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from World’s Finest #164 (February 1967) by Leo Dorfman, Curt Swan & George Klein

Transferring that pic to the foil surface of the packaging didn’t do it any favors. It’s hard to tell looking at the scan, since it sort of flattens everything out and mutes the effect, but having every line on Shaft’s face be a little silver streak is both distracting and disturbing.

Here’s a group shot from card #2:

The quote from Liefeld on the back of the card sums it (and by “it” I mean “the superhero comics industry for the majority of the decade”) all up:

This full page splash from Defenders #16 (October 1974) by Len Wein, Sal Buscema and Mike Esposito:

Well said, my Tholian friend.

So with working on the book, trying to help with the launch of The Bureau Chiefs site in my own limited way, dealing with a migraine, and other personal life issues, I just plain ran out of time for good ol’ Progressive Ruin today. I know, I suck. Not that I didn’t work on PR a little bit…mostly more tinkering with some of the pages here as a result of all that stuff I blathered on about yesterday. But I’ve got things in the hopper, like an End of Civilization post, and other goodies, so don’t worry, I still love you, baby. I mean it.

Also, some of you suggested I elaborate a little on my aside in yesterday’s post about the creepiness factor of Alpha Flight, and that’s a darn good idea, so look for that in the future, too.

AND…I had someone ask on the Twitter if I was going to acknowledge the fourth annual Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk Day, which, by the way, was two days ago. I hadn’t thought about it, since the planets aligned, pigs flew, Hell froze over, and Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk finished its run, but I suppose there are some series out there still not officially canceled, but Good Lord A’mighty they’re running late. All Star Batman and Robin is well over a year late at this point, and, well, I’m sure there are other late books out there. Not just a month or two, but like six months or more. Is All Star Batman the current record holder? Shall I begin celebrating a day in that comic’s honor? I mean, I already celebrate the book, because it’s absolutely fantastic, but I’m no fan of its scheduling.

Anyway, thanks for your patience, internet pals, and hopefully soon I’ll get my act together here on the deadline front.

image from Star Trek The Next Generation #72 (June 1995) by Michael Jan Friedman, Gordon Purcell and Terry Pallot

The creators and writers of Fake AP Stylebook (including yours truly and my close, personal internet chums) bring you The Bureau Chiefs, a new site, updated daily, with news, reviews, commentary, and the kind of bemused sardonic detachment you’ve come to expect from the Fake AP.

You can also follow The Bureau Chiefs on Twitter at @thebureauchiefs.

Okay, your pal Mike is still struggling with his migraine, and he has deadlines to meet on top of that, so instead of writing all that stuff I keep telling you I’m going to write, I’m instead following up on my Valentine’s Day post, where I presented a special card made just for me by pals Dana and Jorean. I mentioned then that they had made more cards that just that, and here are a couple of them:

The Blade card:

• • •
The Wolverine card:

(Red doesn’t react well to JPEG reduction, so let me transcribe: “Wolver HATES Valentine’s Day / Because everyone he has ever loved DIES – We hope you don’t die!”)

The metallic superhero sticker-thingies on the front don’t show up very well there, so here they are after I fooled around with the brightness/contrast settings:

Anyway, those are some swell cards, huh? And, um…I’m assuming “Wolver” is a thing for some fans, but I’m not Googling it up. I’d rather not know.

Yesterday was a rare Mike-less Saturday at the comic shop, as I was suffering the aftereffects of a pretty bad migraine headache. As opposed to, you know, all those wonderfully fantastic migraine headaches. As I write this (late Saturday evening) I’m feeling a bit better, but still not quite up-to-snuff enough to generate the post I was planning, so I’m entering Low Content Mode for today. Hopefully I’ll be back and functioning at full power for tomorrow.

Thankfully, so I have at least something on the site today, Pal Nat sent along this image based on the most recent Sluggo Saturday post, illustrating comic fandom’s everlasting dichotomy:

Okay, maybe not a dichotomy for everyone. I, for example, love both these comics. In fact, I’m hoping for a crossover. “I’m the gosh-darned Rena Titañon!”

Bully the Little Stuffed Bull also worked some of his hooved magic and whipped up this little number, plugging both me and Chris Sims in the process.

