…someone decided to smash the glass in our store’s front door.
Apparently someone doesn’t want me spreading the truth about The Adventures of Patoruzu. THEY CAN’T SCARE ME INTO SILENCE.
Actually, whoever did this also hit a shop down the block, so it appears to be just random vandalism and not, say, attempted burglary or an act of revenge by someone I once told to not sit on the floor and read an entire run of Gold Digger for free.
I wish I’d brought the camera with me…the glass is entirely shattered, with a big gaping hole in the center, and even as I type this little bits and pieces keep dropping off around the edges of the hole. And of course people are looking through the hole and asking “Hey, you open?”
Sigh. That glass door company we called better get here soon.
1. An article on this site mentions that, in the mid-1940s, there was an effort to introduce Patoruzu, an Argentinian comic character, into foreign markets, including English-speaking countries like the U.S.
2. As part of this U.S. push, an English Patoruzu comic was put into production, and covers (dated “Winter 1946”) were printed.
3. Since, as far as I’ve been able to determine, no U.S. version of Adventures of Patoruzu actually containing Patoruzu stories was published, the covers remained unused and were stored away.
4. A few years later, sometime after 1950, for whatever reason a comic publisher ended up with both the unused covers and a whole bunch of coverless Animal Crackers #31s, paired ’em up and unleashed them upon unsuspecting newsstands.
Now, the Green Publishing Company is credited by Overstreet with publishing that Adventures of Patoruzu comic, even though there’s no indication in the comic itself. Green Publishing also produced the initial two issues of Animal Crackers in 1946. The next issue of Animal Crackers was the #31 in question, published by Fox Features, in 1950. (There were at least two more issues, a #9 in 1959 published by Norlen (also in my collection), and another unnumbered issue with no noted publisher from the 1950s.)
This site indicates that Green Publishing often republished material from other companies, and since Fox Features was gone by the early to mid-1950s, and Green was around at least ’til the late 1950s (as per this article about Cosmo Cat), it looks like it was indeed Green what did the deed, pairing the unused covers with a bunch of leftover coverless copies of Animal Crackers #31 that they obtained from Fox.
At least, that’s my best guess. If anyone else knows a little bit more and would care to smooth out the edges of my crackpot theory, please do.
You can also read more about Fox Features courtesy Toonopedia.
In other news:
Speaking of Dirk, he turns up what must be the single worst (or, perhaps, best) permutation of the whole Mary Jane statue boondoggle…a streaming video MSNBC interview with the “winner” of that Who Wants to Be A Superhero “reality” show. Oh God my eyes. (Two bucks says that a minute into that interview, that newscaster was thinking “what the hell has my career come to?”)
Since the promo site is down, I’ll link to the Newsarama article so you can see the revealed pic of Heath Ledger as the Joker from the forthcoming Batman flick. Hey, looks pretty neat, I think. And, as pal Dorian noted to me over the weekend, I hope all those folks who plugged their e-mails into the promo site in order to reveal the image (one pixel at a time, for every e-mail entered) enjoy their spam.
The new DC solicits are up, and all you need to know is:
…Swamp Thing spin-off The Un-Men is finally coming out! Woo! And there’s Cranius right there on the cover…fantastic.
Sure, I’vementioned Spunky the Monkey before, but aside from a few tantalizing panels, I haven’t really given you full Spunky exposure. So, here’s a story from an issue of Animal Crackers, as reprinted in 1946’s The Adventures of Patoruzu (discussed previously).
WHAT YOU DON’T WANT TO HEAR: We had a female customer of ours spot All Star Batman and Robin #5 on the rack, exclaim “Ooh! Finally!” and then ponder for a few moments over which of the two covers to buy.
Her options:
Her final decision:
Just thought that was worth mentioning.
WHAT YOU PROBABLY DON’T CARE ABOUT: I was processing part of a collection today, and was tickled by this tiny, tiny banner across the bottom of Strange Tales #137:
There’s just something goofy and appealing about that image of those two fellas mentally squaring off. Plus, the pic has “repurposing” written all over it.
