So apparently "616 Day" is a thing now, I guess. If you're thinking, "What the hell is 616 Day" Bleeding Cool has a good run-down of how/why the Marvel Universe began to get referred to as 616. And since the universe is known as 616, why not celebrate on the sixteenth day of the sixth month -- June 16. Today.

I don't recall precisely when/where I first heard the Marvel Universe referred to as 616. Certainly sometime in the '80s. Probably from something Chris Claremont wrote, but it's possible I picked it up from The Official Marvel Handbooks. I don't recall using it much, but it was a handy shorthand when I needed to differentiate the 'main' Marvel Universe and a story from What If or another timeline or something. But it never really got brought up unless you needed to make a distinction.

And that's how it stayed up until 2008 or so. Because that's when the Marvel movies started coming out and becoming popular and, when you were in Marvel fan circles, you could be talking about two very distinct versions of, for example, Captain America. The characters' origins were similar, but different. Their power levels were similar, but different. The construction of their shield was similar, but different. If someone asks you trivia about the character, you need to make sure they specify which version they're asking about because that could change your answer. So whereas the What If stories relatively obscure, even within fan circles, the movies very much were not. Since the "616" appelation, though not widely used, was already in place, it made sense to bring that to the fore when contrasting that against the MCU.

For whatever reason(s), Marvel -- the comics publisher, not the movie studio -- tried to dissuade the name's use. Perhaps because it was originally just meant as a joke. Perhaps because it harkened back to a type of continuity that they had been trying to deliverately move away from since around 2000. Perhaps there was some form of professional jealousy against the movie studios, and how they were 'requiring' the 616 designation just to make a distinction, even though the 616 universe came decades before the MCU. It doesn't really matter; the problem was that fans were routinely and actively talking about two different Marvel Universes now and they needed some way to offer a readily understood distinction.

But beginning, as far as I can tell, in 2023, Marvel Comics began embracing the 616 name and even leaning into to the idea by designating "616 Day."

And I think that's what bugs me about 616 Day. Marvel is hardly the first company to create a pseudo-holiday to bring attention to their company by taking advantage of some weird quirk of the calendar. Star Wars has May 4 ("May the Fourth Be With You") and Nintendo has March 10 ("Mar10"); there's nothing significant that happened on those days as far as the companies are concerned. Their "significance" for the intellectual properties is merely a quirk of language, and doesn't really work outside certain regions. And in those cases, it's a quirk of language that fans picked up on first, and it took several years for the company in question to capitalize on what was already a grass-roots celebration of sorts. I don't believe that's the case with 616 Day. As outlined in that Bleeding Cool piece, the 616 designation was created specifically for Marvel stories by one of the writers and -- as far as I know -- fans had never really suggested June 16 be a day to celebrate Marvel Comics. It didn't come about organically; it was put together specifically as a marketing tactic,

Don't get me wrong; it is a clever bit. Kudos to the marketing person who came up with it. But because it wasn't really a thing that came from the ground up... because it feels it's being handed down from Marvel itself, it feels more cynical and artificial.

At least to me. I was also really skeptical the Avengers movie would work when it was first announced since the sum total of MCU movies that had been released at the time of the announcement was: Iron Man and Hulk. Neither Captain America nor Thor had made it to theaters (I think both were still filming at the time of the Avengers announcement) and fans were expected to line up and celebrate a big movie with all these heroes -- only two of which had made it to the screen, and one of those had the main actor being replaced. It smacked of "you'll enjoy what we tell you to enjoy."

There wasn't organic buzz being generated; it was being pushed down from the studio. Now, to be fair, Avengers was a good film and probably would have generated a fair amount of buzz naturally anyway, but it felt very artificially inflated to me initially. And I feel that with 616 Day as well. The promo materials being sent from Marvel to comic shops, and the Marvel Rivals promos I've seen ads for point very much to that.

