Freebie Friday!

For the next few months I will be featuring a freebie every Friday, Freebie Friday! if you will. What's a freebie? To me a freebie is defined as follows:

free-bie (also free-bee)
Is something that is given to a person for no exchange of money, free of charge. Further, an item that is not given as a present, ex: birthday present or christmas present, but not to include gifts handed out as promotional items.

These are items that I have been given for one reason or the other because I collect something along those lines or I like characters from that particular form of entertainment. Needless to say free stuff is the best stuff!

To start this off, I bring you something I just scored this week. It's another Justice League promotional sign. What makes this one pretty cool is it has been die cut and layered so it has a three dimensional feel to the artwork. I snapped a pic of this on a background so you could see the characters sort of bursting off the background. This was just being thrown in the Photo Studio here at work and I asked if I could hang it up and I was told I could do whatever I wanted to with it since it wasn't used anymore.

Well it's now going to be hanging in my office here at work as soon as I get some hangers! I really like items like this, so let me hear some feedback if you want me to continue with Freebie Friday.

Who knows it might be interesting, it might be lame, but every Friday won't be the same!

Okay that was my sad attempt at ad copy.

Mego Knock-Offs Assemble!

I am totally digging these new Signature Series Figures from Hasbro. These are a continuation of sorts of their previous line of "mego like" figures that featured DC characters. This time around it's Marvel that's getting the retro retread treatment. I like these because they remind me of Megos back in the day and I finally get a chance to get characters that I didn't get back then.

So far Hasbro has churned out a pretty good number of these things starting with Spider-Man, Black Costume Spider-Man, Doc Oct, and the Green Goblin. The second series featured Captain America, Wolverine, Dare Devil, and Iron Spider-Man (from the Civil War story arc). Somewhere in between they did a couple of Target exclusives of First Appearance Spider-Man and the Punisher. That's just the Marvel characters!

More recently they produced a Cyclops figure and rumor has it a Sandman figure will make an appearance soon. My hopes are high that this line continues strong into the future, but by the looks of Hasbro's spotty distribution of these and the series trickling down to just one figure per release, I'm afraid it might be the DC line all over again. I hope I'm wrong on this one.

My goal has been so far to get one of every one of these toys Marvel and DC. So far I've been pretty good about picking these up, to date I am missing only a couple of the DC figures, hopefully Ebay will turn up these at decent prices.

Collection Wall

I'm in the process of re organizing the "collection wall" in my home office / studio. For the longest time it has featured Batman, but the idea behind the wall was to be able to rotate various items from my entire collection and make more items viewable. I really do not like having anything in storage and I think it's much more enjoyable to see what you collect. I think this may be one of the reasons I started this blog, as I bring things out, I can shoot a picture, remember a story about it, and actually enjoy it.

So I thought it would be cool to see how everyone else views or displays their collection, don't be shy, if it's in totes and boxes, it's in totes and boxes (I recently found a whole tote buried in the bottom of a closet that had toys I didn't even remember buying). I always find it interesting, seeing how others display and organize their collectable prizes. So chime in while I get things organized.

It's Astroboy!

Some more Kubricks goodness on Tuesday! I picked this Kubricks up from one of the most awesome, back alley, toy shops in Hong Kong! I was finishing up my shopping in this little (and by little I mean about the length and width of a full size pickup truck) shop when I spotted this Kubricks by the cashier.

I topped off my purchases with Astroboy here, and made my way to the second most awesome, back alley, toy shop in Hong Kong, which was right across the alley.

For those of you who are going "who's Astroboy?", he was a Manga character created by Tezuka Osamu in the 50's that later became a television show in the 60's. Considered by many to be the birth of Anime (Japanese Animation). Japan knows him by his name Mighty Atom, but either way it's a fun little comic / cartoon. I would recommend checking out the reprinted stuff from Dark Horse or maybe tracking down some of his cartoons.

SOTW: Part 10

"Join me and I will complete your training" Hey why not? Darth Vader seemed to have a pretty sweet gig right? Not for Luke though he was a Jedi, like his father before him! Wait a minute... Oh well, this weeks Stormtrooper of the Week (SOTW) is from a set of Topps Empire Strikes Back cards, printed in 1980.

These can still be found at comic shops across the land, but this particular card is from one of my first encounters with a wholesale club concept that has changed the way America buys bulk. All my friends and I would go and beg our parents to take us to Sam's which had just moved into a bowling alley right next door to Wal Mart, go figure, huh. The place really didn't seem as big as it does now, and come to think of it it really wasn't in that location long.

We would save our allowance and newspaper money to buy these chewing gum cards by the box load and tear home to see who could chew the most gum while sorting and trading cards. The stacks of cards and stale chewing gum never seemed to end.

The illustration cards were always some of my favorites (next to the Ralph McQuarrie cards), while simple in design they had pretty dynamic poses of the characters. The backs of the cards would carry quotes or facts about the movie which were always good for a quick reference to all your favorite moments in the film. These were probably one of the reasons I decided to start a career in illustration.