From the Superman The Animated Series episode “The Last Son of Krypton – Part 1,” in which Sul-Van flies and crashes a small aircraft in an attempt to distract Krypton’s police force:
“Those…aren’t…PILLOWS!”
This scene struck me as a bit odd upon my first viewing of the DVD (and the first time I’ve seen this episode since it originally aired in 1996). And, upon listening to its commentary track, I’m glad to know I’m not the only one, as most of the commentators burst into an extended fit of giggles when Sul-Van’s “crash pillows” made their appearance. Of course, they never explain why they’re laughing, this commentary being on a DVD intended for children an’ all.
This could all have been avoided if only they’d applied some other color to those crash pillows. Did that long-ago issue of Amazing Heroes teach us nothing?
(Here’s the link to the full “those aren’t pillows” clip from Planes, Trains & Automobiles, in the off-chance you require some context.)
Happy Thanksgiving to those of us in the U.S. who celebrate it, and Happy Thursday to everyone else…and what better way to commemorate either event than with paging through the latest Diamond Previews (December 2010 edition) and discovering what bounty awaits within this paper cornucopia. Follow along, pilgrims:
p. 93 – Adventure Comics #523:
Is there really such a thing as a “jumping-on point for new readers” for anything Legion-related? I’m not even sure this was true way back in Adventure #247.
p. 132 – Blackest Night Firestorm Bust:
This is not a good look for Don King.
p. 138 – Star Trek Infestation #2:
“Say, Mike, how can I get the ‘zombie-fied’ Star Trek logo cover?”
“Only if you’re bad.”
p. 205 – Marvel Select Thor and Loki Movie Version Action Figures:
“Verily, my microphone is too cumbersome and awkwardly formed!”
“At least yours isn’t too tall!”
p. 215 – Victorian Secret: Girls of Steampunk:
Oh, Antarctic Press.
p. 218 – Betty & Veronica #252:
“Betty and Veronica swap their faces with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in a story you won’t soon forget!”
p. 233 – Political Power: Glenn Beck:
“You know, when the fascist totalitarian socialists bring this country to its knees, you’re gonna need the basics to ride out the coming storm…plenty of gold, a stockpile of survivalist seeds, and plenty of copies of this, the Glenn Beck comic book, because brother, you’re gonna need the paper.”
p. 298 – Owly & Wormy: Friends All Aflutter HC – Young Readers Picture Book:
Because there was so much reading in the previous Owly releases.
(Yes, yes, I know, the 40-page hardcover is a more kid-friendly format. I was a children’s librarian for several years, after all. And survived.)
p. 314 – Gumby’s Gang #2: Starring Prickle:
“Prickle heads for England in search of his ancestral roots and finds out more about dragons and dinosaurs than he bargained for! Meanwhile, the Blockheads’ evil robot version of Prickle has infiltrated Gumby’s rock band and is wreaking havoc on Gumby, Pokey and Goo. Will Toy Town survive the wrath of…The Prickleton 8000?!”
Well, that’s it, reading that solicitation has driven me insane.
Then again, the seeming purpose of any Gumby animated short was to drive the viewers insane, so this is right in line, I suppose.
p. 321 – The Classic Marvel Figurine Collection Magazine Special – The Blob:
“And then I hold the cows above my head in each hand like this, and squeeze their udders directly into my mouth!”
“Blob, that’s really more than I wanted to kn….”
“And then you should see what I do with the pigs!”
“Oh God, please stop talking.”
p. 327 – Star Wars Mysteries of the Jedi HC:
“…Then George Lucas grafted a bunch of half-baked New Age-y ideas onto a modified chivalrous knighthood, with a little of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai mixed in, and….”
“Wh…what?”
“Um, I mean, ‘and then the Jedi used their great command over the Force to bring peace to the galaxy.'”