Thanks for checking in, folks, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

So I was talking with Employee Timmy about Smallville at the shop the other day, and I happened to mention “hey, you know who hasn’t popped back up on the show? Mxyzptlk!” Which is just as well, since the Smallville version was, well, kinda lame, but then I asked Timmy if he’d ever seen the Michael Pollard version of Mxyzptlk from the Superboy TV show. Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t, since the show ran from ’88 to ’92, and Timmy was born, um, somewhere around 2004, I think. Anyway, I Googled up a YouTube clip on my iPad while riding around the store on my Segway, and here is what I showed him:

Given my usual luck with YouTube clips, it’ll probably disappear in short order, but what it shows is 1) Mr. Pollard popping up out of a pool in the full-on Silver Age Mr. Mxyzptlk outfit, 2) special guest star Richard Kiel as a larger, more menacing imp from the 5th Dimension, sporting a purple beanie and roughing up Mxyzptlk, 3) Stacy Haiduk in a swimsuit, 4) the finest special effects $3.98 could buy, and 5) not a whole lot of dignity. It’s…all a bit strange, and I suspect any attempt at doing a live action version of Mxyzptlk can’t help but turn out like this, but…well, it’s certainly something.

I really don’t remember a whole lot about this series, since I probably haven’t seen it since it originally aired…and even then, I only saw a handful of episodes. But my memory of it was that it wasn’t too bad…even the clip above is sort of amusing in a very peculiar sort of way, and honestly, I think my initial negative reaction to it came from the fact that I just wasn’t prepared to see what I had seen. I mean, how could you prepare for that? Purple-beanied Richard Kiel will be visiting me in my unquiet dreams.

So, I’ll ask you folks…did you like (or not like) the show? Should I seek out a DVD rental or two to refresh my memories, or should I just let those memories fade gently away?

• • •
I still plan on doing a little follow-up on some of the later questions you folks dropped into my comments sections over the last week. Thanks for reading and participating!

You have-a the questions, I have-a the answers:

• caman agus sliotar wants to know
  

  “Why won’t Mr. Ellis put out Fell in a timely manner?”

  I’m probably not the best person to ask that. I wish it would come out a little more often, as I do have customers asking for new installments, and it does make for a good impulse buy at only $1.99 a pop. (I did notice that the first issue is no longer available for reorder, so unless they bring it back into print, the day of selling runs of the series may be over.)

  “Does every arc get put out in hard and eventually soft cover trades or do only some get this treatment? If it’s not every book how do you think they decide what gets hard cover? Obviously ‘blockbuster events’ types are a given but what about the rest?”

  It sure seems like everything gets put out in trades, doesn’t it? I’m trying to think of something recent from Marvel or DC that either hasn’t ended up in a collected edition or isn’t destined for eventual collection. Not a whole lot, is there?

  As to why some get hardcovers and others don’t…just someone in editorial deciding which titles would be more likely to attract that hardcover-buying crowd, is all. The more popular the item, the more likely the hardcover release I suspect is the rule of thumb, though I’m sure someone will pop into the comments to set me straight. As for the less seemingly-popular items that get reprinted, it may be a matter of going to a hardcover edition to add to the perceived value of a higher pricepoint to counteract the expected lower sales…or, heck, instead of speculating, let me just say the reasoning is “money” and leave it at that.

  “Why does a shop owner I sometimes frequent get mildly angry at the idea of me giving, oh, say some plastic colored promo rings, to my 6 year old son?”

  Because some shop owners need to catch a clue, I think, or at least work on socializing themselves enough to be around other human beings. Man, kids love those rings…why would you not want to let them have some?

• Brad adds to the iPad discussion from yesterday:
  

  “What happens to the ‘average’ comic store (most of whom already diversify to some extent into rpgs, heroclix, ccg’s and the like) if the DM shrinks, even by a nominal extent? How much of an overall market change do you think the status quo can handle without yet another retail-implosion? And most importantly, are there advantages to the DM that could be created by better access to digitally distributed comics work?”

  That’s hard to say without it actually happening. When the market crashed in the ’90s, we were able to stay afloat on sales from our game store and, God help us, POGs (though we still did okay, if not great, in comic sales, thanks to back issues and a loyal clientele for new books). If the market crashed again, due to a shift from physical items to digital (let’s say), maybe we could adapt (as discussed in yesterday’s post) but I can see a lot of stores going away, print comic sales going down as they lose their outlets, and so on until there’s no one left but guys like us selling runs of Dazzler to hipsters and the elderly.

