@Amy Yes, it definitely is. That incorrect answer slowed me down.
@Amy Before I got any crosses, I debated if it was going to be SPIDEY SENSE (classic Marvel universe term) or “Peter Tingle,” which also fits the space and is what it’s playfully called in the MCU.
@Amy I’ve always known it as spidey sense. Oddly in my comment this morning in this very forum i used spidey sense, because that’s what Peter Parker called it, at least when I was a Spider-Man reader 60 years ago. It’s one of those weird coincidences, that not having used the term in many decades, a variant of would appear in next crossword. Cue the eerie music.
@Amy Not a Spider-Man fan, so I had to look it up. Spidey Sense is what I've heard. But Google "Spidey Sense," and see what comes up first (after the AI nonsense) from the actual Marvel Comics website.
@Amy Although I have always heard friends refer to things colloquially as their "spidey sense," it appears that devoted fans of Spiderman use the term "Spider Sense": <a href="https://marvelanimated.fandom.com/wiki/Spider-Sense" target="_blank">https://marvelanimated.fandom.com/wiki/Spider-Sense</a>
@Amy 100% How did this get past the editors?
@Amy That was the last answer I got stuck on. I was thinking "What the heck is an OYLESS" because ORLESS doesn't seem intuitive either.
Sometimes solvers sound like boxers, wearing satin trunks, doing vigorous knee-bends in their corner of the ring, and they were ready to come out swinging. Puzzles should be judged by their merits, not by how long they take or whether they're deemed appropriate for a day of the week. They're puzzles. Sometimes easy, sometimes not, and if it's more fun for you to see it as contest, fine, but pot shots and caviling about it aren't relevant or appropriate. Abigail Martin has debuted with an interesting, original puzzle. I had fun solving it and needed some of the crosses to help me complete it. That's pretty much what I came for. Thank you, Abigail.
@dutchiris Your first paragraph painted a very vivid picture.
@dutchiris But it's an explicit feature of the NYT crossword that it gets harder as the week goes on - that's part of the puzzle's DNA. So for a lot of us "difficulty" is one of many valid criteria by which to judge a puzzle. It shouldn't be the sole measure of a puzzle's success, but it's hardly irrelevant or inappropriate to comment on difficulty when its an inherent part of the way the NYT puzzle is set up and presented to solvers.
@dutchiris, Where’s the button for 100 Recommends? Well said.
@Arthurs I'd love to see a scatterplot of how each solver rates the difficulty of a puzzle on a given day. Even if the editors had perfect foresight and the trend line for every week went steadily upward, I know my own data points would be all over the place. There is no way I can judge a puzzle's place on some theoretically desirable weekly trend line by my own individual measure of its difficulty. And judging by comments in this space, this appears to be generally true--invariably when a bunch of people find a puzzle easy, others will find it unusually difficult. We are not promised that the puzzles will get steadily harder for each one of us, or even for the solving public as an aggregate, but that they will _generally_ get harder as a week progresses. I find that to be true. And if there were no outliers, no surprises, wouldn't things get boring?
@dutchiris I agree wholeheartedly with your fourth paragraph. For me, this was a fun, interesting puzzle that felt fresh. It wasn't just a typing contest; I needed the crosses to figure some things out. I finished with my best Friday time, but so what? I view that as making up for last week, when I went to another tab without stopping the timer (oops!) and ended up with a seven hour solve.
The first friday i ever completed! 47 minutes feels embarrassing compared to others here. One day I will join your superfast ranks!
@Stepan Embarrassing? No way. Even a grump like me will not rain on your parade. This may have been easy for a Friday grid for experienced solvers, but there definitely was some Friday-worthy clueing. Congrats on your first late-week solve 🙂 Also, while time is one of the metrics sometimes used to evaluate puzzles around here, it doesn't matter much, anyway. Don't fixate on it.
@Stepan I am in 100% agreement with Andrzej. There is never a shred of embarrassment about solving a Friday/Saturday, at least not in my book. I keep trying to telling myself that a solve time, like an age, is just a number. P. S. Andrzej's advice on solve time is good--and he's also convinced me that streaks are a threat to the joy of puzzle solving.
