BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOKS!!!

I've got to give a big shout out and heartfelt thanks to Dave C. for sending me a killer care package full of readable radness! Just look at all of this beautiful bookocity...

First up, we've got some classic comics from Dell and Gold Key, two of my all-time favorite comic companies from the olden days. These comics (all printed in 1962) remind me of the type you'd get in packs of 3,4 and 5 at highway rest stops. I think the Beetle Bailey issue is my favorite of this batch. I liked the comic strip when I was a kid and have always been a friend of Mort Walker's art style.

Some of you may not recognize Little Iodine, but that unfortunately named character actually had a bit of a heyday in the comic strip world back int he 1950's. She's a weird character that sort of came and went, so it's cool to come across this little slice of comic strip history when this obscure character vied for a fresh start in the comic book world.

The one that really has me scratching my head is this issue of Dondi. I've never heard of this comic in my life! I flipped through it a bit and was mystified by what I picked up from the story. He seems to be some sort of mix between Huck Finn and Johnny Quest. Weird, yet awesome.

 

But the true hidden gold in this stack of comics is this absolutely gorgeous ad on the back for the Schwinn 5-Speed Corvette bicycle. Good lord. This ad just screams vintage Americana. I mean, the bike itself is stunning, but from a graphic designer's point of view, just look at the classic typefaces used and the Norman Rockwell-like illustration of rosy cheeked kids losing their minds over Timmy's new Christmas present. Just beautiful.

Next up, we have volume four in the Mighty Marvel Superheroes Fun Book series! I have the first book, and have seen the second installment in a used book store (but they were asking a bit too much for my taste), so I was stoked to find this in my book care package.

Like most Marvel Fun Books, it's full of all kinds of classic puzzles and games. I used to eat these types of books alive when I was a kid.

One of the funnest pages, I thought, was this one, which tests your knowledge of some of Marvel's biggest villains from the '70s. Can you name them all?

And finally, the book that made me practically flip out as soon as I saw it, here we have Lucha Loco, a collection of portraits of the greatest living Mexican wrestlers.

The format of this book is so simple, so sublime. Just a portrait of a Luchador, their name and a small quote. That's it. I spent well over an hour going through this book, and when I was done, i found myself needing to add a few new masks to my collection.

 One of my favorites from the book was a wrestler that is clearly not worried about copyright infringement...

Again, my thanks to Dave C. for his generosity. You da man, Dave!

Now then, I've got some reading to do.

Book Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

I don't do a whole ton of book reviews, but the book I just finished reading was so unbelievable, so imaginative, so original and so seemingly ripped from the very corner of my heart that contains everything geeky and fantastic that I have ever loved, that I just had to tell you all about it.

Now that I think about it, this isn't really a review so much as it is a love letter.


Ready Player One is the kind of story every self-professed geek has always wanted to read, or maybe even write themselves, but more probably wanted to live.

Here's my quickie, spoiler free run-down of the story: About 40 or so years in the future, the planet is ravaged by ecological disasters and the human population is massively over-crowded, losing energy resources fast and every system we have ever counted on is on the verge of collapse. But that really doesn't matter because most people live their lives virtually in the Oasis, sort of a mix between Second Life, Facebook, Amazon, Phoenix University and every MMO ever created all rolled into one. In fact, it's such a massive online environment that it basically replaces the internet as we know it now. People of all walks of life practically live every waking moment in the Oasis through the use of virtual reality visors, special interactive gloves and other forms of immersive equipment. The Oasis is where you can literally go to school, go to work, fight Orcs, become a Jedi, buy your groceries or live out any other fantasy your little heart could want.

When the creator of Oasis kicks the bucket (imagine a combined Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Benjamin Franklin and Sheldon from Big Bang Theory), he's one of the last gazillionaires on a planet full of poor, starving saps. The kicker is that he has no heirs, so, being the creator of the world largest online game/world and a lover of classic games from his teen years in the '80s, he hides an Easter Egg somewhere in the vastness of the Oasis. This Easter Egg can only be found by finding three keys that open three gates that will all test you before allowing you to move on. And every clue that leads you to each key and each gate is hidden within some form of geeky 1980s pop culture, be it video games, roleplaying games, TV sitcoms, movies, Japanese animation, comic books, pop music or what-have-you.

