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ad detail from Fantastic Films #20 (December 1980)
Five hundred dollars? In 1980? That’s like a billionty dollars in 2011 money. …Oh, okay, it’s closer to about $1,300 or so, according to that currency conversion site I checked it on. But still, that’s a lot of scratch for someone to dole out for a sci-fi collectible at the time. Or maybe it wasn’t…I don’t know, I was only 11 at the time, I was too busy keeping tabs on my couple of bucks’ worth of comics-buying budget to worry about slapping down five bills for something that dear, and, let’s face it*, completely awesome.
By the way, this isn’t a sculpture…it’s a “custom limited edition mask” (it says elsewhere on the page) from Don Post Studios, which “comes complete with its own attractive display case” and “each [mask] is individually crafted as your order is received.”
It also says each set is “serialized and recorded,” so…I wonder if you could contact the studio today with a serial number to verify that the mask is authentic, or establish chain of ownership? I’m guessing so. I’m sure it’s all computerized, but I still amused myself by picturing a beat-up old notebook, with each purchaser’s name scribbled in it along with the serial number, with “PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT THE FACEHUGGER MASK” in felt tip pen on the cover, sitting on a shelf somewhere in the office.
And you know, the more I think about it…I’m betting as rare as this item likely is now, that $500 price tag was probably a bargain.
* Almost wrote “let’s face-hugger it.” So glad I resisted the temptation.
1. Call me at the shop on Wednesday.
2. Tell me you have a bunch of comics for sale in “really good shape.”
3. I ask how old they are, you say they’re “pretty old.”
4. I ask you for some titles, you tell me X-Force, Groo, Elric, X-Factor and so on.
5. I say “bring ’em in, let me take a look at them,” warning you that I’ll probably only be interested in the Groo books (and maybe the Elric).
6. You say you’ll be in Thursday.
7. Thursday. You don’t come in.
8. Friday. You do come in, with a filthy plastic crate filled with even filthier comics. Waterlogged, beat to hell, and just plain dirty comics. Even the comics that are in plastic bags (about half of them) are ratty and filthy.
9. I take a brief look through the comics, not even wanting to touch them, in the off-chance there might be something salvageable.
10. I decide it’s not really worth the effort, and tell you I’m not interested in any of these.
11. You take your crate of comics and depart.
12. I go home at the end of my shift Friday evening.
13. I come into the store Saturday morning. Sitting on the floor by the front counter – that same filthy plastic crate of the even filthier comics.
14. Employee who worked the closing shift the night before tells me that, after I left, an employee at a neighboring business brought the crate of comics to us, having found it dumped in the bed of his pickup truck.
15. So I end up having to deal with this box of crap comics anyway. I pull the plastic bags off the ones that are bagged so that I can dump them in the recycle bin, while going through the comics and seeing if anything actually is salvageable.
16. End result: about 200 or so unsellable comics dumped into the recylcer; about two dozen comics just about good enough for the bargain bin; two comics actually worth keeping and pricing for the regular back issue stock (that one issue of the original What If series with “What If Elektra Had Lived”) and Sub-Mariner #42); and one copy of Zot! #10 1/2 with rusty staples that I ended up giving to Employee Aaron.
17. Just to be clear, had I actually gone through the collection and paid him for the two comics I actually wanted, I may have paid two dollars, tops, for them. And maybe another buck or so for the Zot! just because you don’t see those too much any more. Ultimately, not really worth the time and effort involved here, and only really bothered with them once they were dumped on us just because I was averse to simply throwing away the comics without checking for anything usable.
18. As for the plastic crate: put outside by the back door, where hopefully someone will take it away. And not, say, dump it into the bed of any neighbor’s pickup truck. Or my pickup truck.
19. So in the future, should you happen to call and tell me you have comics for sale, and they’re all in mint condition…I’ll try to suppress the sigh, but no promises.
MORE TRUSTING THAN YOUR CELL PHONE COMPANY
AND ONLY HALF AS EVIL
from The Unexpected #196 (March 1980) by Mike W. Barr & Vic Catan
So on a whim, I thought I’d reread the early appearances of Klarion the Witch Boy from Jack Kirby’s The Demon:
…just because Klarion the Witch Boy is awesome:
…when I came across this little bit of comics trivia that I assumed nobody cared about, but, as you know, a little Googling will always dissuade the “nobody else cares about this” assumption. Anyway, in Klarion’s first appearance, his feline companion Teekl is described as a male cat, as seen in this panel:
However, a few issues later when Klarion makes his return appearance, Teekl is suddenly a girl cat:
And…okay, that was a bit strange. Not that the cat’s suddenly being female is strange, I mean that
panel is damned peculiar. But things get a little stranger, and a little bit more lady-ish, as Teekl eventually transforms into a full-blown woman-with-fursuit:
As I said, this is apparently an issue with some folks, as the
Young Justice wiki notes that “Teekl’s sex has often been a subject of variation and debate amongst writers and fans alike in comics and cartoons,” and the
Wikipedia entry for Klarion has a separate section devoted to the Teekl gender issue. Both entries state that Kirby’s version of Teekl was female (as opposed to the current version of Teekl, in the
Young Justice cartoon and in the
Seven Soldiers comics by Grant Morrison, where he’s a boy cat), without mentioning the cat’s apparent maleness when first introduced by Kirby.
Of course, we’re talking about a magic cat, so one could assume its gender could be changed on the fly as necessary. I mean, clearly that’s the only logical conclusion.
images from The Demon #7 (March 1973) and #15 (December 1973) by Jack Kirby & Mike Royer
(updated 8/2017)
house ad from Challengers of the Unknown #51 (Aug/Sept 1966)
Shown, but not mentioned: “Sweatin’??”