@Stepan Congratulations! My thought about solve times: I enjoy the time spent solving, and I would like to spend more time doing this thing that I enjoy. Often I deliberately slow down and think about the puzzle. That said, for me, the solve accelerates at the end and I just can't slow down! That part is also fun.
@Stepan It’s not the speed, it’s how much fun you had, in my opinion. Congratulations! 🏅
@Stepan If it makes you feel any better, I solved it in a little under two hours, in-between hot cups of coffee and morning stretches. I am also humbled by other solvers, but my joy is greater than its thief.
@Stepan you're only in competition with yourself. Great job!
@Stepan Do yourself a favor and turn off the timer in Settings. It's so counterproductive to actually enjoying the puzzle (for a lot of us anyway). In my opinion it should be off by default. When I saw that thing ticking away the first time I accessed the web site, I winced. What a joy killer.
@Stepan Congratulations on your first Friday puzzle completion! I stopped focusing on time when I realized that rushing through a puzzle was taking the joy out of solving. I love taking time to admire clever clues, well constructed grids and all the new things I learn along the way. I avoid comparing myself to other solvers because we all come to the puzzles with unique experiences and knowledge that either helps us or slows us down. Forget the time, enjoy the solve!
@Stepan 1:48:14 with a few look-ups, and I'm very proud.
@Stepan remember this one and come back to it in 6 months, you're going to be completing Fridays regularly and completely all your puzzles quickly.
@Stepan Andrzej is right. I mean in the end maybe I don’t want to type really really fast for a hobby. Maybe I enjoy the puzzle.
I already see a trend forming in these comments, so I'll offer the opposite perspective: I really enjoyed this! A bit challenging, but not intimidatingly so. I know some folks look forward to more difficult puzzles at the end of the week, so I can see why they may be disappointed, but this was fun for me. Great first puzzle for the constructor, too!
@Josh Tbh I'm not a great fan of overly hard puzzles so I enjoyed this, but I can understand how some could be disappointed by it. If a Polish guy solved a Friday puzzle in Tuesday/Wednesday time, it probably ran on the wrong day. It was a nice grid by an obviously talented constructor, but the editors may have done it an injustice picking the day for it.
It took me only ten years, but all of the sudden I'm cruising through many Fridays and Saturdays without lookups. Loved it! Congrats on a great debut.
Way to go, @Kevin! 🏅
@Kevin Congrats! Give the old Fridays and Saturdays from the archives a shot and see how you do
@Kevin I find myself in the same boat—realizing that all those folks who I saw commenting how easy the puzzles have been may just be coming into their own.
Solid puzzle, made remarkable by learning it's a debut. Very little cheap fill and it's sort of nice to see Ora without Rita for a change. But I must join the chorus who reluctantly changed that Y to accommodate Peter's non-existent sense. Must be his different and more proper variant in the spiderverse.
Blurry photos make me shutter. (I can develop more puns in a flash.)
Spidey Sense not Spider Sense :)
@Erick Yeah that seemed off to me too. I suppose the intersecting "Sale sign words" could be OY! LESS!
@Erick Right? I'm not into superhero stuff, and I don't actually know if Spiderman is DC or Marvel, but even I have heard of SPIDEy SENSE (probably from memes?) and went for it first.
@Erick Although I have always heard friends refer to things colloquially as their "spidey sense," it appears that devoted fans of Spiderman use the term "Spider Sense": <a href="https://marvelanimated.fandom.com/wiki/Spider-Sense" target="_blank">https://marvelanimated.fandom.com/wiki/Spider-Sense</a>
@Erick I’m seeing a fair amount of “spider-sense” in actual comic book panels: <a href="https://www.cbr.com/spider-sense-secrets" target="_blank">https://www.cbr.com/spider-sense-secrets</a>/
@Erick “spider sense” was more common originally but now “spidey sense” is about three times as common according to Google’s ngram viewer (<a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=spidey+sense" target="_blank">https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=spidey+sense</a>%2Cspider+sense&year_start=1970&year_end=2024&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true). I think they’re both legit.
