Onward, To Val Halla!

Of all the parts of a comic book for one last set of eyes in the Marvel offices to scrutinize before it heads to the printer, you'd think it would be the first thing a buyer in the store is going to see--the cover itself. And given that so many hands are involved in creating, revising, and touching up that cover, it's even more astonishing when an "oops" slips through the cracks. Here's a brief and hopefully fun look at a few of those face-palm moments for editors who couldn't bolt to the phone and yell "Stop the presses!" in time.

The first thing you generally notice in a look at cover trip-ups is that, the more captions that are splattered on a cover, the greater the chance that something is going to be too hastily jotted down. Let's take a look at a couple of Defenders covers, for example:

For the cover of issue #56, aside from the minor slip-up of Hellcat having a hyphen added to her name (maybe she idolizes Ann-Margret?), there's a chance that people would be taking a second look at their radios and wondering if "radio activity," like storm activity or solar flare activity, was now a cause for concern. If you noticed a decrease in the number of kids dancing to tunes from their pocket radios, you can probably point the finger of blame at the Defenders.

As for issue #67, no wonder the Defenders seem to be racing toward outer space--it's as good a place as any to start looking for "Val Halla."

This cover to Captain America had me a little perplexed:

For some reason, I kept wanting to continue Cap's thought: "Falcon! Stop! You'll kill him! And if you do--! The crime wave breaks!" And I'd think: "Gee, it looks like Cap is more worried about the crime wave breaking than he is about the Viper being killed by Falc."

(I guess it was a moot point, since the Falcon doesn't seem to be in the mood to pay attention to Cap, one way or the other.)

On this Fantastic Four cover, Omega (not that Omega) is perhaps too busy tackling everyone in the Great Refuge to realize that he's leaving words out of his sentences:

While I bet you didn't know that there was a time when Iron Man powered his armor with a single transistor:

Meanwhile, the Champions may have had a short run, but they had a few noteworthy moments. Yet two things they lacked were (1) chemistry and (2) a proofreader. For instance, how many sons of Zeus do you count on this cover?

On the bright side, "Hercules" appears to be much easier to spell than "Crimson Dynamo":

And after being grappled by Quasar, you can bet that Iron Man will never "interferr" with Dr. Kurarkill again:

(Though he's probably not about to make his attacker angrier by correcting him.)