Welcome, younglings, as the 33rd monthly installment of the End of Civilization, this is. Your November 2007 edition of Diamond Previews you will read, and follow along, you wi…oh, okay, I’ll stop. Anyway, the previous installments are, as always, in the sidebar, so let the bad merchandise, silly products, and the objectification of the female form begin!

p. 45 – Judge Dredd Alien Statue:

In case you needed to confuse any of your friends and family…”why does your Alien statue have the face of a helmeted man with a deformed chin?”

p. 131 – Showcase Presents Series 1 Action Figures:

As I mentioned here…ALTERNATE RED KRYPTONITE HEADS. The real fun will come in as you try to fit them onto other figures. (I have some likely prospects….)

p. 164 – The Godfather Action Figure:

Okay, I know the “action figure” description is a misnomer, but I suppose that helps the item sell better than calling it “only barely-articulated plastic statue.” But I can’t help picturing neighborhood kids playing with their toys:

“Okay, so my Luke Skywalker uses his lightsabre to cut off Snake Eyes’ head.”

“No way! Snake Eyes totally dodged that lightsabre.”

“The Godfather has ordered a hit on both of you, and his thugs gun you down in cold blood. Your bodies lie on the ground, almost looking as if you were sleeping, save for the red sticky pool of viscous liquid forming beneath you.”

“…”

“…My mom says I can’t play with you any more.”

p. 174 – Witchblade Takeru Manga #11:

Okay, let’s be honest here. This is a stroke book, pure and simple. And by “stroke book,” in case any of you are confused, I mean “a magazine featuring images of prurient interest for use as visual stimuli during masturbation.” It features an assemblage of barely covered breasts and vaginas (bottoms being generally free of clothing) being posed in a variety of ways. I suppose there’s dialogue, and some pretense at a plot, but the star of the show is female body parts.

I didn’t think they could outdo the cheesecake factor of the original Witchblade comic, but here it is.

p. 209 – Archie Comics:

Dear publishers of Archie Comics:

Screw you, you incredible pricks. (1, 2 for how Archie is trying to drop Dan DeCarlo, creator of Josie and co-creator of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, into the memory hole.)

p. 242-3 – Red Sonja comics:

Speaking of stroke books….

It’s a two page spread of Red Sonja’s rear end! On the left hand side is Alex Ross’ illustration of Red Sonja’s butt:

And to the right are two more Red Sonja behinds, presented for your perusal:

Okay, those two are more or less the same image, one being a comic cover, the other being a 3-D representation. But BAM, BAM, BAM, it’s butt, butt, butt across both pages. Enjoy, boys!

p. 369 – Captain Kirk’s Guide to Women:

At last, we have a replacement for The Bible:

Publishers, shutter your doors. Printers, halt your presses. The book industry has reached its zenith, and human knowledge has achieved its greatest accomplishment. If there is any knowledge in the world not contained within these pages…it’s not worth knowing.

p. 398 – Mounted Cthulhu Head Plush:

You know, after Santa Cthulhu, and Elvis Cthulhu, and so on, I keep thinkng that there’s nothing more that can be done in the stuffed Cthulhu genre…

…but apparently there is.

Of course, now that we’ve achived Mounted Cthulhu, it’s only one more step to incorporate Big Mouth Billy Bass technology to make him talk. Imagine some unsuspecting guest at your house admiring your Mounted Cthulhu, when it suddenly recites “That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may die.” Big laffs!

p. 400 – For A Few Dollars More Minimates Box Set:

Is the world ready for a Clint Eastwood Minimate? I don’t really have anything smart-alecky to say about this. I’m just stunned it even exists.

p. 420 – She Dragon Variant Edition Statue:

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this statue before, but, after doing this End of Civilization thing for nearly three years now, I’m running short of ways to say “the things you people make statues out of.” I mean, honestly:

But, in all fairness, Mr. Glum totally rules. This should be sold this seperately:

p. 430 – Lord of the Rings Snaga Ringbearer Bust:

Okay, now, this needs to stop. Gandalf statues, fine. There’ll always be hippies to buy ’em. And Gollum? Who doesn’t love Gollum? But this guy:

At this point, with the movies well over and done with, “scraping the bottom of barrel”-level characters may be a tough sell.

p. 448 – Marvel Bearz Series 1 Vinyl Figures:

From the solicitation info:

“Each Marvel Bearz features a colorful, hidden button on the back of it’s [sic] head. Some of these buttons are rarer than others, and are covered with a safety cap, so until you have purchased your bear, no one knows what color (or limitation) your button will be.”

