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So Wednesday I had a customer ask me where he could find the Black Freighter comic book, as seen in the Watchmen film. “Only in Watchmen, my friend,” I told him, but I’m still really surprised no new comic-format tie-ins to the film were released. A “replica” Black Freighter comic would have been kind of neat, and perhaps not as…off-putting to the purists as, say, a Nite Owl & Silk Spectre mini-series. Well, there was that fan-made attempt at reconstructing the comic from its excerpts in Watchmen. But I suppose the Black Freighter DVD that was released made an actual comic book release redundant.
…Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m about a year out of date with this Watchmen movie tie-in talk. Look, I’ve been out of it for about a week, and this guy really did ask me this yesterday. I gotta work with what I got, man.
Also, pal Brandon passed this link along to me, and I was going to put it up as one of my sick day posts, but a quick Googling showed that it already made the rounds on some of the comic news sites. But, eh, what the hell…a song about Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl. It ain’t too shabby.
And in all my griping over the last few days about my painful dental issues, I see I never did mention that poor ol’ Employee Aaron managed to get one of his toes broken. No, no, not as a result of a cruel and unfair punishment meted out by me for violating one of our draconian workplace rules. This time. He was doing something at home, like, I think, saving a bunch of nuns and orphans from a buffalo stampede, when he tripped and fell, and, whoops, there goes the pinkie toe. So Sir Aaron Limps-a-lot is staggering around the shop, I can’t talk to anyone because my cheek has swollen up into a hot, painful lump the size of a Ford Festiva, and Ralph has pneumonia, dengue fever and the yaws…we’re a fine bunch.
Speaking of Watchmen, and not speaking of all us sick crew, as I was trying to find that Black Freighter reconstruction, I came across this photo of (presumably authentic) Watchmen film props for the Black Freighter comic and the Tijuana Bible. The user who uploaded that image has other Watchmen items from the film, including some of the magazines…that New Yorker would be a neat item to have.
In other news:
- So former employee pal Sean‘s band, The Kill Junkies, just released their first album Steamroller
which is available from Amazon in that convenient MP3 format. It’s more metal than a really metal thing filled with metal, so it may not be for gentler ears, but Sean’s a swell guy and I’m happy to support his creative endeavors.
- And now…NAKED SUPERMAN AND BATMAN (safe for work, from a Code-approved comic)! I find the jar containing the brain of the Gorilla Boss (visible in one of the panels) to be simultaneously creepy and sad.
- I am slowly…very slowly…almost too slowly…going through and tagging my older posts, and the most recent effort was made tagging most of my Watchmen posts. Now you can more easily find my writings on that particular topic, including the single greatest Watchmen post to ever appear on any comic blog, ever.
So anyway, I did this as a quickie gag for a couple of friends in email, and the files have been sitting on my desktop for a few days, so what the heck, here you go:
SUPERMOBILE
CLARK KENTMOBILE
Just grabbed the pic via the Googling, so hopefully I didn’t offend anyone with my repurposing his/her scan. It was for the purpose of creating a better world, my friend.
Anyway, in other news:
- Regarding that panel I posted yesterday…I felt a little funny picking out a panel by freakin’ Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, for a bit of good-natured mockery. I mean, it seems almost sacrilegious, doesn’t it? Anyway, that panel was from a strip called “Federal Men,” which ran for quite a while in the various iterations of early Adventure Comics. You can read descriptions of some of the stories here. A reprint collection of these stories would be interesting, but I’m not holding my breath.
By the way, speaking of sacrilege: here’s reader Todd with his slight reworking of the panel:
- Tom Spurgeon has some commentary from one of his readers about comic pricing and buying habits. In particular, there is some discussion about the likelihood of someone spending more than $20 a week on comics in the late 1980s. As someone who entered the high-finance world of funnybook retailing in the late ’80s, I thought I’d supply a brief bit of anecdotal…well, perhaps not “evidence,” but it may be of interest.
Starting about the mid-’80s, and off and on through the late ’80s, our shop had a box of overstock and/or deadstock comics by the register with a sign on it that read “FREE COMIC WITH $20 PURCHASE.” And, it is my memory that the $20 level was originally picked because 1) it wasn’t a price level that was normally breached terribly often by the majority of customers, but 2) it was close enough to what a significant portion of customers were spending that the hope was that they’d plop another comic or two on the pile to hit $20 and qualify for their free comic.
