iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 14h

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 336.

The cover of Ripley's Believe It or Not #77 from Gold Key. Focused on True Ghost Stories, this issue's cover is an image of a spectral rider with a skull and praised arm. Above the rider's hand are the words Weird! Eerie! Authentic!"
The bottom part of the image shores a man in a river who is also raising his hand while his horse behind him heads for terra firma. The text below the man says "The grinning specter beckons its victim... to a watery death!"
The expression on the skull of the Ghost Rider in the Dry looks less a like a grin and more like a look of concern.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 335.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 334

The cover of Weird Wonder Tales #7; this was a quarterly reprint series that collected old material from older comics like Mystery Tales. It doesn't have the traditional corner box but a circle with a space scene though one planet or moon is replaced with a skull.
The cover has a large image of some apes about to do some exploratory surgery on a human being as revenge for the doctor's own experiments on animals. Dr. Nagan looks less than thrilled at the idea.
A banner at the bottom touts The Apes That Walked Like Men; the cover also shows that they talk like a man, presumably as fast as they can.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 333.

The cover of Mystery Tales #24 from Atlas, which I thought I'd already featured once before but must have been mistaken.

There's a box on the cover that says "The Lady in Glass", which refers to a fortune telling machine labeled Madame Zaza on the cover, which features an arcade setting. At the center, a watchman has discovered a body and is reacting with shock while Madame Zaza is pushing her arm through the glass behind him. Zaza is a stereotypical fortune teller in a glass jar, which, while it does lack the panache of a devil's head on a napkin holder, is definitely up to the task of aging a kid into an adult upon request.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 332.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

At least it's just orange this time. The Ecto Cooler didn't fade until after Christmas.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 331.

Another Strange Tales cover, this is issue #130, which features The Defeat of Dr. Strange and Human Torch & The Thing Meet the Beatles.
Sadly only Thing and Torch are sporting Beatles moptops; Mordo could definitely pull off that look.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Sammy's crashing through the fourth wall like Godzilla stomping through Tokyo.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 330.

The cover of The Man-Thing #2. Titled Himalayan Nightmare, the cover has a bear charging at a woman while Man-Thing observes from behind her. Whatever Knows Fear Burns at the touch of the Man-Thing and this is definitely not a terrified bear.
Well, unless it's scared about its Fat Bear Week ranking.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 329.

For the sake of comparison, here's the second issue with the Nick Fury rebrand. Strange Tales #136 has a bunch of Hydra soldiers with jetpack operating under the orders "Find Fury or Die!" Their mission? "Destroy Shield."

The bottom of the page has a strip advertising the accompanying Doctor Strange story as well as "If you can find a better mag than this, let US know. We'll buy it ourselves!"

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 328.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Star Wars Episode XIV: Skyerwalk with Me

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

If she got a leash, then all she'd need is a responsible friend to hold i- oh, no.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

It's definitely a Transformers One situation where the people making the trailers not only picked a handful of random comedy sequences that don't really show the soul of the film but they also stripped them of context so they're nowhere near as funny as they are in the actual film.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

If anything, the one guy who tried to get him to stop celebrating is the one who doesn't reflect the team's values.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 328.

The cover of The Little Stooges #3 from Gold Key. The cover has the Little Stooges demonstrating their car wash to a trio of girls; the redhead is named Pixie, the brunette is Moon, and I don't know if the blonde was ever actually given a name despite being Little Curly Joe's girlfriend. There seems to be a dearth of information about this series in general beside the fact that it ran for seven issues and the writing and art were done by Norman Maurer, who was married to Moe's daughter Joan.
This series has the three teenage sons of the Stooges, all named for and mostly identical clones of their fathers; it came out in that period where Larry was still part of the group on paper but unable to do anything because of health issues. It also came out at the time when about half of all kids media was some variation on the Scooby Doo formula; the Little Stooges didn't have an animal mascot with them but did have improbable run ins with criminal gangs.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 327.

