Friday Night Fights: The Winning Hand Is a Clenched Fist

Face facts, Jade Jaws! You’ve just been JACKED!
From The Incredible Hulk #213 (Aug. 1977)

I picked up this comic in a quarter bin at a convention back in the mid-nineties, and it was the best two bits I’ve ever spent. It’s a big dumb superhero slugfest, done in the mighty Marvel 1970’s manner. I have a soft spot for Jack of Hearts, despite his rather busy (Maura says “foolish”) costume and convoluted origin. Marvel made a decent effort to sell the character as the next big thing for a while, but the readers didn’t buy the hype and poor Jack soon drifted into the murky depths of d-lister limbo before getting bumped off just prior to and during (don’t ask) the Avengers Dissassembled fiasco.

Such are the vagaries of the genre. Rather than curse the darkness, I prefer to celebrate that there was a time where someone dressed like a refugee from a Bicycle poker deck got a chance to go toe to toe with one of the most beloved (and powerful) characters in the Marvel Universe and acquit himself pretty darn well, despite having a nasty case of egomaniacal expository syndrome (the superheroic equivalent to mono)…

Sinergy – Rock You like a Hurricane (from A Tribute to the Scorpions, 2001) – It’s impossible to top the original version, but these Finnish rockers give it their best shot. The first band shirt I ever owned was a Scorpions baseball-style t-shirt with red three-quarter length sleeves. Too bad I didn’t hold on to it; I could have sold it to a Japanese collector and paid off the balance of my car loan.

John Lee Hooker – Behind the Plow (from The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker, 1960) – PLOW! I wonder if the person in charge of the sound effects in the top panel grew up in an Amish community. I hope Jack remembered to cultivate in evenly spaced rows at a uniform three-inch depth, and to leave a third of the Hulk’s surface area fallow for the season. Comic book onomatopoeia is a very strange beast.

(The wise gambler bets on Bahlactus.)