Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Batman? JLA? Toys Do Break!

I like the Batman mirror above but I don't have any good place to hang it so I won't be placing an order. Also I would worry that the mirror could easily break or chip and who needs that heartache?

I remember when I received the pre-ordered Justice League versus Starro statue at my local comic shop and I took it home to open it only to find that one of the Starro tentacles (I think the one fighting Wonder Woman) had cracked off the statue! All that careful foam packaging and still a break; those tentacles get very thin in places and I often wonder how many of the Limited Edition of that statue made it into collectors' hands safely. Fortunately, legendary comics dealer Joe Sarno took my broken statue back to his distributor and secured an unflawed replacement for me. 


Monday, September 28, 2015

9/11 on the Comics Pages


For a few years after 9/11 it seemed like a majority of comic strips in the daily newspapers would commemorate he tragedy when September rolled around. It's been fourteen years now though and memories seem to be fading.

The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times are my two hometown newspapers and each of them features multiple pages of comic strips every day. It's entirely possible that these two papers publish a majority of the comic strips that are currently in syndication.

Yet I observed just two strips in these newspapers paying tribute to 9/11 this year.

Just two.

Here is The Wizard of Id by Jeff Parker.


And here is Dick Tracy by Joe Staton and Mike Curtis.



Friday, September 25, 2015

Collecting the Superman Logo


Natalie Lips was a recent multi-day winner on Jeopardy and during her interview with Alex Trebek she revealed that she collects anything with the Superman logo on it.

Natalie was very personable and I was sorry to see her winning streak end after just a handful of games. But what's up with her and the Superman logo?

A large percentage of the Jeopardy contestants say they they are collectors of something or other
(and I remember one person saying that he or she collected any and all replicas of the Eiffel Tower).

I feel that the richest things to collect are content-oriented (like comics or musical recordings) as opposed to white-elephant tchotchkes (like Eiffel Towers or Alfred E. Neuman-as-Superman action figures).

But wait a second. It's coming back to me now that when I was in eighth grade I had a sweet collection of beautiful polished rocks. I think I remember I even had a rock polishing machine and polished some of them up myself.  I'm going to try to find the little box filled with that polished rock collection of mine from long ago...