The Luckiest Boy in The World

 Man, today sucked. Paul Reubens died.

Apparently he'd been battling cancer for the past six years, and you never woulda known it.

Pee-Wee's Playhouse especially was a childhood favorite of mine. He was that rare soul that told kids that it was okay to be weird. In the words of a tweet I saw earlier today: "If it weren't for you, I'd be normal."

The Christmas Special is weird aplenty, and it's a must see no matter what time of year it is.

The man was the very definition of a One Scene Wonder. If he wasn't a lead in something, he'd be in a single scene or two in a show or movie and you'd say "hey, isn't that Pee-Wee Herman?"

Be it Bat-Mite

or as The Spleen in Mystery Men

Or in a Cheech & Chong movie

Or in Flight of The Navigator

Or in Nightmare Before Christmas

Or as REX in Star Tours

Or in Chowder

Or in the Reno 911 movie

Or as a moon in Tim & Eric

As so on. The answer was always "Yes, it was." And his moment was always the best part.

I'm glad I got to meet him a few times at cons.

Here's when me and my friend Danny met him at Monster Mania back in 2018. We only got this photo op because his autograph line was three hours long.

That was a most of the line, as seen from my spot on Cassandra Peterson's line. Her line was only 2 1/2 hours.

And here's a candid shot of him at NYCC in 2019. That time I didn't make the same mistake and got on his line the moment I could. I think I was the seventh person on it? Either way, he was just as cool as you thought he'd be.

And I got this beauty signed by him. You know, I was flipping a coin whether to get this one signed,

Or this great piece by Dave Perillo. The first piece obviously won, and I planned to get this one signed eventually. But, alas. 

I also have this rad prayer candle. Seems appropriate for today, you know?

I just know that somewhere, Pee-Wee is in that Playhouse in the sky, partying with John Paragon, Phil Hartman, and both Kings of Cartoons. Puppetland won't be the same without you.

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Being Thankful

 Thanksgiving has come and gone once again.

What am I thankful for this year? Well, the usual: I'm still alive, my parents are still with me, I've got a job, and a roof over my head. Can't ask for more than that.

But in the span of a week, I and fellow 90s kids lost two of our childhood heroes:

Kevin Conroy, the long time voice of Batman (taken at NYCC in 2014)

and Jason David Frank, the Green Ranger from the OG Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. (taken at Big Apple Con in 2021)

Losing Kevin Conroy to cancer was bad enough, but JDF was a suicide that came out of nowhere. It still feels unreal that it happened. 

I was at Anime NYC at the time, and everyone was refreshing the feeds because there was nothing official for hours, the only indication that the news might've been true was that Johnny Yong Bosch (Adam the black ranger on MMPR) was at that con and abruptly canceled his appearance on that Sunday.

I was on line for Cherami Leigh (probably best known for voicing Lucy on Fairy Tail), and she told me herself that it was official.

But I've had time to ruminate and grieve. Let's look at some other stuff I saw that weekend!

I was several yards away from Adam Savage!

Do you like Spy x Family? It was one of the big anime this year! You could barely walk without tripping over something from this one, be it artwork, merch, photo ops, and especially cosplayers. There were so many cosplayers from this, especially Yor and Anya. I've been reading the manga, it's really good.

And one of the other big hits of the year: Chainsaw Man! The cosplay was easier to pull off. Dress shirt, tie, dress pants, little red devil horns. Done.

From what I've gathered from what little I've seen from this one, it's a show directed at people that want to be stepped on.

And there were quite a few people there who were offering to make that dream a reality.

See?

Yeah, no shortage of horny at this convention.

Just as I was about to leave for the night, I found a girl holding this sign for people to write their hot anime takes on.

Of course I had to add my contribution. I stand by that, I tell you what.

If you want to see the rest of the pictures, here's the album for Saturday, and Sunday.

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Thirty-Five

 It's March 31st!

It's the day Ron Swanson had 91 meetings scheduled because April didn't think that date existed. Ahh, mid 00's comedy.

But in any case, last week was my 35th trip around the sun, and I still don't quite know what to make of that.

Getting random pains, gotta lower the triglyceride level, feeling the existential dread that you wasted your twenties and you still haven't started a family, let alone moved out of the house. That...this is all there is to it. Yep, the mid thirties has it all.

But I have Kirby. We all still have Kirby!

I picked up Kirby & The Forgotten Land last week, and I'm just gonna say it, it's one of the all time best Kirby games. They manage to translate Kirby's world, and especially his powers, to three dimensions incredibly well. The ability evolutions are a great mechanic as well, each new upgrade is mostly a power-up, but there's drawbacks, too. The upgrades that hit harder move slower, or the ones that move faster are harder to control. You know the deal.

