Ok, how about this for an idea. We take it in turns to post a favourite (British spelling) comic cover every day. This went really well on the comic fan website that I used to frequent. What we tried to do was find a theme or subject and follow that, until we all got bored with that theme. I'd like to propose a theme of letters of the alphabet. So, for the remainder of October (only 5 days) and all of November, we post comic cover pictures associated with the letter "A". Then in December, we post covers pertaining to the letter "B". The association to the letter can be as tenuous as you want it to be. For example I could post a cover from "Adventure Comics" or "Amazing Spider Man". However Spider Man covers can also be posted when we're on the letter "S". Adventure Comic covers could also be posted when we're on the letter "L" if they depict the Legion of Super Heroes. So, no real hard, fast rules - in fact the cleverer the interpretation of the letter, the better, as far as I'm concerned.
And it's not written in stone that we have to post a cover every day. There may be some days when no cover gets posted. There's nothing wrong with this, it just demonstrates that we all have lives to lead.
If everyone's in agreement I'd like to kick this off with one of my favourite Action Comic covers, from January 1967. Curt Swan really excelled himself here.
Discussion and voting on future monthly themes takes place on the "Nominations, Themes and Statistics for A Cover A Day" thread. Click here to view the thread.
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Showcase #18, the second try-out for Adam Strange. Still no logo on the cover, but he's mentioned in small print.
For the 18th month, here are two covers with 18 people on them.
I've got one more "Pride" cover I'm saving for tomorrow (if no one beats me to it), then I'm outta here.
Here's a cover with the Bifrost on it. I got a hunch we're gonna see a lot of Bifrost this month.
Surely, we can be more imaginative than that.
And don't call me, "Shirley."
I always pronounced "Bifrost" growing up like "Buy-Frost" or some strange word meaning "two frosts," but I'm told if you can say "Beef-Roast" with an Icelandic accent, that would be pretty close to the Old Norse.
The movies pronounced it "the Buy-Frost," so you were on the money, I pronounced it more or less the second way. (biff-RAWST), and hang my head in shame.
We could probably do a whole thread of comic book names we mispronounced as kids. Me, I used to pronounce the name of Hulk girlfriend "JAR-ella." But then one day I was talking to Bob and he said "jar-ELLA" (like "Cinderella"), and even through his Boston accent I immediately knew he was correct.
I plead to saying Sub-Mareener in my head, until I found out-- I think, I read somewhere-- that it was meant to be Sub-Mariner, as in, "The Rime of the Ancient.." or "that old mariner tells quite a tale." Also, when I first encountered the Hulk in primary school, I thought he was saying "Punny human!" I figured that one out pretty quickly, though I suppose the Hulk might say it the other way if he ever met me.
Kids are so very green when it comes to language.
With Bifrost, I went with the pronunciation that didn't sound like English. Little me didn't know exactly what Vikings spoke, but he was pretty sure it wasn't English.
With Sub-Mariner, I took my cue from an early issue where Roy Thomas had some sailor shout "It's the Sub-ma-REEN-er!" I assumed from the emphasis that sub-ma-REEN-er was an incorrect pronunciation, or why the emphasis? So I used the pronunciation of "Mariner" instead of the pronunciation of "Marine." IOW, I stumbled on the right pronunciation through Roy's joke with the wrong one.
OTOH, I went with Mag-NET-o, due to having heard the word "magnet." I had never heard of a "mag-NEET-o" as a car part when young, and didn't until I was long into adulthood, and then it was in past tense, as something cars used to have. To little me, Mag-NEET-o sounded like "better than neat-o," which was dumb.
With Sub-Mariner, I took my cue from an early issue where Roy Thomas had some sailor shout "It's the Sub-ma-REEN-er!"
I remember that scene. It's from issue #1 (1968, page12, panel 2), but it's two thieves, not sailors. I have known the word "mariner" for as long as I can remember (thanks to MAD magazine), but I still pronounced Namor's nom de plume "Sub-me-REEN-er" reasoning that it was supposed to be evokative of a submarine, rather than an "underwater sailor." I even used that thief's incorrect pronunciation to bolster my point.
Your version of "Bifrost" is more historically accurate, however.
Another use of the Kryptonian flag
Cap, a few pages back you talked about its poor design, but Mort seemed to like it. It didn't look like any flag here on Earth (with one exception) so it was recognizable as a "flag" to young readers but suitably alien at the same time.
I think it's "inspiration" may have been the UN flag adopted in 1947 just a few years before the Kryptonian flag appears (1958).