Hot Thing Summer: Fantastic Four milk

 

I vaguely recall seeing a blue Star Wars milk tie-in a while ago. I don't remember specific thoughts about it, just an overriding emotion that I would not want to drink it and that, perhaps, it should not exist on this world. Well, sometime around June of last year, I found myself on the hunt for what I expect was the exact same product with a different label on the front, and I'm here to say that I did both buy and consume TruMoo's Fantastic Four: First Steps promotional milk-like substance.

I knew that these products were coming sometime in the summer, so I kept an eye out every time I went to the grocery store, but I only discovered them when I saw a half gallon in someone else's cart. I'm only slightly ashamed to say that I talked to a stranger in my local Giant to find out just where they found their container, and it turns out that I missed it because it wasn't shelved with the other milk, but the milk-adjacent liquids like creamer and Quik. All four Fantastic Four characters got their own label, and I of course picked the Thing.

This was not just dyed regular milk, but flavored; the label listed it as "Fantastic Berry." I was hesitant to try it, but, I mean, it says it's fantastic, so why not. Well, the reason why not is because it was kind of syrupy, and rather than fruity, it almost tasted like it was...I want to say perfumed? It was an interesting experience. I did it for the Thing.

Wouldn't you know it, TruMoo's Fantastic Berry milk wasn't the only FF milk product out there this summer. Lehigh Valley is a local dairy brand that I suspect is actually owned by a really big corporation (I mean, I'd guess they probably own TruMoo as well) that puts regional labels on their cartons in different locations. Their take on Fantastic Four milk was a lot more straightforward, as theirs was just a gallon of milk with a character on the label.

As with the Fantastic Berry drink, each FF character got featured on a label, but these were specific to whole, 2%, 1% and skim. The Thing got plastered onto the whole milk gallon jugs, so that's what I got.

I, of course, immediately thought of what my life would be coming to if I kept empty plastic milk jugs, like, on a shelf or something, so I took the slightly less crazy (but still crazy) pathway and I cut the labels off of these to keep.

Around this same time, TruMoo ran a promotion where they gave away color-change Fantastic Four-themed glassware to people who sent in a proof of purchase and filled out an online form. Each week for a month, you could send away for that week's glass. These were apparently very limited, but I still somehow landed both the Thing and Reed. The back of the glass has logos for both the movie and TruMoo.

By "color change", I mean that these reveal their colors when you pour a cold drink into them, or just put them in the fridge for the purposes of taking pictures for your blog. As with much of the promotional materials, these glasses used the standard marketing images. Still, I think that this is one of the more unique pieces of merchandise for the movie, and I'm happy to get this one. Some folks are attempting to add a new wing to their houses by selling theirs on eBay.

Let's look at one more First Steps glass. This one was available at Alamo Drafthouses across the country and is at least a little bit different than just the standard promotional item.

You could order these glasses at the physical Alamo locations, and they have similar ones for many of the movies they show there. I have to believe that there's one guy who collects them all and just has a house full of movie-themed glassware. I guess there are stranger things. You could collect milk jugs.

Hot Thing Summer: Regal's Fantastic Four trading card set

Let me tell you a little bit about the Regal Cinemas 4DX theater experience. It's like you're on a roller coaster, but you still have to watch a movie, and also you get misted with water every few minutes. If you can manage to not be forcibly ejected from your seat during a screening, you get some trading cards afterwards. Maybe? Or was that just me? In any case, I braved the mechanical bull that was the 4DX theater in early May for one reason and one reason only: because there was some Fantastic Four: First Steps promotional merchandise to be had.

The start of Marvel's summer movie season was its Thunderbolts* film, released at the beginning of May. On this same day, the company put out a social media advertisement that showed off Fantastic Four trading cards, and not much context. I eventually figured out that these were real, and that you could get them at very specific Regal Cinemas locations. I looked it up and learned that there were only two of these 4DX locations in the entire state of Pennsylvania, but what do you know, both of them were about an hour away from me. Did I immediately get my car keys? No, I waited several whole minutes to do that.

