Context, if you insist.

The line didn’t just contain Marvel superheroes, but other joke and story books as well, which are named here in this period article, and shown here in an article from the same publication a couple of decades later. It looks to me like this company, Creative House Publishing, licensed the properties from various comic publishers, mixed in their own in-house content (or obtained the joke and story and other content from sources I’m not aware of) and marketed them in this unique format via bubblegum machines and what have you.

Each title featured multiple variations on cover color…here you can see the multiple covers for the Nick Fury book. That brings me to this point: I had been under the impression, from information provided in Overstreet and online, and just from previously having copies of these in the shop before, that each cover was single solid color. You may have noticed that most of the covers in that first pic up there aren’t solid colors, like these two Nick Fury books:

And just for comparison, here’s a close-up of one of the covers with the solid color:

That’s definitely the editor’s signature at the bottom of the front cover of this ‘zine (dating from 1980):

From 1979 comes The Palantir #1:

This collection has a run of, like, eighteen issues of this series, but the cover of #1 (circa 1979/80) is absolutely my favorite:

Okay, the exact value of “coolest” may vary depending on your opinion of Stan Lee’s finest creation, but this was the last thing I expected to see a customer wearing, particularly in this Year of our Lord, Two Thousand Twelve. It gave me a good, surprised laugh, and thus, my most sincere kudos to that customer of mine.

Things did go pretty smoothly, aside from some frantic setting-up in the morning, hefting boxes around and just generally getting the store ready. No weird problems, no complaints, no people asking to go through all the boxes of the porn comics…it all went great. I ended up pulling a twelve hour shift instead of my planned ten-hour stint, so I’m plenty tired, but it was worth it.

The only bit of difficulty we encountered was our usually adequate-for-the-business single register getting desperately backed-up at one point early in the day, requiring the creation of a temporary “cash only” second checkout line at the front counter. I suppose as problems go, “too many customers wanting to give us money” isn’t a bad one, but I don’t like having our customers have too much of a wait time. The situation resolved itself soon enough, but I’ll consider that a lesson learned and we’ll plan accordingly next year.

Big Bad Matt Digges, artist of everyone’s favorite comic about an awesome hospital, Awesome Hospital, announced his intention on the Twitter to pop by the shop for FCBD as part of his weekend birthday celebration, which prompted me to declare:

Plus, pal Casie, she of this swell green drawing, came by the shop and gave us cookies and cupcakes in this lovely decorated box:

In all, it was very busy and a lot of fun, and I saw a lot of new faces and a bunch of happy kids, so what the heck, I guess we’ll do it again next year. We just have to remember to (gulp) order even more Free Comic Book Day comics than we did this year. …I guess we better start savin’ up for it now!

This year we ordered even more comics than in previous years, particularly since we had really upped our orders last year and we were still mostly through our FCBD stock halfway through the day. I’ll let you know how we did this time around!

Oh, and formerly employee Aaron and his lovely wife (and part-time employee) Kempo will be gracing us with their presence and helping out at the shop that day, since I guess this year they’ll be able to make it. I mean, they claim they had something more important to do on Free Comic Book Day last year, but pffft, whatever.

So, Free Comic Book Day…get yerself to a funnybook emporium and help yourself to some freebies. I recommend the Donald Duck Family comic from Fantagraphics…I think that one was my favorite from this year’s batch. For reviews of most of this year’s offerings, I pass you along to pal Dorian.

• Andrew isn’t just a pal and a fellow Bureau Chief and one of my co-writers on Write More Good(still available, still funny!), but he’s one of my favorite comics ‘n’ pop culture commentators as well. He’s celebrating the sixth anniversary of his weblog Armagideon Time this week, and he’s still one of the best writers in our particular cultural niche. …That’s a “damning with faint praise” compliment if ever there was one, but he is darned good, and if you aren’t reading him yet, get started already!
• Hey, Daniel Butler, artist of Copernicus Jones and my swanky new Twitter icon, now has a t-shirt shop. With monster shirts. You like monsters, right? Of course you do. Go check it out.
• PALS LOOK AT PREVIEWS: Dorian has his monthly installment of Previews for Gays, and Dave has his own Previews overview as well, and I’m glad Dave tackled that “NERD? I prefer the term Intellectual Badass” t-shirt, because frankly, my brain locked up pondering the damned thing.
• And what the heck, here are more plugs for books: Matt Wilson‘s Supervillain Handbook is out and totally orderable by clicking on this thing here:
  
  I read his self-published version a couple of years ago, and it’s a hoot.

  Also, She Died in Terrebone, the excellent year-long webcomic by Kevin Church and T.J. Kirsch, is now available in a single volume, and it’s a bargain at only ten bucks.

