Having traveled back fifty years to get a look at the comics which were showing up on Marvel's checklist in April of 1972, let's now be drawn forward again until we arrive just twenty-five years in the past. The calendar date is now April, 1997--and though some of us realize that perhaps the most significant day from that year is six months away on October 16 (the launch date of the space ship Jupiter 2 on its tragic flight toward Alpha Centauri), the fate of Marvel Comics was equally unknown, having gone through some financial difficulties and now in the midst of pulling itself together in terms of stability and direction.
If you were born in 1997, you would of course be 25 this year, another reason to note the twenty-five-year mark. Let's take a peek at what else was happening in April of that year:
- The launch of the pay-per-view Extreme Championship Wrestling event Barely Legal (I take "extreme" to mean that all the body blows and elbows to the face seen in the regular wrestling ring aren't staged in ECW--someone will have to educate me);
- Two environmental anomalies: the April Fool's Day blizzard which dumped rain, sleet and as much as 3 feet of snow from Maryland to Maine, as well as the Red River of the north breaking through dikes and flooding Grand Forks, ND and East Grand Forks, MN, to the tune of $2B in damages;
- Celebrities' births include actors Asa Butterfield, Maddison Brown, and Maisie Williams; YouTuber Crawford Collins; model Molly Bair; south Korean rapper Kim Min-gyu; football players Donny van de Beek, Matteo Pessina, and Oliver Burke;
- The first space burial: a Pegasus rocket carries the remains of 24 people into Earth orbit (this one threw me--not exactly a "burial," is it?);
- The TV series Pokémon premieres on TV Tokyo;
- Michael Chang (who turned 49 this year) defeated Grant Stafford in the U.S. Men's Clay Court Championships singles final;
- The comet Hale-Bopp meets or exceeds predictions when it passes perihelion (the point when Earth is nearest the sun), visible to the naked eye for a record 18 months.
Over at Marvel, the Bullpen Bulletins page has been expanded to two pages, which now include an editor profile, a February (?) Marvel checklist for books sold in April... and, well, a grand total of two bulletins, where the "Items" of yore have made the journey to what you and I might refer to as full-blown "ads."
As for the FebruaryApril checklist, the PPC is going to do a little expanding of its own and run down a few more of the 1997 books sold that month.