F For Fake

Some old school AH goodness. These Trek books aren't worth anything, but I NEVER run across them. Got the set for about $2. Also picked up a couple of Zee's at my LCS.

Some LCS pickups. The Solar is nicer than the scan (need to clean my glass!) and the AH Zatannas aren't perfect, but they're decent placeholders. Also picked up some nice omni's with my HPB 50% sale.

Sweet!

My favorite excerpt from a review from a friend of mine: "It's a mess, the 3rd act looking like a SyFy channel straight to video exploitation film done in Romania. The only saving grace being the bits where the characters actually talk to each other, but otherwise a mess."

Ha, true! You can definitely tell after the first flick RDJ flexed his celeb muscle and said "Ok, I'm not wearing any of that junk anymore, you can CGI my face in." Hell, he barely even went that far with Iron Man 3, where he mostly ran around in a hoody while wearing an Iron glove.

Whoa, everyone else is probably pretty jealous that that the Cyborg guy gets to wear Pj's while they're all cinched up in plastic body armor and foam.

I can only base my expectations on what I've seen so far in the trailers, and how I felt about MoS and BvS, which I'd considered to be of a piece with JL, and both of which I loathed. I'm willing to go see JL and try to judge it on its own merits, but with the partial exception of Wonder Woman, I've had a strong distaste for the general aesthetic of the DCU movies so far. I just think the whole "universe" was launched in an ugly and wrongheaded fashion. Would I love to see a great Justice League movie? Absolutely! But nothing I've seen so far suggests that this will be a change from what has come before, and I already know how I feel about that junk. I don't have a personal stake in how much it makes, so financial success doesn't matter to me. And CG doesn't have to be perfect. For me, "perfect" would mean practically no CG at all. But I realize I am not with the times in this respect. Someone keeps paying to see those godawful Transformers movies, after all. So yeah, I will withhold a final judgment until I see the actual film. But so far I can only base my anticipation around what I've seen in the trailers, the the trailers just make me sad.

It's pretty cool! I was always fond of the original Tryout book (the one with Spidey on the cover) but I don't know that I've ever run across this one in the wild. In fact, I'd kinda forgotten that it existed.

Man, Eclipse put out SO much great stuff back in the day.

Another day, another dollar dive. Actually paid about $7 for the Marvel Tryout Book, but I never see these around, so I picked it up. Nothing mind blowing in the dollar bins tonight. The Ultimate X 1 is a solid book, and I've been on a Spawn kick lately as well. Oh, and a handful of X-Men newsies for my collection. Back to the bins!

Finally picked up a couple of pieces on my To Buy list! The NECA 1/4 Catwoman is a work of art, and bargain for the price. The DC Collectibles BTAS Batwing is just enormous. Holy cats. I have no idea what I'm gonna do with this thing, but I love it.

You got a mouse in your pocket?

Oh, they're all awful, so far. I just hate the look of the whole thing, from the CGI environments to the basic costume designs. Just an ugly, ugly lookin' movie.

Well, they released Blu Ray Legacy Collections of Frankenstein and Wolfman last year, and released Legacy Collections of Dracula and Mummy this year. They look beautiful, at least in my experience. So I'd have to imagine that Invisible Man and Creature will hit next year, at which point we'll have all of them!

I had that whole set of Eclipse posters once upon a time, got water damaged when the basement at my folks' leaked. Haven't seen a nice set locally since. Inre: this particular one, I always thought the World of Wood covers were unfairly underloved, in the Dave canon.

Yes, this exactly.

Yeah, I've never been much for trades. Someone is pretty much always going to come up with the short end of the stick. I'd rather just trade my cash for their goods, and vice versa. Simpler.

Precisely. I don't know why, with these reboots and re-imaginings, like "Dracula Untold" and "The Mummy", they insist on straying so far from the original monster designs and aesthetics. Universal still owns those designs, and they continue to sell merch year in and year out. It seems like a no-brainer, to me at least, to make a Frankenstein that looks like Frankenstein, a Wolfman that looks like Wolfman, etc. They were gothic horror films with timeless creature designs. There are ways to update these monsters without completely throwing away what made them iconic in the first place.

I'll be curious to see how this all shakes out. Trailers look godawful to me, seemingly carrying over the hideous BvS aesthetic, but I suppose they'll still get my money eventually.

Would really like to see Hickman take on the Legion.

that's really my only problem with them. I actually like them quite a bit for a quick/cheap option when bagging up a bunch of things that aren't really meant for the long-term collection. I've never had any issue with the sticky part getting stuck to a book. However, yes, those little peeled-away strips are annoying as hell. After I've bagged a couple hundred books, I'll still be finding them weeks later, stuck to the underside of the couch, etc.

Revenge of drek! Fun visit to HPB tonight. Nice set of Battle Chasers (which remain more popular than I would have initially thought) for a buck each, including the #1 Monika variant cover, which is a fairly pricey book. Also surprised to pick up such a large set of the Battlebooks. Kind of a dumb idea, but you don't see them every day, and some still seem to sell strongly.

Well, my experience is that you can sell them all fast, or you can maximize your profit, but you probably can't do both. A dealer might take the lot at once, but the best bang for your buck would be doing exactly what you're trying NOT to do, which is piece them out. Good luck either way!

True, he has been a bit of a Chatty Cathy, especially since Catwoman has been hanging around so much.

Finally got caught up on about a year's worth of reading, this past weekend. I was confused when I read 171, it seemed like the story just sort of ran out, and there was no letters column or anything. I noticed that I had a variant of 171 in my box, so I took a look at that, and realized the rest of the story was there. I assumed that the regular cover must have been misprinted or something, as the variant seemed to have a complete story. I had no idea about the pink sig variant thing. My shop is always cool to give me the variants at cover price, so I had no idea I was sitting on something hot at the time. As variants go, it's kind of a weird one, though.