image from Super Powers Collection: Parademons (1984)
I could use a Tower of Rage. It’d be a nice trade-up from my current Bathroom of Annoyance.
Mikester
Another from the back room of misfit toys.
Once again I’ve dug deep in the recesses of the store’s backroom to pull out for sacrifices for the eBay slaughter, and this time I’ve dragged out “Barrow-Wight, Evil Spirit of Angmar” based on some fantasy book trilogy with wizards and elves and stuff like that.
This was released in 2000 as part of a line of figures based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels…and then the year 2001 rolled along, what with its big-budget Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the RIng movie directed by Peter Jackson. And then suddenly came the flood of movie merchandise, including, of course, action figures, and this figure pictured above was suddenly made effectively redundant. Not that there’s anything wrong with having a figure line based on the books as opposed to the movies…but, well, here I still have it, a decade later, with plans to put it up for online sale at prices so low, I must be under the influence of an evil ring.
I seem to remember having other figures from the same line in stock, but none of the other figures pictured on the back really ring a bell:
Whatever we had in stock did sell, though, so perhaps having this last straggling figure isn’t so much “the movie merchandise killed its sales” as “nobody wanted to buy the barrow-wight.”
Anyway, it’s kind of neat…it has a little translucent green bit of plastic in its head, so that light shining into the exposed bit in the scalp feeds the light through to the figure’s eyes, where the green plastic gem-thing is also exposed. And he’s got his sword, and his mug for drinking his Mr. Pibb, and a little treasure chest where he keeps all his money that he makes barrow-wighting. EBay, I implore you…take this little plastic burden off my hands.
In the meantime,
LADIES
Sluggo Saturday #51.
FAR ENOUGH
from The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy (1988) – thanks to pal Andres
Where to direct the blame.
Was working on another project last night, so I didn’t have time to prepare a proper post for today. Sorry about that! But I did write a guest review for the Trouble with Comics group blog that was posted just the other day. So please, go read what I said about a certain comic publication’s huge influence upon a teenaged Mikester! (As usual, I ramble a bit and get off topic, but hopefully you’ll enjoy it anyway.)
I know a few people who could use these.
1982 comic book ad
The Startling Return of Sgt. Shark.
from Scary Tales #34 (Sept. 1982)
1. The “ferocious fins” in the first panel…is that an exclamation, or is Sgt. Shark just describing what he’s seeing?
2. By what mechanism does the Shark Tooth pendant lend “strength” to Sgt. Shark? Is there some kind of transfer of mystical energy, or is it some placebo effect, making Sgt. Shark think he’s stronger simply because he’s wearing it?
3. “I hope I wasn’t too late” to save the girl from the shark attack, he says. So long as he’s carrying more than just the half of her body we can see, hopefully she’s fine.
4. Okay, dude, you just saved her from a shark attack. Is now the time to do the hard-sell on your magical Shark Tooth necklace thingie?
5. I don’t even want to know what’s going on in silhouette in that last panel.
(as seen previously)
Ultra Klutz #28 (April 1990).
So I was just poking through the Vast Mikester Comic Archives when I took note of the cover date on this comic.
Barring the usual cover-date-usually-a-month-or-three-off shenanigans usually involved in comics (though this was a small press book, and may actually have come out in April), this comic is now 20 years old.
The series is cartoonist Jeff Nicholson’s parody/homage/take-off on the Japanese giant-hero-versus-monsters TV show Ultraman, and unfortunately, this is the only issue of the series I own, so I don’t really have a whole lot to say about it. (You can read a more extensive appreciation of the series here.) Not sure why I wasn’t following it, exactly…Nicholson’s stories in this issue were amusing, and it wasn’t like I was shunning indies or black-and-white titles or anything. Probably just a case of “I can’t read everything” more than anything else.
