Miraclo Miles

       The comics fan challenge of the past day (based on the posts I've seen) appears to be to post four comics one read (and presumably thought highly of) when you were fourteen. Eleven, twelve or thirteen (age, not number of comics) would have been better for me, as by fourteen there had been some significant financial and creative changes in the wrong direction, but the assignment's the assignment. Around this time the financial struggles for the publisher had led to them quietly dropping the story page count to 18 as they were in a long fight to hold the cover price of a standard monthly comic to 25 cents.       I decided to narrow it to what I was picking up the month I turned 14, so that would have been comics newly-arrived to the spinner racks that April, which would have had July as their cover dates.        Working within this narrow band, I decided to go with: Defenders 25 : "The Serpent Sheds Its Skin" I really loved this era of Defenders

         I'm hopeful that the folks behind Blogger will fix whatever is suddenly vexing me today, where it won't allow me to directly post images (I have to sneak in links to images on the web) nor allow me to embed video, forcing me to just have to link to them. Whatever this problem is, it wasn't there yesterday.       My most direct recourse seems to be sending feedback through their system, which I did earlier today. It's in the hands of the gods now, and I can just try to move ahead as best I can.       I greatly enjoyed blogging back circa 2004 or so, then fell away from it. I know the audience for these is almost always very low, but I prefer to work in longer form, and in the end I'm doing this for my own focus, development, or at least amusement.

    Second Vatican Council formally concluded December 8, 1965, so I was one of the first wave of kids going through Catholic school from the start while the parishes were variously embracing and (the older members) often struggling with the implementation of the various changes to both the mass and doctrine, or at least what was to be emphasized and de-emphasized in said doctrine. It was all new to us, so we couldn't appreciate from personal experience how unsettling various aspects of it were for older generations who'd been raised in a comfortably compartmentalized structure of worship. The moves to modernize and humanize the experience, and to involve and engage the parishioners, were an affront to those who felt betrayed by a sudden, intrusive change in their contract with the God. They'd been raised to believe that their task was to follow the rules (some stricter than others, I've only ever known a sort of buffet style Catholicism to be in actual practice), sho