I thought that the Thunderbolts* movie was pretty good. The Fantastic Four teaser in the post-credits scene is a little confusing after having seen the First Steps movie, but whatever -- I saw the Pogo Plane (they're probably not calling it that) and I liked it. I was one of five people in the fully automated theater, wearing 3D glasses and being jostled around in my seat as chairs all around me were seemingly filled by ghosts, but I was determined to get those cards. I got them, and, um, I might have talked myself into getting a few more packs on the way out. Listen, I deserve this.

The packs were pretty nicely made. They felt like the wax packs of yore and they maintained the retro theme that much of the FF advertising had throughout the buildup to the movie. The back of the package had the company branding on it and there were five cards inside, with all four members plus H.E.R.B.I.E.

The backs of the cards are all the same, with the "4" logo and movie date. These cards were really great and boy, am I glad that I found some locally and didn't have to pay to buy 'em on eBay after the fact. I got to keep a sealed pack and open one up. This was a great success.

This happened to be Free Comic Book Day weekend, so I grabbed the very first Fantastic Four FCBD title in the event's 25-year history, which means it was a big day. Around this time, Diamond filed for bankruptcy, and the Free Comic Book Day brand is owned by them, so maybe this was also the last FCBD? At least with that specific title and logo? Who knows.

A few months later, there were four more First Steps promo cards to be had, these ones from Topps at their Comic-Con booth in San Diego. They released one each day of the show, from Thursday through Sunday.

And in the months since, Topps has put out a bunch of sets that include some FF movie cards. Most of them use the standard promotional art and images, and they're hard for me to keep track of. The trading card industry shares a lot of the same ills as the comic book industry, in that it's caught up in another dumb speculation boom, and thus there are variants and shiny, metallic versions and, like, pop up versions or whatever. I picked up a Thing card from eBay recently and it has 82/125 stamped on the back, and I'm thinking to myself, is this good? Do I care about this? And then I settle on, "well, this is dumb," and then there's a voice that whispers in my ear, "it's the same with comic books and variant covers" and I try to suppress that as much as I can. Ah hem.

Anyway, the Regal cards were a great promotion, and I was happy to chase them down. I'm not sure if it would have been better with a stick of gum included.

Hot Thing Summer: Little Caesars Fantastic Four pizza

 

I never give Little Caesars enough credit. I don't order their pizza very often, but when I do, I find myself thinking, "this is an okay delivery pizza." And that's, I mean, pretty good, all things considered. Beyond this, though, I like that Little Caesars is willing to go all in on a marketing promotion. A few years ago, they made a Bat Pizza, which was their pizza shaped like a bat, and it tied in with one of the many Batman movies. I tried it! It was fine. Good enough!

When I found out about their Fantastic Four: First Steps marketing tie-in, I knew it was time to place another order. The company had four pizza boxes, each with a different FF character on it; if you placed them all together, the "4" logo connected the boxes in the middle. My overall goal was to get an empty box. A Thing box. An empty Thing box, without cheese or whatever on it, that I could keep and store and look at and wonder, over the next 30 years, "do I really need to keep this?" It goes in the Thing museum, everyone.

My order was a moderate success. I say this because I did, indeed, get pizza, and I ate it, and it was pretty good. I got the Invisible Woman box. At the store nearest to my house, the front, ordering area is as close to autonomous as it can get at this point. It's like walking into some strange, liminal space, because no one is there. There's a counter with a menu, but you're directed to a warming station where you're instructed to enter a code to open the door to the space that contains your pizza. It's like ordering a hammer from Lowe's for pickup, but instead of a hammer that you use to pound nails, you eat the hammer, or whatever.

Anyway, when you attempt to get the attention of the pizza makers in the back, they give you a wearied look, but I took my chances because I was hoping to grab a Thing box. I was informed that the workers go through all of one character before moving onto the next, and the Thing boxes were probably in some unopened stack somewhere else. That was fine, of course, and I had no desire to get into a battle of wills with a food service worker (they don't deserve having to deal with some weird, desperate person getting upset over a box), so Sue Storm and I left with one pizza. Here's a picture of it!

