How can you say someone is great who's never had his picture on bubblegum cards?

So, on Monday I was talking about this Volstagg trading card sticker:



...and I thought it would be fun to feature an entire week of Warriors Three Marvel trading cards from all those various series licensed to card companies! Unfortunately...as far as I can tell (and let me know if I'm wrong, Bully-boosters!), none of the various 1990s Marvel cards featured our trio of titanic troopers. By Odin! What's up with that?!?

Yeah, sure, there's a card featuring the Asgardians, but only Thor, Odin, and Loki appear on it.



In fact, it's usually only Thor and Loki, and occasionally Beta Ray Bill, who make any appearances at all on Marvel cards. (Tough luck for you Sif fans, huh?) And even when he is featured, Thor, not unlike his Midgardian secret identity Rodney Dangerfield, seldom gets any respect. Here's a mural of nine cards featuring the "mythic" characters of 1990s Marvel. Sure, Thor's on there...but is he in the middle?



No. He is not. Instead, that honor is reserved for one of Marvel's most popular and enduring characters:



COBWEB! With the power of...mildly making your home a little more disheveled. Yep, remember when Sleepwalker was popular? Sleepwalker!: Created with the express purpose of being more Sandman than anything else Marvel published, including that Spider-Man villain spin-off Sandman. And he had a dog named Rambo! Yep, that topical reference will never get old!



Say, Bully, (you're probably asking), what other Marvel characters were considered more worthy of being featured on a bubblegum card than three immortal warrior-gods co-created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby? And, how do you keep your fuzzy fur so shiny and glossy? Answers: plenty of raw eggs and a nightly dose of castor oil. Also, these guys:

Cardinal! The superhero with the power of voting for the next Pope!




Heart Attack! She strikes...with the proportionate strength of a stick of butter!




Splice! He'll fix your ruined VHS and Betamax tapes!




MLF! Hey, how come Marvel never uses that acronym anymore?




Proctor! Don't cheat on that standardized test near him!




Blackheart! From the post-Frank Miller, ultra-gritty and realistic years of Daredevil!




Calypso! She's...not wearing a bra. Geez, lady!




Deadzone! One of the terrifying members of the supervillain team King's Klan, including Cujo, It, Night Shift, Tommyknocker, and Stephen King Goes to the Movies!




Slayback! Alt-rock band out of Austin, Texas!




Wild Heart! Stevie Nicks's second LP!




Hardcore! Even his name says Merry Christmas he's hardcore!




Goddess! Her real name is Goddess! Her parents must have met at Woodstock!




And then there's this guy.


Whoa, enough cards there, Gambit? Remember the rule of this blog, folks: this is the only acceptable Gambit, in card form or otherwise!



Well, that's just plain Ragnarok-grettable. So many chances to feature the Warriors Three, so many cards tossed away on second- or third-stringer has-beens whose action figures gather dust in the Big Lots of America's strip malls. Remember folks, Kirby Kharacters will endure! Also, kooler to kollect.

To be absolutely fair, earlier this year the W3 were featured on cards tying in with Marvel's hit movie Captain America Thor! It was really rather humiliating, however, that the Warriors Three had to cut patches out their undershortsr to create these cards.



Say, what was that Lucy van Pelt said at the beginning?

He never got his picture on bubblegum cards, did he? Have you ever seen his picture on a bubblegum card? Hmmm? How can you say someone is great who's never had his picture on bubblegum cards?

Huh. Well, this blog is all about righting rights and Jane Wiedlin, so let me introduce, for the very first time ever, straight outta Asgard...

Warriors Three Bubblegum cards!

There ya go, kids! Cut them out and collect 'em all! Trade 'em with your friends! Put 'em in your bicycle wheel spokes! Use them to whup the asses of anybody playing the Pokemon trading card game! Slip 'em into a deck of cards at a Vegas gaming table! But most of all, love them. And they'll love you right back. That's how cool they are.

Oh yeah! And here's your gum.



Warning: do not eat gum.

The Land of Cancelled Heroes

Panels from Animal Man #24 (June 1990), script by Grant Morrison, pencils by Chas Truog, inks by Doug Hazlewood, colors by Tatjana Wood, letters by John Costanza

Upset that your favorite hero or heroine's incarnation doesn't have a place in the new 52 books of the DC Universe? Cry no more, fanboys, cry no more. They will always be there on Earth-Reread:



And remember, there's always a chance that a hero might eventually escape from the Land of Cancelled Heroes...say, for instance, Quicksilver (aka Max Mercury), released into custody of the pages of Impulse, or J'emm, Son of Saturn (as seen in JLA...


Panels from Animal Man #25 (July 1990), script by Grant Morrison, pencils by Chas Truog, inks by Mark Farmer, colors by Tatjana Wood, letters by John Costanza

Or the Red Bee, guesting in Starman...as a ghost mind you, but hey, can he complain?



