Stink, Stock, and Supergirl.
So the award for “Stinkiest Comic” this week goes to Atomic Robo #1. No, not “stinky” as in “this comic is no good” — it looks just dandy to me, I mean “stinky” as in “oh God, someone shoot off my nose” stinky. It literally reeked. Something about the paper, or the ink, or the cover stock, or a combination of all these things, and maybe a skunk wandering around the Diamond warehouse…Good Lord, it was awful. Awful smelling, I emphasize…this is no slam on the actual quality of art and storytelling.
It still sold well, however.
Every once in a great while, as I’m listing and relisting on the eBay, I’ll relist something that, oops, we’d sold already, due to some failure in my recordkeeping, or due to my just plain not paying attention.
Recently I’ve been listing a bunch of old posters from the backroom…stuff that had sort of gone past its sell-by date, at least locally, but now has found some new retail life on the internationally-spanning inter-webs. One item I listed a while back was a poster released in conjunction with the original late ’80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, featuring Raphael in an overcoat:
Yes, yes, I know, he looks like a flasher. But that poster sold pretty well at the time, leaving us with only one copy left over to vanish into the backroom for a couple decades.
Anyway, I sold the poster through that auction…and a week ago, I listed and relisted a whole bunch of TMNT posters, accidentally relisting the Raphael in overcoat one. And, of course, I didn’t realize it until just before that auction ended, too late to cancel it.
Even though I was pretty sure the copy I’d previously sold was the last in the store, I still delved deep into our storage, frantically seeking through our boxes of past-their-prime posters, hoping I wouldn’t have to eat some crow and beg forgiveness of our bidder.
I found another copy of the Raphael in overcoat poster. I had one more copy of an 18-year-old poster that, I was almost certain, we not longer had in stock.
What we can find in our backroom scares me, sometimes. It’s a labyrinthine treasure trove of wonders and horrors, beauty and treachery.
We also have about a dozen copies of the “Donatello in a straw hat” poster. Apparently that was slightly less popular than the Raphael’s overcoat poster.
This is one of the cards from the newly released, hideously expensive DC Legacy trading card series from Rittenhouse Archives. The design is nice…the modern version featured in color on one side, with an embossed silver outline of the original version of the character on the other. Usually it makes for an interesting contrast, but in the above example of Supergirl, the newer version doesn’t exactly compare favorably to the old. Granted, it’s not as if the anatomy on the original Supergirl drawing is spot on or anything, but it’s nowhere near as aggressively appalling as the dead-eyed gal on the left. It’s a progression from “cute” and “charming” and “quaint” straight into “kewl” and “horrific” and “just plain dumb looking.”
I don’t care for the usual art for this new version of Supergirl; can you tell? This Renato Guedes version we’ve had lately has been a welcome relief from the straight-outta-the-early-’90s version we’d been enduring.
And because if I don’t point it out, one of you will…though the back of the card talks solely about the Kara Zor-El version of Supergirl, the “classic Supergirl” image on the front is, in fact, “Super-Girl,” a pre-Kara tryout of the Supergirl concept from 1958. Wished into existence by Jimmy Olsen, in fact. I imagine you can probably read a lot into that, if one were so inclined.
