“Allied with a vampire?! It’s a…funny war!”

filed under Categories chris sims, dracula, sgt. fury 12 Comments

While issues #77, #78 and #79 of Marvel Comics Presents contain chapters from Barry Windsor-Smith’s “Weapon X” serial, which is the primary reason anyone 1) bought those comics, and 2) remembers them now, I would suggest that you not overlook the three part Sgt. Fury / Dracula team-up titled “Rumanian Rumble” that runs in those same issues:


Yes, Sgt. Fury, the Howling Commandos, and Dracula, teaming up to fight Nazis. …I don’t consider that a spoiler, I consider that incentive.


So my recommendation to you: dig these comics out of your long boxes, or go buy ’em as back issues, and read this story. And if the clerk at the shop says “oh, hey, this Windsor-Smith Wolverine story is awesome,” you look him straight in the eye and you tell him “Brother, you don’t know from awesome.”

Also, there’s a back cover on #79 by Mike Mignola, and here’s the relevant portion of it:


Mostly, I’m just posting that to get Mignola Fan #1 Former Employee Aaron to buy it. But you should buy it, too. I mean, c’mon:


 

images from Marvel Comics Presents #78 & #79 (1991) by Doug Murray, Tom Lyle & Joe Rubinstein – back cover detail from #79 by Mike Mignola

“That poor bastard was shot right in the 28.”

filed under Categories gaming, I cast magic missile 5 Comments

This is Bio One, a 12-page digest-sized booklet published by TSR in 1974:


It’s a rules supplement that “provides a complete and accurate system of damage location and effects for any gunpowder period of warfare.” In other words, it tells you where the bullet hit, how badly it hit you, how much bleeding you’re currently experiencing, whether anyone can stop that bleeding, and so on.

It includes this amazing bit of business: the Abdominal Wounds Chart, which divvies up a torso into numbered sections, and each section having a subseries of multiple possibilities of injury (or lack thereof):


For example, if you’re shot in section #7, a randomized die roll could specify your injury as lung damage, or as rib damage, or as both, or perhaps, if you’re lucky, as no damage at all (like it bounced off your “medicinal” flask in your pocket, or your Bible inexplicably bound with solid steel covers).

It’s an interesting, if almost too-exacting approach to role-playing gunfire injury…it wouldn’t surprise me if similar systems weren’t implemented in later games. And if they were, I’m sure someone out there will let me know in the comments.

I’m pretty sure that’s not how you spell “idiosyncrasies.”

filed under Categories gaming, I cast magic missile 7 Comments

So here are a few issues of the digest-sized gaming ‘zine The Dungeoneer from the late 1970s that we received in that nearly-bottomless role playing collection we just acquired. I thought these had some interesting covers and thought I’d share them with you…also, these nearly triggered my ‘zine-collecting obsession and almost kept them for myself, but, alas, we’ve already sold them off and I just have these scans for memories:


ISSUE #5 (APRIL/MAY 1977)


ISSUE #7 (MARCH/APRIL 1978)

Now, issue #6, seen here:


…is sort of amusing, in that there apparently was some delay in getting the darned thing out, resulting in this cover blurb:


…and this cover date:


If only certain comics were this honest with cover dates, when they bother to have them at all.

Just when I thought I’d never use the “SMALLVILLE” category tag again.

filed under Categories retailing, smallville, watchmen 12 Comments

So I was just going to leave this post (and my smartypantsiness on the Twitter) to be my comment on the whole “Before Watchmen” prequel thing, since that’s been discussed to death by everyone already. But (and you knew there was a “but” coming), I did have someone come into the shop a couple of days ago to buy a copy of the Watchmen trade paperback, telling me the specific reason he was buying it was because of the prequels announcement. “The prequels look interesting,” he said, “and since I never did read the original, I thought I’d better get it before those prequels started coming out!”

Now, for us, sales peaked on the Watchmen trade just prior to the movie’s release, then dropped to almost nothing as soon as it was out. (You know, as usual with comic book movies.) We used to reorder the book every week prior to the movie ever being a factor, ordered tons of the book when the movie was a Big Deal, and now if I reorder the book more than once every few months, I’m surprised. The local market may just be saturated after the big movie-inspired sales bump, on top of the fact that we’ve been selling the darn thing for twenty five years and most comic fans who had even the vaguest interest in giving Watchmen a go have already went.

On the other hand, we may be experiencing a Howard the Duck event, in which the reputation of a once highly-regarded comic has been supplanted by the reputation of a not-so-regarded film adaptation. Any new customers spotting Watchmen on the shelves will think “oh, yeah, that dumb weirdly-violent movie,” not “hey, isn’t that the ground-breaking deconstructionist comic about the state of the superhero genre as it stood in the mid 1980s?”

I’ve no idea how sales on the Watchmen trades have been overall. I can only go by how things are doing at our shop. Maybe its sales haven’t dropped as drastically everywhere else as they did for us, but this is a quarter-century old comic that’s been consistently available for sale, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it isn’t moving like it used to.

So there you go: the Watchmen prequels could very well get those last few stragglers who haven’t picked up Watchmen to maybe try it out, bumping up interest in an item that may have hit some rough times in its post-film adaptation era. I’m basing this entirely on the single data source of our store, and on one customer transaction, but I’ve written posts for this site on shakier foundations, so why would I stop now.

But of course it’s promotion to help keep one of DC’s most famous evergreen graphic novels alive, but going from one famously self-contained graphic novel to, eventually, a shelf of eight graphic novels could be more of an imposing detriment than a long-term sales boost. I guess we’ll see.

