Camp Pickens preview. Camp Pickens’ mysterious past shrouds a deep, dark secret: it’s cursed, and this summer all of its campers are going to find out the hard way #comics #comicbooks
DOHA (The New York Times) — Together they share the convivial closeness of fraternity brothers. They are blessed with fresh legs and unlined faces. They don’t know any better than to be brimming with confidence.
They are the United States men’s soccer team, and they are young — very young. With an average age of 25 years 214 days, they will be the second-youngest of the 32 squads when the World Cup begins on Sunday in Qatar, according to Nielsen’s Gracenote, a data provider. Only Ghana, with an average of 25 years 108 days, has a younger 26-man squad.
They are America’s first Gen Z World Cup team. Time will tell whether they represent, as many hope, a golden generation. For now, at least, they have their youth, the endless possibility of tomorrow and that pleasantly anxious feeling that they might be at the starting point of something really, really good.
“One of them didn’t know who Prince was,” midfielder Kellyn Acosta, at 27 one of the older players on the squad, said about his younger teammates. “It’s like, ‘Wait, how old are you again?’”
Age is but a number, of course, and it tells only a sliver of the story when evaluating a team against a field of opponents. For a single group of players, though, it can be a narratively significant data point, a marker of a place in a developmental arc. More broadly, and potentially more worryingly for this year’s U.S. team, historical statistics show that a surplus of young players does not augur well for a team’s performance at a World Cup: At the past 12 World Cups, only five teams — Poland (1974, 1982), Brazil (1978), Sweden (1994) and Germany (2010) — have finished in the top four with squads whose average age was under 26, according Nielsen’s Gracenote.
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The Archie Horror imprint from Archie Comics turns ten this year, and what a decade it’s been! Ever since the AFTERLIFE WITH ARCHIE series destroyed the apple pie town of Riverdale with a brutal zombie invasion, fans of horror and pop culture in general have witnessed a wide array of gruesome tests for Archie’s normally wholesome characters, and that “can you believe they were allowed to do…