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 a 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. That's a Silver Age Human Torch if I've ever seen one.

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.

RANDOM NOTES strike back: Allegiance Comics, The Tick reunion, a new Funko Thing figure and more!

Sometimes I have stuff to talk about that doesn't really warrant an entire post, but I want to talk about them anyway, so I put them all in a post called "random notes". Also, there's an X-Men character named "Random". I hate him.

And off we go!

I'm still lamenting the loss of the DC's 100-Page Giant Walmart-exclusive comics, so I was surprised to see a new comic book display for Allegiance Comics on a recent walk through the superstore. This one isn't in the checkout line, but with the books and magazines that are usually near the back of the store, and it's got a pretty prominent endcap display going for it.

I didn't purchase any of these, but one thing I did notice is that they all had big Walmart price stickers stuck on the front of each cover.

A little while ago, I posted about a virtual Tick reunion panel hosted by House Seats and featuring cast members from all three iterations of the Tick tv shows. It happened on November 15th and it was wonderful!

The whole thing lasted about 2.5 hours and had different cast members reading scripts from each version of the show, including an unproduced episode of the cartoon!

It was simply incredible to see all of these fine folks together in one virtual space. Between readings, each Tick and each Arthur had their own mini-session to talk about their roles. I had never seen David Burke in anything after his time in the 2001 show, so I especially enjoyed getting to hear from him.

"Crossover", a new comic from Image Comics by Donny Cates and Geof Shaw, came out last month. It features a lot of copyrighted superhero approximations, including re-colored thinly-veiled versions of Captain Marvel and Spider-Man. It also maybe has The Tick show up in one panel? It might just be a re-colored Ant/Giant Man. But this guy is blue, has what looks like antennae, and is causing property damage, so I prefer to think that it's the Big Blue Bug of Justice.

Gamestop released a frightening number of new, store exclusive Fantastic Four Funko Pops for Black Friday (eight in total, ugh) this year. Each new mystery box includes a Pop figure of an FF member with a Venom symbiote. Here's the Thing, and also, I guess, the Dr. Doom/Venom pin that came in the box. There's a metallic version of the figure as well.

Back in May, I posted about the copies of the personalized, mail-in X-Men and Captain Universe from 1994 that I have. I bought both of my copies from eBay, one of which was originally purchased by or for Josh Meinhausen, whose name appears over and over throughout the book.

Well, just a few days ago, Josh himself commented on the original post to tell me that this copy...had actually been stolen from him a long time ago! Yikes! That is not what I wanted to hear. It appears that my copy fell out of the back of a truck, so to speak. Josh, if you're reading this and would like to have a tear-filled reunion with your previous possession, let me know and I can try to make that happen. Or I can just send ransom notes with pictures of this book in peril.

I've been working on a few lettering projects recently. I made these weird balloons and I like them. Here, look at them, too!

So what else have I been doing? Well, I'm staking out potential press conference locations, and I stumbled upon this little-known gem in North Philly.

Also, someone please update my IMDb page to reflect my recent appearance in the Hulu-streaming "Happiest Season" movie. Hey there, K-Stew.

Requiem for DC's Walmart 100-Page Giants

So the rumors are true - DC's 100-Page Giants line is no more. The once Walmart-exclusive titles that became shared comic store books with new stories have been replaced with pre-packaged collections of existing titles. I went to my local Walmart a little while ago and, for the first time in almost two years, found no new Giant titles on display.

I don't know why this bums me out so much - the overall quality of the Giant titles wasn't exactly stellar, and I'm not really old enough to be nostalgic for the first run of 100-page DC books from the '70s. I suppose that I was enamored by the potential of this line: a small run of titles for a good price point with new material and reprints sold in a popular retail chain - what's not to like? Comic companies don't do nearly enough outreach, and this felt like, for the first time in a while, someone was doing something to pull in new readers with a fun new format.

It's especially a shame that the books had to end like this, because many titles finished up mid-story. May's Batman Giant #5, Flash Giant #5 and Swamp Thing #5 became de facto Walmart exclusives, because those books won't be printed for the direct market, as previous issues had been. And Superman Giant #5, scheduled for June, won't come out at all. I'd imagine that DC will publish the new stories meant for that issue digitally, but it's a shame the titles won't at least make it to their respective sixth issues, when all of their storylines would have presumably wrapped up.

DC's new offerings are cellophane-wrapped four-packs of previously published comics, with, I think, some new covers. This is similar to what Marvel is doing with their shelf space at Walmart, and it feels a bit lazy to me. I never thought that DC would end up following Marvel's lead in this, as opposed to the other way around (I would have killed for a Fantastic Four equivalent of a 100-Page Giant title). The new collections are $9 items as opposed to the $5 Giant books, so they're not the same type of impulse buy I imagine the Giant books were.

Even the display, which was one of the cooler things about the Giant line, is smaller and more subdued. 

This is not to say that I don't remain a sucker for comics in retail stores, as I picked up the five offerings for June.

Part of me is somewhat relieved, I suppose, as my "to read" pile grew considerably over the last two years, mostly due to the Giants line and how I was adding the equivalent of around 20 books to my stack each month after I added titles like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash and Swamp Thing to all of my regular comic shop titles. Now I'm able to make a dent in some of the books that have been piling up, but I'll still miss these fun titles that always felt special.

Batman Giant, it seems, wins the race for most issues published at 21 between two volumes, just edging out Superman Giant by one issue. I've got complete runs of most of the Giant titles; when the books lost their exclusivity in 2019, I cut back on some books, but now that they're all done for good, why not grab those extra issues of Wonder Woman and Aquaman?

I hope that, if nothing else, DC helped comics claim a little bit of shelf space in Walmart (and the same goes for those two Target Giant comics, too) for the future, and I hope that they don't let the opportunity go to waste. Comic shops are the backbone of the retail industry, but putting comics in high-traffic areas like the Walmart checkout line can be nothing but a good thing, in my opinion.

Here's a picture of the display as it looked in July of 2018. I remember how excited I was to see these new books in a new location. Oh, and I, uh, eventually took the display home with me (but not until they replaced it with a new version). Here's hoping for new and better things in the future.