Really fresh, sparkling fill, which made up for the editors’ decision to not run this really neat puzzle a couple of days earlier in the week. SPIDEySENSE was a last-minute correction after I decided that maybe I’ve never seen a sale sign proclaiming “Oy! LESS!” after all. Mmm, street food. We had my cousin (åtte times removed) from the Land of the Midnight Sun down for the weekend with her family just a few days back. We were all moseying around town and came across a Mexican restaurant with outdoor seating. Rain poured down all around us as we sat under an umbrella and ordered plates and plates of street tacos, quesadillas, and nachos to go with pitchers of beer for us and Mexican lemonade for the kiddos. It wasn’t quite food-truck food, but it came very close. Most importantly, my pale-faced, reared-on-lutefisk cousins couldn’t hack the hot, freshly made mango and pineapple salsa and it was mine, all mine, its tangy bite calling to mind my own land: the Land of Enchantment. New Mexico, I miss you so. On this homesick, maudlin note, I’m signing off to go grind the morning beans. Abigail’s puzzle has made me too hungry to go back to sleep.
P.S. Loved the BEREAL-CEREAL stack which made for grid op-art.
@Sam Lyons I've always wanted to experience the midnight sun. Almost as much as I'd like to experience darkness at noon. And the more I see pictures of abandoned strip malls and empty storefronts, the more I think *this* is the Old World. I don't think I've seen anything in Europe more decrepit than a strip mall with only a single pawn shop open, but with acres of parking.
@Sam Lyons OK you must say where this elusive Mexican food is! I so miss it, omg. There are a few places in France, not many, not very good, so far.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid</a> Wow, APHIDs are really interesting! I went down a bit of a rabbit hole: Populations are often entirely female and they can give birth to pregnant females. And some species … “can produce up to 41 generations of females in a season. Thus, one female hatched in spring can theoretically produce billions of descendants, were they all to survive.” (A generation typically living 20 to 40 days.) I know they can be a pain in the garden, especially if you love artichokes, but it’s hard not to give them some respect!
@Cindy One of those things that's posed as "can you believe this?". As you say, interesting, but ultimately, without male aphids they go extinct.
I solved this quite enjoyable but not particularly challenging puzzle in Tuesday/Wednesday time, but I was almost defeated by the NE corner: stacking CNBC, MWAH, COHEN, AERO and PATREON was unintentionally cruel for a solver like me. Thankfully the educated guess of AERO and realization of MWAH gave me crosses to get BRAVO, that V gave me SERVE, and then I was able to deal with the rest. I did not comment yesterday or the day before, travelling around Mazowsze Północne (Northern Mazovia) with my father, but I did solve the puzzles. I especially enjoyed the pure siliness of parsing TENANTS as TEN ANTS on Thursday - there was something Monthy-Pythonesque and liberating about it.
Random guy who totally is *not* my father at the monastery in Przasnysz: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/UE3t5hS" target="_blank">https://imgur.com/a/UE3t5hS</a> Feet of two totally random guys on the bank of the Narew river in Serock: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/6BdSHSy" target="_blank">https://imgur.com/a/6BdSHSy</a> Gothic town hall tower on Europe's (allegedly) longest, 500m medieval town square in Pułtusk: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/LyvnSWO" target="_blank">https://imgur.com/a/LyvnSWO</a>
Don’t ask me how I know, but “wakeup” has the same number of letters as BEREAL, and “breakfast” has the same number of letters as HOTCEREAL.
@Joe P I also had this same realisation. Dont ask me how I know either
Agree with the comments that call out SPIDERSENSE. Spidey-sense is what it's called. Don't think I've ever heard it called spider sense in the MCU or any other medium. But good luck clueing OYLESS. "What your Jewish mother says when you're being a bit much?" Otherwise, a perfectly good puzzle. A bit underwhelming for a Friday, but probably not bad for a new constructor.
C'mon, everyone knows it's SPIDEY sense.
@Flamingo 100% correct. This one's inaccurate and misleading.
A most enjoyable Friday from Abigail Martin. We Are really looking forward to future puzzles. Those long downs were intimidating but suss-able. And Street Food, Hot Cereal, and Carne Asada are among my favorite things, more Or Less. New Release? Bravo!
I finished that one with an EASYA
I, like many, had SPIDEySENSE....But, oy vey, I had to change it to an R. TGIF - hope no one here was too affected by yesterday's storms. Here in NL CT, not much rain. BUT wow - a lovely walk this morning at 63 deg.
