2 posts tagged “superheroes”
So I've been a slacker lately. No big surprise there. Hell, I even fell asleep reading to my kids the other night. I'm pretty sure that was supposed to work the other way around. But my daughter and I have been off buying more toys to play with and here's a nice little wrap-up. I bought series 2 of McFarlane's Corpse Bride toys. For once being a slackass paid off - they were $3 a piece. After I found most of series 1 in my daughter's room I snapped off a pick of them all together. For being so cheap I have nothing to complain about. So I really wasn't too upset when yet another McFarlane figure lost a limb right out of the package. A little glue, it's all better. The character selection was better than the first series, with Mayhew,
Plum, Albert and the Skeleton being much more visually appealing
characters.
Sure my wife still raises her eyebrows when my daughter is watching Corpse Bride, Nightmare Before Christmas or any of the other silly movies she's gotten from me. But she's happy - and it's cool. How many kids get to say they played with their dad with his toy collection?
Then we finally found some new Super Hero Showdown Marvel figures. A nice wave of Fantastic Four figures. As well as the first batch of "mega" mini figures of Galactus and a Sentinel. They're all great! Ultra kid friendly and resilient enough for the baby to chew on when I wasn't looking. I'm tempted to pick up another sentinel or two, just to have an army, but the announcement at San Diego Comic Con of more Marvel Figures (including two more megas of Giant Man and Apocalypse) has left me pretty happy.
First the good stuff. The paint applications is great on all of them. Bane uses the bigger (villian) body, Batgirl and Wildcat have extra hairpieces so they can appear unmasked and Cyborg Superman's little piece of remaining face is removable. Now for the bad stuff. Flash's helmet and hair are one piece, Specter and Deadman would look a lot better if they glowed in the dark, and for some reason Bane's mask is removable (why?) while Steel's is not. Steel really should have used the bigger body, he is supposed to be a guy in a suit of armor after all, and he should have been wearing a helmet to reveal John Henry's face underneath. Minor details I know, but they all bugged me. Now I have to go wrestle Batgirl away from my daughter before she disappears and comes back decked out in pink.
More toys coming right up....
I'm a sucker for an old-fashioned comic strip. Probably just nostalgia from being a kid, stretched out on the floor reading Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County. Sure I read the rest, Garfield, Peanuts, etc. but they were just filler between my favorites and when those two died so did my habit of reading the paper every day. Instead I caught up on Pogo, the Spirit, Dick Tracy, other masterpieces of the serialized daily format. Then I became enamored with Liberty Meadows - Frank Cho's brilliant take on the format, but one that wasn't available in a paper available to me. So I read it online, Then the Boondocks. Then Aaron went on hiatus. Cho switched to comics. What's a guy to do?
So I wandering into the world of self-published online strips.T
hen on to random online strips that fell under the umbrella of my interests - toys and superheroes. And the two that kept me reading the longest are Evil Inc. and Shortpacked.
Shortpacked is all about toys from the perspective of 20 somethings working in a toy store.
You can find it here.
http://www.shortpacked.com/
Along with author David Willis's blog. Funny stuff if you are into that kind of thing.
And then there is Evil Inc. An online daily about the inner workings of a corporation created and run by Supervillians.
Supervillians who decided they could do more evil if they were part of the corporate world.
And it lives here:
http://www.evil-comic.com/
Brad J. Guigar has a great sense of timing and the extended storylines are great reads. And the art is easy on the eyes too!
