This morning we'll be continuing to poke around in the source of last night's feature. It was 30 years ago - 1988 - and
Marvel was trying to fly an old style parody book. Since pretty much every term for mental illness had already been taken by other magazines, they called it
What The--?!
They tested the waters with a four issue series, and they put a fair bit of effort into those issues. The series was picked up a half year later and continued numbering from 5, but those first four stand apart from the rest - despite some very fine efforts over the following one score and two issues.
Let's take a little look -
You might have already noted one thing that set those first four issues apart from later efforts - parody by big name series creators who weren't generally known for doing comedic parody. The above piece by
Peter David,
Todd MacFarlane and
Jim Salicrup is a good example.
A better example still - getting the big name guys to parody their own works - like this team up of
John Byrne and
Jerry Ordway with their parody of
Superman and the
Fantastic Four (& friends) -
What The--?! featured silly little bits of fun...
...and quietly brilliant slams that none dare sign...
And every now and then, they slipped in some tasty oddity that i didn't know i needed to see until they showed it to me - like one of my favorite characters,
Doctor Strange, as filtered through the wonderfully warped lens of another old fave -
Phil Foglio* -
pages from What The--?! #s 2 & 4 (1988)
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*(Really? We haven't done anything on Phil Foglio yet? Not even on Blue Monday?
Damn. So much yet...
Dear Odd, so much...)
