The Thing, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Marvel Two-in-One #75

It's been well documented that the Thing is a fan of the New York Jets.  This makes a lot of sense (for a fictional character, anyway), because of what part of New York Ben Grimm is from and his early publication history; the Jets were an exciting team in the 1960s with "Broadway" Joe Namath and their memorable win in Super Bowl III.  I'm also fairly certain that the Thing is a fan of the New York Mets, a team that shares some fan geography as well as 1960s improbable success.

The Jets rolled into Pittsburgh yesterday as owners of week one's best offensive output and got stomped by your Pittsburgh Steelers, 28-10.

Here's a picture of Heath Miller, a vastly underrated tight end (and farmer's tan recipient) catching a touchdown pass.  OH YEAH!!  Season predictions: the Steelers will win Super Bowl XVLII.  You read it here, folks.

I am slowly working my way through the entire Marvel Two-in-One series, which despite having some memorable runs and hall-of-fame type talent on many of its issues, also has stretches of awful, awful stories.  Sometimes these issues are difficult to make it through, but for the Thing, I persevere.  It's only fair.

A few days ago I made it to Two-in-One #75, an extra-sized issue featuring a team up with the Avengers.  In it, the Thing makes two NFL references, both regarding the Pittsburgh Steelers.  The first is directly above.  It also mentions the Dallas Cowboys, but whatever.

At little bit further on, there's also a player specific, Terry Bradshaw reference!  What's funny about this is that this issue was published in 1981, as the four-time Super Bowl championship Steelers team was at the end of its run, having won its fourth championship during the 1979 season.  Many of the great Steelers players were retiring or entering into the last years of their careers.  I believe (without doing 30 seconds of research and looking it up) that Bradshaw's last year was 1983, so these references were a little late in coming.  But hey, better late than never!  It's a nice combination of two of my favorite things.

The time period was a heyday for the Steelers for sure, but it was also a time where the Thing's popularity was entirely evident.  Not only did the character headline his own book as well as appear in the proper Fantastic Four title, but he also showed up in three separate in-house ads.  The one directly above is advertising the very book it was published in.

This one was the standard mailing subscription ad.  Look at this!  The Thing takes up 25 percent of the page.

And there was also a full page ad for the then-new Dazzler series (which was the beginning of the direct market approach to sales, interestingly enough), in which the Thing shows up as part of an ensemble cast.  The Thing was as much a corporate mascot in the '60s, '70s and early 1980s as Spider-Man, or as Wolverine is today.  Good times.

UPC Codes...AND YOU!

As comics have more or less lost their space on spinner racks in grocery stores and gas stations, the need for UPC codes have lessened; comics have since found more homes in smaller specialty shops with no capabilities or desires for electronic scanning devices.

If you pick up a back issue from one of the large companies published in the 1980s, it's easy to see which of them were originally sold in comic shops (i.e. the "direct market") and which were sold at, say, a Walden Books at the mall - direct market editions would still have the box on the cover where the barcode would have been printed, but instead of the zebra-stripe lines, companies would put logos or artwork in their place.

Until I figured this out, I would wonder why Marvel decided to put a picture of Spider-Man's head in the bottom left corner of all my Fantastic Four issues. Did they think I just wanted to see it? Was it a marketing tactic to get me to pick up issues of Web of Spider-Man? No (well, maybe on some level), it was because stores selling this version didn't need to scan a barcode to keep an inventory of what they were selling like they would at, say, a hardware store. They sold one thing and almost exclusively one thing - comics. If comics cost a dollar and you bought 16 of them...well, I'll bet adding all the books up wasn't the most difficult thing, either.

This, apparently, is changing, as I found out when I listed the first issue of Teddy and the Yeti in Diamond's Previews publication. It seems that anyone listing a book in Previews is now required to have a unique, scannable barcode on the cover.

I'm honestly not sure that I've yet been to a comic shop equipped with a scanner. The one here in Wilmington is a fairly up-to-date shop; it's a decent size with lots of different products - comics, shirts, posters, action figures, games - to choose from. They write down what you're buying on a piece of notebook paper and add the total up with a calculator. This is how they do it! And it's never once struck me as odd.

But I suppose that it was bound to happen, and, I thought, now I could have my own shiny barcode that I could flaunt around school to all of my friends. It seems that most barcodes are bought in bulk, and it was suggested that someone like me, who needed to buy...well, one...go to a website where they resell barcodes. I'm curious as to why there are barcodes available to sell again. The one you had wasn't working out for you? Found a newer one and decided to replace the older model?

At any rate, I ended up buying three from www.buyabarcode.com. One UPC code cost $85 and the total for three was $150...so now I have two codes just lying around, taking up space in my house. Maybe I'll take one and slap it on my pants...just so I can walk around scanning my pants when I go out shopping. Maybe there will be guards who will try and stop me as I walk out of Target or some place, and I will have to explain that this has all been a big misunderstanding, because you see, these pants are mine, and the barcode is mine. And then we will laugh.

So Teddy and the Yeti #1 is appropriately tagged and coded. I had to move a few things around on the cover to make sure nothing was obstructed, but it worked out just fine. Now the three comic shops with scanners can all breathe sighs of relief.