mere alcohol doesn’t fill him at all

So a forty-foot tall being of cosmic power shows up on your doorstep, eyeing your planet’s biosphere hungrily and smacking his lips, what do you do?

You could steal an Ultimate Nullifer and use it as leverage in hard-nosed negotiations, or perhaps offer one’s services to the being in exchange for sparing your homeworld. Depending on one’s connections in the superhero scene, you might even be able to use a brute force method combining some mystic arts mojo with straightforward physical violence. Another approach would be to mope around planetside and let the Silver Surfer do all the heavy lifting.

..or you could refer to fourth issue of Marvel’s 1982 Hercules mini-series, and slip the big guy a mickey and hope he gets too shitfaced to operate his planet-munching Kirbytech. Sounds like a plan? Hercules, Marvel’s lovable lout of a demigod thinks so…


…but Hercules doesn’t exactly pose a threat to Athena in the “Deity Most Associated with Wisdom” department.



It’s not easy to drink an entity who quaffs entire oceans as an aperitif under the table. Fortunately for Herc (and the planet he was protecting), Galactus factors effort and creativity into the final grade. (He’s a Hampshire College alumni, though he tells all his cosmic peers he graduated from Amherst, out of fear of being mocked, especially by the Living Tribunal, who was valedictorian of his class at Yale and makes sure everyone within earshot knows it.)

I drafted a proposal for a What If story based on this comic, but Marvel has yet to get back to me about it. It’s a shame, because I think that “What If Galactus Couldn’t Hold His Liquor?” has a lot of potential…


Ethel Merman – I Get a Kick Out of You (from The Ethel Merman Collection, 1997) – The original Anything Goes version, complete with a reference to cocaine. Cole Porter was the Grandmaster Flash of his times.

The Ramones – Somebody Put Something in My Drink (from Animal Boy, 1986) – I’m ambivalent about the Ramones mid-80’s material. While it’s nice that they made the effort to break from the 1-2-3-4 mold, too much of it sounds like generic rock with no discernable trace of the band’s personality. (This is another instance where Maura’s opinions and mine diverge. She actually prefers this to their older, signature sound.)