The cover of Groo the Wanderer #100, which has Groo and Rufferto fighting Abecedario, the guardian of King Manlo's long lost treasure, in the midst of said treasure hoard.

One of my all-time favorite comics, this issue features Groo reassessing a lot of his life, what he wants out of it, and taking a big step forward as a person by deciding that he wants to learn how to read. Which definitely alters the way Groo sees the world and how a small part of it finally sees Groo for who he really is as a person.

So this is sort of a Dolly Day special since Parton understood the transformative power of reading far more than most.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The rat patrol is actually several hundred rats in a trench coat and fedora but most people are just too polite to point it out.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 326.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The other old slumber party standby, braiding each other's hair, isn't an really an option either when one of them is a werewolf.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 325.

The cover of the second issue of 2001: A Space Odyssey from Marvel. Marvel's adaptation of the film was so successful that they asked Jack Kirby to make a monthly series based on the film though he had to work with certain conditions. One of them was that Marvel was uncertain as to who would own any characters created in this series so they wanted recurring characters kept to a minimum.
So most of its relatively short run featured completely different characters each time; they must have figured something out since this series is where the character that would evolve into Machine Man came from.
As part of that new cast each time, the first half dozen or so issues featured stories based on the opening sequence of the film where a character would encounter The Monolith and become enlightened. In the case of this particular issue, it's Vira, The She-Demon and her distant descendant Vera.
The cover has half of the face of Vira in her She-Demon outfit next to half of Vera's face; a caveman with an axe is in the background of Vira's half of the image and an alien with a laser is behind Vera. A Kirby energy bolt is between the two faces.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 324.

The cover of Daredevil #41, titled with The Death of Mike Murdock. Mike was, of course, Matt's "identical twin" that was his way of shifting suspicion away from him being Daredevil.
The main image is a street scene where Daredevil is stretching his hand out to the reader. His body is translucent so that you can see the street behind him though with a reddish tint.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 323.

For the last day of summer, it's the cover of Archie Giant Series Magazine: #224. This particular issue Presents Betty and Veronica Summer Fun. The cover has a beach scene where Veronica is questioning why Denise si suddenly so popular with the boys and Betty reveals that it's because her dad bought a gas station. This came out in 1974 so the cover would have been drawn and the dialogue written when the country was undergoing massive inflation, facing geopolitical issues around the world, and the President was a crooked stooge. Well, Nietzsche did say history is just a flat circle.

That Denise character looks familiar; I think that character design might have been originally used for a version of Ethel before that character's more famous look became standard. I believe those stories might have called her Myrtle or something along those lines in reprints.

The cover also has small drawings of Betty and Veronica comparing heights and talking to each other in baseball uniforms.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It's probably that low because people know that we'd be forced to sit through a state funeral and Republicans renaming things after him if the GOP is still in control when he dies. If he dropped dead and there was zero chance of any of that happening, it'd definitely be 100%.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 322.

The cover of The Flash #313, which has two panels. The first has Flash zipping up to a mental battle between Gorilla Grodd and Psykon and saying that he needs to stop this senseless battle. The second panel has both of them telling him to keep out of it and blasting him with their psychic powers. Which, first of all, well, yeah, that's obviously going to happen and, second, why did Barry even think for a second it wouldn't?

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 321.

The cover of Action Comics #424, which has Gorilla Grodd spinning Superman right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby, right round, round, round. I know Clark was physically invulnerable back in these days but this had to be really embarrassing. Green Arrow also appears in this issue but declined to appear on the cover for obvious reasons.

Just goes to show that there wasn't much parody comics could do to DC that they didn't already do to themselves.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Clyde's Rule #6: You hit Kip, Clyde hits you.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 320.

The cover of Mad #289 from Sept. 1989, which has Alfred E. Neuman as the Keaton Batman. The least credible thing about this cover these days is the notion of Alfred being a billionaire since he's way too intelligent and dignified to be one.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 319.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 318.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 317.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Transformers One; I can't think of another film whose advertising did so much of a disservice to it as TF1.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 316.

