No one remembers how The Periodic Seven ended.

And by “no one,” I mean “the five people who clung stubbornly to the book as it thrashed its final death throes and faded into dusty quarter-bin obscurity.”

Yes, I was one of those people. Shut up.

In the climactic story arc, the team faces off against Monstrovore, a gigantic, tentacled beast genetically engineered by Doctor Halogen. Said creature paralyzes its foes by invoking an amorphous sort of dread — a nameless, faceless horror — in their very souls. For three wretched issues, it tortures the Seven, forcing them to confront their worst fears, face their angst-laden demons, blah blah, a shitload of flashbacks and dream sequences, blah blah.

So how do they defeat this monster, this looming threat to their sanity and their lives and civilization as we fucking know it?

They don’t.

Instead, Monstrovore picks them off one by one, and we watch our heroes die a series of increasingly gratuitous deaths, ultimately disappearing into the filthy basement of forgotten comic book history.

I know. I know.  It’s a completely batshit-insane detour into Shark-Jumping Crazyland, only it’s more like this particular storyline clears the shark and keeps running and then trips over a few random potholes before blazing off into the distance, cackling maniacally and flipping everyone — fans! Marvel! — the bird.

At the time, I had no Lovecraftian frame of reference, so I didn’t realize that good ol’ Monstro was basically a bargain-basement take on a Cthulhu-esque creation — a Schmthulu, of sorts. But you know what? Schmthulu fucking terrified me. I was nine. I didn’t know about comic book sales figures and cancellations and vindictive writers who decide to send their doomed titles off in a blaze of something resembling dubious glory. All I knew was that this was the one thing Glory Gilmore couldn’t defeat, the one evil she couldn’t conquer.

In my adult years, all of my irrational fears have taken on a Schmthulu sort of mantle. Whenever I feel a stab of out-of-nowhere terror — like, for example, the night after I saw The Grudge and was afraid to cross my apartment building’s courtyard because I suddenly thought the big-mouthed cat boy was going to jump out from behind the stairwell and kill me and yes, this was the American version, I can’t even bring myself to watch the “real” one, fuck you — I imagine Schmthulu rising up inside of me, threatening to swallow me whole. And that’s when I’ve gotta step up and do a little Buffy-esque posturing and kick his/her/its ass, for the sake of maintaining my own carefully calibrated equilibrium.

And for Glory Gilmore, who couldn’t fight back in the end.