Monday Tuesday Night Murals: Larger than life and twice as ugly

Well hello there, Monday Night Murals! Thanks for rescheduling our appointment for Tuesday instead of Monday night...Ben Grimm's adventures at the Oscars just couldn't wait to be posted! So, then, what have you got in store for us tonight in the wonderful world of interlocking cover images? Could it be...Avengers #379-382? Mmmmm...could be!



Wha...what the Sam Scratch is goin' on here?!? I know I'm not the best there is at puzzles, but that don't even match! Even the logos change partway through the comics from a classic title to one of my least favorite logos that The Avengers has ever had! Hmmmm! Did I do it backwards?

Well, yes. All I have to do is turn the comic books over and...


Covers of Avengers/Marvel Double Feature #379-382 (October 1994-January 1995), art by George Perez

Whoa, that's much better! Yes, this is the brief era when Avengers became a "Marvel Double Feature" book; a flip comic that had The Avengers on one side and a Giant-Man serial on the other. The story depended on which side of the book you were holding up—if you accidentally kept plowing right through the Avengers into Giant-Man backwards, you'd see Hank Pym get hit by his wife, shrink down to ant-size, and have his series Tales to Astonish cancelled with issue #35.

Taken by themselves, each of these covers is kinda strange, isn't it? Well, at least the first two had Hank's eye on it...but #381 isn't exactly the sort of cover that inspires great interest. "Oh boy, this month we find out all about Hank Pym's chin!" But I do like the little happy Wasp cavortin' around with a chain o' ants on the final issue. Ah, happier days. Well, at least you could paste them all together and make yourself a Giant-Man mask for Halloween 1994! (Just watch out for...RAID!