Tuesday, January 30, 2007

When Ms. Marvel said Cap was waxing his shield, I was positive it was a metaphor...


Yeah, this is probably the only place in NYC where Cap and Ms. Marvel can have a smoke. Avengers can't even smoke in their own mansion, they oughta have it declared a sovereign nation again or something...oh, that's their breath, it's cold out. Oops.

I seem to recall once or twice in the Gruenwald Cap run, where he had to repaint his shield: it's indestructible, but the paint is merely impact-resistant. Anyone who's had a shopping cart hit their car is probably wondering what kind of magic/unstable molecule paint Cap is using that doesn't chip under gunfire, death rays, and Hulk-level punches. The shield was allegedly supposed to be a hatch lid for a tank when originally made, which is also kind of dubious: I'm sure lots of tank parts are perfectly balanced for throwing at Nazis...

Hmm. This didn't occur to me until just now, but on the tail end of Mark Waid's second stretch on Cap, Cap's shield was lost in the ocean, salvaged by Jim Rhodes (a helicopter pilot with his own undersea salvage/recovery company? Such misuse of a cool character), subsequently shattered, and finally restored during a fight with Klaw. The last was in Captain America #22, which even the Grand Comics Database has to call "One of the unlikeliest moments in Cap's history; Waid stretches the suspension of disbelief here to the breaking point." (GCD is usually pretty straightforward, so I love when something is so out of hand they have to comment on it.) It occurs to me that I was OK with Cap's shield miraculously reforming through comic psuedo-scientific doubletalk, but it came back in color. "Because it's cool," is the only answer I have there.

From Avengers #194, "Interlude" Written by David Michelinie, pencils by George Perez, inks by Josef Rubinstein.

Out of office today on more overtime, so this post was one I started a while back, hence the Flickr link. I could see myself getting really incoherent as this goes on though.

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