Morning Ramble for March 8th, 2017

Morning Ramble for March 8th, 2017 in which I look at the upsets I’ve predicted for the Adjective Mammal battles in the 2017 March Mammal Madness tournament and I take another step in reading the Complete Marvel Reading Order but reading Tales to Astonish #32. It’s kinda a step back because they reset to reading order.  I mean I’m still reading from 1962, you’d think everything would be in order already.

2017 March Mammal Madness: Adjective Mammal Battles

The wildcard match is over and today starts the main event…or events as Round 1 begins. Tonight at 8:30 Eastern, 5:30 Pacific, the Adjective Mammals kick off the tournament’s round of 64.

According to Merriam Webster an adjective modifies a noun or in this case, a Mammal.

The modifiers applied to the Mammals in today’s bracket range from Spectacled (applied to Bear) to Spotted (as in Skunk), from Brown-throated (describing the Sloth) to Hairy-nosed (distinguishing the Wombat). I think my favorite might be the Screaming Hairy Armadillo considering he actually gets 2 adjectives screaming and hairy; and the name makes me wonder what kind of noise this critter makes.

You can see how this could cause someone to give him the Screaming moniker. I actually have this little guy beating out the Hairy-nosed Wombat in a major upset of a 13 vs a 4 seed so I hope his screeching pays off.

The other upset I have for this bracket is the Spotted Skunk beating out the Long-tailed Pangolin. I’ve never smelled a Pangolin but this could very well be the stinkiest fight of the entire tournament since both animals use foul-smelling scents as a defense mechanism. I certainly hope the Skunk wins since I actually have him making it to the Sweet 16.

I can’t wait to see what the matches bring. There are always surprises and as we saw with the wildcard battle royal, the arena environment can play a major role in determining the outcome.

As I mentioned previously, you can follow the battles on Twitter with the hashtag #2017MMM or @2017MMMLetsgo and be sure to check out the official site at Mammals suck…Milk. This time around, since there are so many matchups, I might try to figure out the Storify thing to see how the different competitions play out.

Tales to Astonish (1959) #32: The Girl in the Black Hood

I finally got back around to reading further in the Complete Marvel Reading Order – CMRO and when I got on the website, the list indicated I had actually missed an issue. Tales to Astonish #32 was published in June 1962 and I had already read up to Fantastic Four #6 which was put out in September…time to go back for a quick read. And it was pretty quick since only a portion of the comic was on the list (Sidenote: The CMRO tries to list all comics that relate to the main Marvel universe and puts them in an order that makes sense for reading. Sometimes that means that only part of a book is included in the list, particularly when there are multiple stories in the comic as is the case with many of the Tales to Astonish issues). For this issue, only The Girl in the Black Hood is considered to be part of the reading order so I focused on that story.

The story is short and pretty much to the point. Basically a thief decides to rob a famous photographer who never shows her face…kinda like the musician Sia. He sets up a photo shoot and starts stealing things from her studio and when she shows up, he draws a gun on her demanding to see her face. This was a fatal caper since she had a perfectly good reason to keep her face hidden…her name was May Dusa (I think you can figure out what happened). The art is pretty good, if typical for this time frame, and the sexism is also a bit standard for the early 60s. Depicting people’s attitudes of the time, particularly those of the evil thief gives the story authenticity, but also shows it’s age. These days, in such a short tale it would be highly frowned upon to comment so much on the looks of May’s body and the question of if her face is as beautiful as her figure.

I haven’t personally seen Sia’s face so I wonder if she shares a similar reason for her cover.

I give this story a C.