The big news is that the trailer for the new Dungeons and Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves, has been unleashed:
Slightly bigger news: it actually looks like it’ll be pretty good.
But the biggest news of all:
GELATINOUS CUBE CAMEO. Over there, on the right, suckin’ that guy into its…belly? Let’s say belly.
As you may know from my previous posts on the subject, I do loves me some gelatinous cubin’, so I was tickled translucent when pals Jason and Dave confirmed for me that a Cube does indeed make its glorious appearance.
Now granted, it’s been a while since I’ve played D&D with, you know, other people. Like, not since “before 2nd Edition” times, back when I played with some of the neighborhood kids ’til another neighbor played a tape of some religious radio show about how D&D and other fantasy games were “evil” and scared them all off. Once I had a Macintosh computer some years later, I enjoyed playing some of the licensed D&D games there, but even that was, what, 25, 30 years ago?
What I’m saying is, it’s been a while, so I don’t recall if Gelatinous Cubes are only found sweeping up debris, critters, treasure and adventurers in dungeon corridors. Seeing it just out in the open like this doesn’t seem…right, though given this scene is in an arena setting I’m guessing it was brought out there for the purpose of…being in the right place for that dude to just slide right into it. Anyway, that brings up the question of how one would forcibly move a Gelatinous Cube out of a dungeon. Perhaps using some kind of giant gelatin mold tray, I suppose.
“6-INCH SCALE GELATINOUS CUBE: Pose a 6-inch action figure within your Gelatinous Cube collectible figure and imagine the heroes of D&D stuck inside. Figures sold separately. Subject to availability.
“14 SNAP-IN ACCESSORIES & “INVISIBLE” STAND: D&D dice are the D&D accessories of choice for boring humans, but this Gelatinous Cube comes with accessories & stand for prodigious posing possibilities.”
Amazing. I mean, I don’t have any other Dungeons and Dragons figures so I’m just going to have to imagine multiple iterations of Swamp Thing stuck inside instead.
The order page also asks
“IS IT A GOOD D&D GIFT FOR BOYS, MEN, GIRLS, WOMEN, AND ALSO EVERYONE?”
And the answer is “yes, yes of course it is, you dummies, everyone loves the Gelatinous Cube.” If this doesn’t become the best-selling toy in history, I’m going to be very disappointed.
Okay, so I don’t have my Nancy and Sluggo Pops yet, but this release may mollify me somewhat:
Hokey smokes it’s a Gelatinous Cube Pop, apparently a convention exclusive but perhaps available at select retailers, says the linked article. Well, they darn well better select me, America’s Most Beloved Fan of Gelatinous Cube-Related Stuff.
Anyway, that’s pretty wild, but what I’m most astonished by is the fact that the possibility of this actually being A Thing never occurred to me. Particularly after having a Mind Flayer Pop come into the store. And I just checked…there doesn’t seem to be a Beholder Pop either…not even the Beholder knock-off from Big Trouble in Little China.
Not that I need any more tchotchkes in the house. Pop-wise, I have the various Swamp Things, and Popeye, and recently took home a Galactus. That should be plenty, but I’d definitely make room for a Gelatinous Cube. …And a Nancy and/or Sluggo, of course. I mean, honestly, what’s the hold up? Are they tied up by other licensing agreements? C’MON ALREADY
“So what’s the deal with this ring?” asked the customer, gesturing at the little pile of plastic Legion of Super-Heroes rings I had laid out on the counter, a promotional giveaway for the new Legion series that debuted last week. “Are they for Aquaman?”
Um, Aquaman? How do you get “Aquaman” from a ring that very clearly has an “L” on it? I didn’t say that to the customer, but I did let him know what the rings were actually for, and that seemed to satisfy him.
What struck me, though, is that he knew enough about comics to mention to the people he was with that the Flash used to have a ring in which he would keep his super-compressed costume. But he didn’t know enough about the Legion to be able to identify one of the flight rings, which is a fairly integral element of the series. …Which is fine, of course, just because you like superhero comics doesn’t mean you have to know Every. Single. Detail. of each and every one.
But he wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what the flight ring was. I had a number of people certainly identify what it was supposed to be, but had just as many other folks, comic reading folks, coming-in-every-Wednesday-for-the-new-goodies customers, who did not know what that ring was supposed to represent.
There was once a time when Legion fandom was a thing…like, it was one of the franchise’s defining elements was its active, involved fanbase. And that fanbase eroded over the years for various reasons (discussed both by me and pal Andrew a while back) to the point where DC no longer found it profitable to even attempt at keeping an ongoing Legion book on the stands for the last several years.
Of course, that absence has changed now, with DC’s much-ballyhooed Legion relaunch last week (preceded by an entertaining two-part mini bridging the current DC Universe to the Legion’s future), brought about by DC’s equally-ballyhooed acquiring of one of Marvel’s Big Name comic writers Brian Michael Bendis. Whether that rebuilding of what was once the formidable Legion Fandom will follow is…well, okay, it won’t, it’s a different time, and the natural, organic evolution of that fandom over years and decades isn’t suddenly going to repeat itself with the latest revival, however long it manages to last without yet another reboot.
