F For Fake

Ugh. Unless you got a sweetheart deal, I'd be demanding a partial refund on that one.

At one time I would have agreed with you, but thanks to Deadpool, Slapstick has gone from the quarter bin to selling for $5-$20! We are truly living in a mad world.

Awesome! Larry is a cool guy and he does beautiful stuff. I have his Bettie Page barbarian print hanging in my office. Is he still in the Leitchfield area? I get down that way about once a month during the summer. Nice little town.

Since I haven't really been on top of monthlies for a while, the Rebirth event has been a little confusing. I went around to my local shops yesterday to see what I could find. The biggest shop was sold out of everything except Batman. Another shop had Batman and one copy of Green Lanterns. My final stop had Bats and Superman, but that was it. I thought I was buying the Rebirth specials, but I guess these are the #1's of the ongoing, and the one-shots came out a couple of weeks ago. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but whatever. Batman was solidly ok. Superman made no sense to me. Green Lanterns was dull as dirt. Didn't even finish reading it. Off to eBay they go! May stick around for Bats, but nothing else looks very interesting to me.

DUDE.

Nice! One of my all time favorite books. An awesome copper key that you really don't see all of the time. Picked this one up a couple of months ago. Had planned to get it slabbed, but with the new case shenanigans I'm content to sit on it for the time being. Nicest raw copy I've owned.

Went to Wonderfest this weekend. It's one of the world's largest sci-fi/fantasy model kit conventions. I can't build or paint a model to save my life, but I still enjoy attending. Every once in a while I'll get lucky and someone will have some comics. This year only two guys had any comics at all, but I did manage to grab the suddenly hot Marvel Two-in-One along with the Marvel Presents for just $2. Mark Schultz was also there, and as always, he is a super nice and awesome dude. Got to look through some of his originals, my god, beautiful stuff. I didn't have that much money on me, so I had to settle for a couple of prints. All in all a fun show this year.

I like his art too, but I don't like his Joker. There's a real divide, not a lot of people I've heard chime in on it that go "Eh, I don't care either way." Eh, I don't care either way.

Yeah, the adult area is a ghost town, a real killer for sales.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. If nothing is happening between the pages in these variants, then why will people give a damn about them 20 - 30 years from now? There are plenty of collectors who buy books for the cover art alone so this isn't always true. Plus there some keys... New Avengers 7-Squirrel Girl becomes Jessica Jones Nanny. ( laugh all you want on this one but there's a pretty big Squirrel Girl fan base out there.) Thor 617-First Kid Loki Anyone who doesn't know this is demonstrating a shocking ignorance of the comics market. Going all the way back to the GA, some of the most valuable and sought after books are such based only on their covers, be it because of the image itself, the artist , or both. -J. I would tend to agree. I don't own any Venom/Tron variants and I'm not selling any, so I don't have a horse in this race. But I'd wager that a lot of the people buying these specific variants are fans of the character or the art, or both. Venom fans are pretty hardcore. Maybe it just took a while for the books to catch on. Same with Tron (though I'd expect it to be to a lesser extent). I personally tend to stay away from variants that have nothing to do with the book itself (like Venom variant on, I don't know, a Dr. Strange book, or something) but that's just my preference. Some of these covers are pretty cool looking though!

I like J-Law quite a bit (hometown girl!) but agree that she is miscast in these movies. And the character is as well. The take on Mystique from the original trilogy seemed perfect for the character. This version, not so much. Reviews continue to be poisonous. Glad I decided to short it on HSX, I'm making a lot of fake money!

SST is killing me with the PF's. FOUR Catwoman PF's in one year??? Gah. Gotta catch 'em all!

Only until you actually put Classics Illustrated in it! Then it looks sad and you cannot give it away! This made me actually .

Beautiful stuff, Chip. I had a lot of it, and also had to give a lot of it up as well. I particularly love the Secret Wars stuff. That is amazing! Here is the lone SW figure I hung onto: This is the figure that started the collecting sickness in me. I saw it at a comic show at a local mall. It was $30. I was only 8 or 9 at the time, $30 may as well have been $3000. I drew up a contract with my parents and asked that if they bought it for me, I'd give all of my allowance, do extra chores, whatever it took. They caved and bought it for me, and despite all of the things I've bought and sold in the 30 years since, I've never let this one go.

Wow. Gorgeous presentation of a gorgeous piece. I need to get on the ball and pick up a Timm sooner than later. Very cool!

Yeah, me too. check out the Esquire photoshoot I'd post some gifs but the wife is giving me the stink eye Did I ever mention that she's my girlfriend? I'll introduce you guys sometime. why didn't you take a pic standing next to her breathing in her ear? The wife says "no".

Terrific set up!

Their site is dead...probably not a good sign!

There was a guy always at our local arcade that was basically unbeatable at fighting games. There was always a line to play him at Street Fighter 2 Turbo, Mortal Kombat, Virtua Fighter, or Killer Instinct...whichever he was playing at the time. Unreal to see him smoke 30 kids in a row without losing. He could basically play with one quarter until he was ready to go home. I could do that with Virtual Fighter, stay on beating people till I was ready to leave. One day I'm out at mall of America arcade and this kid comes up and asks to play me, I said fine, kid whipped my azz three games in a row, no one had done that to me before. I admitted defeat and bought him whatever he wanted from the snack bar in honor of his beating me. He was probably 11, had on not one, not two, but three separate fanny packs (that should have been my first clue he had super human gaming abilities) and Giant coke bottle glasses. My brother who was with me at the time called him the White Webster. I actually laughed out loud. Great story!

Bet she's Susan Delgado.

Holy ! William Stout and Mark Schultz in the guest lineup. This might be the year to finally make the effort to get there. Yup! And what's great is that everyone is so focused on models, the artists usually don't have any kind of lines. So you'd have a very good shot at having them all to yourself, at least for a few minutes!

I know! I couldn't believe it. They had some other multipacks, mostly image stuff like "Shadowhawk". I'm assuming they bought a collection of them, and had assumed that they were all pretty much worthless, as they were all priced the same. I was happy to pick this one up! And yeah, I think I'm going to leave it as is. The 3rd print is relatively tough in nice shape, but I haven't seen one of these sealed packs in a long, long time, so I think I'll just leave it.

Can't recall if I posted these before or not, and am too lazy to scroll back. Back when I purchased my signed copy of "Brush With Passion" from Dave's estate, they were kind enough to throw these in. I was super psyched about the greeting card as I'd been looking for one for years.

Picked this up at my LCS a couple of months ago for about $6. Couldn't believe it! The 3rd print is right on top, and looks sharp. I'd considered opening it up to see if the 3rd was nice enough to slab, but I have to say that I kinda like it as is. I really dig the purple and orange deco with the bats, very Halloweeny!

Dragon's Lair was absolutely groundbreaking. First "twitch" game I can remember playing as a kid, where it really mattered how quickly you could respond to a situation that popped up. It was so different than every other game out there. Basically a Choose Your Own Adventure book in video game form. They eventually released a version (I had it on Playstation 3, but I'm sure it was probably in other formats as well) where you could just sit and WATCH the whole of Dragon's Lair without having to play it. Infinitely more satisfying! Loved the design of the game, hated playing it.