“…Aaaaahhhh.”
p. 335 – Extreme Anger Military Tee:
Granted, that’s a better name than “Dislocated Jaw Hulk T-Shirt.”
p. 352 – Spy Net Video Watch:
Well, sure, what’s more covert than the GIANTEST WATCH ‘N’ WRISTBAND EVER.
p. 353 – Barbie Dynasty Doll:
Barbie’s Lily Pond Catfight Playset sold separately:
p. 361 – Lucha Libre Luchador Masks:
It’s nice of Diamond to explicitly market to Chris Sims like this.
p. 389 – Norman Phartephant Plush:
“This 10″ elephant plush toy makes eight different ‘phart’ sounds, along with an ‘oops’ and ‘sorry,’ all activated by a squeeze of his tail!”
p. 393 – Star Wars: Darth Vader Limited Edition Ceramic Cookie Jar:
He’s filled with midi-cookie-ans!
…Okay, that was bit of a stretch. I’ll have better jokes when the Cookie Jar Jar is eventually released.
p. 394 – Disney by Britto: Mickey Summer Box and Figurine:
Uh, oh…Mickey’s tripping hard! And oh the irony, it’s from his own tattoos! Walt won’t be pleased.
p. 401 – Oh Gnome You Don’t Board Game:
Just posting this as a warning to Employee Aaron that I’ll be saying “Oh Gnome You Don’t” incessantly at the shop over the next few weeks.
Marvel Previews p. 48 – Venom/Deadpool #1:
“…The House of Ideas asks and answers: What if the Venom Symbiote possessed Deadpool!”
“Pssst…hey, Deadpool, it’s me, Venom. You know, I had about a million series of my own back in the ’90s, until people got sick of me and I had to go away for a while. But even I didn’t have them all running concurrently. Just sayin’.”
Marvel Previews p. 97 – Namor Visionaries: John Byrne Vol. 1 TPB:
Dropping this in here because John Byrne’s Namor series came out twenty years ago, and if I’m going to feel old, so are the rest of you.
So it’s been a while since I’ve brought you some “found art” drawn within one of the old comics or magazines we’ve had floating around the shop. I’ve actually had this particular example for a while, but it ended up getting dumped in a box in the backroom and forgotten until I dug it out again the other day.
Sure, it may look liked your typical beat and mold-spotted copy of Marvel Comics Index: The Amazing Spider-Man #1 (1976), featuring a photo checklist (with credits) of Spider-Man comics:
But within…oh yes, within….
Apparently, the checklist, which only goes up to #151, wasn’t enough, as the previous owner of this index wrote, in red pen, on the “NOTES” page issue numbers #152 through #204, with checkmarks by each number through 194. Apparently the first appearance of the Black Cat was the last straw for this Spidey collector.
Also on the notes page were other details of this person’s collection:
Make no mistake…this dude got all the Spider-Women. Oh yeah.
And while the index does contain a character appearance/issue number listing which is primarily supervillains, there apparently was a need for a separate list of just the bad guys, without such distracting indexing information:
The masterpiece of this particular copy of the Index is this hand drawn and colored image, found on the inside back cover:
At the bottom corner of the inside back cover, written in tiny, tight handwriting, is the signature of the artist, and presumably the former owner of this item:
We salute you, Chris, and your youthful intense obsession with the webslinging wallcrawler. It’s my guess that you’re probably in your forties by now, at least…I wonder if you remember doing all this, and if you do, if you ever wonder what happened to that old Spider-Man mag in which you spent so much time writing and drawing.
So as promised in the comments section for this post, pal Nat dropped by and gifted me with a couple of his extra copies of Charlie Brown’s ‘Cyclopedia. One of them, volume 11, “What We Wear,” contains the single greatest Snoopy image of all time:
I can hear hotlinkers copying and pasting the URL of that image all across the internettings. JUST DOWNLOAD IT AND UPLOAD TO YOUR OWN IMAGE HOSTS, YOU BASTARDS.
