First, I want to put up this cool Darwyn Cooke Criterion cover thats making the rounds thanks to Chris Butcher talking about it. I wish DC would ask Darwyn to do lots of their covers in addition to giving him his own anthology ala the Solo book.



Now I want to see if I can contribute to a meme since when tagged I usually do nothing. He didn't mean to start one, but over at Chris' Invincible Super-Blog during Halloween, Chris made a great note of The Incredulous Bystander.



"Often seen while someone is "crashin' thru," he's a guy who is freaking out so hard at what he's seeing that he cannot believe it. "


A demon with a cape, no less! I love these people who remind us that we're seeing something fantastic. The other day while wrapping up a Sons of the Serpent story for Marvel Adventures: Avengers, I was looking through their first appearance in an Essentials volume. I couldn't stop reading these two panels where nothing in particular is happening except Vision is buzzing off and everyone on the street is losing their stool. Because if it was established by Kirby or Lee, then you know Roy Thomas took it as Mosaic Law.



It's actually kind of appropriate for them to freak out at someone walking into the sidewalk, but I don't know why Soul Brother on the right (who earlier in the scene is demanding that Vision pick a side in the Race War) thinks he needs to be stopped. And the spazzin' guy up in foreground is mostly struck by how grim he looks. The next panel, I think, gets to what's really bothering the incredulous bystanders.



Ultimately, Vision just didn't acknowledge them, and they can't live with that- much less understand a character who doesn't scream out everything he sees around himself. Did that foreground guy try to punt Vision's head and went through, or is he just the most off-balanced man ever? This doesn't really need to be a meme, I just had nowhere to duplicate this scene in my story so I had to get it out of my system here. But WHY?? WHY!!???

mystifying link