@Amy I've seen several mentions of SPIDEySENSE but I'm puzzled. When I had _PID__SENSE I uneasily made up a weird word SPIDERSENSE, but I would never have thought of changing the R to a Y! I guess I should google it.
@Amy ditto on the walk in Boston! And this week is shaping up quite nicely re: weather!
I really enjoyed this. It felt like gradually weaving something lovely into a whole. Bravo!
How nice to have Iftar and seder in the same puzzle.
I have a 7-day streak with NO lookups! What is happening? I think the emus are plotting something for tomorrow! 💭 When will someone give us an emu emoji? 💭
@Cherry 🦆 This duck is an emu at heart.
@Zack well that’s what I filled in for a while!
@Zack Yep. Wondered what kind of oysters or oy vey was hiding in there.
@Zack It turns out this puzzle is OY-LESS.
SPIDEY SENSE. I choose this hill to die on. I do love a themeless. Something about the freedom of a grid that doesn’t need to contort itself into any yoga poses to fit the themers. And that after filling in an answer, the next is a new ballgame! No getting comfy. Crossing fingers for a really chewy, crunchy, gnarly Saturday. Congratulations on your debut Abigail! Ending with TADA. Nailed it.
This was a really good puzzle, and a great debut, so hearty congratulations to you, Abigail! My biggest flub was quickly filling in "marathonrace" for 21D. Even though that seemed a bit redundant, I mean we're talking about Kenyans, right? I did not know there were two kinds of steeple chase. I only knew of the one involving horses. I didn't know about the one involving Kenyans. But, to repeat for emphasis, nice puzzle Ms Martin.
@Francis Man, nobody runs a marathon on a track. Marathons just often end at the track. It's so amazing you're unfamiliar with track and field disciplines. I've been a huge fan of lekkoatletyka (track and field) all my life. I've never heard of an equestrian steeplechase though 🤣
I noticed some interesting pairs in today’s puzzle: CAMERA READY and PHOTO SHOOT, HORSE RACE and STEEPLECHASE, CNBC and BRAVO (with a side of Andy COHEN). I also liked to see SEDERS and IFTAR sharing the same puzzle. And if there really is a pairing theme, maybe the presence of APHIDs will stop a little of the SPIDER SENSE grousing. I enjoyed this one. BRAVO, Abigail. (Yeah, I know it should be “brava”, I’m just using what I was given. 🙃)
@Heidi I had the same reaction. I also liked the pairings of STREET FOOD and ACCESS ROAD, and BE REAL and HOT CEREAL. Great debut puzzle!
I was a little put off by spider sense instead of spidey sense. really?!?
Congratulations on an amusing NYT debut, Ms Martin! Good luck with your remaining studies. I hope we’ll see you back here soon.
I thought it was a great puzzle. My hangups were "Piths"/"itch" (my mind kept wanting 'urge' for 2D). AsTo for InRe in 5A. Great for Bravo in 12D. And Tased for Lased in 38A. Despite those hangups slowing me down I still came in at 25 minutes -> just under half my Friday average. One very nice touch in the puzzle was the parallel words - both visually and in meaning - in 30D and 21D. To get two answers related to horse racing in those two lengthy downs, with neither of the clues having having anything to do with horse racing, was just a really nice touch that I appreciated. Thank you for the very enjoyable puzzle Abigail Martin (and of course to Will Shortz for his consistently fantastic job as editor).
Surprisingly easy for a Friday, not that I’m complaining. (Definitely not complaining.)
Maybe Wednesday level - 9:16, which is 8 minutes less than prior PB! Expect Saturday will be “rough” PS Clearly it is spidey sense. Surprising that a college student would have tried to sneak that by. Should not have made it past edit.
Yes, it was breezy for a Friday, as most people agree, but it was also sunny and original. Difficulty is certainly not the only metric by which to judge these things. I especially enjoyed 29 across; as Wednesday’s crossword taught us (60 across), the little bugs populating the rebus squares on Thursday’s crossword will “farm” today’s sap suckers for their honeydew! Obviously they don’t have udders, so the ants will stroke them with their antennae to stimulate honeydew excretion. I also enjoyed “literally grilled meat.” So often, a generic Spanish term is used in English to denote a very specific preparation or variety. Salsa is just “sauce,” queso is literally every “cheese,” sombrero is any old “hat,” and yes, carne asada literally means grilled meat. Which is fine — there’s good reason for that. But it’s a good reminder that if you go to, say, Argentina and ask for carne asada, there will be zero Mexican seasonings on it.