Know your '80s pop culture well enough, then you can solve the clues, find the keys, find the gates, beat the tests and possibly find the Easter Egg, which will win you all of the inventor's vast fortune.

The story is told from the point of view of one of these young egg hunters (called "Gunters" for short), but not just any Gunter. No, this chap is the very one who finds the first key after five years of people trying since the creator's death, instantly making him a world-wide living legend, if he can keep himself alive, that is.

You see, he's not the only Gunter, they are legion, and fiercely competative to a dangerous degree. And to make matters worse, there's a  huge army of hired faceless boot-boy Gunters sent out into the Oasis by a massive corporate monster that plans to find the Easter Egg and use the fortune that comes with it to take over the Oasis and turn it into a money-making corporate wasteland for only the few who can afford it.

This is just the first couple of chapters.

After that it's a non-stop ride full of classic videogame trivia, Dungeons & Dragons monsters come to life, battling giant Japanese robots, Firefly-class spaceships, Deloreans, anti-gravity night-clubs, adorable geek girls and... wait... I probably shouldn't say any more.

The characters are rich and likable, the evil doers are sinister and worthy of the reader's ire. The plot is ingenious, the pace is heart-pounding.

My biggest regret is that this book isn't already the first in a trilogy. Ready Player One is the kind of book that makes whatever unfortunate book I pick up next suck by default, because nothing compares to this story.

My fellow geeks, this is our Catcher in the Rye. This is our Fahrenheit 451. This is our 1984.

You know what. Screw it. I'm going to read it again. Later.

Book Look! Mail Order Mysteries by Kirk Demarais

I've been a fan of Kirk Demarais' blog, Secret Fun Blog, for years, so when I heard about his newest book, Mail Order Mysteries, I got more excited than a kid waiting by the mailbox for his secret decoder pin. (And as a former professional magician and somewhat reformed prankster, I've been dying to find a copy of his book, Life of the Party, but to no avail.)

Mail Order Mysteries is the kind of book that hits me like a freight train of nostalgia on so many personal levels. It's a a brilliant tome dedicated to those classic mail order comic book ads that tempted us with thrills, chills and solutions to life's ills.

As a kid, it was pretty common practice for me to read through the comic first, then go back and pore over all of those brightly colored pages packed to the gills with tiny ads offering up a multitude of trinkets and novelties. I would carefully look over each ad, mentally picking out the things I was going to buy someday, only to never actually order anything, usually due to my allowance getting sucked up by in-store purchases of trading cards, candy, toys and, of course, more comic books. But that didn't change the fact that I was sorely tempted by life-size submarines or mystical medallions that warded off vampires.

Although I never ordered anything from a comic book ad, there were a couple of moments in my life when I would have a brush with one of these bizarre items, such as the time I visited my first prank store the summer after 5th grade, promptly plunking down my bottle and can return money on a pair of X-Ray Spex, a Whoopie Cushion and a Switchblade Comb (I love the classics), only to almost kill myself on my bike because I tried to where the Spex on the ride home. There was also a time in 3rd grade, when a classmate brought his "foot locker" full of 100 toy soldiers to school, riddled with disappointment over their diminutive size and flat appearance. I, on the other hand, thought they were beyond cool and wasted no time in forking over my Little Debbie Nutty Bar in trade for them.

 

As you can see from my pics, this book is simply bursting with full color photos of all of the classic mail order pieces of merchandise. The presentation helped scratch two different itches for me; I got to take a walk down memory lane, being thrust back in time with every turned page and every new ad, and I finally got to see the items that I had always wondered about, in all their chintzy glory.

The book covers everything, and is broken up into categories such as superpowers, war, horror, top secret spy stuff and trickery to name just a few.

Of course, no collection of mail order comic book ephemera would be complete without a mention of those classic pets in a pouch, those adorable freeze-dried friends, the Sea Monkeys.

If any of you out there are like me (and I know for a fact, many of you are), I strongly suggest you get this book. It's a finely crafted ode to a bygone day, when mysteries were but a few stamps away and catalog humbuggery was practically an American institution.

So do what you have to to get your hands on it. Even if you have to mail order it.

Book Look: The Hanna-Barbera Treasury

The very first cartoons that I remember ever seeing were Hanna-Barbera cartoons. In fact, I have to say the the very first cartoon that I remember sitting down to watch was Wacky Race. Later, I would become a dyed-in-the-wool fan of sun classic HB fare as The Superfriends, Space Ghost, Herculoids and at the very top of the list, Scooby Doo, Where Are You?

