Weekend Reading: The Avengers, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dave Berg

Now, how many times have you already seen The Avengers? Doesn't it just kick movie butt? And what movie do you think we'll be talking about all summer? Avengers or The Dark Knight Rises?

Avengers Assemble...in line! Former Malibu Comics publisher and co-founder Dave Olbrich (now a manager at Space Goat Productions) and for Malibu Comics Editor-In-Chief Chris Ulm (now the head guy at Appy Entertainment), show up at the :20 mark in this report from AMC theaters in southern California.

Longbox Graveyard goes Marathoning and Assembling for Avengers and other Marvel-based movies. “Five of my favorite superhero movies, in a day-long sitting, followed by a midnight debut of The Avengers! Seventeen hours in a movie theater, ninety minutes in the car each way getting there, a day off work to do it and another day off to recover. Great for a twelve-year-old, not-so-great if you’re half a century old. So I found a couple twelve-year-olds and went anyway.”

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WEEKEND READING: STEVE DITKO, SPIDER-MAN, VAL MAYERIK & ELMORE LEONARD

There’s lots of cool stuff on the internets, and I had lots of free time to find all of it, I mean most of it, okay, some of it. If you like your “Tales of Steve Ditko,” have a memory of comic book artist Val Mayerik, love the idea of Dave Berg getting looked at, or want to know about someone who slept their way into comics, this is the place for you. Let’s get it started:

STEPHEN DESTEFANO & STEVE DITKO: A long time ago, Stephen DeStefano, one of the industry’s premiere cartoon people, worked in a near-forgotten department of DC Comics and without really realizing it, he ran into Steve Ditko. At his blog which he no longer seems to update, Stephen relates the story and draws a picture of Ditko from memory. It’s an old post, but worth a visit.

FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN: I’d forgotten that Steve Vrattos used to dress up as Spider-Man, not because of a particular fetish or a desire to pretend to fight crime, but because his employer Marvel Comics used to pay him to do it. If this sounds like perfect blog-fodder it is; it’s a fascinating side of the business of comics that most people don’t know about.
(h/t Scoop at Diamond Galleries)

“I SLEPT WITH A GUY AND ALL I GOT WAS A STORY IN AN IRON MAN ANNUAL”: Before she went on to become “Operations Manager for a telephone answering service,” Carrie Lowry was Carrie Barre, and she was married to an assistant editor at Marvel Comics back in the go-go 1990s. That was

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