Hello, you have reached the AIM Technical Support Helpline, how may we help you
One of my favourite moments from the Gruenwald Quasar run (No, not the preview pic, the but under the cut)
No one could deny that Mark Gruenwald LOVED the Marvel Universe, his knowledge of it was BEYOND encyclopaedic and into the realms of unreal. He could name alien races who had made one appearance and also the issue they appeared in, who wrote it, who drew it, and quite possibly who delivered mail to the office that day. He could tell you the fate of just about any character you could name, and he could name a dozen more than you could... I mean YOU in the collective sense. He was a one man Marvel Wikipedia and he revelled in it.
But that's not to say he wasn't averse to updating things which had been... languishing. This is one of my favourite examples of this trend. (My absolute favourite of those was the foundation of the Serpent Society, a well thought out, logical and functional foundation for a supervillain team, but that's a post for another day)
To wit: AIM - Advanced Idea Mechanics, still best known for being.. "Those guys with the big guns in the beekeeper outfits". Stylish? No. Functional? No. Imposing? Hardly... so what are such a group to do?
It takes a wise man to realise he is on the wrong path, a brave man to do something about it!
AIM decide to embrace true evil and become supervillain tech support! It's brilliant! Simple and brilliant!
Supertechnologist evil meets the Nerd Herd!
And wait until you see their showroom model....
It's a trifle ironic that a mere twenty years later, the idea of a 10 thousand megabyte computer is um... 5 standard home PC's with dual-core 2Gig processors. Still, it's impressive enough in a human-ish brain I suppose.
Please note that someone in the next panel manages to make the beekeeper outfit look fairly attractive, simply by removing the beekeeper hood...
I love the wry comment about the Promotions Department! :)
Alas, since then AIM seem to have backslid, but I like to think that somewhere out in the MU, a 24 helpline is manned by polite, courteous (and deeply sarcastic) AIM technicians, just waiting until the warranty runs out on that batch of battlesuits the sold to HYDRA...