An oldie but a goodie

So as promised I spent the day at home with the munchkins today, and it looks like we finally may be out of the woods. The little guy was, at a minimum, feeling well enough to push against my parental "stop that right now" just to see what would happen, so that's a good sign.

Anyway, I tried to make good use of the unplanned time at home, particularly when one or both children were safely occupied or asleep. I made some decent headway on two interrelated projects: getting the scanner hooked up again, and filing a ton of statements and other papers. Said ton was perched precariously on top of the scanner, which is why those projects were interrelated; don't go thinking I was scanning mortgage bills and filing them electronically or anything ambitious like that. I just had to stuff sheets into folders in our filing cabinet, which not coincidentally is what the scanner rests upon itself.

You might recall that I was really excited about using the scanner specifically in conjunction with this blog, when I acquired it, but then of course shortly thereafter our old home PC died. Then we got a new PC, after having relocated the whole computer workspace from the old spare room/new nursery, and I just never got around to hooking up the scanner because I thought it would be a pain to dig through some other box somewhere else and find trhe drivers and whatnot. What I had failed to realize was I now have a computer made in this decade and all I had to do was connect the scanner and it basically installed itself. Sweet.

Anyway, to celebrate the resurrection of the scanner (and of course the fact that it's Wednesday) I dug out an old comic that's been on my mind lately so that I could share it with all of you. It's a Justice League issue from the summer of '84, which I bought on the newsstand at the age of nine. It hasn't been in my thoughts because of the recent "New 52!" relaunch of all of DC's titles, because other than the publisher there's not much connection. (It dates from a matter of months before the geek-touchstone Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline which happens to be the first time DC tried chucking the past and rebooting everything, and also features Supergirl, who would die a very dramatic death in COIE, which means when I was eleven or twelve I thought that this particular Justice League issue would someday be worth a lot of money since it featured one of the last Supergirl appearances EVAR. I had a lot to learn. Supergirl got a new #1 in the New 52, too. But I digress.)

Really it's just a few panels that had always been burned in my brain, and I will present a scan of them to speak for itself:


Click to super-justice-size!

As noted, there's Supergirl, talking to sorcerer-superhero Doctor Fate about how they have a million tons of leftover evil to dispose of after their most recent battle, and since they happen to be in Washington D.C. they can bypass the step where Doctor Fate constructs a pentagram-shaped vault in which to lock away the bad juju. (This despite the fact that apparently no one told the artist that in panel 3 he had basically drawn half an octagon. Details.)

Work hasn't been going that terribly lately but I have been getting more and more Pentagon-wide e-mails every day which have nothing to do with me, my job functions, etc. and it does sometimes make me wonder if the mail servers for the Pentagon's network are in fact buried undergournd along with some glowing black tumor of undiluted malevolence which has been gaining awareness since the mid-1980's. But questions like that are above my paygrade, as we say, so sadly, we may never know.