Ahem. Anyway, that’s likely not a Schulz drawing, but I would have paid one American dollar to see a sequence in Peanuts featuring this very version of Snoopy. Unless there’s a sequence I missed or don’t remember…there are 50 years’ worth of strips, after all. Yeah, okay, “Joe Zoot” would have seemed a bit…anachronistic, but it probably would have fit right in during that weird Peanuts period of the mid-to-late ’90s. My recollection Schulz was up to some odd stuff in his strips during that time.
But I’m pretty sure even then he never had Sally talking about naked people:
So I was looking through some of Bob Rozakis’s “Answer Man” columns, which ran through DC’s comic books in the ’70s and a wee bit into the ’80s, and this particular question caught my eye:
Well, eventually both things come to pass…there have been several Human Target comics in the years since, and there have been not one, but two TV series. I was amused that the answer to this specific question was so exactly negated.
Some other Answer Man questions and responses I came across:
The joke here is too easy:
Frankly, I’m not even sure this question needed to be asked. It’s all right there, man:
I didn’t even remember this, but of course Mark Waid didn’t forget…that man forgets nothing:
I will die if they bring it back 1) in current continuity (“Hey, technically I’m not flying across the country…I’m cruising comfortably“), or 2) it pops up on Smallville, where it would probably just be a Ford Festiva painted red ‘n’ blue:
And then there’s this:
“You’ve menaced the world with your secular humanism for the last time, Luthor!”
Yeah, that’s right, it’s Medphyll, your favorite humanoid-plant Green Lantern, in convenient action figure form for your entertainment and edification. If there are two things I never expected to see, as a longtime Green Lantern fan, it’s 1) Kilowog appearing in a live action film, and 2) a Medphyll action figure. (Oh, and I guess there’s a third thing: 3) a live action Green Lantern film.)
A quick Googling shows that this news has been popping up over the last couple of weeks or so, but I guess I hadn’t been paying attention, and didn’t know this figure was imminent until I spotted a photo in the latest Tomart’s magazine:
GAZE INTO
MY EYE
Those are some rich, full lips Medphyll has. HELLO, LADIES.
I thought for sure Medphyll had popped up in one of those DC Direct PVCsets, but no dice…oh, sure, Chaselon gets a PVC figure, but not our pal Meddy. (Has anyone ever called him “Meddy?” …How ’bout “Phil?” “Phyll?”) However, you can see a fanmade custom figure right here, which is a little less broccoli-looking than the official thing.
Here’s some follow-up to this entry about sorting my Superman comics, about which Tom Spurgeon said “isn’t for anyone,” and man, ain’t that the truth. That was a weird, obsessive thing for me to do, wasn’t it? Ah, well. ‘Course, that’s not going to stop me from doing it again, because some of you had questions:
Chris McAree asks
“I was wondering what you, or any of the other readers of this blog do when a box early in the alphabet becomes overfull? When your Avengers box can finally hold no more do you start a brand new box after finally getting those ten missing issues from the Roger Stern run, or carefully and meticulously move the last ten issues from box ‘A’ into box ‘B’, box ‘B’ into box ‘B2,’ (cause god knows there are a lot of Batman issues out there!) and so on until you have wasted a couple of hours a finally reached box ‘Z is for Zatanna?’”
Well, my collection is sorted out, more or less, like this: several long boxes divided up by company, so I have a bunch of DC long boxes, about half as many Marvel boxes, a Gladstone/Gemstone box for all those EC reprints, a bunch of Misc. Indie boxes with the books ordered by company and then by title within, and so on. And then I have a bunch of short boxes sorted out by individual titles and/or franchises, like a couple of boxes for Justice League stuff, a Groo box, Swamp Thing boxes, etc. If one of those boxes starts overflowing, like the Justice League box, I start filing them into an overflow box shared by two or three titles that are also overflowing, until I get around to making a new box for that title.