The box was, as far as pizza boxes go, pretty neat. It continued to advertise for the movie on the sides:

About a week later, your friend (and mine) Larry barged into a different Little Caesars location and demanded a Thing box. He left with two, and now I have two unused Thing pizza boxes, and my life is 12% better.

I later learned that there was a specific Fantastic Four style pizza being offered, which consisted of one pizza with four toppings on separate sections: cheese, pepperoni, sausage and bacon, and pepperoni and jalapeño peppers. I imagined trying each of these, and that was good enough for me.

There's also a promotional hat floating around there. It's on my radar, and I need to pick it up, but so far it's been elusive. One day, pizza hat.

This was a decent promotional tie-in that didn't require Little Caesars to try out any new pizza recipes. I would have been more excited if they had, say, offered up a Thing pizza. Maybe it could have had a smashed up brick or something on top. Next time.

Hot Thing Summer never ends: Fantastic Four cereals

You might be asking yourself, "Jeff, it's been months since you've posted anything. Are you okay?"

I'm fine, thanks.

You might also be asking, "Can you really call this post 'Hot Thing SUMMER' in December?"

Yes, I can. Hot Thing Summer is here. It is eternal. Let's look at the media/merchandizing blitz that surrounded Fantastic Four: First Steps. This one's about the General Mills cereal tie-ins. There's a lot of 'em.

Going into spring and summer of 2025, I knew that Disney and Marvel were going to market hard for the FF movie. Maybe it was to make up for the years that they pretended the characters didn't exist, or maybe it was because Disney was hoping that the Fantastic Four could bring Marvel's movies back to Avengers-level heights. Either way, the sheer amount of items with the FF brand that showed up this year, especially leading up to the movie, was pretty staggering. A lot of it was fun, and I tried to keep up with it all, as much as I could. The General Mills cereals were maybe the first of the deluge that was to come, and MAN, was I excited to see it.

This led to me taking pictures of cereal boxes at different grocery stores, and lining my cart with these things. Some people gave me strange looks. They didn't get it.

The first box to show up in my area was Cheerios with the Human Torch on the front. These appeared more than a week before any others, leading me to think that the other three would be difficult to find. What I think actually happened was that stores got all of them at the same time, but because Cheerios is a popular cereal, they probably moved through their stock a little more quickly, so Johnny Storm made his debut while the others were still sitting in stockrooms. Still, it was a harrowing few days of searching different stores for the right box of Reese's Puffs.

General Mills released the four main characters on four different boxes: the Torch on Cheerios, the Thing on Reese's Puffs, Mr. Fantastic on Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and the Invisible Woman on Lucky Charms. But there were a few others out there, limited to different stores.

First, Galactus got his own retro-style box of Cocoa Puffs, exclusive to Walmart stores. Since Walmart has stores all over the country, this wasn't too hard to find.

Trix, with H.E.R.B.I.E. on the box, was a different story, and I found some more out of luck than anything else. This box was exclusive to Kroger-brand stores, and there are currently zero of those near me. But I took a trip to the Pittsburgh area at the beginning of July, and I made the very irresponsible decision to drive from there to Morgantown, West Virginia to search the Kroger stores that surround the WVU campus. On my second stop, I found Trix in Giant Size (an absolutely enormous box), and let me tell you, I felt pretty good about myself.

Now, Kroger is not a regional store, but they don't have locations all around the country. I later learned that the same company that owns Kroger also owns Ralph's, which is a grocery store I visit in San Diego to get cheese (presumably other things) after a long day at Comic-Con. Did Ralph's also get H.E.R.B.I.E. boxes? Who can say? They didn't have any when I visited during the convention.

