Oh Canada!

I've long had a love of and desire to collect specialty comics. That is to say comics that either contain corporate characters selling or appearing in comics that are sponsored by other companies (not their respective publishers) or comics where the characters are pushing some sort of pro-social cause. Quite a few of these comics have been from Marvel, DC, and Archie, and I have amassed quite a few of them. 

Recently I acquired one that came out way back in 2001 for which I had long been searching. Well it arrived the other day and I've just finished reading it, and while I enjoyed it, I do have just one minor beef with it, which I plan on sharing with all'y'all now. 

As you can plainly see, the comic in question is Marvel's Wolverine Son of Canada, which was subsidized by Doritos/Lays, and was issued only in Canada. In this comic, native son Wolverine, along with Spider-Man and The Hulk get sucked through a vortex and wind up in The Great White North (where they eventually meet up with Storm, Captain America, Silver Surfer, Thing, and Thor all of whom have been captured by minions of Blastaar). 

To cut to the chase, the heroes manage to free their friends, and defeat Blastaar and his minions with relative ease (hey, it's only a 16-page comic with 2 pages of ads). My issue is this. I found a typo (printo, really as it was probably hand lettered). The error came on page two where Wolverine says "This is Vancouver, British Columbia." and Spider-Man responds, "Canada? Where in Canada? which makes no sense as Wolverine just said that they were in Vancouver, British Columbia. Causing me to think that Spidey was supposed to have said "We're in Canada? which would have made much more sense.

(I placed arrows on the art so you could better see what I was talking about above. 

Not a big deal, but, honestly, my editor-sense was buzzing.

Having gone through that, I just wanted to add one more image from the comic, which is a shot of Cabot Tower on Signal Hill in Newfoundland, but only because my good buddy Roger Keel lives in Newfoundland, and I thought he might be entertained by its inclusion in the comic. 

Well, that's all I have for today, now I have to get back to my real work so I can go catch the last matinee of Captain America New World Order later today. 

The Kinder Avengers

Some years back (2000) a book I wrote about fast food toys and collectibles hit the book shelves. That book was entitled Kiddie Meal Collectibles. It was a fun book to write and I rather enjoyed not only doing the research, compiling the data, but actually writing. Over the years since them I've continued to write about and collect toys attached to food products, mostly superhero-related toys, to be sure, but still.

Recently I have become aware of the presence of Kinder Eggs here in the U.S. Now, they are not the same as the Kinder Eggs that are found in Canada, but that actually matters less to me than the toys themselves. Last year I found out that the U.S. Kinder Eggs started licensing the toys that are included (still not sure if the Canadian eggs do as well).

So far I have found Barbie, Star Wars, and Avengers. I scored just a single Barbie Kinder, and a few Star Wars figures, but my best find were complete sets of Avengers:Infinity Wars and Avengers: Endgame figures.

First up the Avengers:

Avengers Infinity War

In this set we have Iron Man (L),
(Back row) Captain America, Groot, Ant Man, Star Lord,
(front row) Black Panther, Wasp, and Spider-Man

 

    

     

The second image is the front of the instructions to the left we have one of the Kinder Egg shells,and then to the right we have five of the assembly instructions.

Avengers Endgame

This set gave us (L) Spider-Man
(Way Back) Iron Man, Captain America, Groot, Ant Man,
(Middle) Black Panther, Thor (who seems to be laying down on the job),
(front & center) Hulk

Here we have the instructions for assembling the Black Panther as well as the front view of the full team (sadly, Wasp, Gamora, and Captain Marvel are pictured but don't appear in the toy set).

 

An Avengers: Endgame egg shell, and Iron Man

Spidey and Ant Man

Hulk & Groot

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

I don't recall how many characters were in this set, but here is R2D2, A Sith Lord, and an Imperial Trooper (If I remembered their names I'd certainly tell you).

One of the Star Wars egg shells

Barbie

Only picked up a single Barbie Kinder Egg

Candida Kinder Eggs

These are the Canadian Kinder Eggs I picked up (the difference is that in the Canadian eggs the toy is inside the chocolet egg, while in the American versions, the toy is in half the shell and the chocolate is in the other half with a scoop to get at the chocolate.

These are the two toys that I acquired from the Canadian eggs. 

I know that I have some other random Kinder eggs (Including some from Jurassic Park), but they will have to wait for another post (once I can find them).