Okay, leaving aside I have no idea what they mean by “what limitation your button will be” (I’ll Google it up later, if I still care), does everything have to have some kind of artificial collectible/trading aspect to it? Can’t these just be weird superhero bears? Can’t we enjoy the simple sublime beauty of the concept just as is?

Well, “beauty” is a relative term. This Carnage Bear is just pure nightmare fuel:

GAH.

p. 452 – Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 – Lei Fang ArtFX Statue:

“I’m ready for my exam, Doctor!”

p. 482 – Smallville Kryptonite Metal Key:

At $39.99, that’s one expensive coaster. Because WHAT ELSE CAN YOU POSSIBLY USE THIS FOR? Leveling out table legs? Paint it red and make a very small stop sign?

p. 482 – Horror Playing Cards:

I’m not sure what’s so horrific about the Vivid Girls cards (though I suppose the implants are terrifying), and I was all set to poke a little fun at these, but…well, I kinda want a set of the Nightmare on Elm Street cards. And I bet they’d sell like gangbusters, especially at five bucks a pop.

Hmmm…I think I need to add “playing cards” to the store’s merchandise shelves….

…so here’s a panel of Swamp Thing fighting some robot dogs:

from Swamp Thing #17 (July 1975) by David Michelinie & Nestor Redondo

So as you may have heard, big chunks of Southern California are ablaze, driven by strong winds. Most of that activity is quite a bit south of the store, so we’re not in danger, though I’m surprised we haven’t yet had our semi-annual brushfire just over the hills behind us yet.

However, on Monday I’d gone to a grocery store very near my house, and between going in the store and coming out of the store, a grassy embankment on the other side of the parking lot had caught on fire. It’s right there next to a freeway offramp, and I’m guessing the culprit was “tossed out cigarette butt.” Thankfully, the fire department was right on top of it and took care of the fire in short order.

Employees Jeff and Aaron live much closer to the Piru and Fillmore events, so think kind thoughts for them, as well as for everyone else affected by these fires.

On Sunday, the winds had blown lots of smoke and ash our way, turning the skies orange, and I took a couple photos outside the shop:

I didn’t color correct this image, or alter the contrast or brightness. I took these photos at about 3 in the afternoon. It cleared up later that day for a while, and it was actually sunny, but since then the skies have been consistently cloudy, the air thick with ash and smoke.

As long as I was out there takin’ photos, I grabbed a pic of that tree the city planted in front of our shop:

The tree had grown crooked, so the city employees in charge of this sort of thing set up an elaborate system of wooden poles and rubber straps to set the tree straight, to no real avail.

And that branch that sticks out way to the left, there…it’s just the right height and length to poke at the doors, or rest on the hoods, of any car that parks there. I’ve spoken to one of the city guys to do something about trimming that branch, but no go so far. I’m thinking about doing it myself, but I can just see me doing a nickel up the river in the ol’ graybar hotel on the tree vandalism rap.

Also, if you take a close look in one of those street photos, you can see where our shop was from 1983 ’til 1990:

Yes, it’s a massage parlor now. It was a massage parlor before we were in there, too…there was even a working shower in the back. Could have used showers in our later locations, come to think of it. “Sold…POGS…must…wash off…shame….”

And just look at that…their tree isn’t deformed. Man.

So a customer recently unloaded his collection of funnybooks on us, as he’s moving, and isn’t taking the books with him. As is usually the case when we receive collections in bulk like this, the vast majority of the books is going straight to the bargain bins, but a few items are being kept aside. An Albedo #2 (the first appearance of Usagi Yojimbo), a couple copies of Tales from the Tube (the comic-sized edition and the one from the surfing magazine), and not just one, but two New Mutants #87, second printings, signed by the man himself, Rob Liefeld.

However, also in this collection was three copies of this bit of horror film history, about which I was previously unaware:

It’s a magazine-sized promo for the film’s release, only twelve pages long, and in color…sort of. I’ll explain that in the moment.