WHAT YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE: Every once in a great while, a small flying insect will flitter just a tad too close to one of the machines what makes your funnybook polybags…
…and THIS IS THE HORRIFIC RESULT:
A poor little bug, frozen forever in time, locked within the face of a polypropylene bag as it protects a copy of Child’s Play 2: The Official Movie Adaptation from the ravages of man and nature.
Anyway, I was sorta grossed out by it when I pulled that bag out of the package, so I thought I’d scan ‘n’ share it with all of you.
No need to thank me.
(EDIT: To clarify…I’m only kidding about using the fly-bag. I disposed of it properly and safely…in an envelope I just mailed to Chris.)
1. Did a little remodeling around the place. Hit “refresh” on your browser-thingie if you can’t see the changes.
2. My Fallen Son cover mock-up from yesterday almost featured, instead, that Mary Jane statue. Just on the off-chance that, you know, you haven’t seen it yet.
3. Speaking of Fallen Son…we didn’t get in a whole lot of that third variant cover of the Captain America installment, the one with the blank image and the stiff cover, because, really, c’mon now. But damned if it didn’t fly out the door. I can only assume folks are drawing their own “sad superhero” covers, because when you get right down to it, they probably can’t be any worse than Tur…okay, that’s enough flogging of that horse.
4. So I was worrying a while back that sales for Dark Tower had suddenly dropped off…well, we had a minor flurry of folks grabbing the fourth issue and asking for back numbers. Phew, good…this could have gone one of two ways: 1) the Stephen King fans burn out on the monthly drive to the funnybook emporium to get each succeeding issue, decide just #1 is enough, pass on the rest; or 2) just pop by every few months and catch up on Dark Tower issues as necessary. Mostly it appears to be the latter…though there is still some significant drop-off fron the first issue. Unless, of course, there are yet more fans waiting even longer to get their King comics.
5. For those of you still hold out that hope that there may be another watchable Marvel animated movie someday, please enjoy the Doctor Strange site complete with trailer and a countdown ’til destruction release. That first Ultimate Avengers movie was passable, the second a snoozefest, and that Iron Man cartoon…oy. So following that progression, I think I’ll be giving the Doctor Strange flick a pass.
6. For no good reason…Batman versus Lion-O, video-game style:
It’s five minutes or so long. I don’t expect you to watch it all. But I do so enjoy the game’s background soundbites of “THUNDERCATS…HO!!!”
Pal Nat and his little friend, Licensable Bear™, are auctioning off the chance to have your message on the cover of the very next issue of Licensable Bear™. It’s for charity, so bid big, bid often. (And if the winning bidder were to, say, use his message to plug my site…I wouldn’t object.)
Alan linked to this, but it’s a great story of ’80s comics retailing and I wanted to share it here: Roger talks about the Counterfeit Cerebus #1. (A few years back, we actually had copies of both the real and the fake #1s in the shop at the same time…we ended up selling them both to the same fellow, who happened to be a hardcore Cerebus fan who was actively seeking one of the counterfeits for his collection.)
I’m the last person on the planet to mention this, but Diamond Comics Distribution has decided against carrying the print incarnation of the Comic Foundry website. It always amazes me what Diamond will and will not carry. They won’t carry a comics magazine that, from the sounds of things, is on par with the half-dozen or so TwoMorrows publications, and yet they’ll carry, say, talking Snakes on a Plane pens long after that film’s expiration date. Okay, admittedly it’s an uphill battle for any new magazine to build a readership, and maybe Diamond didn’t feel like waiting for Comic Foundry‘s sales to justify their distributing the book. But I hear about stuff like this and I think “What? Not enough room on the warehouse shelves among all the Avatar variant covers for one more measly comics mag?”
I mean, I’m not entirely unsympathetic toward Diamond’s position, but it’s a shame Comic Foundry didn’t even get a chance.
* Associated Comics And Pop Culture Webloggers of Ventura County, CA And Outlying Environs. …Boy, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to explain that.
