There are a billion lousy licensed toy comics in the naked retropolis. The following is about one of them. The tale begins with Mattel’s Masters of the Universe line, an assortment of bowlegged plastic titans inspired by an extremely literal (Skinkor, Man-E-Faces, Get-Your-Mom-To-Buy-It-Right-Now-Ko) and high concept mishmash of sci-fi and fantasy tropes. The popularity of [...]

…as I’m otherwise occupied at the moment.

Even the most casual readers of DC’s late 1980s output will likely have memories of the numerous house ads for the company’s equally numerous flood of “mature readers” titles unleashed during that period. As I’ve mentioned before, this wave of material resulted from a confluence of trends. On the publisher’s side, the direct market boom [...]

I was born in 1972, which means my childhood was roughly split between the touchy-feely hedonism of the Seventies and the glossy-greedy hedonism of the Eighties. It also means that I’m just old enough to remember a time before Kenner and George Lucas completely transformed the notion of “boys’ playthings.” (The concept of action figures [...]

All at once I became conscious of another sound. A noise like the crisp crackle of twigs and branches, burning in a bonfire just beyond my vision in the mist, made me think I must be approaching some burning building. I realized, when my neighbour on the right dropped with a bullet in the abdomen, [...]

You folks can keep your iPads and widescreen LCD TVs and blu-ray players. I know exactly what I want for a gift this Christmas… Granted, it’s only a scale model of the actual M-65 280mm Atomic Cannon, but it still reflects the necrotropic majesty of the original… On a side note, several of the twenty-odd [...]

This was found at the bottom of a box of vintage toys Maura brought home from an estate sale: I’m pretty sure it’s a stray page from the German edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Recommended listening: As if I had a choice.

I don’t watch G4′s Attack of the Show because, well, a man — no matter how geeky — has to have some standards, but one of my fellow Bureau Chiefs directed my attention to this segment of last night’s episode, which featured a very special guest star. Go ahead and watch it. I’ll still be [...]

(from All-American Comics #12, March 1940) Unfortunately for Gary Concord Jr. (a.k.a. “The Ultra Man”), his helio-shaft’s sticky payload was successfully intercepted by the enemy’s Strategic Diaphragm Initiative.   (If deployed properly, the system can be up to 90% successful at preventing unwanted penetration of the user’s fertile territories, though it’s effectiveness at stopping viral or bacterial [...]