  If done properly, however that may be, there is a possibility that collected print editions of digital-only comics could support the direct market, but we likely won’t know for sure until The Big Change happens…if it does.

• Pal Sean asks
  

  “OK Mike, I got one. Do you sometimes think of just how different your life is since starting this site? Is it strange?”

  Well, in a way, it’s not that much different, since in one form or another I’ve been talking about comics in online arenas for about twenty years now. But I’ve never really had an audience quite this size before. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t be part of a book deal if it weren’t for the people I “met” because of this site, I wouldn’t be interacting with a bunch of interesting people (bloggers, commentators, comic creators, and the like) from all across the world, and I wouldn’t be basically synonymous with “Swamp Thing” and/or “Sluggo” with all those folks.

  “And I have one for your lovely girlfriend: when the hell are you and Mike getting hitched?”

  I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear the question.

• Scott Rowland asks lots of stuff:
  

  “What’s your dream reprint project from DC? Marvel? Dark Horse? Image? Anybody else?”

  DC: Sugar & Spike, Scribbly, or pretty much any Sheldon Mayer production.

  Marvel: A full-color reprint of the ’70s Man-Thing comics (including the Savage Tales debut and the stories from Fear).

  Dark Horse: Not a whole lot from Dark Horse that isn’t available in one form or another. Maybe they can pick up one the titles in “Others,” below.

  Image: A good reprinting of Matt Wagner’s first Mage series, without the futzing around with color effects and the typo-ridden relettering. (Though I have the excellent Starblaze reprints, so I’ve got mine, suckers!)

  Others: I’d like to see a collection of all the ’70s Atlas Comics, just so I can stop hunting the damned things down myself. And I’d like to have the original Metamorphosis Odyssey serial from Epic Illustrated under one cover…it’s been collected before, but not very well (it was all in black and white, and had some production issues as I recall). I’d also like to see more reprinting of some of the off-brand horror comics of the 1950s.

  “Do you think the current spate of event storylines with multiple tie-ins offered is training even long-term collectors to wait for the trades?”

  Probably not quite as much as you’d think…most long-term fans, at least the ones I deal with, would rather have the individual issues than the collections. I think to a certain extent we’re still dealing with a divided market, which some people are getting the stories in trades, and the others in serial format. I’m not saying there isn’t any overlap…of course there is, but I don’t think one is really replacing the other just yet.

  “Who would win: Herbie Popnecker or Sugar Plumm?”

  You know, I was going to say “Herbie” because Herbie always wins, but man, Sugar is the immovable object to Herbie’s unstoppable force. But I think Herbie is too much of a good guy to put a fight against a baby girl, anyway.

  “Why the heck is there not a Sugar and Spike collected edition?”

  Because DC hates money. Surely that’s the only reason.

  “How do you think retailers can compete with something like Amazon when it comes to TPBs?”

  That’s a tough question. It really comes down to some customers wanting to see something in person before buying it, and not wanting to wait for the mail to bring it. Plus, there are always those saintlike folks who want to support their local businesses. We can’t compete on prices, but we can compete on being friendly faces in a nice store. Well, mostly friendly faces, anyway…that’s why I have employees Timmy and Aaron.

  “What’s the current count on HOS 92 reprints you own? (I’m too lazy to look back through the site). Is there any other story you have that approaches that number? (Me, I think I have about 9 or so copies of the Spider-Man origin).”

  As of this post, I have twelve versions of the first Swamp Thing story from House of Secrets #92. Still, not nearly enough.

• Nate queries
  

  “Do you worry about the future of your career in direct sales? Do you think there will be enough fanboys that need to hold a piece of paper to keep direct sales going?”

  As I’ve said, we’re probably big enough with enough diversification in stock to survive a market shift created by digital delivery. And I think the “all-digital” revolution for comics is still quite a ways off, iPad or no iPad, so I don’t think it’s an immediate job-killer for me, at any rate. It would probably take an additional generation or three of kids accustomed to reading material solely in digital form before the print market drops below sustainable levels.

  But I think there will always prefer printed matter to digital displays. Maybe not a lot of them, maybe about as common as people who collect wax cylinders today, but they’ll exist. And I’ll still sell ’em funnybooks!