Employee Aaron: “I wonder what George Takei’s power is on Heroes?”
Me: “The power of being incredibly cool.”
Employee Aaron: “…I’ll accept that.”
…And then Employee Jeff asked about the sequence in the most recent episode, where he wondered if Hiro’s father (Takei) really taught Hiro expert swordsmanship in so short a period of time. That resulted in this shameful display:
Me (in my best Comic Book Guy voice): “Well, if you were to refer to your copy of All New Collectors’ Edition #C56, better known as ‘Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali,’ you will see that during the course of the story, Ali trained Superman in the sweet science while in another dimension…a dimension where time passes at a far different rate to our own dimension. Only minutes would pass by in the ‘real world’ while hours, or even days, could go by in this other dimension.
“Perhaps, with his time-altering powers, possibly even unwittingly, Hiro altered the passage of time for his father and himself, allowing them hours or days of training while only a short period of time passed outside of Hiro’s influence.”
Employee Jeff: “…”
Employee Aaron: “…I need to go sit down now.”
The whole Mary Jane “sexy” statue brouhaha reminded me of this oddity from a while back: the Marvel Milestone Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy statues:
The sculpts are absolutely identical, save for the heads. This should tell us something, I’d imagine.
And, as pal Dorian had noted, the “sexy” MJ statue is still better than this damned thing:
Why? Why would you want that?
Speaking of offending people, I wanted you to know that I had this title banner all ready to go when All Star Batman & Robin #5 was finally unleashed on the marketplace:
I was going to replace my regular title banner just for the day, without comment, just to…well, be annoying, I guess. But right now, with all the hoo-har over the sexual nature of the aforementioned Mary Jane statue, I thought maybe now may not be the best time to splash Wonder Woman’s rear end across the top of my page. I mean, sure, all you folks reading this site would get that I’m just messin’ around, but I suppose I don’t need the additional grief it could bring at the moment.
I wasn’t even going to bring it up, except for one thing. Would you like to know when I made that banner?
According to the file creation date of my original image, I made it on April 26th.
Of 2006.
It’s been about a year since the last issue of All Star Batman. It’s been several months since the last issue of Ultimates 2 (also out this week). And, as I’ve noted before, it’s been a year (and counting) since the last issue of Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk.
Quite frankly, this is embarrassing. Appalling and embarrassing. There’s no excuse for alleged periodicals to be this late. I’m willing to cut folks a little slack, but once we’re measuring lateness in years, it becomes obvious that something’s broken at Marvel and DC.
Come to think of it, when was the last time a Frank Miller project was released on a timely basis? Daredevil? I remember the delays on Ronin. Dark Knight Returns #4 was so late DC actually released a promo item for stores to post, announcing its arrival:
And I’m sure most of you remember the delays on the Dark Knight sequel. Did the various Sin City series maintain a schedule? I’ll have to check.
Do any of Marvel and DC’s lateness problems have any repercussions? I mean, aside from readers giving up on the books and the occasional, sheepish “yeah, I know we’re late, we’re working on it!” interview in Wizard? Or have the companies 1) realized that readers are accustomed to late books now being the norm, and 2) grown attached to the slight sales bump provided by the low-rent star-f’ing of having minor league “celebrities” write their books regardless of their consistent lateness issues, and therefore just don’t care?
Wow, that got bitter, fast. I really just wanted to say, hey, finally a new issue of All Star Batman, it’s a hoot! But I’m too pissed off right now to be particularly enthusiastic about it.
But here are some questions I’d like to see answered by the powers that be:
1. Why are these books so late?
2. What is being done to correct this problem?
3. What is being done to prevent this problem from recurring?
4. What are you doing to repair the erosion of consumer (and retailer) confidence in your products?
Let us lighten the mood with a little joy:
I hadn’t known that there was a flash animation of the Alan Moore-vocalized “March of the Sinister Ducks” song:
…but now I do.
And since some of you were wondering how this turned out:
2. My Fallen Son cover mock-up 