Now…and please consider, I’m working off decades-old memories here…I believe that we had some, but not a lot, of customers slapping on additional comics to get to twenty bucks, but that eventually we had enough people already buying twenty dollars’ worth of stuff without going back and grabbing an extra book or two that they got their free comic anyway. And, eventually still, sometime around the big Batman movie-fueled boom, we did away with it completely. (I suppose we could have just raised the price level to, say, $30 or $40 for the free book, but at the time rivers of cash were flowing through the direct market and thus, perhaps the need to encourage additional sales in that fashion was no longer as strong.)
Later, we briefly did a “spend $50, get a free poster” thing along these same lines, which I’m pretty sure was in the post-market crash years of the mid ’90s. And that tells me that, even though the high-livin’ days of the boom were long gone, the customer base that remained was spending far more on average than they had pre-boom, so that $50 now seemed like the just-above-average typical sales level that seemed achievable.
My memory was that was more about clearing out old poster stock than hoping people would hit $50, which, like what happened with the $20 level, is something people gradually started doing anyway.
Wish I remembered more details about these things. Should’ve kept better notes.
- Speaking of our retail past: Chris Sims recently concocted this Comics Alliance article about comic book bumper stickers, and in the comments section to it, someone mentioned our old “U.S. OUT OF LATVERIA” stickers that we had at the shop. [NOTE FOR MY DAD, WHO READS MY BLOG: Latveria is the fictional country that the Fantastic Four's arch-nemesis, Dr. Doom, hails from.] Now, I tried to respond to said comment with a link to a post on my site featuring said sticker, but alas, the CA comment machine does not like linkity-links, so instead I’ll post that link here.
And before you ask: no, I don’t have any more. Sorry, kids.
- More Comico history: the transition to color printing, including some early and neat-looking coloring guides for a page from the original Mage series.
- Pal Dorian does terrible things to an old DC subscription pitch. TERRIBLE THINGS.
- Employee Aaron’s fiancée Kempo whips out her 2010 San Diego Comic-Con report, with lots of photos of the two of them eating meals.
- I’d noted something on my Twitter the other day, and thought I’d repeat it here: you know what I’d like to see Christopher Nolan name the third Batman movie? The Caped Crusader. That’d be pretty awesome, right? Yeah, I knew you’d agree.
So as promised, here’s a pic of Employee Aaron’s fiance Kempo dressed as the Red Lantern cat Dex-Starr. BONUS: she’s in the pic with Dex-Starr’s co-creator, Geoff Johns:
Pretty awesome, I think. I wonder which is weirder: being dressed as a character and running into that character’s creator, or being the character’s creator and seeing people dressed as him/her/it. Luckily, thanks to my
Spunky the Monkey cosplay, I think I’m relatively safe from any awkward encounters since I’m pretty sure everyone involved in the strip is long-departed.
Also, she got to ask during a DC Universe panel if Dex-Starr would be fighting Krypto the Superdog EDIT: Streaky the Supercat at some point, and Johns responded in the affirmative. WE’RE HOLDING YOU TO THIS, JOHNS.
Apparently, Employee Aaron was also in line to ask a question, but he wasn’t able to ask before question-time was cut off. His inquiry? How DC plans on reintroducing Swamp Thing into the regular, non-Vertigo DC Universe. …I’ve trained the boy well.
• • •
Hey, you look like you have a dollar. And I would like you to spend it by just clicking on that image just below, there:
Fellow
Bureau Chief and
Fake AP Stylebook contributor Eugene, under the name “Adam WarRock,” has released his single “Ira Glass,” and you can choose your purchasing and download options
right here. (Use the Bandcamp option, since they take less off the top, which means more coin of the realm for the Euge Machine.)
BONUS: Cover art, as seen above, by The Rack‘s Benjamin Birdie. He’s also a swell cat who deserves your support.
Anyway, Eugene has gifted us with plenty of free songs over the last few months (including multiple theme songs for the comics podcast War Rocket Ajax) so please, throw down a buck for at least this one thing. Help a brother out.
And yes, I realize the rap and the hipping and the hopping isn’t to everyone’s taste. Not my own preferred musical genres, usually, but I’ve been enjoying Euge’s work over the last few months, and hopefully most of you will, too.