@at "...the ants will stroke them with their antennae to stimulate honeydew excretion." I think I saw...uh, I mean... a friend told me he saw something like that on the naughty channel.
I enjoyed this, Abigail. I’m looking forward to your next offering.
Very nice debut! Congrats on making the NYT constructors' roster, and hope to see more from you in the future. Thanks, Abigail!
After squashing yesterday's anthill, today felt like a pith of cake. Bravo!
Not too hard for a Friday puzzle. Finished six minutes faster than my average. Still, I found it enjoyable.
This was a very nice and breezy Friday! Though I find it a bit funny that I've never heard of oatmeal referred to as HOTCEREAL while living in a country that practically lives on it. I wonder, how does the rest of the world take their oatmeal? Here, it's most often eaten with a little knob of butter and some fruit jam. If I make it at home, I'll put some fresh fruit instead, or frozen berries everyone has stocked up in their freezer, left over from the summer foraging :)
@Sonja We take our oatmeal in the US the same as you describe. I've never known anyone to eat it cold. We also spruce it up with something with flavor: butter, honey, sugar, fruits of various kinds. I loved it with banana and cinnamon. If fact over the years I must have had it a thousand times. Loved it the last time as much as the first.
@Sonja In our house every morning is ‘puuro aika’, our son can’t get enough of it, although the blueberries we can get in the UK (I believe Finns call them pensasmistikoita) aren’t a patch on the ones in Finland. Needless to say, Mummo’s porridge is always best :)
@Sonja Oatmeal is one of several hot cereals, including grits, cream of rice, cream of wheat and maybe more. There are variants of cold cereals made from oats, like Cheerios or granola. Anyway, yeah, we do sort of lump it as a hot cereal. I want to like oatmeal, but I can’t do it. It’s a textural thing…
@Sonja Mine is cooking now. A bit of brown sugar and applesauce and I’m a happy camper. Maybe a splash of oat milk today..? No. Too crazy. Keep it together CC…
@Sonja I love oatmeal, especially in the winter, with raisins or bananas or strawberries or.... We call it HOT CEREAL, but I don't think anyone in the US would call it "porridge", unless they were trying to be cutesy and evoke Goldilocks. I remember a number of years' back, when increasing "roughage" and fiber in one's diet was a big deal, NYTimes food columnist Mark Bittman advocated eating one's oatmeal "savory", with soy sauce, green onions, and sesame oil. It sounded interesting, but I never tried it. Anyone eat their porridge savory?
@Sonja As The X-Phile said, we don’t generally use the word “porridge” at all, unless we’re telling fairy tales. In fact, I’d bet most Americans telling the story of Goldilocks don’t even know exactly what porridge is.
@Sonja I take my oatmeal and throw it in the trash – can't stand that glop.
Congrats on the debut! This was great! So much fun fill: SCAM ARTIST, SEAWEED SALAD, CARNE ASADA, both SEDER and IFTAR, SPIDER SENSE. I'm amazed at how little glue there was, especially considering this is a debut. I'm now convinced that ORCA is the Oreo of the animal world.
@Katie They're both way up there: ORCA - 390 appearances. OREO - 502 ....
@Katie and never forget the ELAND 🦌
[Street food?] I thought this was a really fresh puzzle. And not as easy as many here found it. Brava. (My aranea sense told me one entry would weave a tangled web of discontent) ROADKILL
My spidey sense is telling me we'll see more of Abigail. Nice initial Frday!
Wow! A sub 20 minute Friday with no lookups! Very unusual for me. Proud of myself... before I see all the comments saying it was easy. But shouldn't it be SPIDEySENSE?? I also don't really like BEREAL. The phrase is get real.
@Rebecca It absolutely should have been SPIDEySENSE.
@Rebecca Be real and get real are both used.
Haven't yet read the comments but if there is not a spider vs spidey sense debate, I will be disappointed. and yes, it's spidey sense. And yes, I spent a long time trying to make that work.
