Mike Sterling's Progressive RuinAlone, unmourned, and unloved since 1969

I’m worth four times as much as bubble wrap.

§ September 24th, 2006 § Filed under Uncategorized § 1 Comment

So Brook, a longtime customer of mine and an old friend of former employee Rob, came by our store late Wednesday afternoon, as he usually does each week to get the new comics. Last Wednesday, we had the following exchange:

Brook: “Hey, Mike, are you working this Saturday?”

Me: “Yup.”

Brook: “All day?”

Me: “Yeah…um, why are you asking?”

Brook: “Oh, no reason.”

Now I was busy, and couldn’t press the issue, but I was fairly certain Brook probably wasn’t planning any kind of bodily harm to me, so I was willing to wait and see what he had planned.

One of Brook’s regular things is an annual scavenger hunt that he arranges (with real cash money prizes), and he passes out long lists of items to be acquired to the participants, each item assigned a particular point value based on rarity or difficulty. For example, a sheet of bubble wrap was five points, while a photo of the player standing in a bank with either a ski-mask or pantyhose pulled down over his/her head was forty-seven points. (Generously, the contest also offered fifty bonus points to anyone arrested and/or hospitalized during the hunt.)

Well, yesterday was the scavenger hunt, and it turned out a photo of the player exchanging a high-five with yours truly was worth twenty points. I took many a photo that day, and hopefully I can get my hands on some of these pictures for display here. (Brook, very wisely, also made “issue #86 of any Marvel Comic” part of the hunt, so I was able to sell a few comics to them at the same time.)

In a way, I was glad to find out I was worth twenty points (four times as much as bubble wrap, less than half as dangerous as the ski-mask in a bank bit). If I were only, say, three points, I would have felt like Bugs Bunny in “Rebel Rabbit” — the one where he was pissed as all get-out because his bounty was only two cents and proceeds to go on a rampage.

By the way, I asked the players, and no one planned on doing the bank thing, in case you were worried.

An interesting bit of trivia regarding the Close Encounters of the Third Kind card set that I had posted some cards from yesterday: Richard Dreyfuss, the star of the film, appears nowhere on any of the cards. I knew there was some kind of likeness rights issue regarding Marvel’s comic book adaptation, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me that other merchandise would have been affected by it as well…at least until I started flipping through the card set and noticed the omission. (A quick Googling turned up a brief mention of this situation in, of all places, an article about Jack Kirby’s interpretation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

I’ve never read any issues of The Crow. Am I right in assuming, as the Crow is chasing down the bad guys, he changes into a giant crow and flies after them, flapping his mighty wings? Or that he’s wearing a giant crow outfit, his head peeking out through the open beak, shouting “CAW CAW CAW!” as he exacts vengeance upon those who’ve done him wrong?

Because if that’s not what happens in the comics, I don’t want to know. (“How can I strike fear into the hearts of criminals? …That’s it! I shall become a crow!”) I mean, the comic looks like it’s about a shirtless mime that mopes around in cemetaries on rainy evenings, and that can’t be right.