5) SHASTA

If you want a soder pop and you only have 25 cents, you’re gonna get yourself a Shasta.  At least you were gonna when I was a kid in the wilds of Beloit, Kansas.  In addition to being affordable, Shasta came in a remarkable array of flavors, including Black Cherry, Grapefruit and Raspberry Creme, making it the canned soft drink equivalent of Dum Dum lollipops to a pre-teen fat kid like me.  As for Shasta, The Living Mountain, he was created by Grant Morrison as a parody of grim and gritty 90s comics and belonged to a team called Doom Force, led by an older version of teen Doom Patrol member Dorothy Skinner.  Set in an almost certainly apocryphal future, their one full adventure included a “Someone DIES!” tease on the cover and a full issue of hints that it would be Shasta.

It totally was Shasta…