So while the rest of the Doom Patrol and the Challengers of the Unknown battle against their other foes, Elasti-Girl faces off against Multi-Man (that little bald guy, there) and his robotic Multi-Woman:
Predating Batman’s
Human Siamese Knot by a couple of years!
Meanwhile, Multi-Man makes his tactical-yet-hilarious withdrawal from the conflict:
images from Challengers of the Unknown #48 (February/March 1966) by Arnold Drake & Bob Brown
Like this one:
Whenever I come across it, it certainly stands out from the other covers in the series around it, most of which (at least early in the run) are very much in the
“let’s cram in everybody however we can” style.
While the crowd-scene covers from West Coast Avengers seemed to be more…utilitarian than artistic, some covers could have benefited from a little more artsiness:
…especially if you’ve got gorillas in the midst of your funnybook image. Wonder Man fighting an ape army totally should have been the full cover image, particularly as the fallen West Coasters just look like they’re floating in the aether, there. The bright-yellow aether, as, you know, aether tends to be. But regardless, the “bodies” are a big distraction and take space away from apes, and when you got apes on your cover, you want to take full advantage of them.
And then there’s this cover:
GAH.
Once again, covers from the Grand Comics Database. All covers by Al Milgrom and Mike Machlan, except for the Hawkeye one, inked by Joe Sinnot. Also, “gorillias in the midst?” Yeah, I meant to do that.
So the amount of time that had passed between the release of this comic:
…and this comic:
…is kinda/sorta about the same, give or take a handful of months, as will have passed between the release of this comic:
…and the new
Action Comics #1 coming this September:
First, to save me some “um, actually”-ing in the comments, please note I said “about,” not “exactly.” It’s close enough for my point, or what passes as my point.
Second, it’s a bit “one of these things is not like the other,” I realize, since one is a debut issue and the other two are reboots of one kind or another, though you could read the “Death of Superman” event as an equally-influential revitalization of the franchise.
But when looking at the spans of time involved here…the debut of Superman (and, if not the launch of the Golden Age of Comics, at least its most significant event) in 1938, followed eighteen years later by the launching of the Silver Age* with the debut of the new Flash (itself only seven years after the cancellation of the Golden Age Flash series, and five years after the G.A. Flash’s last appearance in All-Star Comics).
My only point to this really is that, when I was younger, and was first learning about all these events in comics history, it certainly felt like we were talking about longer periods of time. Given all the talk and bandying about of the terms “Golden Age” and “Silver Age,” it came as bit of a shock to realize that only about half a decade separated the two eras. I mean, that’s barely longer than it took Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk to finish.
Conventional wisdom is that the customer base for comics turned over fairly quickly in those days. The kid who bought the last issue of the Golden Age Flash Comics, #104, had probably outgrown comics before Showcase #4 rolled along, and the kids who bought Showcase #4 probably had never seen the previous Flash. I mean, I wasn’t there, and I’m making some assumptions, and I know some people probably carried over from one “Age” to the next. But that was the general belief.
Compare to today, when most people who buy comics have been buying for years at a time. In my case, using the Superman example…I was buying the comic in the early 1980s, I bought the Man of Steel mini in 1986 which restarted Superman’s history from scratch, I bought (and am still buying) all the main Superman series from then ’til now, and I plan on picking up the new relaunched Superman titles in a couple of months. That’s bit of an extreme case, but comic fans following characters or series for years at a time is more the rule than the exception, nowadays. At least, those folks are the primary target of the superhero publishers. The “crossover event leading into the next crossover event” publishing strategy is obviously not one they could have pulled off in, say, 1948, when the audience turnover would have meant people reading the end result of this strategy without having been there at the beginning.
I picked the Death of Superman issue as an example because that’s a relatively recent event that a number of us recall happening during our comics-reading (and for some of us, our comics-retailing) history. It’s a pretty solid timestamp in our memories, a “where were you when…?” kind of thing. (Where was I? Explaining to an enormous and increasingly-irritable crowd of people “uh, only one customer, please.”) It doesn’t seem like that long ago to me, and yet the time that has passed is longer that the original run of The Spirit and the original run of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel.
Boy, this kind of got away from me. Another point I was intended to make was “it was a lot easier to get away with reboots back in the day” because, well, anyone complaining was probably going to stop reading comics soon anyway, and there were always more readers coming to replace them. Yet another point was simply realizing that less tempus had fugited than I thought when it came to certain historical events in the comics industry. That last point is simply the result of age, I’m sure…when I was 15, a five year span sure seemed like an eternity. Today: well, I’m pretty sure I’ve got socks that are older than five years. (Shut up…they’re in good shape!)
But if there were a primary point to all this babbling, it is simply that I was somewhat amused by comparing the two timespans above. And yes, I know not everyone who’s reading this has been reading comics for decades. Let me wallow in my dotage in peace.
* Some people mark the beginning of the Silver Age with the first appearance of the Martian Manhunter. And, y’know, that’s cool with me.
Oh, by the way, all images are from the Grand Comics Database. I was too lazy to dig out my copy of the original Action #1 to scan.
…since I’ve had a long couple of days and need a break. So, I’m not putting together a post for today. Well, aside from this.
Um…how’re you doing?
ONLY ONE MAN IN THIS ROOM
IS TRULY THRILLED BY THE FEMME FORCE PROJECT
from Captain America #144 (December 1971) by Gary Friedrich and John Romita
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