• • •
This week’s sidebar icon image comes from
Chris Sims,
Chad Bowers and
Matt Digges‘s webcomic
Awesome Hospital. It’s from
this particular page (WARNING: cartoon naked butt), and I was informed, as I’d
wondered previously, that the image in question
is in fact a specific reference to me.
So of course I totally stole it. SWAMP THING IN AN “M” HAT WANTS TO BE FREE.
…but Kempo and Employee Aaron later reenacted the question-popping for friends and other well-wishers while still at the convention:
I’m reasonably certain the raygun-coercion wasn’t a part of the actual event, but I’m going to pretend it was anyway.
So while attending the San Diego Comic Con, Employee Aaron, as seen here:
…asked for the hand in marriage of his girlfriend Kempo, as seen here:
…and she must not have heard the question, because she actually said “yes” and now she’s pretty much stuck having to marry the guy.
Seriously, though, congratulations to both of them…I’ve known Kempo since she was just a kid, and now here she is, marrying this Aaron fella. Tempus sure does fugit when you ain’t lookin’.
Here’s a nice photo of the both of them, taken during one of those rare occasions Aaron remembered which side of the razor goes against his face:
Okay, I pick on Aaron a lot, but he really is a nice guy — don’t tell him I said that! — and I do wish these two the best.
• • •
In other news:
- Yes, that really is Kempo in the Plastic Man get-up…that photo was taken a couple of San Diegos ago. She has quite the affinity for costume-making, and this year she went to the con dressed as Dex-Starr. Yes, the Red Lantern cat. Soon as I get a photo, I’ll run it here. If Kempo doesn’t kill me for running the Plastic Man pic first.
- Isn’t this like the third time Smallville character Chloe Sullivan has been announced as entering the DC Universe proper? No idea what the hold-up was the previous times (probably no more than “didn’t have the right time and place to squeeze her in,” or maybe the show’s producers put the kibosh on it…really no clue), but it should be interesting to see how they alter/merge her Smallville backstory to fit into Superman’s comic book continuity (such as it is).
- Holy cow, Fantagraphics will be publishing the complete Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse comic strips. I don’t do a whole lot of Disney stuff on this site, I realize, because, oh, hello Disney lawyers, but I am a fan of the Gottfredson Mickey strips and can’t wait to see this book.
Hopefully someday we’ll get a collection of those early Donald Duck strips, too, which Gladstone used to reprint in their early Donald Duck comics.
- So the Infinity Gauntlet will be in the Thor movie. I’m still fanboy enough to think that’s neat. And as Augie De Blieck said on this Twitter thingie, that explains the recent hardcover release of the original Infinity Gauntlet mini-series.
- I knew attending the Injury-to-Eye panel was a bad idea. Okay, it may turn out no one was actually “stabbed” as such, so there goes my jokes about how after all this time, a fan finally decided to literally “go stabby,” but according to the article someone was scratched near the eye with “a pen or an inflatable toy” or perhaps a puppy or maybe a Ford Fiesta, no one’s quite sure, it seems.
- David Wolkin has been posting his “Internal Monologue Reviews” of the con, and they’re weirdly amusing and disturbing. Also, he dropped by our store to say hello on his way down to San Diego, and he is one handsome bastard.
- Huh, new Rocketeer stories, by a bunch of name creators. This mini-series would come very close to doubling the amount of Rocketeer comics in existence, wouldn’t it? Anyway, it won’t be Dave Stevens, alas, but it sounds like it could be interesting.
- Here’s an announcement I didn’t expect: John Byrne’s Next Men is coming back. As I recall, when Byrne ended the series in the mid 1990s, the plan was to revive it when the comic industry’s health improved to the point that it’d be economically feasible to return to the title. Well, I guess he got tired of waiting, because here we go. I am looking forward to this, as Next Men was an enjoyable comic, allowing Byrne’s Byrne-ness to be unfettered by corporate hoohar and goings-on.
- Here’s a trio of Dark Horse Comics related news items: a movie trailer for The Goon (video autoplays, have to watch an ad), a new Witchfinder mini-series drawn by John freakin’ Severin, and Dark Horse Presents is coming back, with a new Concrete story in the first issue. These are all good things.