I remember the last time DC Comics provided plastic Legion ring giveaways to tie into some new Legion thing or ‘nother, it seemed like everyone was in on it. They all knew the Legion, knew what the flight ring was and what it represented, and so on…but then, Legion was still an ongoing, if not entirely what it once was, concern at the time, a couple of decades back. Now…after being basically gone, or generally off the average comic fan’s radar, for about a decade or even more, one can’t depend on a shared fan nostalgia that will remember some piece of a franchise that was dead, or might as well have been, when several of today’s fans first got into the comic collecting hoohar.
Now, the good news is that despite some of my customer base not recognizing the Legion ring, there is still enough of the rest of that base to have either recognized the Legion, or are new to it but have been intrigued enough by the advertising/guest-appearances, to pick up the book. In fact, it was a near sell-out for me, and I have a box of restocked copies heading my way…well, today, hopefully…and even then about half of those restocks are already spoken for. I haven’t even got one for myself yet, since I was saving copies for the shelf.
I spoke with a friend who has a comic shop a few hundred miles away and says he can’t give them away, so I guess Your Store’s Mileage Will Vary. I’ve experienced this before…even back in the ’90s, I was comparing notes with a retailer in L.A. and he was all like “you sell how many Legion!?” But I hope this series is an overall success (in whatever meets “success” levels in today’s diminished market)…I do like the Legion, and I would like to have a new comic of theirs I can read. It won’t be the same, with the characters all cut off from their long history that brought me to these comics in the first place, but I can still enjoy a good comic regardless. I mean, assuming it’s good.
Oh, and I figured out why that customer thought this was an Aquaman ring:
…because he probably saw one turned on its side. An easy enough mistake to make, I guess.
Said Gelatinous Cube reference fuzzily resized for your viewing convenience:
Now, what exactly a “+3” cube would be, I’m not sure, because the last time I played D&D, back in Ye Olden Tymes, a “+(x)” designation was more for weapons and items, not for living creatures. Perhaps Deadpool is being, as shocking as it may seem, less then accurate about D&D terms for humorous effect. HOW DARE HE JOKE ABOUT MY BELOVED GELATINO–er, anyway.
Thanks to Bully for keeping the Cube faith alive…and allowing me to resurrection this much-neglected category on my site!
So Greg, on the Twitter, pointed me in the direction of a couple of message board threads in which the Gelatinous Cube is discussed: first, it is wondered what a dead Cube would look like, and lo, it is revealed. Secondly, in another thread, the supposed origin of the Gelatinous Cube is dished out.
Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull, and his pal, Shelly the Little Otter Puppet, try out their new ping pong kit with adorably animated results. …Okay, not strictly speaking “comics,” but it’s awesome and you should go look anyway.
This week’s entry in pal Andrew’s ongoing Nobody’s Favorites is sure to honk off some of you. And I don’t use the phrase “honk off” lightly.
…courtesy reader Dave McK., who responded to my ages-old desire to have a Gelatinous Cube as a player-character in a D&D campaign with this drawing of a Gelatinous Cube as (in Dave’s words) a playa-character:
Once I have finished converting Progressive Ruin to a Gelatinous Cube fan-site, my job on your planet will be done and I can — at long last — return to my people.
Oh, you poor, misguided warrior. There is no defeating…the Gelatinous Cube.
In other news:
Speaking of Bully, I helped him out a bit with his “366 Days of Alfred Pennyworth” project.
If you remember this Sluggo Saturday (the one with the wholly-inappropriate Dolly Parton gag I made), the folks at Boing Boing present the strip in full, and come to sort of the same conclusion I had about what was going on there. (Thanks to pal Andres for letting me know about this!)
~P~ at Sanctum Sanctorum wants you to put words in Dr. Strange’s mouth! (~P~’s example of what he’s kind of looking for is…slightly Not Safe for Work…but what are you doing goofing off at work and looking at comic book websites for anyway? Well, except for mine, of course.)
Not comics, but pal Dawn has written a book (FaeMaker: Making Fantasy Characters with Polymer Clay) and I thought I’d point that out to you folks. You might have seen her selling her wares at a San Diego Con or two, and she’s a swell gal…so please pick up her book if that sounds like something you’d be into!
Just get your hands on card #577 from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition 1991 Trading Cards Set:
…and paste it into that big ol’ blank space next to the Gelatinous Cube entry in your first edition Monster Manual (provided you haven’t already supplied an illustration of your own), and you’re all set.
Yes, yes, I know that means crossing the 1st Edition/2nd Edition AD&D streams. Don’t you rules-lawyer me.
…who felt that the lack of an accompanying image for the Gelatinous Cube entry was an omission that could not be overlooked:
Also appreciated: the clarification that the 2-8 hit point damage it can inflict is caused by “digestive fluids” and not by, say, the Cube hitting you with a polearm.
I’ve been so used to seeing the Kryptonian language represented by a special symbol typeface in Superman comics over the last few years that seeing a phonetic version of spoken Kryptonian is…well:
from Action Comics #489 (Nov 1978) by Cary Bates, Curt Swan & Frank Chiaramonte
…yeah. I suppose, once I have a spare decade and a complete collection of Superman comics, I can catalog the different ways Kryptonian has been represented over the years. Then I can finally fulfill my dream of opening a Kryptonian language camp for underprivileged children, and we can compete with the Klingon language camp across the lake…but perhaps I’ve said too much.
Here’s an interesting look back at Comico’s licensing of properties for comics, including Macross and Jonny Quest. Of particular note is the mention of one cult-favorite ’80s character that Comico licensed but ended up not publishing. I hadn’t known about that!