• Matthew Allison asks the worst thing ever:
  

  “How much is The Legend of The Dark Night #1 worth if it’s the yellow cover?”

  If you hide a dollar in its pages, it’ll be worth a dollar.

  “How much will it be worth ten years from now?”

  It’ll be worth one Jovian Space-Credit.

  “How much more is it worth if it’s signed by Billy Gibbons from The ZZ Tops?”

  Man, I love the ZZ Tops. They’re my favorite Motown group. Clearly any comic signed by one of its members would be worth exactly One Trazillion Dollars.

• Rich Handley ponders
  

  “If I turned my long-dormant Swamp Thing site into a book, do you think DC’s lawyers would break down my legs and THEN issue a cease-and-desist, or would I get the cease-and-desist first and then the broken legs?”

  If you ask them nicely if you could use DC’s characters ahead of time, maybe the lawyers would let you slide with just a busted ankle or something. I really don’t know…do the people who put out Draw and Alter Ego get DC’s permission to run all the DC art they do? Or is it fair use for review/discussion purposes?

  “’Sluggo-Thing’: Best. Crossover. Ever… or just plain stupid?”

  Nothing this beautiful could ever be called stupid.

• • •
Tomorrow…the shocking conclusion!

So anyway, a while back pal Dana and Employee Timmy were planning to go to a particular event together, and Dana repeatedly reminded Timmy to “dress nicely.” She of course made the mistake of doing so within my presence, thus resulting in my telling Timmy that the perfect complement to any formal wear is, of course, the sombrero. Man oh man, I do love sombreros.

Well, Dana, an apparent supporter of the anti-sombrero agenda, did not hold to my opinions on fashion, and forbade Timmy from sporting a stylish sombrero for the function they planned to attend. Which of course caused me to extol the virtues of the beloved sombrero to Timmy nearly every day leading up to the actual event, in turn causing additional grief to Dana and further warnings from her to Timmy. And the occasional threat of punching to me.

Alas, Timmy ultimately did not take my advice and attended the event with Dana sans sombrero. But, months later, for Valentine’s Day, Dana and her friend Jorean gifted the store and its employees with a multitude of hand-crafted greeting cards, including this fine example for yours truly:

The inside reads “Payback’s a BITCH” which, we can all agree, is in the true spirit of Valentine’s Day. Apparently the point is that for all my grief given to Dana about sombreros, her revenge is giving me a drawing of Swamp Thing (whom you may recall is my favorite comic book character) in a sombrero. There’s just one thing she did not count on: the only thing more awesome than Swamp Thing? Swamp Thing in a sombrero. And the only thing cooler than that? Swamp Thing in two sombreros. You know, in case Dana was wondering what to draw for me next time.

The other cards were pretty swell, too, so I’ll try to get scans of those when I can. Assuming Dana doesn’t kill me for putting this one up on the site.

Also, the cards came with homemade cookies. Mmmmmm homemade cookies.

• • •
Kevin Church saw yesterday’s Sluggo Saturday and decided to improve it/make it slightly creepier:

That’s my hideous mug peeking back at you on the canvas there. I look just like Nancy!

• • •
They’re making Watchmen pieces for the Heroclix tabletop mini-figure war game thingamajig. Pieces pictured: Silk Spectre and Comedian. Set includes 25 pieces, which should cover all the superhero characters in the book, though I hope there’s room for the two Bernies (the newsstand operator and the kid mooching the free read…I want Kid Bernie’s piece to be just him sitting down and reading the comic). Also, Employee Tim mentioned that there should be a Seymour piece, and yes, dammit, there absolutely should be. Seymour’s the real hero of Watchmen, you know.

This quote amused me a bit:

“…We’ve got a comprehensive offering that will satisfy both avid gamers and Watchmen movie fans.”

So maybe the set will also include pieces featuring Rorschach chopping that guy’s head, Nite Owl falling to his knees and shouting “NOOOOO,” and of course a dual-figure sculpt commemorating that 48 minute long sex scene between Daniel and Laurie.

…Okay, I do buy the occasional Heroclix figure if it’s a character I like…so I’m likely to be sorely tempted by these. But, seriously, I want the Bernies as part of the set. C’mon, you know that’d be awesome.

• • •
Reminder! Last day to send in questions for me! Please leave ’em at the link there, and with any luck I will start answering them on Monday. Thanks!