I learned from this experience that cereal boxes come in a lot of different sizes. I knew all about regular and family size, but many shops also stock giant size as well as mega size, which I guess you get if you have to feed an entire summer camp. Mega size should not exist. It is an abomination.

Anyway, I started seeing the Fantastic Four on different sized boxes, and I very reasonably thought, "I'll just get one of each, like, regular size box and that'll be that." This was a good thought. The fronts all looked the same, no matter the size.

And then I found my the giant Reese's Puffs with the Thing on the front, and I knew it was all over. This was the Giant-Size Fantastic Four. I grabbed it.

It had been decades since I had tried Reese's Puffs, and now I was buying every box I could find. Whatever you paid for the license, General Mills, it was worth it.

I ate some. It was as I remembered, which is to say, there's no way it's good for you. But it was Thing Cereal, so I ate it, just as Ben Grimm would have wanted.

The backs of the boxes were all pretty much the same, though they each had a different phrase to decode.

A few days before Comic-Con, Walmart released yet another version, this one a retro, online-only Lucky Charms with a Human Torch toy inside. This one was product placement directly from the movie; Johnny eats some on screen and shows off the toy. His version had a line of dialogue, but in our universe, it's simply a tiny plastic standee (the base is on the other side of the card):

These boxes cost around $25, as I guess Walmart tried to recoup some of their advertising money, but the art on the back of the box might have been worth it:

Again, this was screen specific, but regardless, the designer did a really nice job with the art and overall feel.

So that's seven different boxes, most of which came in different sizes. If you made it about two paragraphs into this post, you know that I'm obviously a collector, but it would be pretty impractical to keep maybe two dozen unopened cereal boxes, so I swallowed hard and flattened them all to store them (I kept an unopened Reese's Puffs for display; I have some standards). Then I was faced with the question of, "what do I do with all of these bags of cereal?" So for a few weeks, I gave a lot of people unboxed bags of cereal and had to repeat the same story each time I did. But it was worth it.

These were fun to chase down, and they took up a lot of space in my head (and in the guest bedroom) for a big portion of the spring. I still have another bag of Thing Cereal to eat before it goes stale. Of all the tie-in food products, these might have been the best, but they certainly weren't the only ones. I'll show off more of 'em later.

It's been a Hot Thing Summer

One day, I expect to wake up to the (earth-shattering) news that Google has discontinued its support for Blogger, and that my years and years of comic book-adjacent posts will disappear into the ether, and I'll then I'll be able to start off conversations with the phrase, "back when I had a blog..." and just trail off into silence. For now, thought, I guess I'll be content to post really important news that bots are probably scraping for content, such as this:

I have seen the Fantastic Four movie, and it is good.

2025 has been maybe the biggest year ever for the FF and its branding. I certainly struggled to keep up with all of the marketing for the new film, with new comics and an absolute ton of products surrounding Fantastic Four: First Steps. Fantastic Four milk is now a thing! What a world we live in. I'd like to, in the weeks and months to come, post about all of the new Fantastic Four items this year has brought (and, of course, the Comic-Con experience!). But for now, let's talk a little bit about the movie.

The movie opened up on July 25th, which happened to coincide with Comic-Con in San Diego. I was hoping that there would be a screening in Hall H like last year's Deadpool/Wolverine movie, but despite the Fantastic Four being Marvel's main focus at the show, it didn't happen. I ended up going to a Regal Cinemas north of San Diego for their "Fantastic Four Fan Event", which is a phrase that meant "Jeff, spend your money here." There weren't any specially themed things happening outside of the movie, which was somewhat disappointing, but I did walk out with a set of FF enamel pins that were specific to the 7pm showing.

Walking into the show, I was certain that I was going to like it. The previews and the general vibe surrounding the production all worked for (and on) me. Walking out, I felt like the Fantastic Four finally had put its best foot forward to the world at large, at least in movie form. The characters felt like they knew (and liked) each other. The changes made in the adaptation all made sense. The scene on Galactus's ship was top-notch science fiction and the practical effects worked really well. The Silver Surfer was eerie, cold and wonderful. The Thing said "it's clobberin' time!" H.E.R.B.I.E. was cute. The Jack Kirby tribute was long overdue.

