Since I’ve been posting so much about Marvel Comics lately, it seems only right to pull this photo out of my archives.
If you’ve never worked in the field, you may not realize just how slap-happy people can get. But when you spend all day, every day together, slowly digging a square hole, you get goofy. In the summer of 2005 we were excavating a dormitory at MSU which had burned down in 1876, That summer, The Fantastic Four film came out, and I think the Fantastic Four jokes probably grew out of the fact that one student, Lesley, kept saying ‘Flame On!’ whenever she could make it fit into the conversation. Eventually everyone on Lesley’s crew, one of the crews I was supervising, had been tagged as one of the Four.
Since the dormitory rooms had been heated with wood-burning stoves, we had some heavy lifting to do during excavation. This crew carefully pulled a cast iron stove out of the site. We took a photo for posterity. And though I don’t have the original version any more, I still have the one I photoshopped. Flame On.
