A shout out to a pretty amazing guide

Props to the following guide, which can take you all the way through cosmic Marvel from its early Silver Age dawn in 1963 to 2017:

Cosmic Guide Extraordinaire

Seriously, this thing is pretty extensive and pretty hilarious.  My own experience with Cosmic Marvel is fairly broad, but let's face it, even the most thorough comic reader is going to have gaps in mythos that spans a crap ton of issues in over seven decades of print.  This is the sort of guide that even Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons could salute.

Knowing that there are plenty of Judgy Jim's out there... Yes, there are gaps in the list. Considering that the guide tries to cover nearly three quarters of a century, there are bound to be gaps!  I'll start with an obvious one to me, the lack of mention of the first appearance of the Living Tribunal in Strange Tales 157 (cameo) and 158 (first full appearance). 

Image taken from Marvel's page on the Living Tribunal, or as I've mispronounced it forever, Living Triniball.  

You can't get much more high cosmic than number two after the One Above All!  As you can see, he's a bit judgy himself and might have qualms with being excluded off this otherwise thorough list.  He's pretty smooth here in his first sitting as depicted by his co-creator artist Marie Severin, the mother of Cosmic Marvel.  

Speaking of hot heads, the list also left out another significant moment, as pointed out in the comments on said list, the ascension of Nova (Frankie Raye) into herald status (Fantastic Four vol. 1 issues 243-244).

That's the image of Nova that usually jumps to mind when I think about her, as depicted by John Byrne.  Here she is doing a solo annihilation of the bulk of the Skrull fleet (Fantastic Four vol. 1 issue 257, aka Galactus dines in his Skrull homeworld jacuzzi).  Heralds are incredibly buff, and one imagines what such raw power has on the psyche of the mortals who get elevated to their newfound place among the celestial powers, to say nothing of what feeding whole worlds to Galactus does to even the more ruthless ones like Terrax or Morg.  I take that back.  Morg is a complete asshole.  

Anyhoo... I mention these two omissions not to call out the list compiler, but because they are two great examples of what makes cosmic Marvel so appealing, at least to me: mortals becoming a part of the world of the immortal/divine.  Here we see Dr. Stephen Strange and Frankie Raye, two mortals, (granted, both exceptional, powered mortals) encountering powers and forces very much not-so-mortal.  What always gets me about these two, and others in their shoes, is that they still retain a sense of awe and even a bit of humility (that comes and goes) despite all they have seen.  Even more significant, the forces that encounter them are given that rare chance to consider how mortal eyes see them, even if they might not truly experience said viewpoint empathetically.  Art has tried capturing that many times!

God rocks a pink nightgown, that's for sure.  

Ahem...  Many far wiser and holier than I have pondered the question of just why a perfect, complete God would create someone to know God in the first place, so I'll not bore you with all that (TL;DR, "love").  Many less than holy people have pondered it, too, like me or Hegel.  Some people say "why are we here, does it matter, shit...".  I get that, and if that's your bag, I'm not going to be a Judgy Jim.  

As Frankie Raye experienced though, it's all a wild ride no matter what your angle on it.  Thanks for joining me on a slice of it today, and enjoy the list!