But the reason I did buy this issue was due to it containing a back-up story by Yummy Fur‘s Chester Brown, in which his bunny character visits Japan and finds himself in the midst of one of Ultra Klutz’s monster battles:
Brown’s art seems a little more rough than normal, but still it’s an enjoyable short. And I’d completely forgotten about the fact that there’s a three-page Dishman story in here as well. Yes, Dishman. Read about him at the link, there. (Someday I need to find the rest of the Dishman mini-comics to round out my collection.)
Anyway, I don’t really have a “review” as such of this comic….like I said, I grabbed it off the rack for the Brown back-up, was reasonably entertained by the rest of the book, and then stored the comic away. Plus, as far as I can remember, this is probably the first time I’ve read the comic since my original reading of it all those years ago. Mostly, I’m just amazed that, well, here’s something I just bought on a whim for a few minutes of entertainment…and here it is, still in my possession, two decades later.
And here I am, just a few lines of this post back, thinking about looking for more comics to buy to plug holes in the ol’ collection. We really are slaves to our possessions, sometimes.
But on the other hand, all those comics are helping to feed this here website, so it’s not all for nothing, I guess!
We have one of these at the house…
…and I was all ready to crank this sucker up and shoot video of it for the delight and edification of all, but alas, the “action” part of the Spider-Man Action Alarm Clock no longer appears to work:
Well, the actual clock part still works, so if your thing is watching the hour, minute, and second hands spin around the clock’s face, then action is your reward, brother.
Anyway, when the clock’s alarm sounds, you get a little playlet of the eternal struggle of man in blue and red leotards versus a guy in a green Halloween costume, as Spidey shoots out of the door at the bottom of the building, “climbs” up the wall, and dives into that top window, there, tackling the Green Goblin. And then Spidey cycles back down through the body of the clock, where he hangs out behind a couple of tiny rubbery doors waiting to be called forth again. The Goblin, however, is still hanging out in that top window, leering at you from your nightstand, mocking the futility of Spidey’s battle against injustice.
Also, there’s a button you can press to set off this whole drama at your whim. Again, theoretically, since ours is busted.
Apparently the clock also projects Spider-Man’s face on the wall, just in case you have any kids you need to terrorize first thing in the morning as they groggily wake themselves from a fitful sleep, subconsciously aware that the Goblin’s eyes are gazing upon them from his building-top lookout. But again, that doesn’t seem to work on the actual clock I have in hand, either. WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.
The clock does come with a Certificate of Authenticity, guaranteeing that this is an Honest-to-God genuine clock that broke during on us during the, oh, seven or eight years we’ve had it:
Thankfully, this guy did a video review of the Spider-Man Action Alarm Clock, and you can dig the excitement right here:
The mustache has zero points of articulation.
I’ve had these things floating around the backroom forever, and I had to peel off the series of price stickers on each of these, with the progressively lower and more desperate pricing.
First off, Cameron Hodge, a character I’m vaguely familiar with only from seeing him on the covers of comics I process here at the shop…can’t say I’ve ever actually read anything with him in it:
Figure includes a “water blasting bio weapon.”
WATER BLASTING BIO WEAPON.
Presumably this is analogous to an ability Hodge has in the comics and/or cartoon, but I suspect the less I know, the happier I am. But it’s hard to hate a toy that comes with a little squeeze box so you can shoot water at your friends. You know, if my old Darth Vader action figure, instead of having a lightsaber, had a little tube that ran through his arm and was fed by a squeezable water bulb, I would have happily spritzed the Rebels into submission. “BEHOLD THE SPRITELY WATERS OF THE DARK SIDE,” I’d intone deeply, as I gave Han and Luke what-for with liquid evil.
…
Um.
…
Anyway, get a load of this handsome bastard:
Sadly, has no bio weapon of his own, though surely the awesome mustache must have a martial arts belt of some kind. The package does blurb him as a “swashbuckling space pirate,” so you’ll have to settle for buckling some swashes for Corsair’s action feature.
So onto the eBay with you, my two little shelfwarmers. May you find a home there; a better home, or worse, so long as it isn’t mine.
Sluggo Saturday #50.
OF FETISHISM