Later, I would eventually morph into a full-blown cartoon fanatic, delving deep into cartoon collectibles and various other pieces of production ephemera, like animation cels, style sheets and background art.

With that in mind, this book, The Hanna-Barbera Treasury, was practically made for cartoon-loving geeks like me.

This is basically one of those usual treasury-style books, which are often light on the text, big on the pictures and come with lots of little inserts of reproduction pieces.

Now, I'm not going to go into a long-winded history of  Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, because if you're the type of person to read this blog, you already know who these guys are, but on the off chance that you don't know about these legendary animators, I can pretty much guarantee that you've seen their work; Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones, the list goes on and on.

Like I mentioned before, this is one of those big coffee-table books that's simply jam-packed with massive, colorful pictures, which is my favorite thing to plunk down on the couch with on a lazy weekend afternoon, poring through the history of a game-changing animation studio.

One of my favorite things to geek out on is old-school storyboards, like this one seen below from Frankenstein Jr....

A couple of pages were dedicated to the voice talents of days gone by, such as voice-acting legends Daws Butler (Scooby Doo, among countless others) and Mel Blanc (who made a name for himself by performing just about every single Warner Bros. voice, like Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, before moving on to the Hanna-Barbera studios)...

Now for some of the goodies! The reproduction inserts in these types of books get my collector mojo buzzing. Even though the pieces included in these books are not originals, they're very often reproduced with enough care to detail that I can at least pretend for a moment that I'm holding a piece of animation history.

Each flat reproduction comes sealed inside these little translucent envelopes...

And this book has everything! From the Huckleberry Hound collector's cards above, to the reproduction animation cels like this Ruff 'n Reddy one seen below...

Other gems found within (especially from a one-time aspiring cartoonist's point of view) are these shots of original development sketches showing what Yogi bear could have looked like...

Vintage activity book repro pages...

Australian "gum cards"...

Promo animation cels...

Some shots of a vintage line of collectible Flintstone figurines (note the blurb: Painted by Hand by Artists)...

 Flintstones card game...

Jetsons storyboards and background sketches...

Masks...

But the book isn't all silly animals wearing bow ties. The latter part of the book is devoted to some of HB's "adventure" cartoons, including good ol' Johnny Quest...

And a personal favorite of mine, Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaace Ghooooooooooooooooost!

Birdman gets some love, but it's hard to see this character without thinking of the bastardization of the character from Cartoon Network's Adult Swim cartoon.

I'm seriously considering framing these Space Ghost cards...

And of course, no Hanna-Barbera book would be complete without a good long look at that cowardly Great Dane and his gang of mystery solving teens from one of my all-time favorite cartoons, Scooby Doo, Where Are You?...

I have always loved this cartoon, and remember running home from the bus stops in the afternoon to make sure I never missed a second of this classic. I even loved the later Scooby Doo Movies cartoon, where the Mystery Inc. gang were teamed up with such shining stars of Hollywood like Sonny & Cher and the Harlem Globetrotters. But by the time the '80s kicked in, Scooby's cartoons just got too corny for my taste, especially with the addition of that insipid Scrappy Doo. But the original cartoon will always have a place in my heart.

The only downside to this book is that it only covers the animation studio's efforts through the 1970s, and even then, just the major stars, which left out so many of my favorite cartoons from Hanna-Barbera such as The Smurfs (yes, I admit it), Pac Man (don't knock it, it was an awesome cartoon), Jabber Jaw, Superfriends, Speed Buggy, Hong Kong Phooey, Blue Falcon & Dynomutt, Captain Caveman and many more.

Oh well, maybe I can hope for a second Hanna-Barbera Treasury where some of the above mentioned classics could get a little love and where I could get my hands on some reproduction Pac Man cels or Superfriends style sheets.

Anyway, I highly recommend this book to any animation nerd, especially if you can find it cheap, like I did in a bargain book store for $15. At that price, it was a steal.

Anyway, I guess I've rambled on enough about this heavy tome filled with classic cartoon goodies. I'm going to go bust out some of my old Scooby Doo and Smurfs DVDs. Yabba dabba doo, everybody.