I was hoping (and I'm sure Marvel and Disney were, too) that this movie would be a billion-dollar blockbuster. It's a little silly of me to hope that a giant corporation like Disney would get even more obscenely rich, but I guess if it had, it would have felt a little vindicating after the FF's previous cinematic missteps and because of my love for the characters. In the end, it looks like First Steps will fall into the category of "good, but not great" from a box office standpoint, as it just passed $500 million worldwide after about a month in theaters. It's worth noting, though, that it's Marvel's highest-grossing movie of '25, both in the US and worldwide, and that it did well even as it went up against a much more recognizable superhero in Superman (which was another movie I really liked).

One thing this higher profile brought with it was an absolute ridiculous amount of merchandise, and I did my level best to grab what I could when it was out. Did I mention the milk? Outrageous.

Walking out of the theater, I saw both the Galactus and Fantasticar popcorn receptacles. I did not purchase either of these monstrosities, a thought that still tugs at the edges of my brain at night, but I think I made the right call.

Okay. Maybe I'll get the Fantasticar on the secondary market one day.

I barely made it back to the car before I opened up the exclusive pins. I like 'em.

It looks like the Fantastic Four will be a lynchpin in this next iteration of Marvel movies, and I'll be there for it. Now let's see the First Steps director's cut with John Malkovich's Red Ghost.

Jon Hartman's clay Thing bust!

The world is a place fraught with danger, full of tribulations and travails, but there are still some good things in it, as evidenced by this NEW THING BUST BY JON HARTMAN!

Is it my birthday? Yes, it is, but the reason I got this new addition to the Thing club is instead because...I wanted it a lot, and it's tough to say no to the Thing.

What you see here is a custom order from Pittsburgh's own Jon Hartman, who created this model of Ben Grimm, perhaps staring out into the Negative Zone as the hordes of Annihilus come barreling in toward the Baxter Building. I saw some of Jon's work on other models and knew that I had to get one for myself.

Jon used Sculpey Premo to create this work, a modeling clay that is shaped and then baked to maintain its form. It's attached to the wooden base, where it will sit for generations to observe, probably in a museum or something after I kick it. The model sits just about four inches high on top of the base. The shade of orange is just right and the individual rocks are smooshed just right into place. (That is a technical term.)

I debated asking for the mutated, "pineapple" version of the Thing when ordering this. I couldn't stray from the classic Thing, though. After getting this in the mail, I think I made the right choice, and I think that I will also eventually purchase another of Pineapple Thing. These are important decisions.

This Ink Runs Cold on Kickstarter

The Kickstarter for Scott Morse's This Ink Runs Cold graphic novel is now live! I've talked about this book a few times, and it's now off to the printer, with 89 different one-page stories, including one written my me!

What must it be like to run a campaign that's immediately successful? Is it stress-free? Do you pay even more attention to it? I may never personally know, but this one reached its funding goal in just about two days, which is really impressive!

Scott created some graphics for the campaign, one of which lists all of the creators who worked on the book. How did I get on the first line? Bribery? No, never. But if you take a look at the list, you can see some really talented industry professionals like Stan Sakai, Brian Michael Bendis, Fabio Moon, Jim Mafood, Phil Hester and a bunch of other folks.

After last year's Comic-Con in San Diego, I posted a video that I made with Scott, talking about the book and what we might expect. The finished book should be ready by this year's convention, which is a quick turnaround and really exciting.

Scott is printing a regular version of the book, and a black and white "noir" version that'll be pretty limited. There's original art tiers, bookplates, and other physical rewards to get. I'm hoping that there'll be a group signing at Comic-Con during the summer, where I will definitely try to get a second volume going via the bully pulpit, if necessary. I'm really looking forward to this book. Check it out here, if you'd like: http://kck.st/3DvoBcS