This, I think, makes it a little easier to add boxes when you need to expand, since you’re not shifting comics through the entire collection, but just through the section of the collection you need to open up some space in. …I have no idea if any of that made sense.
Longtime site reader “O” the Humanatee! has a couple of questions:
“…When sorting alphabetically, does one use the common-sense title (say, Spider-Man rather than Amazing Spider-Man), the full title as it reads on the cover, or the title shown in the indicia? Should you group all titles starring a character together? Surely, it is an abomination against God to put Detective before Defenders just so you can group it with other Batman titles! Are you going to put Action in among your Lex Luthor comics?
And what should I do when the title changes mid-numbering? What do I do with ‘Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes’ and ‘The New Teen Titans’? What, I beg of you? WHAT?”
Usually I go by the title on the front cover, because I’m going to remember that more easily than the official title on the indicia. And, as I said in the response to the first question, I have some franchises lumped together in their own separate boxes…so all my Batman books are separated out, filed together alphabetically. (And before you ask, Superman/Batman is filed with my Superman comics.) (In the Superman “specials/annuals/minis” boxes, which come after the post-Crisis series boxes, because I don’t have enough Superman/Batman to justify a box just for it, oh God, I’m doing it again.)
When a series undergoes a minor title change while keeping the numbering, I generally just keep filing later issues as if nothing happened, which is exactly what I did with your Tales of the New Teen Titans/Legion of Super-Heroes examples (and which also answers Thwacko’s later question about Peter Parker/The Spectacular Spider-Man). Plus, in both cases, I have Titans and Legion in their own boxes.
“I looked at the Nov 2008 post about Superman triangle numbering, and the post included a comment about the Legion of Super-Heroes’ triangle numbering, saying something along the lines of ‘Remember when the Legion could support two monthly books?’ Without commenting on how successful the current Legion venture is, funny how the market actually IS currently supporting two Legion books.”
That’s true, it is, but every time they relaunch the Legion franchise, it seems like there’s a brief surge of interest at first…and then it goes back down to what it was selling before, or a little less. The current titles are selling for us at what is about the lower edge of “mid-range” — not a best-seller, like Morrison’s Batman stuff, but not at the “why did they bother” range, like the dozen or so minis companies tying into forthcoming movies. Anyway, when I wrote that old post, that was more or less true, but the push given the Legion by the Final Crisis crossover, and the additional anticipated sales goose of the return of 1) the original continuity Legion, more or less, I think, and 2) old Legion scribe Paul Levitz returning as writer probably encouraged DC to take a chance with a second Legion book. But, given that one of the books is named Adventure, if the Legion thing there doesn’t work out, they can always replace it with a new lead without having to cancel it.
Michael G. notes
“I empathize. Have you ever tried shelving Acme Novelty Library? The first 15 issues are all out of order and most of them won’t fit in the same box!”
Ah, yes, those things. I have a pretty good-sized bookcase with a shelf large enough to hold even the tallest Acme volume, so I just have all of them together on that one shelf. It’ll do, it’ll do.
How evil is Green Lantern’s arch nemesis Sinestro? Why, he’s so evil, he’s coming in a very solid second, just behind Gypo-Bax, in the Most Evil Citizen of Qward popularity contest:
I do have to admit that the very idea of Sinestro desperately trying to win a popularity contest tickles me. I can just picture Sinestro handpainting a bunch of “VOTE SIN” construction paper signs and hanging them around the school. But then again, the very idea of Sinestro fretting about a contest like this, while appearing a bit silly to adults, would probably resonate with the school-age children this comic was aimed at.
But seriously, This Guy:
…he’s like the Qward Dimension Evil Anti-Matter Duplicate of Doiby Dickles.
And that he’s Sinestro’s “campaign manager” is a hoot, too. You know Sinestro didn’t hire the guy, that he just kinda declared himself Sinestro’s campaign manager, and Sinestro simply can’t shake him off.