- Scanning some of the online photo galleries of this year’s costumes…now, it’s kinda weird that someone dressed up their six or seven year old daughter as Hit-Girl from Kick Ass, right? It’s not just me thinkin’ that? Another thought I had seeing some of these costumes…they realize they’re going to have to be walking through huge crowds on hot days, right? Maybe a giant costume made of thick fabric and/or with pointy, stick-outy bits is not the best of ideas?
Also, apparently the Slave Leias are multiplying. At this rate, by the year 2040 approximately 88% of Earth’s population will be Slave Leias. …I hope George Lucas is happy.
…when I came across this item:
First, it never occurred to me that there was a tie-in item of this particular type for the
Superman Returns movie, though if you can
dress up as Supes, I guess Lex is fair game.
Second, “Luthor” is totally misspelled on the package. I’m reasonably sure this is an official item, which makes the error fairly surprising…and I’ve also found pictures of this product with the correct spelling, so it was caught eventually, in case you were as worried about this as I was.
In other news:
…for one of our very semi-occasional Midnight Madness sales, so I’m downright pooped as I write this (at 1:40 Sunday morning). Thus, all you’re getting today is a photo taken at said event, featuring Employee Aaron and Kempo, his lovely significant other:
I’m pretty sure this photo is weapons-grade cuteness.
Anyway, they’re going to the San Diego Comic Con next week, so if you see them there, be sure to ask Aaron to show you his cat ears. It’s good luck if you rub them.
…after a long day and a longer evening and seriously, folks, I’ve got nothing. I have nothing I particularly want to write about, nothing to scan, nothing happening at work that’s particularly interesting to talk about…
…so let’s instead wish Employee Aaron a happy birthday!
This is where I keep Aaron between his 14-hour workdays at the shop, by the way.
Happy birthday, Aaron! Here’s to at least a half-dozen or so more!
So first, Employee Aaron drew this:
And then I drew this in response:
Neither of us were particularly sad at the time, so I have no explanation. But that won’t stop me from slapping these pics up on the site for all to…”enjoy.”
In other news:
- Say, you know what’s five years old this week? Why, the weblog of Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull, that’s what! Since Bully is only six years old, he’s been doing his site for 5/6ths of his life! And who among us can say that?
Congrats, Bully! May you defeat all the matadors life throws at you!
- Fellow Bureau Chief Matt Wilson penned an article looking at the problems with “nerd news” reporting. Some interesting food for thought in there (especially the bit about some folks just not being able to admit they were wrong about something).
- Here’s something I didn’t expect to see…the all-seeing Neilalien turns his Eye of Agamotto upon the last episode of Lost. It’s a short, thoughtful, and reasoned response to the show, and I can’t disagree with it.
Speaking of Lost, get a load of Nedroid‘s “Twitpic” stream, with plenty of Lost comics and illustrations. If this strip doesn’t make you wish for a follow-up TV series with those two characters, then I don’t know what to tell you.
- Longtime customer Kevin started a sketch blog and I’ve kept meaning to link to it. So here you go. The man wields a mighty pen.
- If you somehow missed out on ordering the print version of The Journal of MODOK Studies fanzine, like I did, you can now get all three issues as PDFs from the official website. You’re welcome.
So no less than THREE
current and former employees had this to say upon seeing the Copperhead action figure…without having heard the others say these things, by the way:
- “Copperhead? Really?”
- “Is he a member of [G.I. Joe's counterpart terrorist organization] Cobra?”
End result: I had to kill all three of them. Sometimes it’s best.
Don’t know why Copperhead stood out so much…I thought it was more strange that you just had a random member of the Metal Men (Iron) in the assortment. Did get a few comments about the Desaad figure in the assortment, though, which isn’t nearly as disturbing as the Super Powers version from the ’80s, but still…”enjoy your action figure of a sadistic torturer, kids!”
Also of note, the Mary Marvel figure in the set is named “Mary Batson,” because of, well, you know, the whole Marvel Comics thing. (Like that set of SHAZAM figures from DC Direct a while back, with “Captain, Jr.” an’ all). Plus, if you get all the figures, each package has a piece o’Darkseid that you can assemble: you can see some of the figures and the fully-assembled Darkseid here.
The figures come with some pinback buttons featuring oddly-cropped cover images of classic, and not-so-classic, DC Comics (though the one I saw of this cover wasn’t too bad). Those pins weren’t nuthin’ on the pins Employee Aaron and I made a while back.
Yup. Those were some good pins we made. Too bad Aaron had to die.
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