The moment you've all been waiting for has arrived: Time to test your brains' capability to remember absolutely otherwise useless information about Marvel and DC's Silver Age comics!
Answer them as quickly as you can (with no outside references!) and try to imagine Mark Waid sitting next to you making faces and saying "That's so EASY!" as a roomful of fans waits for your answer.
-- MSA
Replies
OK, after reading through all the trivia questions and getting the answers to compare along side, I have to cry "Foul" on two.
(Oh Craig, you knew that there'd be at least one in the bunch, didn't you!! LOL!)
The question on how many members of the Fantastic Four are on the cover of #51."This Man...This Monster" can be answered three different ways:
2) You claim that only two are on the cover. ("That's not the Thing!") Alright, trick question... I'll give you that.
3) It most certainly IS the image of the Thing after all... (therefore, the answer IS three!)
4) If you count the corner box in the upper left hand corner, you'll see four bright shiney faces of the four TRUE members of the Fantastic Four staring back at 'cha!
When it comes to significant issue numbers, this ol' Marvel Fan boy is at a loss to figure out #105, 28, and 34, but #252 rings bells BIG TIME! I know that Amazing Spider-Man #252 marks the first appearance of that black suit in the main title. This was SO important, that they copied Amazing Fantasy #15 to ape it!
(I know, I know, if I was raised in the DC tradition, there'd be no question about this....)
(*Yeah, I searched all through the CGB database for a significant #105 in Marvel, and this is the only thing I could find that limps to mind... Sorry Batroc...)
I probably got too cute with that category, which was clever but not a big point-scorer. Someone pretending to be the Thing isn't the Thing, of course. I figured the first person would say three and the second would figure it out and say two, and that's more trick than information.
And, of course, since I did count the corner box in another question, it could easily be argued that it counts here, too. I should've rethought that category, but I was so impressed with all the people nobody sees on covers that I wasn't noticing the problems.
The bad news, again, is that anything after September 1970 doesn't count for this Silver Age contest, so what happened in ASM #252 doesn't matter. It's tough in a Marvel-DC trivia contest to do real well when all you know is Marvel trivia. That's why those high numbers are so useful--few comics got there by September 1970, and most of them were DC, so the choices are limited.
But IMO, you have to be a huge Marvel-only fan not to know what title had an important #105. I'd say the same thing for #28, but we already proved that most people think in terms of characters, and it takes awhile to get to that title.
On the other hand, as part of a team, you'd be a big contributor. Most of the time, the contestants have certain strengths and rely on the others for the parts they don't know. There used to be big Legion battles between Waid and Sidne Gail Ward, a major Legion fan. But since she left the team, those aren't quite as pitched.
Waid used to be really good at DC trivia and less so at Marvel, but Kurt Busiek was on the team and was just the opposite. Nowadays, Kurt doesn't come to Chicago, but Waid has gotten so much better at Marvel trivia that he can answer them all, with only a few gaps.
-- MSA
Yeah, my LCBS clerk/manager loves to go up to Chicago to sit in on that feud...er, I mean, contest. He came back all glowing one year, proud that he had showed up Waid on a question. (I think he's afraid of a rematch, and so didn't go up to chicago this year. HA!)
As for #105 and 28, and all the rest... we've gone round and round on this before. I just have a blind spot when it comes to DC...period. But I'll still always think if Spidey's black suit when 252 is mentioned... just like 337 means Thor...and most of the 200rds mean X-men to me, etc... (I may be a child of both the 60s AND 80s Marvels.
Yes, I'm way behind on this. I take the quiz every year without looking up the answers, and as usual, my Silver Age knowledge is dismal when it comes to DC. You'd think having read all those Showcase Presentses the past few years would help, but my old brain just doesn't retain the useless stuff (or much of anything else) that my young brain did when I was a Marvel fan.
I got 42 correct out of 70, which isn't that bad, I guess. I completely wiped out on category 3, the Batman questions, and category 14, the Kandor questions. I'll bet Dave knew them all.
There's always next year, although I have a better shot at qualifying for American Ninja Warrior than I do at getting all of Mr. Age's questions correct.
Hoy
Don't feel bad, Hoy... Take pride in your Marvel fanboy geekdom. (We used to call this Marvel Zombie fan, until they bastardized that with a series by the same name....ugh!)
We silver age fans will always treasure those significant numbers... the intial appearances, the key issues, the final issue numbers.... 36, 39, 59, 70, 100, 101, 333, 337...
All the numbers have special memories attached to them... cover images burned into my mind...(And to think how upset the grade school teacher got with us when she overheard us boys arguing over number 69 in the playground...debating whether it was any good or not... or if it was just necessary before proceding onto something better. [We were talking about Tales to Astonish #69...the final Giant-Man story, as opposed to the start up of Subby in #70... but she didn't know that. We were all sent to the principal's office until she could sort this out.]