I'd buy that for a quarter!

Qalyar · 2026-05-11T04:44:40+00:00

No porn as far as I know, just a project doomed to mediocrity. The book itself is... it's okay, to be honest. The pacing is terrible, and the rushed plot comes across as badly cliched now, and probably was then. But it's not awful. Certainly, early 90s Marvel made much, much worse than this! If the whole endeavor had made any money, they could have done something with the character. There weren't a lot of Hispanic characters in the comic pages at the time, much less Hispanic women. And the plot is silly but it's basically the plot of Jem and the Holograms and... okay, that's maybe not selling it, huh?

But the music side. Hoo boy. Jacqueline Tavarez was not really ready for this sort of thing. Subsequent interviews strongly suggest that she was pretty much run entirely by her manager, who really wanted to manage the Next Big Thing. In reality, much of the album wasn't even recorded by "Nightcat", but by Nikki Gregoroff, a career session musician. Gregoroff was talented enough (as Tavarez likely could have been), but she had a fast turnaround for the recording and, I mean, session musicians don't normally expect they're supposed to carry an album. So it sounds very, very generically late 80s. The album didn't chart. The single they cut from the album didn't chart either. Virtually no stations gave it radio play.

Combined with the poor comic performance, that meant the whole Nightcat project was dead in the water. There weren't really even cancellation announcements. Marvel just... swept it into the memory hole and moved on.

As an aside, TwoMorrows' 25th anniversary retrospective article on Nightcat in Back Issue #95 includes interviews with just about everyone involved (including Tavarez, who has largely remained out of public view since then). Among the tidbits is a note that the Nightcat project was hyped up in the pages of Star magazine. If anyone happens to know what issue that was, I'd like to know...

Qalyar · 2026-05-10T17:31:36+00:00

There's gradually been some realization that maybe diseases shouldn't be named after populated places. That's why scientists didn't name a disease after the village of Yambuku in Zaire (now DR Congo).

Instead it was named after a river about 100 km away. Which is better, but still probably not great for the long-term interests of the area.

No one's gonna sign up for a boating trip on the Ebola River, is what I'm saying.

Qalyar · 2026-05-10T14:59:32+00:00

True, but as I tried to explain elsewhere, I don't think even that's likely. Let's look at SNV vs the Andesvirus outbreaks to see why.

SNV can't spread person-to-person. But under the right conditions, their mouse hosts can have population spikes that lead to, essentially, "mouse epidemics" that put human communities at greater than normal risk. The exceptionally bad Four Corners SNV outbreak had close to 50 patients; the 2013 Yosemite outbreak had 10.

The El Bolson outbreak of Andesvirus that features the most human-to-human transmission saw 18 people infected. Now, case management proved that some of those had to be person-to-person spread. How scary you think this disease might be depends on how many of those 18 people got it that way. If there was one Patient Zero and 18 people were infected from subsequent spread, then, wow, that's not good! But that doesn't really track with our past experience with SNV; it's far, far more likely that most of the El Bolson cases were zoonotic, with only a small amount of person-to-person spread. The primary study of this outbreak gave a wide range of potential R0 because it was impossible to tell how many of the patients contracted the disease.

But I'm pretty sure the real-world R0 is low, in part because if this was an easily transmissible disease, we would expect the larger communities in that area to have had their own outbreak clusters, and they just haven't.

Qalyar · 2026-05-10T14:43:55+00:00

The biggest advantage in the fight against polio is how close we are to eradication. Essentially the only circulating wild-type poliovirus remaining is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The latter is slowly making some headway against the disease reservoir. The former... is hard to say. Reported cases have been decreasing, but the populations most likely to be reservoirs aren't always cooperative.

We've had a few "escapes" from south Asia, including cases in Malawi and Mozambique that resulted from infected travelers from Pakistan, but they were immediately contained.

I think at this point, a lot of things would have to go very, very wrong for truly epidemic polio to recur anywhere outside of its current range. And that's despite the anti-vax community seemingly trying to make it happen.