• Bully flips for Batman. And let’s be honest…who doesn’t?

Chad asks:

“Out of curiosity, is there enough Man-Thing material to generate a second omnibus?”

There’s more Man-Thing out there…there was this short-lived ongoing, the serial from Marvel Comics Presents, assorted cameos, that one Giant-Size Spider-Man issue, I think an Iron Man annual, this thing, and so on. I don’t know if it’s another 1,200 pages, or anywhere close to justifying another omnibus, but it’s a not-insignificant amount of Man-Thing.

Also, the more I think about it, the more I am coming to believe that the omission of Marvel Two-in-One #1 from the contents listing I reprinted in my last post was simply an accident. It’s not impossible that they left that issue out for whatever reason, but it seems very unlikely. I’m betting it’s in there. …Well, not enough to bet $125 on it, but I’ll let one of you buy it and tell me for certain.

Richard adds

“And of course we may never see the reprint of the Man-Thing appearance in ‘Micronauts’ because of all the legal rights involved.”

And that’s a shame. I feel pretty safe in suspecting the solution is “money, and lots of it” but I doubt the financial return in obtaining usage rights to reprint one story would be worthwhile. But, heck, it’s not like that particular issue is too hard to find. Ask a comic book guy near you! Or even ask me…I’ve probably got one or three in our back issue assortment, somewhere.

Someone remind me to poke through my Overstreet when next I have an opportunity to see if these reprint-verboten issues are suddenly commanding slightly higher prices than their freely-reprintable comrades surrounding them in those particular runs. I think there’s a Hulk trade paperback just recently solicited that skips over this issue, and of course there’s that one issue of Power Man and Iron Fist that’s forgotten by God and man and Marvel’s reprint department. I’ll have to see if the stockpiles of those issues I’ve been investing in are sellable now…wait, what? No, I didn’t say that. Must’ve been someone else.

And speaking of Man-Thing…I don’t think I’ve noted anywhere on the site yet that Steve Gerber’s final Man-Thing script is seeing print in the forthcoming three-issue mini Infernal Man-Thing (starting in June), illustrated by Kevin Nowlan. Here is Nowlan’s cover for #1:

“Collecting ASTONISHING TALES (1970) #12-13; FEAR #11-18, and material from #10 and #19; MAN-THING (1974) #1-22, GIANT-SIZE MAN-THING #1-3 and material from #4-5, INCREDIBLE HULK (1968) #197-198; MARVEL TEAM-UP (1972) #68; MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #43; MAN-THING (1979) #1-11; DR. STRANGE (1974) #41; and material from SAVAGE TALES (1971) #1, MONSTERS UNLEASHED #5 and #8-9, and RAMPAGING HULK (1977) #7.”

First thought is, as Chris more or less implied in his response to my Twitter post about this book, if anything deserves to be called Giant-Size Man-Thing, it’s this monstrosity. Secondly, it seems odd that they’d pass up Marvel Two-in-One #1 while including Marvel Two-in-One #43, which is also (as I recall) the second part of a two-part story. Plus, there are a couple of other appearances of Manny in this general time period that don’t appear to be part of the contents…but they gotta leave something for Man-Thing Omnibus: The Second Volumening, I guess.

The $125 price tag is a bit dear, but let’s face it…no one is going to pay full retail for this. And it’ll probably cut off circulation to your lower extremities if you keep this book in your lap while reading for too long. But, it would be nice to have good reprints of this material, in color, on white paper. Some of the older comics were printed on…not the best paper available for magazine use, and certain artistic decisions (like printing white text on black backgrounds) can make some of the stories a bit of a challenge to read. I’m interested, of course, but I may just hold out for a more affordable format. (A color format, I should add, since I know Marvel has the black and white Essentials books reprinting a lot of this same work.)

One more note: I could have sworn something like this already came out, but I didn’t see any record of it in our distributor’s stock listings. Maybe I was just imagining things…Man-Things, that is!

…Yeah, sorry.

In addition, the new schedule frees me up to do things like, oh, reread the entire run of The Boys thus far, in preparation for the series wrapping up in the few months. I don’t have a whole lot to say about that, other than noting that the story certainly flowed a lot more smoothly for me reading it over a relatively short period of time, instead of an issue a month for about six years. Easy to lose some of the nuances, and to lose track of some of the set-ups and payoffs, of the plot when you’ve got four weeks between installments.

Anyway, got sidetracked a bit there…what I’m trying to say is that I’m ultimately pleased with having dropped the pace down a bit here at the site, and I hope that comes across in what I’m doing. Thanks for your patience, and for sticking around and reading my nonsense.