@Margrethe I don’t fill in the long downs like 22D until I have some crosses. So 39A with the crosses was obviously ORLESS, and I never even noticed that 22D would logically have solved to SPIDEySENSE.
TRAY crossing PHISH can’t be a coincidence. The only thing that takes me longer than a weekend puzzle is getting through a TReY Anastasio guitar solo. 🎹🎸⭕️🌵
Unusually enjoyable Friday puzzle. Not all that easy for me, of course, and I did have to look up a couple of things. But then it was just a lot of pondering and working the crosses until something finally dawned on me. Oh, and I'm about 15 miles west of our constructor's college. An off-topic joke inspired by 47d. During my time in Vietnam we were in the far north and often not far from the border of LAOS. That led me to recall one funny moment. After a long day trekking through the jungle, we had camped for the night on a hilltop. When we got up the next morning, one of the guys looked out to the east and said, "Oh, wow. You can see the gulf from here!" And one other guy said, "Really? Can you see Hue out there?" To which he replied... "Oh yeah, way, way out there." Some interesting puzzle finds today, all with somewhat similar tricks. I'll put those in replies. ....
@Rich in Atlanta As threatened: First, a Sunday from May 11, 2003 by Patrick Berry with the title: "Unfinished works." Some theme clues and answers in that one: "Unfinished James Grady work about time-sharing?" SIXDAYSOFTHECONDO "Unfinished Anthony Burgess work about a punctual "primate?" ACLOCKWORKORANG "Unfinished Rudyard Kipling work about a future son-in-law?" THEMANWHOWOULDBEKIN And some other theme answers: THESPYWHOLOVEDM THENAKEDANDTHEDEA (and... that was an answer in another puzzle. I'll put that one in another reply.) Here's that Xword Info link: <a href="https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=5/11/2003&g=108&d=A" target="_blank">https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=5/11/2003&g=108&d=A</a> ...
@Rich in Atlanta I'm impressed you guys found something to laugh about... BRAVO. Love that you share daily.
Hand up for SPIDEySENSE and ACCESSRamp in an otherwise smooth solve. Congratulations on your NYT debut Abigail Martin and hope to see more.
@John Carson I also think of it as SpideySense, but the fan wiki shows it as SPIDERSENSE: <a href="https://marvelanimated.fandom.com/wiki/Spider-Sense" target="_blank">https://marvelanimated.fandom.com/wiki/Spider-Sense</a>
A lot of new-to-me factoids here! Ramadan meal; defense scty all those years ago; track event (Don't the Kenyans win them all??); what it was that bonked Chicken Little; Korean DaDa; and I thought that was SPIDEY SENSE!! Also, who goes around pluralizing PITH? TAZED before LASED. That's about it. I've been up since 3:11a.m. CDT (against my will, but the sneeze attack was spectacular! And then my nose ran for the next hour.) So I did the Wordle (tsk-5) and the Bee (Genius + as per usual) and tried to avoid reading the news. Met my walking buddy at 6:30 for a taste of Purgatory. In my second set of clothes and upping the coffee intake. All y'all stay safe and find the high ground.
@Mean Old Lady You too, MOL. And thoughts and prayers floating your way. ...
FINALLY! Finally got the work week sweep. First ever 5 day in a road gold star. Feels good😄
@Domenic Not there yet so color me impressed.
Friday brag: I did it in 42:34 without looking at any of the Down clues, only crosses! The saving graces for me were the long and guessable down clues like S__WEEDSA_AD and S_E_PL__HA_E, which totally helped fill in a lot of the gaps. SE corner was the hardest because I don’t know my Bible so I hazarded Eli instead of LOT, which knocked me off course for a while, and couldn’t get “green” out of my head when I needed ROUGH. Got there In the end! Great puzzle!
@Petrol Nice! One of my go-to methods for spicing up a breezy puzzle. Another favorite- start at the final SE square and move up and backward. Makes it last a bit longer, even.
An easy peasy Friday filler-inner. But I do kind of miss the ants.
I had SPIDEYSENSE for a while, but couldn’t quite get OYLESS referring to a sale. L
@LarryF "What? You want $50 for this dreck??? OY! LESS!!!"
@LarryF I was so proud of myself for thinking of “spidey sense” even though I am not a Marvel comics fan. I spent the longest time stuck on that one letter.