Teddy and the Yeti featured on the Cornered Blog!

The Cornered Blog is a website that's dedicated to those little character profiles that show up in the left-hand corner of some comics.  These mini-marvels might be a Silver Age relic at this point, but there's something to be said for nostalgia, and the comics industry is full of that.  Much of the corner art featured on the blog is redrawn from original images as loving homages to covers of old.  Just recently, the corner art on an upcoming issue of Teddy and the Yeti was featured on the website!

This cover clip has some art by Pietro, one of my favorite artists going.  This cover, though you can't see the full image, obviously, does harken back to one of my favorite covers of the Silver Age.

Many thank to Jon from the Cornered Blog for the post and the good press.  You should check out the full site here - http://corneredblog.blogspot.com - but be prepared to spend a lot of time digging through all of the images.

Not surprisingly, the Thing is one of the most popular characters on the site, with homages to the Fantastic Four, Marvel Two-in-One and the Thing solo series aplenty.  Here are a few!

The Thing and Man-Thing!  From Marvel Two-in-One #43, by Flynn Nichols.

"Calamity" Jon Morris, owner of the site, must be a big fan of the Two-in-One series, because he's got a number of entries similar to this one above, from issues 52, 53 and 55 ("The Pegasus Project"!) of the series featuring Moon Knight, Quasar and Giant Man/Black Goliath...and the Thing!

Here's one of my favorites...it's a classic Kirby homage from Michael Lynch!  Very cool.

Check out the Cornered Blog and enjoy the nostalgia!

There has to be an explanation for this.

It's often unfair to judge things that have happened in the past with today's understanding. This is a general axiom that can be applied to comic books in a lot of cases - the infamous "Slap a Jap" World War II-era cover of Action Comics (urging people to buy war bonds) is a great example of this. SURE it's racist, but when you look at it in the context of one of the most costly wars of all time...well, okay, it's still racist, but you know what I mean - it's an unfortunate byproduct of an us-versus-them mentality that was of course present during the war.

There are times, though, when this concept doesn't hold up, and as an example of that, I give you exhibit A: Giant-Size Man-Thing. In the 1970s, Marvel published a lot of these types of books - they were called "Giant-Size" because of the page length. There was Giant-Size Fantastic Four, Giant-Size Spider-Man, Giant-Size Avengers, and so on, so there was precedent. But even so, I find it difficult to believe that those in the Marvel bullpen at the time weren't in on the joke, somehow. I mean, come on - it's not like there weren't such things as euphemisms 35 years ago, and this one is one of the more obvious ones.

Perhaps some of the villains in Giant-Size Man-Thing could have been the terrifying Bearded Clam or the dastardly One-Eyed Monster if they wanted to take it a step further. That people bought enough of these books for Marvel to publish more than one issue is a wonder on its own. I have to chuckle, looking at the cover posted above - the woman at the bottom is simply terrified of a giant-size man-thing. I probably would be, too.