In what will likely come as a shock to most of you, I’ve never actually seen any of the Leprechaun films, despite my love for cheesy-yet-great horror films. I mean, I’ve even seen The Gingerdead Man (starring Gary Busey as an executed killer who comes back in the form of a murderous animated gingerbread man cookie), and yet I’ve never seen a Leprechaun film? Not even Leprechaun 6: Back 2 Tha Hood. Ah, well…Netflix, here I come, I guess.

Anyway, here are a few samples from the book, such as this panel with the Leprechaun in question:

As the Leprechaun zips through these few pages seeking his lost gold, he spends some time causing mischief and delivering ironic, or at least rhyming, punishments:

The artwork for the most part is a tad on the amateurish side, but serviceably cartoonish. There’s at least one terrifying full-page image of the Leprechaun’s face, which reminded me a bit of the heavily photo-referenced pin-up pages from the old Partridge Family comics.

And there are a couple bizarrely creepy panels like this in the mag:

Those two panels along the bottom there show the Leprechaun’s hand reaching out for the lady in the first panel, and the second panel shows the woman, presumably stripped of her clothing and her hair, in case you couldn’t see what was going on in the scan. Geez, Lep, what’d that lady ever do to you?

I mentioned the book was “sort of” in color a few sentences back, and that’s because this is some of the worst printing I’ve ever seen. Dark, muddy, blurry…here’s a sample of what the art looked like without my fiddling around with brightness and contrast:

The inside covers were both full-page ads…one was for the Sci-Fi Channel, and the other was for this frightening thing. Rick Dees! AIIIIIIEEEEE:

The back cover was a reproduction of the movie poster, with the blurb “LOOK FOR THE ‘LEPRECHAUN’ BOARD GAME” at the bottom. I did a brief Googling, and looked at Boardgamegeek.com, but couldn’t spot it. I hope it does exist. I’m picturing a Monopoly-type board, where every square, and every Chance and Community Chest card, has the Leprechaun’s face on it, with a word balloon that reads “WHERE’S ME GOLD?”

Anyway, for some good scans of the entire story, this Angelfire site has full-color images donated by the artist himself, and unencumbered by the horrible printing job. (And since it is an Angelfire site, it’ll likely have pop-ups and bandwidth issues, so if it’s down, check again later.) The main page is located here, last updated eight years ago. There’s a link to what is apparently a more up-to-date Leprechaun page by the same person, but I couldn’t get it to load. Well, it has been since 1999 when that link was presumably posted.

---

Because I know some of you wouldn’t believe me…here’s the trailer for The Gingerdead Man. Some dialogue Not Safe for Work:

From Spider-Man, Storm and Power Man (1992):

Here’s what I think Brian would say:

How’s ’bout you?

ad from Flash #272 (April 1979)

“Key Character in Harry Potter is Gay”

“One of the main male characters, a master wizard and headmaster of the book’s witchcraft school, known as Albus Dumbledore, was declared by author J.K. Rowling to be gay.”

[…]

“She then noted that Dumbledore’s love was his ‘great tragedy,’ and then chuckled, ‘Oh my god, the Fan Fiction.’

“Fan Fiction is an Internet site where fans can speculate, converse and write on books, movies, shows, etc.

“One branch of the site is dedicated to Harry Potter, and explicit scenes with Dumbledore already appear there.”

(via Metafilter)

• Death of the New Gods #1 sold remarkably well, selling through all our copies by Thursday afternoon. I haven’t been looking ’round the internet at reactions to the series, but I imagine folks aren’t responding well to Off-Model Jimmy Olsen:
  
  WHERE ARE THE FRECKLES, MAN?

  And is this really what Jimmy’s Superman Signal Watch looks like? C’mon:

  
  Actually, none of this bothers me…well, maybe the freckles thing…as I’m just glad we’ve got Jim Starlin writing and drawing the New Gods. If I can’t have Kirby, and I can’t have Simonson, this’ll do. It’s a little odd, in that off-kilter Starlin manner, but entertaining.

  Oh, and the “retailer incentive” variant covers we received all have heavy dirt scuffs along the spine. Swell.

• Superman: Bottle City of Kandor trade paperback – cover by DC Direct merchandise, apparently. Soon as Employee Aaron saw this cover, he pointed it out to me and said “Is…is that an action figure in the background?” And, yea, verily it was.

