Sorry, this domain is not for sale.
from Man-Bat #2 (Feb-Mar 1976) by Martin Pasko, Pablo Marcos & R. Villamonte
Three things the Ten-Eyed Man doesn’t like to do:
1. Pick his nose.
2. Thumbwrestle with the Ten-Penised Man.
3. Wipe.
Found on the eBay:
“ADAM West Signed Check BATMAN ZAP POW BAM….* REAL *”
“Authentic Autographed Check with original signature of Adam West best known as BATMAN…… Check is in very good condition with normal bank markings and cancellations. Check is from 1981 and payable to State Farm . It is boldly signed in Blue Ink.”
“BOLDY.” Take that, evildoers.
We got a couple Marvel key books in a collection the other day that we hadn’t had in the shop for a while: Giant-Size X-Men #1, introducing the new team, and it was all downhill from there; and Amazing Spider-Man #129, featuring the first appearance of the Punisher. I only mention them here because 1) in the case of the X-Men, I felt like being a smartass, and 2) the ASM #129 reminded me of the huge crash in popularity of the Punisher from the mid-’90s. That crash can probably be tied to the general comics market crash of about the same time, at least as a symptom of the overall damage being done to the marketplace. It wasn’t just that sales were dropping across the board, but that once popular characters were being outright rejected by the still-remaining fanbase. Just plain character burnout? A conscious (or even subconscious) realization of the usage of said character, as a sales-bumping guest-star, being part of the market’s poor health?
There’s probably an overlong, confusingly-written essay in me on that very topic, but that’s for another day, I think. No, I just wanted to bring up a brief flash of memory from that middle period of the 1990s, when we had a stack of Amazing Spider-Man #129s all priced up and sittin’ pretty in our big ol’ glass case, just waiting for a Punisher fan with a few bills in his or her pocket to wander by and make a purchase.
Used to be, in the Good Old Days, we could turn over ASM #129s day in and day out. We had people hounding us for them constantly. Almost as soon as we got one in, it went away. And we were buying and selling them all the time. Seemed like every other collection we bought had one of those in it.
Then we ended up with a small stack of them. About half a dozen. Varying conditions. We thought “Wow, those will be gone in no time!”
Then no time passed. Then some time passed. Then a lot of time passed, and there they were, still in the case. The bloom was off the tree on the other side of the fence leading a horse, or something like that, and suddenly we went from having “1ST APPEARANCE OF THE PUNISHER WOO HOO” to “Do you have any cheaper copies of #129? I’m just trying to fill my Spider-Man run.”
And that’s how, with tears in our eyes and Shadowhawks in our quarter boxes, we ended up slashing the prices on those ASM #129s in order to move them out.
‘Course, now, what with a revived interest in the Punisher character, and increased demand for ’70s Amazing Spider-Man comics, we could have sold those ASM #129s for much more than we had them originally marked at the time, but What Can You Do? You can’t sit on everything, thinking its time will come again, or even come a first time.
No, really, this domain is NOT FOR SALE. I will, however, happily accept sponsors. “CAMEL CIGARETTES, HALLIBURTON, STARBUCKS, MARVEL COMICS, WALMART, THE RIAA, AND CHRIS SIMS PROUDLY PRESENT MIKE STERLING’S PROGRESSIVE RUIN.”
Oh, the possibilities. Brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it? And if you were the Ten-Eyed Man, you’d be weeping from your fingers like nobody’s business, I bet.
