Merry Christmas, blog friends!

We all know that blog friends are real friends.  So Merry Christmas to one and all.

Birthday Swag, 2012

Another birthday has come and gone (my...17th...), and there's an annual tradition around these parts - one where I takes pictures of the cool stuff I got and everyone else oohs and aahs because I'm such a lucky guy.  So let's get to it!  Right at the top is a guitar pick with the Thing on it!  Here's a fun fact: there's a company that makes display cases for guitar picks.  Also, I have one.  Also, the Thing is on the  pick.  It's pretty cool.

Some DVDs!  New Adventure Time and the 24/7 Penguins special from 2010/11.

This above shirt is from Larry, and I'm pretty intimidating in it.  It's a Future Foundation shirt...specifically with the symbol the Thing wears.  This is the most obscure Thing shirt I've got, and I love it for that reason.

I stopped and bought another couple Marvel Treasury editions on the way to visit my parents for some birthday dinner.  Look, it's the Thing dressed up as Santa Claus!  Someone at Marvel must have thought that Ben Grimm as Santa was hilarious, because he's been depicted this way quite a few times over the years.

This last image wasn't, well, a birthday gift from anyone other than myself.  It wasn't a birthday gift at all, actually, but I got it in the mail the day before my birthday so it goes up on the blog regardless.  Check out this great print with a retrospective of Al's career so far.

There were a couple other things that didn't get pictures taken of them, so they will remain a mystery perhaps forever, or perhaps until I decide I want to take pictures of them.  All in all a great day.  Next up: an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen with a confusing, obscure quote written in icing.  Can't wait.

Temperature sale swag at Pittsburgh Comics! (and a new Dukes of Hazzard blog!)

Finding great deals is one of the things that makes collecting fun, and a recent "temperature sale" at McMurray, PA's Pittsburgh Comics brought in some hallmark examples that I'm particularly happy with.

Here's how a temperature sale works: the temperature at the time of purchase equals your total discount.  Tuesday was one of those days at the comic shop, and I took full advantage of the unseasonably warm weather to grab a ton of great books.  My discount was a whopping 70% off!

One of the reasons I went to the shop in the first place to was to check out a recently acquired collection of Marvel Treasury Edition, a 1970s oversized that featured mostly reprints.  While grabbing those left and right, I also picked up the two oversized Superman/Spider-Man crossovers, which are just classics. It's interesting to note that Superman gets top billing in both, even though the second book was published as the last issue of Marvel Treasury Edition.

I cleaned up on the Fantastic Four issues of the book, which apparently needed another adjective to show just how great they were.  These pictures don't make it clear just how big these books are.  They're ungainly and I really have no idea how I'm going to go about storing these books...they certainly won't fit in a regular size comic box.  I'm just glad that they came in plastic bags so I didn't have to search for them.  Apparently they're listed as "treasury size bags".

The treasury books alone came to over $130 at the register, but thanks to the sale, I got over $90 off.  This was the only way I was ever going to own a book like the Superman vs. Spider-Man issue, so I'm a lucky guy.

I did all right with regular back issues as well.  I grabbed a number of random Fantastic Four related books (no, that's not the original FF #1 in the top left, but a reprint that came with a Marvel Legends action figure).  Oh, Marvel Team-Up.  The fact that the Human Torch took top billing in a handful of issues is flustering sometimes.

I also got a half dozen issues of the creatively conceived but often poorly executed Tangent Comics that DC put out in the late '90s.  I don't know what it is about self-contained alternate realities in comics, but I usually end up trying to get full runs of these.

Oh!  And I got both issues of the strange Star Trek/X-Men comics put out when Marvel had the license.  The Next Generation crossover was continued in a novel, apparently, which was an odd lead-in.  I remember flipping though the first book when it came out, and chuckling at the Dr. McCoy meets Dr. McCoy moment, and I did the same this time around as well.

Lastly, I picked up two variant editions of the Ultimate Fallout book.  Yes, the only reason I got them was because the Ultimate Fantastic Four is on the front.  It happens.

This blog isn't entirely about the cool comics stuff that I buy, but it's fun to post some of that stuff from time to time.  Our good friend Larry Franks recently started up a blog of his own as a companion to his Dukes of Hazzard website, and you should check it out!  On the blog, Larry discusses all of the great Dukes swag that he has and comes across.  From the perspective of a collector (no matter what it is you collect), this is very cool.  Larry's got some great stuff and he's showing it off a little bit at a time.  Go there now (AND EVERY DAY) by following this link: http://dukescollector.blogspot.com/!