Marvel Stamps Finalized

What the heck is wrong with Google lately. Have they finally gotten so big they're having problems scaling now? Blogger is in a perpetual state of maintenance (or just plain broke) these days. And now the main Google home page seems to be having issues occasionally also.

A while back when I mentioned that Marvel was going to be doing a set of stamps through the US Post Office much like DC released a set of stamps (that didn't include J'onn J'onzz). Well the preview for the sheet is available now (see over on the right). I already went into my thoughts on the individual character choices, so I don't intend to revisit that, but the images they used are new material. They did more or less the same thing they did with the DC ones, where they have the individuals up top, then issues down below. But man did they do some funky stuff with the issue correlation. Seems like The Spider-Man issue shown below happens to be the issue where he attempts to join the Fantastic Four, so they're on the cover also. The Hulk cover shown is back from the earliest days when he was grey and not the iconic green that most people recognize (I will say some of the best Hulk stories I've read came from the period where Peter David was writing the title and had him return to the grey Hulk). Spider-Woman doesn't even get a cover from her own series, just her first appearance (which was in Marvel Spotlight). The wackiest ones though are Elektra and Wolverine. Elektra's cover is actually not an issue of Elektra, but a Daredevil cover, they apparently just took Daredevil's name off the cover and slapped Elektra's up there instead (and they took off the annoying ad for the Huffy bicycle that was on top of the issue also, but I can't fault them for doing that). Wolverine's cover is an X-Men cover, which makes sense considering that's where he 'broke out' as a popular character (he didn't appear in X-Men first though, his first appearance was actually Canada turning him loose on the Hulk). The thing that's weird though is they choose an issue of X-Men where not only is Wolverine not on the cover, but at that point he wasn't even on the team (they're showing X-Men number one, which is a couple decades before Wolverine joins). Even with all those anomalies, I'll still try and pick up a sheet of these at some point when they come out in 2007.

And finally, got one more picture from the creek in the woods out back. Not real thrilled with this one since it seems cluttered or something. Maybe the colors are too drab or something.