Number 374


I Shagged The World!


My friend Jonny R. and I were junior high school smartasses, as obnoxious as only 13-year-olds can be. Jonny was a really smart kid, got A's just by showing up for class, but had a really vicious sense of humor. Everyone, and everything, was a target for his sarcasm. We were both comic book fans, and we bought the Jack Kirby pre-Marvel monster books. Jonny and I both heaped particular scorn on the names of the monsters: Fin Fang Foom, Googam, Vandoom, Manoo...you might know them better than me. There were a lot of them. I remember Jonny thought the name "Shagg" was funny. We didn't know then that shag would one day be used as a slang term for the sex act, because had we known we would have had even more fun with it. I went along with Jonny, but secretly I liked the monster books. He probably did too, otherwise why were we buying them?

Just before the monster books segued into the Marvel superhero comics Jonny transferred to another school and after a while we lost touch. I thought of him because this past weekend I visited my parents' graves and while walking through the cemetery I came across a headstone with Jonny's name, died in 1988. So that would be a good reason for him being out of circulation for a long time!

This is a copy of "Shagg" from a 1970s Marvel reprint. There is a small-size scan of the story from the original comic on the excellent site, Monster Blog. You can read it here, if you can tear yourself away from the dozens of other great Kirby monsters and fantasies on that site.

Oh yeah...the slug on the bottom of the splash page saying this story appeared in Tales Of Suspense #14 is wrong. The story appeared in Journey Into Mystery #59, July 1960.