Now speaking of which…I have no idea how to order on these prequel mini-series. I’m hoping DC will make the first issues of all of them returnable, so I can order high in case these really take off, but not get stuck if they receive the “check this out, comics based on that crappy movie” reaction. Yeah, yeah, I know everyone online threw a huge shit-fit when “Before Watchmen” was announced, but if actual sales were tied to online reaction, All Star Batman and Robin wouldn’t have been the best-selling comic on our shelves in any given month it deigned to come out.

I suspect they’ll sell reasonably well, but I don’t expect they’ll have the life expectancy of the original, which probably didn’t need to be said but I said it anyway. At the very least, however, it’ll hopefully get a few new people gaining an appreciation for Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen…even if it’s only by comparison.

I realize none of this gets into the moral or artistic issues of whether or not DC should be doing publishing new Watchmen comics. There are already plenty of other folks arguing about that right now, and maybe I’ll discuss it in a later post, if I feel like getting more grey hair.

For another look at this whole prequel hoohar, here’s the presumably-pseudonymous Sleestak with the article “Controversy as Advertising.”

• • •

In other news, I was looking at DC Comics’ site to check some info on the Watchmen stuff, when I saw this headline:

“ANNOUNCING SMALLVILLE SEASON 11”


OH GOD NO…oh, wait, it’s just a Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8/9-esque comics-only follow-up. I hope it’s just page after page of never quite showing heavily photo-referenced drawings of Tom Welling in his Superman suit…like, he’s always in shadow or behind potted palm trees or something.

My favorite thing about these magazines is how they hand-drew accent marks on all the weird names in the articles.

filed under Categories gaming, I cast magic missile 8 Comments

Here’s something else I’ve never seen before, out of our recently-acquired boxes of old role playing game stuff…the first two issues of The Tékumel Journal (1978), a magazine devoted to the fantasy world that was the basis for The Empire of the Petal Throne and other games:


While tied to gaming, these magazines aren’t filled with charts and stats and other RPG-style information. It is solely devoted to exploring the history and the characters of this fantasy setting that, apparently, had been an ongoing project of its creator since the 1940s. Wikipedia has more information about this, thankfully, since I was a bit thrown when I first pulled these things out of the box.

Neat covers, though.

The Great Grendel Re-Read Project continues apace…

filed under Categories grendel, retailing 9 Comments

…and actually jumped ahead a bit the night my technical problems began, as I passed the time waiting for utility software and installation-type things to work on my computer by working my way through that pile of Grendel I just happened to have sittin’ here. (In case you’re curious, as of today, I’m about two or three series into the Grendel Tales from the early ’90s, after skipping ahead and reading the harrowing Devil’s Child from a few years ago.)

In the process of rereading these, I was reminded of this particular product, as advertised in the later Comico issues from about ’89 or so:


I’m pretty sure this was the same product available in comic shops and not just through mail order, as at the time we certainly had a stack of about five or six packages of Grendel masks at the shop. (That $34.95 price point sounds about right.) It took us…a while to sell them, but sell they did, and I kind of wish we still had them so I could run across rooftops at night throw ’em on the eBay or something.

Fine, I was joking about the “running across rooftops” thing maybe, but I did have a regular customer of ours ask me way back when what would happen if someone bought one of these masks, wore it while getting up to some hijinks (i.e. of a felonious nature) and suddenly Action News Team 7 is there at the shop’s front door wondering what my part was in all this. I think I told him I’d throw on one of the other Grendel masks and chase them out, because hey, no such thing as bad publicity.

…Okay, I probably wouldn’t have done that, and I’m pretty sure no one who did buy the masks was likely to go out on a crime spree, thanks to my extensive background checks, so I’m pretty sure I was safe from being the center of a media firestorm. Well, at least until a couple of years later when Superman died and fingers started pointing at me — “He’s the one! That comic shop guy killed Superman!”

Anyway, that’s a swell ad, and I hope and pray that was actually Grendel creator Matt Wagner modelling the mask in the photos there, because that would be awesome. Yeah, I know, it probably isn’t, but don’t you poop on my dreams.

I always enjoy seeing things I’ve never seen before.

filed under Categories gaming, I cast magic missile 13 Comments

Here are just a couple of items recently acquired in a collection of role playing game materials, the first of which may be of interest to comic fans:


This is issue #2 of the Wyrm’s Footnotes, a 1977 fantasy role-playing game ‘zine, which features a front cover image by the late Gene Day (shown above) and a Day back cover:


And here’s a thing I’ve never seen before until I pulled it out that box yesterday…TSR’s 1974 wargaming rules based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter novels, in the same format as those early Dungeons & Dragons digest-sized books:


There really is nothing quite like the illustrations from early TSR books:

We are still experiencing technical difficulties…please stand by.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, sluggo 4 Comments

While I hurriedly replace all the hamsters in the wheels that run Progressive Ruin Industries, please enjoy this fine Sluggo-riffic post from that best of all little stuffed bulls, Bully. A finer hooved friend one cannot have.

And for those of you who have expressed concern…no, “technical difficulties” is not a euphemism for “Mike is sick…again.” It actually was a computer problem. Things are on their way to being back to normal after many hours of computer hoohar and an ill-advised purchase of a more powerful disk utility tool than the one provided with the system, which I ultimately ended up not really needing, but I guess I have it now just in case I ever do. Don’t make significant purchasing decisions with money you don’t really have at 1 in the morning when you’re exhausted and pissed at your computer, kids!

But at any rate, I’m at the point where the initial problem is resolved, and now I’m just restoring from back-ups and redownloading software and system updates and just plain getting everything back to where it was, so it should be business as usual sooner rather than later.

Thanks for your patience, and I’ll see you all tomorrow.