A Fifteen-Year Recap

As You Should Surely Know By Now -
BOOJUM! doesn't really follow established blog procedures, and is in fact unsure if there are any.  Are there?  If there are, this is us snapping our fingers disrespectfully at them!  <snaps fingers, hurts them, cries>.
     For Lo! I have just finished re-reading the entire collection of "Invincible" trade paperbacks that I have amassed, all 25 of them.  Art?

Invincible and friends
(Invincible in yellow and black)

     I have enthused about the series before.  What's hard to get is that it lasted for 15 years, which, for an independent comic line, is almost eternity.  As Robert Kirkman (the creator of same) explained, sales picked up slightly but significantly after Issue 12, so it kept going, and with each new issue, sales picked up slightly but significantly.  Believe me, there is no industry more capitalistic and cut-throat than the comics trade, and if the bottom line wasn't a profitable one, Invincible would have been gone by 2005.

Robert Kirkman.  Talented git!

     Is this significant?  Only in that, last year, an animated television series was apparently about to go into production, rather than the Seth Rogen live version.  I like Seth, but a live action version would need a budget in the Many Hundreds Of Millions: you not only have all the superhero stuff of a Marvel film, you also need to include a healthy dash of soap opera and space opera and rite of passage and a bit of spoofery - all in the service of a superhero most people have never heard of.  A hard sell to hard-headed (and equally hard-hearted) studio execs.

Allen the Alien: a fan favourite

     I think one of my very favourite art spreads in the whole thing is an awesome and excellent montage of Terra growing up.  She's the daughter of Mark (a.k.a. Invincible) and Eve (a.k.a. Atom Eve), and, yes, she has superpowers.  But she's also a child growing up.  Art?

Simultaneously hilarious and poignant

     And - SPOILER ALERT!  LOOK AWAY LOOK AWAY - which is a Big Country lyric, by the way - Mark, Eve and Terra get to grow up and have a happy ending.  Mr. Kirkman jibes at the fans who would rather have the whole thing end in an ocean of fire and blood, to which I say - Fans?  You are quite at liberty to go out and create your own comic series where that happens.

Best Tiger: a gunfighter so good he has to handicap himself with a blindfold.

     I think after all that we need to see what effect Kendall Mint Cake has on the motley.*

Let The Conspiracy Theories Commence!
For yesterday was when the various ballfoot teams who play Association Football, which is the real game and not to be confused with that over-the-top version of rugby they play in South Canada, were drawn against each other in the FA Cup.  Art?

Behold bag and balls

     The process is done by those balls above being placed in that there bag, jumbled around a bit and then drawn out, sight unseen.  This removes all possibility of fixing the results - or it would, if there weren't so many swivel-eyed conspiranoid bumbletucks around. 
     "They fix the balls!" assert these witless warts.  "They put some in the fridge, and some on a radiator, and leave a third set alone."
     This allegedly means the selectors know which group they are selecting by touch alone with no visible signs of tampering.  Of course, there's absolutely NO evidence to support this conspiracy theory; in fact, if you question it, then YOU are part of the conspiracy!
       
                                             A load of - but that would be rude.

A Hoard Abroad
I am rewatching "Kelly's Heroes" for the umpteenth time, as Lee prompted me about it.  It's an ironic title, when you stop to think about it, as Kelly's mob are in it purely for the money and heroics are definitely out the window.
     Anyway, one of the reasons it was filmed in then-Yugoslavia was that the Yugoslav army never, ever threw anything away.  I may have mentioned this before, but back in the Nineties when the civil war was raging in the former Yugoslavia, I remember seeing a weapons cache being examined, and it contained one of these -

The gun, not the gun Jesus.

     The water-jacket had been given a brave bold paint job of emerald green, to try and make it blend in a bit.  This beast dates from before the First Unpleasantness, meaning it was at least 70 years old.
     They also had a lot of both Allied and Teuton kit, meaning things looked realistic, because, once again, once acquired never let go.  Art?

The ingenious recycling of mobile scrap iron

     Although -

Look!  Look!

     That there in the background is a South Canadian M3 half-track trying to look like a Teuton one.  Not bad for a fleeting second of screen time, and only an awesomely skilled anorak** like your humble scribe would ever spot it.
     Also -

Hmmmmm.

     There's an awful lot of swastikas, Nazi flags and SS here present, and one wonders quite what the locals felt, Yugoslavia (standing in for France)  feeling the Teuton lash rather severely during the Second Unpleasantness.

Zero For The Gazebo
Hmmm.  That was a tricky Cryptic Crossword clue.  "A prickly design that often gets beaten (6)". 
     "Aha!" I bethought myself.  "It's got to be GAZEBO." 
     I'm a bit hazy as to what a gazebo actually is, so eventually I Googled it, after completing the squares.
     Ah.

Add caption

     Perhaps not.  I wonder - what's a Pergola?

Oh.

     One of those climbing frames for vines and creepers, eh?   Besides, it has 7 letters. 
     I suppose that, eventually, I will cave in and Google for the answer, yet until that moment the question and solution will be simmering in the back of my mind like a stew on the hob.

Art!

     And on that note I shall go have some lunch.  Later!

*  Kendall Mint Cake: kryptonite to motleys.
**  A badge of honour in my opinion.