This is kinda fun...let's throw another oldie up.

Bit of a preface to this one: the 90s were not a good time to be a Spider-Man fan. I know, "DUH"...but, seriously, you had to be there. It was BAD (except "Untold Tales of Spider-Man"...do yourself a favor and look it up). I was a pretty devoted Spider-Fan, but the Clone Saga had just finished me off and I'd already largely jumped ship to DC by that point, particularly for the then-new Superboy (back when he was in fun 90s Peter Pan mode, before Geoff Johns turned him into Broody McLinebacker in the 2000s).

Then, in '96, a little, forgotten comic book came out called "Marvel Vs. DC" (or "DC Vs. Marvel" depending on the issue). In the penultimate issue, The Spectre and the Living Tribunal did a mad gambit to save the two universes by mashing them together into one, the Amalgam Universe, and both participating publishers put out six books each of the resulting characters. Not ALL of the Amalgam books were gems, but most were pretty great, and my undisputed favorite was "Spider-Boy" by Karl Kesel and the late Mike Wieringo. I mean, c'mon, it had the co-creators of Superboy and Impulse, two of the best characters in 90s DC Comics, teaming up to reinvent Spider-Man...it was practically MADE for me. The heartbreaker, though, was that it was only ONE ISSUE. I became obsessed with trying to recapture the fun of that single issue no matter what, and, as I frequently have quoted, "if there is a story you want to read, and no one has written it, it is your DUTY to write it."

After several attempts, I ended up with this guy: George Johnson, aka "Live Wire," a teenager who gains the power to manipulate ambient static electricity and, through that, metallic objects like cables and, yes, wires. I was pretty gonzo on this character at first, but the more I worked with him, the more I realized that I'd been going about this project all wrong: in my efforts to recreate the experience of "Spider-Boy," all I'd really done was make an electrical Spider-Man wannabe, and any time I tried to tweak it to not be so Peter Parker-esque, he ended up as Teen Magneto.

Dejected, I filed him away...for about a week, when, while walking through the local mall, I saw the "dancing blobs" scene from "Flubber" playing in the window of Suncoast Videos and suddenly had one of those "3AM Alchemy" moments about 12 hours earlier than normal. My mind suddenly composited one of the Flubber gel-bodies over Live Wire...and The Mighty Goo, as seen elsewhere in this gallery, was born.

Still, with the passage of time and my problems with refining Goo into a workable character, I was reminded of this guy while watching the player character in "Sunset Overdrive," because he essentially had Live Wire's powers AND managed to successfully solve the one unsolvable issue I'd had with the character, how he traveled. So, who knows?

Maybe lightning will strike twice.