In fact, you might even forget that Mister Freeze had once not been seen for years!



Even Earth-616...the Marvel Universe..has a land of canceled heroes. With a pretty liberal revolving door policy, it appears!


Page from Ka-Zar the Savage (October 1984), script by Mike Carlin, pencils by Paul Neary, inks by Carlos Garzon, colors by George Roussos, letters by Janice Chiang





So relax and play for a while, kids. We'll get you out...sooner or later.



Hang in there, babies!

Ever since I put your picture In a frame

Hey, remember this comic book cover?:



Sure you do! That's the cover of What If? v.2 #25, "What if the Marvel Super Heroes Had Last Atlantis Attacks?," which we looked at together a couple days ago. The more I looked at it, tho', the more it became familiar to me. No, it didn't remind me of that time seven giant snakes with Cyclop's optic blasts came bursting out of Lake Placid...it's really the surrounding frame which caught my interest, because it reminded me of this:



Remember those? That's the Marvel 25th Anniversary frame, which adorned every Marvel (and Star) Comic cover-dated November 1986, to celebrate a quarter-century of Reed Richards crashing rocket ships into the ground. All that month, this multi-character frame penciled and inked by John Romita Sr. surrounded a headshot portrait of the comic's star or one of the co-stars. Take yourself a gander or goose at some of them right now!



That wasn't the last time Marvel used that motif, of course! Recently through 2009 and 2010, a newly designed frame debuted:



They were used on issues to commemorate both the 70th anniversary of the debut of Timely Comics and The Year of the Marvel Woman. Hey, who let Sentry on there? Well, you can blank him over with some White-Out. That's exactly what Mike Nesmith's mother had in mind when she invented it, you know!



Which got me thinkin'...Marvel shoulda used the frame from the cover of What If? #25 on a whole new series of comics! Since they're all looking so shocked and stunned, they could frame a special crossover event in which everybody dies! And I think it would go something like this:



You could use it to re-tell recent big event deaths like Captain America, or flash back in time to revisit the classic deaths of yesteryear!:



Eh, don't worry; she'll be back. And hey, my idea would be perfect for this summer's big Death of Spider-Man event! Because this time it's for sure!



Of course, when you're killing off Spider-Man, it's always helpful to start thinning out the ranks of his supporting cast as well.



Yes, in the Death of Spider-Man cross-over, no-one is safe!



Just to make sure nobody's coming back, we've hired a consultant to help keep this crossover kicking the bucket with every issue!



Spoilsport.

Now, make your own! Remember, it doesn't count if you don't see the body!

33⅓

We interrupt this blog for an advertisement...or rather, several advertisements! Let's all scoot back to the sweet, swingin' seventies, when platform shoes were high-heeled, trousers were tight, and your iPod played the Bee Gees, except it was called a record player and you couldn't carry it around with you unless you had a strong back and a really long power cord. Those were the sweet, sweet days when comics cost 15¢, and if you happened to have forty-five cents in the pocket of your Toughskin jeans when you walked into the Rexell, well, Stan Lee was gonna figger out a way to get all of your hard-earned, paper-route, sellin' Grit money. How was he gonna do that? Through the four-color magic of advertisements: compelling, intriguing, cliff-hanging banners which made you want, nay, need the issue in question. It's no doubt that the thing Marvel did best after making comics was selling comics, and all it took was one-third of a page, at the bottom of the letters column, to hawk and bark the newest ("on sale now!") ish of a book you might not be reading but by golly now you'd better pick it up. Let's take a look at some of these ads for classic Marvel comic titles of the early 1970s. They may be small in size, but they're big with juicy advertising flavor!



Ad for Amazing Spider-Man #91 in Fantastic Four #105 (December 1970)



Ad for Man-Thing #1 and Ka-Zar #1 in Amazing Spider-Man #128 (January 1974)



Ad for Tower of Shadows in Thor #185 (February 1971). Curiously, King Kull never appeared in Tower of Shadows...by the time that feature appeared, Tower had changed its title to Creatures on the Loose with #10 (March 1971)



Ad for Iron Man #39 in Fantastic Four #112 (July 1971)



Ad for Fantastic Four #104 in Incredible Hulk #133 (November 1970)



Ad for Conan the Barbarian #4 in Fantastic Four #109 (April 1971)



Ad for Thor #183 in Incredible Hulk #183 (December 1970)



Ad for Fantastic Four #109 in Incredible Hulk #138 (April 1971)



Ad for Thor #190 in Fantastic Four #113 (August 1971)



Ad for Sub-Mariner #37 in Incredible Hulk #139 (May 1971)



Ad for Amazing Adventures #6 in Avengers #87 (April 1971)



Ad for Conan the Barbarian #2 in INcredible Hulk #135 (January 1971)



Ad for Avengers #88 and Incredible Hulk #140 in Fantastic Four #111 (June 1971)