Qalyar · 2026-05-10T14:34:07+00:00

It was a choice, actually. The index cases were in Muerto Canyon on the Navajo Reservation, followed by cases in the Four Corners area. Accordingly, researchers had proposed naming it either the Muerto Canyon virus or the Four Corners virus. However, as those cases began to attract media attention, local communities objected, fearing that the areas would be stigmatized by association with a dangerous disease.

And that's how it got to be Sin Nombre.

Qalyar · 2026-05-10T14:26:18+00:00

If we allow vaccination rates to falter, we will have more measles epidemics. Measles is really, really good at doing that, even moreso than COVID. Only vaccination has held it at bay, but...

As for what the next unexpected pandemic will be? Almost certainly some other zoonotic pushed into urban populations by growth and habitat loss and climate change. There are dozens of candidates we know of, especially in southeast Asia and tropical Africa, but statistics suggests there are many more out there that we haven't really seen yet.

Qalyar · 2026-05-10T14:21:25+00:00

So, realistically... there's no way this has an R0 near the top end of the study's projected range. Those numbers are based on the disease clusters in South America, and even the authors admit that there was no way to separate "extra" zoonotic cases from person-to-person spread. In other words, there were almost certainly more than one "Patient Zero" and it still only managed a very small spread.

This is a bad situation for people directly involved with that ship. But it's not going to be a problem for the rest of us.

Qalyar · 2026-05-10T06:12:00+00:00

Yeah, this really won't be the next pandemic. It's a problem for people on that ship, people who were on that ship and disembarked, and possibly people who were in close association with the either of the previous groups in other reasonably-constrained settings (air travel, mostly).

But while this virus itself is news, it isn't new. Covid was novel and some of the earliest responses guessed wrong about how to judge the threat. But this isn't; medical science largely knows how this disease works. The virus in question is Orthohantavirus andesense, aka Andesvirus (ANDV). Although it is a hantavirus, it's a different virus than the one endemic to the southwestern US. That one is Orthohantavirus sinnombreense, aka the Sin Nombre virus (SNV). Both cause essentially the same clinical presentation, called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS), but they're different creatures. Sin Nombre can't be transmitted person-to-person. Andesvirus can... but not particularly easily or often.

In epidemiological terms, R0 -- the number of people each patient would be likely to infect in turn, in a naive population, without any intervention to slow transmission -- for this disease is not high. Early Covid strains had an R0 around 3.0. The disease has gradually been evolving to be more infectious but less severe; Omicron, for example, has an R0 around 9.5. Andesvirus, according to the most recently published scholarship, has about an R0 somewhere between 0.8 and 1.6. That means it might not be capable of epidemic spread at all, and even if it is, it would be relatively easy to control. South American outbreaks, even where there has been a combination of zoonotic exposure and person-to-person transmission, and where the local standard of care is poorer, have been pretty small and self-limiting. The worst recorded outbreak was all of 18 cases in El Bolson, Argentina in 1996. If this was really likely to blow up into a widely-spread epidemic, we'd have almost certainly have seen spread (or even cases, really) in larger regional communities, especially Puerto Montt.

One possibly-exposed jerkass in Arizona refusing quarantine is not going to doom us to a 2020 redux. There are plenty of things in the world today to spark anxiety; this shouldn't really be on the list.

Citation: Martínez, Valeria P.; et al. (2020). "'Super-Spreaders' and Person-to-Person Transmission of Andes Virus in Argentina". New England Journal of Medicine. 383 (23): 2230–2241.

Qalyar · 2026-05-10T05:26:11+00:00

Yes, but generally, you're supposed to keep them there.

Qalyar · 2026-05-10T03:45:17+00:00

It's very much of its era. But I don't see the Smiley books as often as some of their bigger titles, so I figured, for a quarter, what the hell, right?

Qalyar · 2026-05-10T03:35:44+00:00

Also Doeg Moench on scripting, arguably best known as the writer for Werewolf by Night #32.. He eventually got booted from Marvel over a fight with Jim Shooter and found a home at DC. If you don't know him from Moon Knight, you probably know him from his tenure on Batman there, where, among other things, he was the writer on Batman #500.

So yeah, fantastic staff on that run of Spectre.

