Tuesday, December 04, 2007

This cat Aunt May is one bad mutha.../Shut yo' mouth!/I'm jus' talkin' 'bout Aunt May!

The best-laid plans of rodents and regular guys gang aft agley, 'cording to Major Frank Burns, so please kindly wait for your regularly scheduled A Wodehouse a Week to appear a little later this...uh...week. (It's a longer book than I expected and I'm not quite through re-reading it yet!) Speaking of mice, here's a clue about which book I'm readin':
Mickey Mouse doll

In the meantime, and because this is Comics Oughta Be Fun!, after all...I present to you one of my favorite Marvel Comics cameo appearances of all time: a quite-unexpected guest shot by a certain Ms. M. Parker in the pages of Fantastic Four #260, smack-dab in the midst of a battle between the FF, Terrax the Tamer, and the redoubtable Doctor Doom. You'd think such a frail and sensitive elderly lady would scamper away home to Queens at the first sign of trouble, wouldn't you? Uh uh...because our Miss May is full of piss and vinegar:
FF #260 panel
FF #260 panel
FF #260 panel
Panels from Fantastic Four (1961 series) #260 (November 1983), written and drawn by John Byrne, coloring by Glynis Wein, lettering by Jim Novak

Say what you want about John Byrne's personal politics...and I often do...but you can't deny that he writes Aunt May as a complete badass. Because that dude in the blue shirt in the second panel May badmouths Dr. Doom to? Why, that's Doom himself (just body-switched using the Ovoid mind-swapping technique he learned years ago in a Lee/Kirby issue).

What does that mean? It means that May Parker called Doctor Doom nasty to his face and lived to tell the tale.

I repeat. Aunt May: complete badass.

4 comments:

  1. She was also the best part of the second movie when she bitch-slapped Doc Ock!

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  2. Neat. I did a book report on Luck of the Bodkins once.

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  3. She didn't just call him nasty. She pointed out that the FF whups his hiney on a regular basis and lived to tell about it.

    I believe that is worth an "and utter" between "complete" and "badass".

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  4. MIchael Sensei, I was thinking the exact same thing.

    She reminds me of my Nana, who frightened off a purse snatcher at Sears (Nana was 75 years old and 4 feet 10 inches at the time).

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