Amazing Fantasy #9

Greetings, true believers! It has been brought to my attention that there is a minor Marvel comic book character very loosely based on... me! Seriously! This means your favorite real life mild-mannered travel blogwriter is now a part of the Marvel universe with the likes of Wolverine and Spiderman -- and I mean the ficticious one, not the dress up guy wandering around the streets of Manila on New Year's Eve.

In Marvel's revival of Amazing Fantasy, in issue No. 9 (June 2005), the main character, a globetrotting female assassin known as The Scorpion, encounters Troy, a young aspiring travel writer on a round-the-world trip. She actually starts falling for Troy until she has to leave him to kick some ass, leaving Troy all confused and alone in Prague.

If you pick up the issue (available at comic stores everywhere), you'll see that while Troy is an aspiring travel writer who keeps a travel blog, his illustrated likeless doesn't exactly fit me; he's a blonde white guy and I'm a guy who looks like this. You're probably thinking, That could be any backpacker; there are thousands of them! But if you turn to the last page, where there is a full page panel of Troy's make-believe blog, you'll see its likeness is strikingly similar to one you are familiar with.

Note the similar layout design and font color scheme of the text, the labels of the pull down menus (of the same varied sizes), and even the "BLOG" logo in the upper right-hand corner. It is an obvious rip off of my crude design.

Coincidence? Hmmm... Is it a coincidence that the second comment is from a blogreader named "erik"?

(Well, perhaps not; I'm the friend of a friend of one of the writers at Marvel.)

Now if only I had some mutant powers....