same length.

Yeah, this would have been better.

There's a fan made timeline tries to reconcile everything, with some pretty dubious results (I believe Catelyn has to spend like a month secretly in King's Landing, for instance, to allow her to meet Tyrion at the Crossroads Inn).

Meereen and the non-Stannis related aspects of the Wall could be perfectly quiescent for five years if Martin chose to make them so, at least judging from the endpoint of Storm of Swords. Martin chose to create chaotic shifting landscapes. Stannis is a bit of a pickle, though.

Oh yeah, absolutely true. And I really don't think *any* of the other plots would be hurt by the jump.

The one non-Brienne plotline that was hard to do the five year jump with was Stannis. What's he going to do for five years?

I mean, at that point you're just saying that it's not okay to depict rape.

Ugh, Yorick. How many wisecracking twenty-something white dudes do comics need? (Answer: all of them. Comics need all of the wisecracking twenty-something white dudes)