  Cover aside, this is another great collection of Silver Age ‘n’ ’70s Superman weirdness, culminating in the story with one of the greatest titles for a Superman story ever: “Let My People Grow!”

  And, if I may self-link, I addressed not long ago the questions about Kandor that DC Comics DARE NOT ANSWER.

• Clean Cartoonists, Dirty Drawings was a hoot to flip through. Some of the illustrations came as no surprise…yeah, Wally Wood drew all kinds of filth (and his “Disneyland Memorial Orgy” is included) and Steve Ditko’s fetish stuff is represented, but Superman co-creator Joe Shuster? Charles Schulz? And Jack Kirby? Though Kirby’s pages are more “upsetting” than “dirty,” like walking in on your grandfather while he’s putting on his ballgag.

  There is a generous preview of the book on the official site allowing you to flip through a large number of the pages at reduced size.

  Oh, and Not Safe for Work, in case you couldn’t guess.

• Archaic #10 – actually came in last week, but we got in a reorder because it was drawn by one of our customers, Weshoyot, and we all like Weshoyot.
• Marvel Zombies 2 #1 – I’ve no beef with the Marvel Zombies comic in and of itself. That’s fine…it’s dark-humored and fairly clever. I’m just hoping that Marvel’s usual business practice of “find something popular and drive it into the ground as quickly as possible” with their onslaught of “zombie variant covers” hasn’t hurt the sales potential of this title. “Giving the customer what they want until they’re sick of it” rarely works as well as “leave the customer wanting more.”

  So far, the comic seems to be selling okay for us. Once you’ve got the customers buying the first issue, unless things go horribly awry most of them should stick through ’til the end. But Marvel probably shouldn’t press its luck with a Marvel Zombies 3, or, God help us, a regular series.

  Joking around the store, we were trying to come up with variant cover ideas for Marvel Zombies 2, playing off the “zombie variants” for the rest of the Marvel Universe. Employee Aaron’s idea would be just featuring all the heroes in their normal, non-zombified state. My idea was that they would all be actually dead, slumped to the ground, unmoving. Logo at the top, lots of white space, and then just a pile of superhero bodies and parts of bodies at the bottom.

• So pal Dorian asked me to order for him a copy of Lio: Happiness Is A Squishy Cephalopod, which was a reprint volume of a comic strip I hadn’t heard of.

  It came in this week…I flipped though the book before putting it in Dor’s box…and then I placed an order for a copy of my own. What a wonderful and beautifully drawn strip, cheerfully morbid in a way that reminds me a smidgen of Gahan Wilson. And, like most comic strips that commit the crime of not being blandly unamusing, it has its share of humorless detractors who proclaim it unfit for children.

  Here, have a handy Amazon link:

  
  Buy two! Buy a dozen! Give ’em away for Halloween!

• Pretty much all the posters we get nowadays have some pixelation, but you have to get your nose pretty close to the surface of the paper to notice. For example, if you look at the straight red line in the background of this Black Canary poster (in person, not just in the scan at the link), you can see what I’m talking about. But again, like I said, you’ve got to get pretty close to notice.

  But on this Batman poster, the pixelation is quite a bit more noticeable. This was the cover of issue #655, and I don’t think it was quite meant to be blown up to this size. If you see it in person, get a look at the bats, and at Andy Kubert’s signature. You don’t have to get too close to see the pixels, so hang this sucker high on the wall.

  Perhaps I exaggerate slightly, and it’s not really that distracting on the Batman poster. It’s just, compared to the others, the image in this Batman poster seemed less suited to being blown up to poster size.

  A side note: Employee Aaron noted that, if you didn’t know who Black Canary was, the poster makes her look like a crazed killer, with the blood of her victims splattered around her.

• That the cover of the Army @ Love trade paperback is covered with pull-quotes from many, many reviews, I found very amusing, and very appropriate, given the nature of the book.

  So buy lots of copies of this book, and of the series itself, so that it’ll keep going and I can keep reading it. Thank you.

• When we cracked open the shipment boxes on Wednesday morning, Employee Jeff grabbed the Transformers: Beast Wars comics and wouldn’t let me see them. I can’t imagine why.