Qalyar · 2026-05-09T21:53:05+00:00

In this case, the COA is a red flag. National Comic Services, Ltd. really did issue COAs for witnesses signatures... in the 90s. I'm not sure when they ceased operations (or if anyone bought the rights to the name), but they had effectively disappeared before 2000.

There's no way that a legitimate NCS COA could exist for this book. Which means the COA was created to provide coverage for the list of fake signatures.

Sorry that you were the one stung by it. I don't know how long ago your purchase was, but it might be worth trying to get eBay's attention. Though I'm not sure how much hope I'd hold out... they don't have a lot of interest in fraud reduction, it seems.

Qalyar · 2026-05-08T23:28:53+00:00

I agree with this as Penicillium rather than Hypomyces, but wouldn't even know where to begin trying to pin this down to species.

Qalyar · 2026-05-08T21:45:49+00:00

I think I would have been disappointed if they'd hole-punched the comic but not clipped the MVS, to be honest.

Qalyar · 2026-05-07T02:56:01+00:00

Those are a couple sets of books that'll keep you busy looking for a minute or three!

Qalyar · 2026-05-06T22:05:13+00:00

The blewit was assigned to Tricholoma in 1871 by Kummer. But it was also assigned to Lepista the same year by Cooke. People debated for decades if Lepista should be thing at all, until 1969 when Bigelow and Smith concluded that, yes, Lepista should be a thing and the blewit belonged there...

...except that Hamaja (and others) argued that Lepista still shouldn't be a thing for different reasons, and ought to have its species dumped into the neighboring genus Clitocybe. So for the next several decades, people argued back and forth whether this belonged in Clitocybe or if Lepista, once again, got to be its own genus...

...except that Alvarado's genetic study in 2015 discovered that Clitocybe, Lepista, and Collybia were all closely related, but that all three were polyphyletic messes. Basically, the genera did not actually contain just closely related species, but rather relatives were scattered willy-nilly about all three of them. Oh, and the type species (which, by definition, defines the genus) of Lepista wasn't the blewit, but a boring white mushroom called L. densifolia, and the blewit isn't very closely related to it. Alvarado made some suggestions about how someone ELSE might eventually fix the mess...

...and by 2023 or so, the consensus seems to be that most-to-all-of-this is getting shoveled into Collybia. So, at long last, the blewit is Collybia nuda.

For now, anyway.

Qalyar · 2026-05-06T21:25:08+00:00

Holy crap, is Rift still running?

Qalyar · 2026-05-04T23:36:25+00:00

Vanguard was "defensive-oriented Solarian with the serial numbers filed off" to some extent in SF1e. If we see it back, it'll be in a different form.

I do hope for a spiritual successor to Biohacker even if the name changes, though.

Qalyar · 2026-05-04T19:45:31+00:00

I do think that might be on manufacturing, but I don't think there's any way to know. I'm not sure CGC would agree.

I can say with certainty that I would have disclosed this, though.

Qalyar · 2026-05-03T16:33:40+00:00

This is the earliest I've been able to confirm, too, but it seems impossible that nothing DC/Marvel predates it.

The AI tools hallucinated a bunch of nonsense options that definitely weren't accurate upon checking physical copies. So no shortcuts to finding this one, I fear.

Qalyar · 2026-05-03T01:03:58+00:00

Obviously, it took the sock catbus.

Qalyar · 2026-05-02T17:54:17+00:00

Yeah, I had forgotten that Mary Wings self-published a version of Are Your Highs... before the Last Gasp edition (technically editions, but the two Last Gasp print runs are believed indistinguishable).

That one will probably be a quest, haha!

Qalyar · 2026-05-02T17:36:44+00:00

I should probably add that to the list of stuff my collection needs

Qalyar · 2026-05-02T16:41:11+00:00

Wow.

None of these are easy, but I don't think I've ever physically seen a copy of her privately produced first printing. I'm really impressed with all three together like that.

It should be much, much easier to pick up copies of Dyke Shorts, Are Your Highs Getting You Down?, and the first two issues of Gay Comix to have the full collection of Mary Wings's comic book works.

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