Now maybe I'm being overly cynical here. Maybe Marvel fans will embrace 616 Day as much as Star Wars fans have embraced May 4. But me? I'm certainly not going to any comic shops, and I probably won't even have time to read any Marvel comics today. Right now, I'm curious to see if 616 Day will have legs from year to year, but honestly, I'll probably forget about it this time next year unless Marvel does some MAJOR promotions for the first half of June.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: The King is a Fink
https://ift.tt/XpsVKcZ

Jack Kirby Collector: Incidental Iconography
https://ift.tt/fa9sk3C

Kleefeld on Comics: In the Land of the Lacandón Review
https://ift.tt/npCBNQF

Kleefeld on Comics: G.I. Rocky
https://ift.tt/ALU9X7f

Kleefeld on Comics: Loving Day
https://ift.tt/hQ5ET23

Kleefeld on Comics: Same As It Ever Was
https://ift.tt/pW5mgBH

With the events in LA over the past week -- particularly the borderline inherent ability of the police and the military to radically escalate otherwise peaceful situations by both instigating and inciting violence -- I thought I'd share a collection of politicial cartoons from from the late 1960s and early 1970s. If you were unaware, the police forces in the United States are a direct descendant of slave patrols from the 1700s. The people who were charged with re-capturing enslaved people and beating them into submission before returning their all-but-dead bodies back to the plantations they escaped from. The police force as we know it in the United States was born out of violence, and the notion of "to serve and protect" was very much limited to the wealthy plantation owners who paid them.

The notion of excessive police brutality is not new, and these political cartoons from roughly a half century ago show it carried on through the 20th century. And that these cartoons still resonate a half century after they were made shows it carries on to today.

Richard and Mildred Loving were a couple that had to sue the state of Virginia to legalize their marriage. It was considered illegal because it violated the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which stated that in order "to preserve racial integrity" that white people could not marry "colored" people (which was defined as, basically, everybody not white). The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that not only was the Virginia law unconstitutional, but that ALL such laws were unconstitutional. It was a landmark decision and was used as a precedent for approving same sex marriages.

In 2012, before that second decision was made, Raighne Hogan ran a Kickstarter to publish an anthology of comic works promoting the idea of marriage equality. At the level I backed the project, it included a page of original art from Noah Van Sciver's contribution. That contribution was a ten page biography of the Lovings so, as a white man married to a Black woman, I was keenly interested in that story. I was later thrilled to receive the final page from the story (shown here) which includes a very poignant quote from Mildred Loving.

I have more pages of original comic art than I have available wall space. (Which is more a commentary on my lack of wall space than anything else!) So I sometimes swap out which pages I have up on display at any given time. But this Loving piece, because it encapsulates and represents why I was able to marry my wife, is always on display.

Loving v. Virginia was decided on this day in 1967. "Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people's civil rights."

I stumbled across a bit of trivia recently that I can't quite seem to get a full story behind.

Hasbro saw that the Rambo movie franchise was quite successful, and thought that would make for an obvious tie-in with their popular G.I.Joe line of action figures. The problem, though, was that the character was a little too violent (even in the cartoon version) and the license went to Coleco.

Still wanting to capitalize on things, they looked to license the other big Sylvester Stallone character, Rocky Balboa. While they worked on the contracts, they got Bill Merklein to design/sculpt the figure and had the folks at Marvel start working the character into the comics. Larry Hama wrote up a G.I.Joe-specific biography and Herb Trimpe did some artwork for a character file comic called G.I.Joe Order of Battle #2. (In the image at the top, you can see Rocky pretty squarely in the center of the back cover.)

The deal fell through, though, and Marvel had to print a retraction in the next two issues stating:

The character of Rocky Balboa (Code Name: ROCKY) was incorrectly included as a member of G.I.Joe in The G.I.Joe ORDER OF BATTLE, Issue #2 on page 10. ROCKY is not and never has been a member of G.I.Joe.

The Rocky art was removed entirely from the trade paperback that came later.

I understand the basics of this whole process. But what I don't get is how the contract end of things fell apart so far along in the process. According to former Hasbro product manager Kirk Bozigian, “The reason Rocky was dropped from the G.I. Joe line is because his agents got greedy. While we were designing and sculpting Rocky Balboa, a competing toy company, Coleco, was introducing Rambo action figures and vehicles to compete with us. The decision to drop Rocky was an easy one.” (Source) But that doesn't make sense since Hasbro's decision to use Rocky was in response to Coleco picking up (or at least pursuing) the Rambo license in the first place!

Keep in mind, too, that we're talking the 1986/87 timeframe. While Rocky was initially released in 1976 and thus might be considered a dated property a decade later, Rocky IV came out in 1985... the same year that Rambo: First Blood Part II came out. So both characters had a very active currency at the time, and Stallone was at the height of his popularity. Either/both proprieties were very viable. Also, why would Hasbro -- the 800 pound gorilla of toy manufacturing in the US -- be concerned about competition from Coleco, who was making any number of questionable business decisions at the time? Decisions that led to their bankruptcy in 1988. Plus, this isn't just Hasbro, this is Hasbro's G.I.Joe line at the height of its popularity -- what kind of competition did they realistically have? Something doesn't seem quite right here.

