smacky and bucky

Yesterday evening was not the greatest. Something happened at work yesterday, something not my fault, but it happened in such a way that it could be perceived as my fault. No point in going into the details here, but I had sick-to-my-stomach worry all night, and no one to hug me and tell me everything was going to be okay.

I spent the evening trying not to think about things, and reading this:

Machine Man: Created, drawn, and written by the amazing Jack "King" Kirby. Kirby co-created the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Hulk, Captain America, and a gazillion others. The man is a legend.

The Machine Man series only lasted 19 issues, from the late 1970s to early 1980, but man, what a bunch worked on it: The first nine issues were written and drawn by Kirby himself. Starting with issue #10, Marv Wolfman wrote for it and Steve Ditko did the art. Marv Wolfman did the classic run of Teen Titans in the 1980s, co-creating Black Cat for Marvel, and wrote a little thing called Crisis on Infinite Earths, which basically repaired 50 years of DC comics continuity problems. Doesn't seem like such a big deal now, with huge "internet cracking" events happening every week, but when this came out, it was a huge deal. And Steve Ditko? He co-created Spider-Man! And depending on who tells the story, created the costume's look and came up with Spidey's ability to shoot webs from his wrist (which was from web-shooters, okay? Director Sam Raimi decided to make that an organic side-effect of being bitten by the radioactive spider in the first Spider-Man movie. I don't have a problem with that, by the way. Spidey running out of web fluid during a fight was a tired plot point by the time I was ten.)

Hoo. Didn't mean to comic-geek out like that.

Oh, and I went to see my boss's boss's boss this morning and clarified my side of the story, and everything is cool. I didn't do anything wrong, and everyone knows and agrees. So yay!