LJ icon meme.

[uvula_fr_b4]

Spotted most recently on britgeekgrrl's LJ:

Look at your LJ userpics list. If you have fewer than 50 icons, pick every fifth one. If you have between fifty and seventy-five icons, pick every seventh one. If you have over seventy-five icons, pick every tenth one. If you have fewer than ten, pick all of 'em. List them on your LJ, and tell everyone exactly why you have it, why it's interesting to you, and what significance it has.

Since I've got between 50 and 75 userpics, I'll be posting and commenting upon every 7th one. So let's get started, shall we..?

• This one is called "Here lies hidden...the unspeakable ULTIMO!," and is taken from the penultimate panel from the so-titled Iron Man story in Tales of Suspense (Vol. 1) #76 (April 1966), drawn by Gene Colan (using the nom de plume of "Adam Austin") and Jack Abel (using his alias of "Gary Michaels"). As anyone who's read more than a couple of entries in my LJ will be able to deduce, I am a comic book geek and a recovering Marvel Zombie (i.e., someone who is blindly, if not foolishly, partisan in their support of the publications of the Marvel Comics Group). While I haven't been able to stomach any of Marvel's main-line titles for the past, what, seven or eight years now, I still quite enjoy a lot of Marvel's pre-Onslaught, pre-Heroes Reborn stuff, with particular fondness for the Silver Age (1960s) and, believe it or nuts, the comics published in the first half of the 1970s (the Political Age? the Age of Relevancy?). Ultimo is a gigantic, blue-skinned android roughly the size of Godzilla who, up until Iron Man (Vol. 1) #96 at least, was under the control of Iron Man's major nemesis, the bargain basement Fu Manchu known as The Mandarin. (Like Fu, Mandy has as little love for the Communists as he does for the decadent West.) Before I stopped collecting Marvels, the Mandarin's character and goals were tweaked a bit: instead of wishing to wipe every other major player out so that he could ruuuuuule the world, he now wishes to eliminate all technology developed after, oh, roughly the 2nd century B.C.E., and restore his heavily fantasized, romantical notion of Chung Kuo, the Middle Kingdom. (Why such a fanatical Sinophile would continue to use a title that is a Western [Portuguese] corruption of a Sanskrit [via Malay] word was never explored. The fact that I actually care about such minutiae is doubtless one of the reasons why I no longer collect superhero comics.) Basically I use this icon when commenting upon what I see as a pretty gosh-darned significant development in the news (or sometimes in my personal life); the icon signifies something ominous, portentous, and unable to be ignored.
  
  
  
  
  
• This one is called "Yeah, but you should see the OTHER guy!" It's from a panel of the late, lamented, magazine-sized black & white comic book Love & Rockets (published by Fantagraphics, the same folks what bring yez The Comics Journal). I forget the issue number, story title, etc. (my L&R collection is off-site), but the art is by Jaime (sometimes spelled "Xaime") Hernandez. I use this one when commenting on a heated debate in public discourse, when I think I might be involved in same by virtue of my post (or comments to someone else's post), or on some of my reviews of noir, hard-boiled, pulp-y type books.
  
  
  
  
  
• I think I might've ganked this one from britgeekgrrl. I like O.G. Star Trek: I never got into the subsequent series due to a combination of lousy reception, weird work schedule, and hooking up with a significant other who actively discouraged my watching the shows, no matter whose TV I tried to watch it on. (The fact that this wasn't a relationship breaker signifies the importance of ST in my life; I have managed to see all of the Generations movies, but for the most part I wasn't terribly impressed with them.) The icon -- which slyly doffs its hat to the Kirk/Spock slash fic that has probably been going on since 1966 -- is most useful on my posts where I simply can't believe some of the shite The Man (damn The Man!) is trying to put down.
  
  
  
  
  
• One of the posters for one of my all-time favorite sci-fi movies, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), based on the short story "Farewell to the Master" by Harry Bates (1947, if memory serves). I've called this icon "We are SOOOOO fucked...," for obvious reasons. I tend to use it on "we are SOOOOOO fucked..."-type-posts.
  
  
  
  
  
• This panel comes from the Ant-Man story in Tales to Astonish (Vol. 1) #38 ("Betrayed By the Ants!;" Dec. 1962), the first story in which Henry ("Hank") Pym, in his Ant-Man identity, goes head-to-head with Elias Starr (a.k.a. The Egghead), a third-string criminal genius who nonetheless managed to screw over two of Marvel's second-tier heroes pretty badly (the heroes in question being Hawkeye and Hank Pym, who had four superhero IDs -- Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Goliath and Yellowjacket -- before eventually sallying forth as "Doctor Pym," at first garbed in a Doctor Who-esque hat and scarf before switching to a red, Six Million Dollar Man-type "action suit" [read: leisure suit]). The art is by Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers; one of the gangsters in this story is a dead ringer for Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar, Bullets or Ballots, Brother Orchid, Key Largo), while another seems to be a cross between Boris Karloff (Scarface, the Shame of a Nation) and Fred Gwynne (Car 54, Where Are You?, The Munsters). The icon is taken from the third-to-the-last panel, and shows Egghead sitting dejected "in a dingy Bowery flophouse" (which has a table stolen from a cheap Italian restaurant...), mumbling, "The ants defeated me... They were too smart for me... Too smart..." I find this panel hilarious; while I first used it on posts remarking on items in which someone (if only myself) was outfoxed by some obvious, niggling little detail, it has since morphed into my default icon for posts or comments expressing sorrow or sympathy over someone's loss and/or bad karma. Egghead has proven a more nuanced character in LJ-land than he ever was in Marvel Comics.
  
  
  
  
  
• This is a page from a primate dictionary (whose name and author escape me), reproduced in one glossy magazine or another; the page shows a chimpanzee expressing the idea, "This is really crazy!" The use of this icon should be self-explanatory.
  
  
  
  
  
• An icon from one of Peter Bagge's stories ("Hippy House") of The Bradleys, originally published in the magazine-sized black & white comic book Neat Stuff (which was published by Fantagraphics), subsequently collected in The Bradleys (also published by Fantagraphics); this panel features pre-eminent slacker/hipster-wannabe Buddy Bradley and his burn-out/stoner acquaintance Kevin passing judgment on the "cool kids" at the house party of one of their classmates that they've crashed. I've called this icon "Sneers of the world;" since LJ icons have to be in such a minuscule size, the by-play between Buddy and Kevin is unreadable. Buddy says, "Look at all these pretentious assholes, acting all palsy-walsy with each other. I bet they all hate each other's guts just as much as I do!," to which Kevin replies, "You said it!" I made this icon to deploy on my snarks about trendoids and popular people/places/things, but haven't used it too much since the unreadable dialogue diminishes its significance considerably.
  
  
  
  
  
• Last but not least, a promotional still from the classic 1957 American International movie I Was a Teenage Werewolf (and really, fellas, weren't we all?), starring Michael Landon (Little House on the Prairie, Highway to Heaven) as the track-suited lycanthrope. I've titled this one "Wanna neck..?!" Despite the ironic humorousness of this icon (none dare call it camp...), I've tended to use this one on posts about certain aspects of sexuality; I say "despite" because I think I may have deployed it in a less-than-respectful-and-thoughtful manner. *Shrug* Deal.