Happy National Comic Book Day!

It's finally here!  National Comic Book Day!  The turkey is roasting in the oven, the cranberries are doing whatever it is cranberries do, Wonder Girl is dancing around with her headphones on while Robin, Speedy and Kid Flash glower unappreciatively from along the far wall.  I didn't get you anything.  Sorry.  I've just been so busy reading old Teen Titans and back issues of Batgirl while pretending the DC reboot doesn't exist.  Also, my hours have been severely cut at work-- I'm a bad employee, I'm rude to everyone and my attitude stinks-- so I don't really have the money to buy new comics for deconstruction/review/mockery/gifts for my reader.  Tightening the belt, loosening the shoes, selling my toupees.

But I do have some great stuff coming up.  There's yet another entry about Cassandra Cain, some Planet of the Apes nonsense, possibly a visit with Mars's top teen and so forth.  More importantly, October will be our 2nd Annual Spookey Month here at When Comic Books Ruled the Earth as well as my Super-Gaijin '76 blog.  We'll be celebrating some gruesome horror comics along with that wonderful punk combo from Hamamatsu, Japan, Spookey.  In the meantime, in honor of Gnarrk, please enjoy this NBC promo featuring Phil Hartman as the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer:

Gnarrk: Smartest of the Teen Titans

We've pretty much established the original Teen Titans are no brain trust. No think tank. Even by the standards of typical teenage behavior, the Titans are a pretty dim-witted bunch. With the addition of Gnarrk, a Cro-Magnon ("Early Modern Human" or "Anatomically Modern Human" in today's terminology) teen from 20,000 years ago, their collective intelligence quotient took a mega-leap upward. Unfortunately, as we see in this page from Teen Titans # 39 (1972), the other male members of the Titans find Gnarrk's vocabulary troubling.  From his pose and facial expression, Robin takes it particularly hard.  See, growing up in a circus family and then becoming the ward and partner of Batman left him with little time for things like education and self-esteem, or developing and expressing ideas that aren't simple re-wordings of things he's just heard.

What Gnarrk should have said in the second panel is, "Donna's hip to my scene, Lilith, baby.  I wasn't making like some crazy Sir Lancelot on a Camelot trip.  My bag is taking it easy with the muscle stuff and using my noggin, dig?"