pins

What sound does the Swamp Thing Signal Watch make?

filed under Categories fantastic four, how the sausage is made, original art, pins, swamp thing 18 Comments

So I received a nice surprise in the mail on Tuesday…a postcard from Steve Lieber advertising the forthcoming hardcover collection of the Jimmy Olsen series he with with Matt Fraction:


If that cover seems familiar, here’s why.

On the back of the postcard is info about the book, plus a special handdrawn message from Mr. Lieber his own self:


A closer look:


Very nice. Made my day getting this card. And, if y’all haven’t read that Jimmy Olsen series yet, this is as good a way as any to check it out. It’s a great run, very funny and imaginative, and one of my favorites.

• • •

In other surprises-shipped-to-the-store news, I received last Friday an envelope from Marvel marked “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 6/16” so I went ahead and opened it up immediately because c’mon guys, I don’t have time for this “do not open until Christmas” nonsense. (And it’s “616 Day” for reasons discussed in the links I put in this post the other day.)

Anyway, inside was a note from Marvel saying they’re trying to get 6/16 to be “Marvel Day” or whatever, and they’re kicking it off with some new, branded variant covers for recent Marvels, like this one for X-Men #15:


So anyway, I put those out for sale on Monday, but not put out for sale was this item, a set of Fantastic Four pins:


Pretty cool, thinks me. And as someone who likes pins, I’m just gonna hang onto these, thank you very much.

I think future 616 Days may be better served by some kind of freebie comic instead of just “collectibles” to be marked up. (And if they’re going to ship pins like these with comics in the future, they might want to do a better job making sure the clasps on the back don’t get crushed into the covers of those special variants when the envelope containing everything is at the bottom of a box with piles of books on top of it.)

• • •

Okay, we kinda lost the thread a tiny bit with the Final ’90s Countdown, in which the intention was to only cover titles that began in 1990 or later.

However, this have resulted in a lot of hair-splitting and questionable decision-making and whathaveyou and sometimes something slips through the cracks, like 1989’s The Mask.

So, there will be some sidebars to the Final ’90s Countdown with some “Honorary ’90s Comics” — titles like Eightball and From Hell, all technically beginning in the very late ’80s but are very associated with the ’90s. Look, I’m flying by the seat of my pants here, but these comics should be discussed, even if they were disqualified from the initial vote.

It’s a little bit of a mess, but at least we get to talk about a bunch of good comics!

Then again, that one button does give you a nice shot of Ghost Rider’s bottom…ladies.

filed under Categories pins 6 Comments

So I have to admit, a not-insignificant portion of my reasoning for buying these from a collection brought into the store on Thursday was so that I could scan ’em and put the pic up on my site, like so:


Okay, to be completely honest I wouldn’t have bought them if I didn’t think I could sell them. And while this still-sealed “collector’s” button set from 1990, complete with serial numbering (#0823 out of, like, a million, probably) has all the appearances of something that would do well on the eBay, the truth of the matter is that sets like these generally sell for around zero dollars there. However, I do have enough people passing through the shop who still are stoking the smouldering embers of interest in our favorite demonic motorcyclist, despite the best efforts of Nicolas Cage, that I’m reasonably certain I might be able to sell this in-store for, oh, a couple of bucks, maybe.

The set might have benefited from the buttons featuring more icon-y poses like this:


…as opposed to using three of the buttons to show Ghost Rider just fightin’ dudes:


…as that level of detail may not be “read” easily or appreciated properly when the button is used as intended (on a Levi’s jacket, backpack, or, perhaps, a baseball cap), where generally only a fleeting glimpse of said image is likely. Or rather, as buttons usually are used as intended, rather than as the “collector’s” item this, and other similar comic book button sets released by Marvel and DC in the ’90s, were supposed to be used…bought and packed away into your long boxes, where they sat and waited for that far-off day, a decade or so into the 21st century, when you would pull them out and take them over to the local funnybook store where the guy behind the counter may take pity and give you a buck for them because he might want to talk about them on his website.

Is there anything more topical than a handful of X-Men pins from the 1990s?

filed under Categories pins, x-men 8 Comments

Came across a few of these while going through some boxes at the store:

“Do you have a small metal pin with a close-up of Cyclops’ grimacing, visorless face in a snowstorm?” “Why, as a matter o’fact….”


BEHOLD: cloisonné stubble:


That may have been too much detail, but on the other hand…granted, this next pin’s actual size is only about an inch tall, so there’s only so much detail they can put in. Still, Cable’s near-featureless face and its soul-sucking gaping maw are just plain creepy:


“Limited to 2,500” says the back of this next pin:


I’m pretty sure they did pins for the other covers, too, but I sure hope they did an extra-wide pin for the fold-out version.