Apropos of nothing (as Nick Cafardo, a favorite sportswriter in The Boston Globe, likes to type)...

Having followed Hope Solo on "Dancing with the Stars" until she got the boot last night, I am convinced that she is the one to cast as Young Bea in the much-needed Hollywood treatment of "The Bea Arthur Story."

And while I've never had any interest or desire to sign an online petition for or against ANYTHING, I may be ready to sign that petition to make television a safer and saner place by performing Kardashian removal.

My thoughts on Grey Hulk, Wolverine, Ghost Rider and Spiderman being the new F.F.

That was such a load of fanboy B.S! Replacing the real F.F. with characters that were being heavily pushed at the expense of classic characters? I'm surprised the Punisher wasn't there in place of Spiderman.

You know what? Elton John did a cover version of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. That sure as hell didn't mean he was a Beatle!

That nonsense was just another nail in the real Marvel's coffin.

In the voice of Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons, "Ha Ha! You watch Dancing With the Stars!"

That's really all I could glean from this post.

I prefer to think of it this way: on Monday and Tuesday evenings, I try to spend quality time with Mrs. Soxolas by sitting next to her on the sofa and as it turns out, SHE'S watching "DWTS."

Then after that on Tuesday, I cleanse my visual man palate by watching "Sons of Anarchy."

(Tho' admittedly, lately SOA is making me feel like I'm that guy fixed on watching a car wreck and can't turn away...)

Okay, I'll let it slide this time. Mrs. Soxolas needs to keep her womanly ills in check through DWTS. I'm glad I don't need to deal with such inconveniences. And for the record, I'm not singling out Mrs. Soxolas, all women have "the womanly ills." It's true, I saw it in a 1951 video lesson.

"Real Marvel" = the Marvel Comics I grew up with and which should never be changed.

Not that that's necessarily a bad or incorrect viewpoint, mind you.

Yeah, it's a sliding fan scale that can be especially amusing when one comes across one or more fans who somehow came on board in or around the mid-nineties, such that their baseline/"normal"/"real" is somewhere between horror and parody to most of us who locked in years earlier.

I've enjoyed comics runs of favorite characters from... probably every decade they've been around, to varying degrees, but there are large chunks I'm prone to either want to ignore or allow to be rewritten. I'm far less hardline about it than I once was.

Incorrect. I don't have a problem with change but I do have a problem with being manipulated.

I see an awful lot of B.S. pushes toward certain "we want them to be more popular" characters while they punk out the other characters.

That whole Onslaught nonsense where the F.F. and the Avengers got farmed out to another Earth smacked of some pinhead that decided those characters just weren't cool enough to associate with a great character like Wolverine. Another example of that mindset was when "ultra cool" Wolverine was telling Captain America that Cap could be Wolverine's sidekick. I'm still looking forward to the opportunity to punch out the assclown that wrote that bit of garbage.

I don't have a problem with change unless it's change for the worse.

I pretty much fall into a part of the pool that's close, if not identical, to that one.

When Kirby was there, so was I. That's about the easiest way to put it. When he wasn't...well, maybe I was or maybe I wasn't. When Bill Everett came back to do Sub-Mariner, I was in Comic Book Fan's Heaven.

Since then, I've tried going back at different times (most recently, Civil Wars, Secret Invasion and The Twelve) if only because I thought there was an interesting idea at the core, but for the most part, the results disappointed me (in the case of The Twelve, my disappointment involves the abandonment). One major exception was Agents of Atlas, which I have in the hardcover edition of the TPB.

So, yeah, at this time, I think of "Real Marvel" as the one of my youth, but I do think that's on merit.

That said, I'm always hopeful for the future.

I was always a fan of the "New" FF but was glad that it only lasted 3-4 issues. It was more of a four man rescue team than anything that was put together on the spot. It wasn't going to last so it was okay. It didn't hurt that this was going on right as I was jumping into mainstream comics. It's also funny what you said about Punisher being in the team. He wasn't, but I specifically remember him being in the storyline somewhere and at some point. I remember him being on at least one of the covers as he was in a Punisher-Copter or somesuch nonsense circling monster island with a nuke or something.

(However, my love for Art Adams might have been why I loved this storyline more than most)

Fair point. I think we'd all be alright with the 90s EXTREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEME! era being flatly ignored and/or written out of continuity.

Yeah, Punisher skewed to the sillier side during the 90's. Seems like they wanted to push the envelope as far as they could without actually taking the plunge.

Still, it did lead to the Angel Punisher, the widespread revulsion of which prompted Marvel to hire Garth Ennis, who took the character to AWESOME heights, IMO.

I dislike Garth Ennis because of his obsession with man rape, his insistence on trying to look cool because he thinks superheroes are stupid and his inability to stop trying to shock us by being as vulgar as he can get away with.

Hitman was proof that he's capable of good storytelling though. (When he wasn't trying to convince of how stupid Green Lantern is or to quote him from an old Entertainment Weekly article - "I think that Green Lantern is a complete arsehole". This helped form my opinion of G.E. as a complete arsehole.

Ennis definitely falls into type and phones it in on occasion (as in the passable "Fury" mini or the ATROCIOUS "Just a Pilgrim"), but I don't think he's "trying to look cool" at the expense of superheroes - I think he sees the entire concept as inherently silly, which it is, arguably.

As for the vulgarity, eh, I stopped being titillated by it when college rolled around. It just seems like there's more of a market for his vulgar stuff than there is for, say, the GREAT (IMO) one-shot war stories he did for DC.

And "Preacher" and "Punisher" are freaking GOLD, IMO. Pretty much from start to finish.

You beat me to it. I loved the New Fantastic Four story. People shouldn't get too worked up about it, for it only lasted, as you said, 3 issues. And yeah, you hit it exactly. The new 4 came together at the behest of Sue (secretly a Skrull) to "rescue" the FF from Monster Island. She was actually after an egg of some sort, that was about to unleash a Skrull weapon.

And yes, Punisher was in the last issue. He even got billing on the cover, but it turned out to be nothing more than a 2 panel cameo at the end.

Sure, it was a "ratings grab," but as you said, it was perfect for new young readers who were just getting into comics. Namely, kids like you and I. The New Fantastic Four was awesome. I will defend it with my dying breath.