Funnybooks @ Taco Bell!

Yep, that’s right I went to Taco Bell yesterday and I found a complete set of the (four) Marvel Comics. The set consists of four brand new, full-sized 12-page comics featuring four Marvel characters or teams (Thor, Captain America, Avengers, and the Fantastic Four).



Each comicbook features 11 pages of a main story, plus a 1-page back-up by cartoonist Chris Giarrusso. Chris is perhaps best known as the guy who produces an on-going — if irregular— feature running through many Marvel comics called Mini Marvels. The Mini Marvels are kid-like incarnations of the main marvel characters in, well, silly adventures. Many of these stories have been collected into digest-sized books and re-issued. If you can find any of them I highly recommend you pick them up.

More Spidey Tchachkas!

As promised, here are more Spidey-related items that my beautiful family has acquired for me recently.

I truly have to hand it to my wife and kids, because not only do they put up with my funnybook habit, but they often supply me with a fix, by hooking me up with all sorts of comicbook-related goodies. (When my wife took my daughter to Micky D’s a month or so back, they had Spidey toys, and my daughter had my fie acquire one foe me, which was totally cool, as I hadn’t known that the Spidey toys were there at the time.)

Any ways, first up for this post is an old-fashion metal Spider-Man alarm clock that my son acquired for me when he was recently in Florida on a school vacation/field trip (how he arranged all that is a bit beyond me, but he did).

This is followed by the bag that it came in when he delivered it to me (no, he didn’t go to Universal, apparently he did his souvenir shopping in the Airport. He is, after all, the laziest kid alive).



This next item is a regular handkerchief that (apparently, and for no discernible reason) someone drew a Spider-Man figure on it. A buddy of mine came across it (I think it was his nephew that drew it). Well, he had no use for it, and knew of my love for all things Spidey, so he gave it to me.



If you look close at Spidey’s face, it almost looks like it was drawn upside down.

Finally, here are a couple of pics of a Spidey Easter Basket that I acquired (for 75% off) a couple of days after Easter from my local CVS. I love after-holiday pricing!



And here is the other side.



Is my family great or what?

Mini Marvels @ Taco Bell

I just heard from Chris Gar that there are going to be Marvel mini comics (staring Chris’ Mini-Marvels) at Taco Bell. I heard this on Tuesday, and ran out to my local Taco Bell, only it had a different promotion (I’m guessing the out-going promotion). These things usually change on Friday, so I’m hoping that this weekend to score a set (Whoo-Haa! more funnybooks on Free Comic Book Day weekend! What could be better than this?



By what I can see it is going to be FF, Cap, Avengers and Thor.

UPDATE! UPDATE! UPDATE!

OK, I just heard back from Chris, and he says that some Taco Bells are already distributing the comics while others haven’t seem to have gotten their shipments. So I’ll be monitoring this situation and let you know when I’ve acquired a set.

Spidey Bubbles

Yep, you heard me right, Spidey Bubbles! When my daughter returned from Virginia a week or so back, she brought with her some Spidey gifts (always a good thing). Well what she brought me was a trio of Spidey bubble-makers (one I already had, but no matter, I always love this stuff).



(This one I already had.)



This one was new.



This one was also new.

Stay tuned for more new Spidey gear!

When Parodies go bad

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m as big a fan of goofy crap as the next guy (yeah, this includes parodies) but this is such a tricky genre, that it can go horribly wrong, so quickly. That’s what I’m assuming happened with this badly-don Watchmen parody.

Sure, I suppose that when it was written, the author and his backer simply assumed that satirizing Watchmen was good enough, only it really takes more than that. This book was such a big swing and a miss that I felt the breeze from here.

Truth of the matter is that, I’ve read some parody comics from Marvel years after the event that they were parodying, and had that same sense of WTF I had when I read this piece of dreck.

Tomorrow, I’ll have more pics of new Spidey stuff I’ve acquired.

What I got for Easter

Yeah, yeah, I know that Easter was like a month ago, but right after Easter (actually ON Easter), the wife and my daughter went south to Virginia for a week (the little one had school vacation, and was invited by a friend to head south, needless to say Management went as well). Well, as can be expected, they took the camera.

Then, no sooner then they returned then the boy had school vacation, and headed souther, to Florida. Well, I had assumed that he took the camera with him as well, but apparently he didn’t. Only it wasn’t until he got back that I realized he hadn’t.

What has all this to do with the Webbing in Freedonia? Well, without access to the camera, I was unable to take pics of all the wicked-cool Spidey stuff I had gotten for Easter. (Yeah, yeah, I could have used my cell-phone camera, but, well, I was having tech issues with that little piece of hardware as well, but that’s an entirely different story).

So what we wind up with this time is a Spidey Sticker, a Spidey Tic-Tack-Toe game, and (believe it or not) Spidey kite string (which will actually go quite nicely with the Spidey Kite that I have sitting out in my garage.



Well, that’s it for now folks, I have to hustle off to a CAG-CT meeting, and I’m already running late for that.

A Blast from the (far distant) Past!

So, a couple of weeks back I attended I-Con with my friend and colleague, Mark Mazz. Our visit there was fruitful on a couple of levels (in that we got to meet with a number of our contemporaries while at the comicbook portion of the event). Plus, I got to hang with Mark, and his lovely family.

As I was leaving, Mark handed me a copy of the very first comic that Mark helped produce (As you all know, Mark was the creative Director on the three issues of Psychosis!, and issue #7 of CAG all of which contained stories of mine (see sidebar). The comic Mark gave me was Utterly Strange Stories #1. The 1991 comic features a full color Plasma Baby cover by Joseph Michael Linsner, a nine-page story, entitled Mercy Street written by David Quinn and entirely illustrated by Linsner in his classic CFD B&W style, a super vintage CFD ad and an ad for Plasma Baby with a Linsner painting!

The second story in the comic is Plasma Baby by Writer artist Mitch Waxman. Plasma Baby is Waxman’s homage to Japanese monster flicks. After it’s debut in Utterly Strange Stories it moved on to Caliber Press where it was appeared in a pair of critically acclaimed miniseries.

Both of the stories in this comic are quite entertaining, with Quinn & Listner’s tale a haunting story of confinement, loneliness, and feeling trapped, while Waxman’s story is a more lighthearted entry into the genre of giant monsters. After reading the comic, I realized that Mark (the comic’s Creative Director) really had this long history of producing high-quality independent comics, and it made me wish that I had spent a greater part of my early career self-publishing.

Fun stuff, all around. As I did a quick search across the net, I discovered that copies Utterly Strange Stories still exist and are available for sale. If you are interested in what a high-quality Indie comic looked like in the early ‘90s (with work from top-flight creators in the field), then you should look this one up and grab a copy for yourself.