The cover of Plop! #4, another entry in the "We have Mad Magazine at home" genre though one with a bit more direct connection than usual since it has Sergio Aragones and Basil Wolverton.
This is a much more typical cover for the series than the previous issue I posted since the cover is a grotesque monstrosity called Nooly Nostrildamus by Wolverton who also did a few gag pages inside.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Going by the croc, it was Destin-ed to be.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 315.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 314.

The cover of Cosmo #1, which has the main cast clustered around the titular Cosmo. Now this is a much better way to update an older property; taking one that hadn't really been used in decades, updating the look (especially by making the characters much more visually distinct), expanding the cast, and switching it over to being a more adventure based series but still keeping a light-hearted tone. All without mocking the original, which, admittedly I'm not all that big a fan of either. Most Archie humor comics from that era besides the core cast in Riverdale fell flat for me; Super Duck in particular is one that I just can't see the appeal of.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 313.

The cover of Blackhawk #228; a banner at the top heralds this as The New Blackhawk Era. The main cover features Superman, Batman, The Flash, and Green Lantern looking at some small figures of the Blackhawk Squadron, who are clearly losing a fight to what looks to be Robotman in a detective outfit. It's actually a training robot called The Champ, who knows all of the team's weaknesses, which seems like a security breach waiting to happen.
Superman and Batman are discussing the deficiencies of the Blackhawks as superheroes; Batman labels them "junkheap heroes". Which is both a major step down from being a jukebox hero and feels off for Bruce to say in general.
Clark calls them "washed up" and that's something I can't see the Kents letting slide; if anything, Clark would get his mouth washed out with soap for being rude.
I don't have a background in marketing or anything like that but it's hard to see how this sort of cover is going to help this sort of drastic change with the existing fanbase. "Hey, those characters you like, they really suck!"

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Posting a comics collection cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 312.

The cover of Garfield Hits the Big Time. This is a 15th anniversary collection from 1993 but is billed as a silver one since it's his twenty-fifth book. So it has a shiny foil cover and Garfield is wearing shades that also have that foil effect but in blue instead.
The book is one of those horizontal collections that collects part of a year since they have two daily strips to a page or a Sunday strip that lacks the title and throwaway panels at the top. So you did lose some of the jokes from Sundays but at least this series collected all of the strips from a given period rather than skipping some of them to fit the year into a certain page count like other collections like Bloom County used to do.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Those would make good browser themes.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 311.

The cover of The Jetsons #8 from Charlton Comics. Mostly yellow with a Hanna Barbera Production and a banner saying All New Stories & Art above that.
The main image is of George trying and failing to fix what looks to be a portable foodarackacycle. It's firing off various foodstuffs in various directions; Rosie looks to be laughing in the background though it's left to the reader to decide whether that laughter is at the idea of Mr. J, who can't even operate a treadmill without incident, fixing a household appliance or in solidarity with her fellow oppressed mechanism. Either way, it's likely now a problem that will have to be fixed by Jane.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Posting a comic or graphic novel cover once a day until I run out of them or get tired of taking a photo. Day 310.

The first issue of the Star Trek series from DC; this started about half a year before STIII came out so the first eight issues take place in a universe where Saavik remained on the Enterprise, which remained active after the events of the previous film and began a new ongoing mission to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new lifeforms and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before.
The cover shows the command crew of the Enterprise below an image of the saucer section in space. They're in the Wrath of Khan uniforms here and everybody is present besides Spock on account of him being dead at the time.
The ninth issue started an extended storyline that altered the universe to include STIII which also created an alternate universe where Kirk is given Excelsior and Spock the USS Surak. That would run up until issue #37 where things are reset to take STIV into account. Volume 1 ended before the fifth film came out and Vol. 2 afterwards so no more retcons were necessary since there was a lengthy gap between the fifth and sixth films for stories to have taken place in.

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Michael Stakely @michaelstakely.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

It's just blurry enough that I can't decide if it doubled the Empire State Building or stuck the Petronas Towers in New York,

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