Clearly, the deal was all but done when it got pulled. That issue of Order of Battle wouldn't have gone to press otherwise. It strikes me as evidence that there's a lot more to this story than anyone has actually said.

I'm having trouble trying to figure out how Richard Ivan Jobs and Steven Van Wolputte sold the idea of this book to a publisher. I mean, the marketing copy about the book says, in part...

In the Land of the Lacandón illuminates [Bernard] de Colmont’s expedition against the backdrop of late imperialism on the eve of the Second World War in Europe. It investigates the history of exploration, science, and media, revealing how these narratives represented and constructed Indigenous Peoples for the public – and how such representations continue to resonate.

Which is an accurate assesment of the book's point, but it completely glosses over the means with which it makes it. Which I think is vital to appreciating the book.

The first part of the book is a graphic novel of Jobs presenting a college lecture on a radio show presented by de Colmont about an expidition he took to southern Mexico. (I know that sounds a little convoluted, but it makes sense in the story, trust me.) The second part is an academic essay that puts de Colmont’s expedition in context. In relation to 1930s ethnography, in relation to the news media platforms of the era, in relation to the string of pop culture that goes from Allan Quatermain to Indiana Jones to Lara Croft, in relation to where we are today in 2025. The third part is a poem imagining how the Lacandón felt in their meetings with de Colmont. The fourth part is a discussion of the means and process of the research and production of this book by way of the creators interviewing each other. And the fifth part are educational discussion guides and end notes. The book looks at de Colmont’s work holisitically, using different forms of expression to address different approaches to the idea. I don't know how you would explain that to a publisher and them say, "Yes, we could sell that!"

Don't get me wrong -- it's cool and interesting in ways that I will get to in a moment, but it just doesn't filter down into an easy elevator pitch. Indeed, the marketing copy all but ignores the multiple formats within the book, and focuses on the broad theme of highlighting de Colmont’s expedition as indicative of broader ideas of the time, and how that continues to affect us nearly one hundred years later.

So here's the deal: de Colmont went trekking through southern Mexico in the 1930s looking for the "lost" tribe of the Lacandón. He found them, took a bunch of pictures and some movie footage, and came back to his native France selling the idea that he'd discovered a group that were closely related to the ancient Mayans. Except he didn't discover them. They had lived in the area of generations and previous explorers had come across them multiple times decades earlier -- de Colmont even used some of their notes to find them. And they were only related to the Mayans in the sense that they happened to be living in vaguely the same area. And, of course, he considered them uncivilized and considerably lower than he was culturally. The pictures of the Lacandón looking confused at modern technology were all staged; at least in so much as de Colmont told them to act surprised or confused or amazed or whatever. But de Colmont did a good job telling his story about the hardships of an interprid explorer, acting selflessly to find ancient cultures that could provide the key to who we are as humans, and his audiences lapped it up, often paying handsomely.

See, in the early part of the twentieth century, we were just getting communications technology to the point where people were starting to really grasp that there were other cultures all over the world, and that they were sometimes radically different than just speaking a different language like they did just one country over. The travel to these 'exotic' locations was still difficult if not treacherous, so people paid good money to hear the exploits of adventurers braving the jungles of the Amazon or "Darkest Africa" or any place that didn't have regular contact with the rest of the world. Henry Morton Stanley was actually hired by the New York Herald newspaper to find David Livingstone because Stanely's communications would make for a good story -- the famous "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" line is almost certainly a fabrication for this story; Robert Ripley -- before gaining fame for his Believe It or Not! cartoons -- was sent on a trip around the world by The Globe newspaper for the sole purpose of creating daily dispatches about whatever he saw/encountered. People were just learning about all these different cultures and were often dumbfounded by the novelty of how the rest of the world thought and acted. So men like Ripley and Stanley and de Colmont often made their living simply telling people, "Here's what I saw in some country you've never heard of."