It's weird to think that this might be one of the few Kirby games without the Stone ability. Certain Mouthful modes pretty much replace it, like you can inhale stairs or a car, and you can plow through almost anything. It's all incredibly cute, and of course frustrating on the harder missions. The game itself goes by pretty quickly, but there's big levels to make up for it. And unless you're really good or lucky, getting 100% completion mainly involved replaying levels until you rescue all the Waddle Dees.

I haven't beaten the game yet as of this writing, but I just KNOW that new little critter buddy is an evil nightmare beast. They've done that twist a few times, it's pretty inevitable.

Also, hidden HAL room in the third level of the first world!

Also, Batman '66 returned to MeTV and the world got a little better. It started right at the beginning, introducing the Batusi to the world.

Frank Gorshin's Riddler was the first villain of the show, and he remains the best actor to fill the ? suit. Until then, The Riddler was a D-tier villain in the comics until Frank Gorshin's cackling, boundless energy brought him to life. It's a completely ridiculous outfit, but he manages to make it work.

I just posted this one because I wasn't expecting the funniest line in the episode. Sixties slang was strange.

See you all in April, folks. I'll still be here, sitting on the couch and contemplating existence.

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Comic Book Basic?

I went to Big Apple Con this past weekend and, well, I may have gone a bit crazy buying up some old comics.

Am I a bit basic for picking up Venom: Lethal Protector #1? There aren't a lot of covers that scream "90s" more than that. So much holofoil.

Or Sensational She-Hulk #1?

Or Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, the issue where Peter Parker and Mary Jane get married?

Perhaps. I never fancied myself a "Comic Book Guy." but I'd been eyeballing those "basic" issues for a while and finally decided to pick them up. Thankfully they were all made in the past 35 years, so picking those up didn't break the bank too much. Hell, ACTUAL key comics (like the actual first appearances of Venom, She-Hulk, or any character people have actually heard of) go into the hundreds, if not thousands of dollars these days. It's a nice racket if you can get into it. It's one of those things where if I had a time machine, I'd go and grab all those early DC and Marvel stuff for nickels apiece, and then grade and sell them when I get back to the present.

It's the only reason I can explain the existence of this copy of Superman #1 in an 8.0 grade. I know less about how comic grading works, but what I do know is that an 8.0 for something that old and iconic is nearly unheard of, it's practically as good as it gets. Someone drew on the cover, and it has a few scuffs, but after 80 years I dare you to find something that looks that good.

For instance, this same issue, graded in .5 (essentially the cover is intact, but not attached to the issue, and there's no back cover), had a price tag of $100,000. That 8.0 is probably worth millions.

They were among several old, iconic comics in a tiny museum display the convention was running. I didn't take pics of all of what they had because frankly, when you've seen one copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 or Incredible Hulk #1, you've seen them all.

That brings us to the other headliner, Bob Kane's personal copy of Detective Comics #27, the first appearance of Batman. It, in unpleasant terms, looks like shit. But since it was owned by Batman's co-creator, that's a piece of history we're looking at here, and I was in awe just looking at it.

And in case you were wondering, here's what the back cover of one of the most iconic comic books of all time looks like. So many scams.

And the book I'm assuming the comic was bound in before it was graded. It's older than your parents, maybe even your grandparents at this point.

But basic aside, if you've read this blog long enough, I think you know where my tastes truly lie.

I'd been looking for a decent copy of this strange Jimmy Olsen issue for what felt like years, and snagged this one. Yes, in one issue Superman must confront that Jimmy has fallen into a crowd of (GASP) dirty hippies! The story is probably lame, but we all know the cover is why many of us even collect the things.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have this incredible silly Lois Lane cover. Even out of context, this is just dumb and hilarious. Also, don't pay attention to the price tags on these, a lot of the booths had sales, especially the one I bought these two issues from.

But I am here to show off what was probably my favorite find that day:

Yes! I finally found one of the Green Lantern/KFC comics in the wild. From 2017, this was the third in a series of KFC comics that were produced by DC for SDCC. 

It's well known that I love weird, random crossovers, and this is as weird and random as it gets and I'd been dying to get my hands on them. It's Colonel Sanders recruiting the Green Lanterns in a search through space, how is that not amazing? The other two issues involve alternate Col Sanders a la The Green Lantern Corps, and you just know I eat stuff like that up like a ten piece bucket.

