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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.
So pretty much out of nowhere at work yesterday, Employee Aaron whips out this decade-plus old bit of promo material:
That’s a sticker, measuring about 4 inches across, advertising the
Hawk and Dove mini-series that I don’t remember a single thing about. Oh, I remember that it exists, and that we have it in stock at the store. I just couldn’t tell you anything that happened in it, if any of it is still relevant to current continuity, etc. I didn’t remember the sticker, either, since we obviously didn’t use it. Neat design, though…nice play on the whole yin and yang thing.
Speaking of Employee Aaron, we had this conversation at the shop:
Aaron: “Hey, what’s this comic?”
Me: “That? That, m’boy, is U.S. 1.”
Aaron: “What’s it about?”
Me: “Truckin’.”
Aaron: “AWESOME. I’m buying it!”
And time will tell whether I did a good thing or a bad thing.
I did wonder momentarily if U.S. 1 experienced the same phenomenon that other normally scorned and shunned comics seem to have in the past…that after a decade or two of being ignored and dumped in bargain boxes and such, people are starting to realize that, maybe, actual mint copies of the series are hard to come by. And, as such, maybe prices on the books are beginning to creep up.
Now, the other two examples I had in mind for this sort of thing are DC’s Shazam! revival of the 1970s (way overprinted beyond demand, as I recall), and Hex (DC’s sci-fi revamp of the western hero, rejected by a readership not ready for its total awesomeness). They pretty much lived in quarter boxes for years…until relatively recently, when the prices jumped up quite a bit for the nice copies. But these two titles had other advantages, such as the characters involved still being around in one form or another, and thus still in the public eye and memory. U.S. 1 was pretty much self-contained, rarely referenced after the fact, and, at this point, yet another forgotten Big Two mini-series. Plus, it was critically reviled at the time, though it’s not like the ’70s Shazam and Hex were exactly embraced by the audiences of their respective times, either.
Anyway, upshot to all this: U.S. 1 guides in Near Mint at $2.50 a pop, so I guess it’s not yet begun its upward price creep. Though I’d be surprised as hell if anyone’s selling it for $2.50. $2.50 for a full run, maybe. (And I’m sure someone’s put one in a plastic “officially graded” sealed slab and sold it for $100 or something dumb like that. Please don’t tell me if that’s the case.)
In fairness, there’s nothing particularly wrong with U.S. 1…it’s a goofy, dopey, and fun comic book that just takes its premise and runs with it. We could use a few more U.S. 1s on the rack nowadays.
It’s like a ready-made symbolic representation of something:
Like the mosquito could be labeled “DC/MARVEL” and the elephant can be, I don’t know, “THE DIRECT MARKET.” Whee, instant editorial cartoon of…dubious meaning, I guess. It came about when, at the end of the day, Employee Aaron got his hands on a piece of paper and asked if I wanted him to draw anything, and I told the very thing that’s in the subject line of this post. So there you go. And yes, maybe it’s a regular-sized elephant and a really freakin’ huge mosquito, or a regular-sized mosquito and a
very tiny elephant. But whatever.
Anyway, I didn’t ask you here to show you that. I asked you all to meet me here today for you to ask me questions. Yes, it’s been about a year since the last time I did this (though that “question time” tag brings up a post from 2007, and I know I did it more recently than that), but I think it’s been long enough. So, you, my internet pals, know the routine…please drop a question in the comments section for this post, and, in a few days (let’s say, Monday) I’ll start answering them. As usual, try to keep ‘em clean and friendly and not too terribly nosy, and at least kinda related to things on this site. And as before, I reserve the right to reject questions, but I haven’t so far. (Don’t take that as a challenge, by the way!)
If you have any questions, please drop ‘em in the comment box down there. I always enjoy doing this and I hope you folks get something out of it, too. (And, since it happened the last couple of times I did this…please don’t answer my questions for me by responding to them in the comments. Thank you!)
from World’s Finest #183 (March 1969) by Leo Dorfman, Ross Andru & Mike Esposito
Hey, I didn’t even realize when I pulled this comic aside that its cover date is the very month and year of my birth! (Its actual
release date was likely a month or two previous, I think.) Huh, neat. To think my birth coincided with the raising of the Superman and Batman flags at the United Nations…where they fly even today.
Anyway, you guys had some comments on the redesign from yesterday, so let me respond to a couple:
Just Some Guy sez:
“Oh god! Searing pain in my retinas! The glare… too bright!”
Yeah, it is very…white, isn’t it? I’d been dead set on duplicating the exact look of the old site, which is one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to upgrade…I kept fiddling around with WordPress templates and getting frustrated and giving up. But I think this layout is a lot more open, and a lot less, I don’t know, 2003. I think I can live with it.
Plus, I finally changed the banner. Having some old friends staring back at me from across the top of my site helps ease the transition.
Walaka wonders
“Um, isn’t the apostrophe in your title backwards/upside down? What’s up with that?”
What, indeed? That’s just how the apostrophe is in this particular font used by this theme (Hanami, if you were wondering and if you hadn’t yet peeked at the link at the very bottom of the page). To tell the truth, it kind of bothered me at first, but just a little, and I kind of like it now. Just a little bit of weirdness in an otherwise stately design.
Plus, when I looked at the site on my work computer, it just had the standard straight-line computer apostrophe, so I guess whatever font that is isn’t installed in the shop’s computer. I just used “computer” three times in that sentence.
Pal Andres asks, in regards to my old comments:
“If I read the Blogger update correctly your old site will still be accessible, right?”