Whether the audiences were actually interested in these other cultures was irrelevant, these people told good stories. Often very literally man versus nature. And to make those stories captivating... well, it didn't matter how accurate they actually were, so long as they met people's expectations of being "exotic." Their explorations were springboards, but their inspirations came from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. They carried with them generations of colonialism and, while a lone man can't really colonize a people single-handedly, he can't bring with him the racism inherent in that colonialistic system, and saw all of these so-called 'lost' peoples are inferior. After all, they didn't have manufactured clothing or firearms. So, even in the case of de Colmont, who was decidedly less egregious than other adventurers, he still played towards his audiences' expectations about their being removed from "civilization" and presented their ideas and methods in what-is-easily-recognizeable-in-hindsight as a racist manner.

It's in this light that movies like King Kong and King of the Jungle (both from 1933) make more sense. It's in this light that comics like Tintin in the Congo (1931) and The Phantom (1936) make more sense. Those weren't one-offs; they were very much in line with what audiences were looking for, as problematic as they might have been. And that relatively simple man versus nature through-line continues to Secret of the Incas (1954) to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) to Tomb Raider (1996) to Uncharted (2007). But because the origins of these stories ultimately are rooted in that sense of colonialism and cultural (if not racial) superiority, they tend to remain at least a little problematic, often despite attempts to remove the worst elements. Jobs expressly points out, for example, that the racism in Tintin in the Congo was toned down considerably between its original serialization and when it was first collected -- and that collected edition is still pretty awful in that regard.

I've not really talked much on the actual content of the book, and that's intentional. It's very interesting and enlightening, but not in a way that lends itself to a simple and straight-forward summary. As I said, the basic story of de Colmont’s expedition is told from the perspective of Jobs relaying how de Colmont told the story of the actual expedition on a radio program. Lots of layers that, while not difficult to parse, would take as much time to explain as it would to just read the darned thing. The majority of the book is not in comic form, but the comic is fundamental to the overall themes of the book, and the prose work after -- both the academic text and the poem -- provide significant context and commentary on the events relayed in the comics. It's a very interesting intersection of forms that all play off each other in a way that I don't believe I've seen before. At least not to this degree. And while the focus is on de Colmont himself, the lessons here are readily and easily applicable to a much wider set of subjects. The content -- even the academic text portion -- is a very accessible, but still offers a great deal to think about and contextualize. It is very much right up my alley and, while I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to everyone, I would recommend it to people who want to put some context on anyone from Frank Buck to Kit Cloudkicker.

In the Land of the Lacandón came out last month from McGill-Queen's University Press and should be available from your favorite bookseller. It retails for $29.95 US but I was provided with a review copy.

I happened to catch last week a Wizard of Id "Classics" in which The King and Sir Rodney were trying to catch The Lone Haranguer, a character who I don't think was ever seen (at least not clearly) and was known for shouting "The King is a fink!" much to the annoyance of The King. The idea that The King was regularly called a fink and that he tried to catch/imprison anyone who said as much was a running gag during Johnny Hart's tenure on the strip. Indeed, the first Wizard of Id collection from 1969 was titled "The King Is a Fink!" and the very first strip included in that collection uses a "the king is a fink" gag.

But it occurs to me that I haven't seen that gag for many years. Admittedly, I'm not a regular reader of Wizard of Id but I do follow some folks on social media who do nothing but post the day's comic strips and I can't recall the last time I saw a "the king is a fink" joke of any sort.

So I did a little digging. The most recent instance I can find of a variation on that joke is from 2014. Much later than I would've anticiapted.

It's not a very good gag, in my opinion, since I think the intent is to show that The King is the one who posted the new "definitions" to counter the graffiti's message, but his carrying the spray can suggests he was the one doing the original message to begin with. Regardless, it's a very clear indication the gag was still running after Johnny Hart's passing in 2007.

In fact, by 2014, the strip was being written by Hart's grandson Mason Mastroianni, who would additionally take over artistic duties from Jeff T. Parker a year later. But since Mastroianni had been writing the strip since 2007, that means he helped work on -- if not completely conceived of -- that strip I posted above. Meaning he is fully aware of the fink joke and its history in the strip.

I bring this up because I think that, given the current political situation in the United States, Mastroianni absolutely should make fink jokes a regular, if not downright frequent, thing. A small-minded, petty tyrant who takes incredible offense to the weakest of insults? Mastroianni could run "the King is a fink" jokes literally every day and they would be 100% topical to whatever the day's headlines were. I'm not sure how big the readership of Wizard of Id is these days, but I would bet regular fink jokes would bring it a lot more attention!