For a free comic, for some reason they shot up in price almost immediately. Maybe it was because the novelty value? It's not often you see comics made in the past ten years be really expensive, unless they're first prints of series that eventually became hit shows (cough)Walking Dead, Invincible(cough), or it was some variant by some artist that I've never heard of. In any case, I had to pick this up, damn the expense. It was under three digits, but it currently stands as the most I spent on a comic.

And I'll add that I managed to get Thor 337, the first appearance of Beta Ray Bill, for $67. At that con, the lower asking price I saw was around $250. Most cases, I'd say trawl eBay, those are where the best deals are.

These were nowhere near all of the stuff I picked up that day, but these were some of the highlights. Maybe I'll share the rest one day? Until then, you'll probably more likely to see them on my Instagram page, conveniently linked at the bottom of each post.

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Funko Stuff!

Well folks, San Diego Comic Con has come and gone once again. Stuff got announced, people cosplayed as cool things, and Funko released more exclusive Pops.

This was the complete set of this year's pops and other stuff. Gonna admit, I was pretty relieved that there weren't a lot of pops I wanted this time around. I've said before that I've pretty much run out of room to store much of anything, so I've become really picky about what I pick up.

In past years, I wouldn't have passed up an orange Conan O'Brien, or went out of my way to grab a Man-Thing pop from Entertainment Earth. I really wish that Pez mascot wasn't a Toy Tokyo exclusive, looks like it's eBay's problem now. And really, I didn't care about the Louie Bloo Otter Pop until it was only limited to 1000 of them.

But here I'll show you what I DID pick up!

Of course it was obvious that I'd nab the Kang & Kodos two pack from GamesStop. Turns out that this was one of those rare times where it was shortpacked, because for some reason stores ended up getting less than 3 of them, if at all. I checked five stores and came up empty handed, but luckily my friend Steve was able to pick up the last one at his local store in the mall.

They're pretty impressive up close. They're slightly bigger than most normal pops, plus they glow in the dark!

These were the Funko shop exclusives. You might remember last year that I managed to snag the Banana Splits set in a stroke of dumb luck. This year Funko got much better about announcing releases in advance so I was more than ready this time. I also may have underestimated the popularity of a few characters. HR Pufnstuf and the SDCC Toucan sold out immediately, but as of writing this, Sigmund is still available.

Being a fan of Sid & Marty Krofft, I had to pick these up. The SDCC Toucan seems to be the convention's mascot, and far be it from me to miss out on yet another ad icon pop.

I really like the details on the HR Pufnstuf pop, like that Mayor badge, and that he's holding the golden flute.

Sigmund is quite cute close up.

The pictures don't do it justice, they're pretty impressive looking.

Oh! And this is probably the more impressive pickup: The Freddy Funko Box o Fun from Fundays. What's Fundays, you ask? Well, it's more or less a party Funko holds every year during SDCC for its most diehard fans and/or resellers. Everyone there gets lots of Funko pops with low production runs (like 24 and 48 pieces total. I've seen 12), prototypes (literally one of a kind), and all kinds of cool stuff. For the second year in a row, Funko decided to be generous and put out a mystery box of nine possible pops that are exclusive to this box.

This year was Tiki party themed, so that explains the two Tiki characters (which are variants of pops given at Fundays this year), plus Surfing Freddy. Batman & Joker's were variants of these two pops:

Yes, these are pops of Batman and Joker from that one episode of the Adam West series where they went surfing.

I've seen that episode and trust me when I say it's gloriously stupid. It's season 3, so it's very cheap and ridiculous, but it's a must see

As for the rest, we have Rick w/Portal Gun and Toxic Rick from Rick & Morty, Chucky, and Mer-Man from Masters of The Universe. Don't ask me why, I don't pick who gets the Malibu Stacy with New Hat treatment.

Here's what it looks like from the back. Everyone at Fundays got one, and last year was the first time Funko extended this gift to the regular folks like me. They sell out lightning quick, too, and you had to basically watch your computer to know when the orders went live.

I would've bought the one they had last year, too, but again, buying the Banana Splits pops were enough for me. And frankly, I liked this year's crop better.

This was my haul: Surfing Batman, Surfing Joker, and Portal Gun Rick.

Here's Rick up close. There's already a Rick Freddy Funko that was given out at a past Fundays, but this is the first one with the portal gun.

All in all, these were the exact three I wanted, so this was $50 and change well spent if you ask me. I've brought up in past posts that I've been having oddly good luck with mystery boxes in the past year, and it turns out this time was no different. Will my luck ever run out? Stay tuned!

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