Well, it could be, if I go through the trouble of setting it up, but then I’d have two copies of my site on the internet and that could be confusing and screw up Googlers and Bingers and such. I mean, I could adjust settings so that Google wouldn’t index the other site or whatever, but one of the reasons I made the transition over to WordPress in the first place is to kind of keep things simple and in one place. Google’s new set-up would have required fiddling with subdomains and redirects to where Google would be hosting my actual posts, while all the media would still be served up by my hoster, and feh on that.
Employee Aaron declares
“The whiteness of your site will burn my retinas every morning from now on! Soon we will have progressive ruin the social networking site so we can compare Swampthing embroidered doilies!”
You’re fired.
C. Elam gives me more gray hair by suggesting
“I am sure you will be working on fixing links on a prodigious number of your entries, because that is the sort of thing that bothers folks like us. Good luck getting things back to ‘normal.’”
I do plan on fixing some of the internal links to other posts, but it’ll be a slow process since I’m gettin’ near to 3000 entries on this site, and I’d like to be able to sleep sometime. I’ll probably focus on the most recent year’s worth of posts, and work backwards from there.
Former employee Ray (and, in fact, the guy I replaced here at the shop!) pleads
“But you have to get the 1969 thing going. I MUST KNOW what you have done since 1969.”
I think instead of the rotating banner I used to have, that would display a new “since 1969″ phrase every time you reloaded the site, I may instead be changing the phrase manually in my banner up there. Not quite as dynamic, I realize, but not everything can make the transition, I’m afraid!
I don’t have the rotating “what people are saying about PROGRESSIVE RUIN” thingie anymore, either, but I do plan on throwing those quotes onto my mostly-empty “About” page. Yes, even the one Dirk wrote about me six years ago about being “one of the better new comic bloggers to emerge so far this year.” I’m hanging onto that quote for dear life.
Ed queries
“Any plans to expand the blogroll to something approaching its former glory?”
Oh, yes, absolutely. But it’ll be a separate page, accessible via a button next to “HOME” and “ABOUT” up there by the banner. Assuming I can do that, that is. In fact, I would have done that today, except I spent all my blogging time doing that swank new banner image. (Who’s not a Photoshop expert? THIS GUY.)
One of the things that bothered me most about the other site is the sheer number of links in the sidebar. It looks cluttered and cramped, but I didn’t want to drop a bunch of links, either. By putting the links on a separate page, that’ll likely encourage me to add lots more of them, so hopefully I can get started on that soon. The links I do have in the sidebar were just kind of put up there to have a blogroll, and are mostly my closest internet pals, the folks with whom I do Fake AP Stylebook, and the mighty Neilalien, the first and most powerful of all comic webloggers.
Anyway, I hope that answered some of your questions about the site. It’s still a work in progress, and again, thank you for your patience and your readership. (And a reminder: you’ll probably need to resubscribe to the syndication feed for your RSS readers…just flip that little chromium switch there at the top of the page.)
In other news:
- Employee Aaron’s girlfriend Mel had a drawing of hers printed in Tank Girl: Skidmarks #3, out this week in a funnybook store near you. Well, okay, we sold out already, but it’s available for reorder and I’ve got more coming! Here’s a little snippet of it:
Pick up the issue and check out the whole pic! Oh, and read the rest of the comic, too. After you pay for it. With money.
You can also visit her Deviantart site and take a gander at her pictures…which, um, may include that same Tank Girl drawing, BUT GO TO SHOP AND PAY MONEY FOR COMIC. Thank you.
- This gentleman is putting together a list of the “100 Best Comic Book Covers” from 1980 to present, and I’m sure he’s going to get a lot of “um, you forgot” and “wow, really?” responses that these lists always get, but hey, a lot of those are nice images. So anyway, go check it out. Tell him he forgot this cover.
So do you ever find yourself flipping channels, and you happen upon a movie you happen to like, and even though you have no intention of watching it, even though you’ve got other stuff you need to be doing, and even though you may even have a copy of it on DVD…you end up sitting there and watching it anyway, with commercials and pan ‘n’ scan an’ all.
Watchmen is kind of like that. (Well, except for the “having on DVD” part, at least for now.) I pulled out my copy of Absolute Watchmen just to check something and ended up reading half the book. And now I don’t even remember what it was I wanted to check in the first place. Oh brother.
Speaking of Watchmen, Employee Aaron text-messaged me from the San Diego Comic Con to tell me:
“Late scoop! San Diego sold out of the Watchmen!”
…so apparently everyone ran out of the trades down there, too. Or, at least, they’re getting scarce. I wonder what kind of crazy panic-pricing is going on for the single issues down there. Anyone got any reports on that?
A few other text messages from Employee Aaron:
“Alright! Just met Ryan Claytor then Edgar Wright followed by Wil Wheaton”
“There is a guy dressed as the Spirit…mask, hat, tie, gloves…Watchmen t-shirt. WTF?”
“Already want to strangle fan behind me. He just called Doc Manhattan ‘Mr. Universe.’ This is going to be tough.”
Also, following up on yesterday…here’s a report on just what the hell was going on at the Eric Powell panel, where Aaron got to join Mr. Powell onstage.
In other news:
Don’t forget to keep up with
Bully the Little Stuffed Bull’s San Diego reports! It’s the cutest con report you’ll read this year! BONUS: At long last, Bully meets his favorite member of the Go-Go’s!
You can see the full photo stream here.
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