In the first four days that Part One of this article was on the board, it picked up over six hundred hits.  Wow.

Now, I know it wasn’t because I'm such a scintillating writer.  I’m not the kind of fellow who can write a page-turner.  I’m lucky when I get the subject and verb to agree.

That many hits in that brief a time is a testament to the…

If a rumour is pithy enough, especially if it involves a famous person and provides a cutting irony or a satisfying comeuppance, then the public will clutch it to its collective bosom, regardless of the facts.  H. L. Mencken proved this some ninety years ago, with his Bathtub Hoax.  I learnt it myself for the first time in 1962, one day at a friend’s house.

We…

Stan Lee, as the sole editor and principal writer for Marvel, was able to maintain a tight continuity for all of his characters, even when they appeared in other titles.  This was an advantage over Silver-Age DC, which grouped its titles under various editors.  If a DC hero crossed over into another editor’s title, rarely did that character bring his continuity baggage with…

Man oh man!  I don’t know if it’s because my questions were a bit too easy or because Jeff of Earth-J is a dyed-in-the-wool Silver-Age Marvel expert (I suspect it’s an admix of both), but he nailed most of the correct answers right out of the gate.  And of the two he missed, Philip Portelli picked up half the slack by correctly identifying the right name in question number…