I guess this would have been a better title if I had actually hung Spidey upside down or something, but I figured you the reader would see the connection. What a crazy weekend I totally feel unorganized starting this week, I hopefully will have something new for you this week. I picked up a few little toys this past weekend and have even started a loose collection organization project I might float by you to see what you think, also to ask how you store your loose figures.

So stay tuned true believer... Oh and this is a Famous Covers Spider-Man form series one if you were wondering, he surfaced from a tote I was cleaning out and has been hanging around on the computer desk. Right now he looks disappointed that he hasn't been featured on the blog and that I have slacked in my Marvel based posts. Jeez, I can't make anyone happy.

So, I have been cleaning up my home office, trying to get it all sorted and organized and I came across some Marvel Trading Cards from 1992. I think these are from the Third Series of cards. I know I have a complete set of Series One, Possibly Series Two, but I had no idea I had any of these. Anyway, today I thought I would throw up the Big Guns, or at least the ones I think are the Big Guns of the Marvel Universe. I even scanned the backs larger so you could read them, so enjoy.



As a kid I loved this character, as an adult I still have a soft spot for this classic. I had a Mego Captain America and I used to throw his little sheild and try to knock over the bad guys, who were usually played by a GI Joe and my friends Mego Penguin figure.





Iron Man, you know the only thing I knew about Iron Man as a kid is that I wanted his Mego Action Figure soooooo bad, it just looked awesome, you know I don't ever remember seeing one in a store and my parents must have not seen him either because I had to buy my own years latter.





Spider-Man, I have an on again off again relationship with Spider-Man, as a kid I liked him, had the Mego Toy and read his comics. As an adult I like him for the most part, have his Mego Toy and every once in awhile I read his comics. Now, my nephew loves, or should I say LOVES, Spider-Man. When we go out to dinner with him and the family the first thing I get assigned to do is draw a Spider-Man on the back of the children's menu. I can't wait to see when he grows up if he still loves the character as much as he does now.

Well, thanks for tuning in for another Marvelous Monday! True Believers, see you next time!

Excelsior!

I'm really liking this Marvel monday thing, I usually feel like I do not have enough of a certain subject on the blog and with scheduling Marvel stuff on Mondays it really takes some of the pressure off of making sure I have enough stuff of any one subject posted.

December already, I feel so behind! I took a few days to help tile a bathroom at my parents, since I tend to stay away from Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales it seemed like a good time to do some tile work. Anyway while I get organized again, here's a recent ( a month or two) addition to the Eclectorama Mego Collection, non other than that friendly neighborhood web head, Spider-Man!

I had a Mego Spider-Man when I was a kid, and while I wish I could say this was him, I had to troll around for quite awhile on ebay to find one at a good price and in decent condition. I remember all the great web slinging adventures from my Mego Spidey, so this guy might be hanging around in future posts, just a warning. So with that, to get you in the mood...



And now for the pictures! Enjoy.

I just felt like posting some more Spider-Man today, the blog could always use a little more Spider-Man.



Sometimes the best figures are the simplest. In my opinion this is one awesome figure, like Batman before him, he was a McDonald's Happy Meal Toy from back in the days of Spider-Man the Animated Series. And like before, because of this toy line I have to visit the doctor every year for my pills! I realize now I did not have to eat the food, but come on I was there at lunch time and I was younger then , might as well have gotten my grub on.



Even though the figure is somewhat out of proportion, I think it does rather well in capturing the look of the Animated Series version of Spider-Man from the Nineties. The shape of his head is really close to the style guide artwork. My family right now is going "Big deal, Spider-Man is Spider-Man", Ah but not so, and I know my pop culture brothers and sister will notice the little differences.



These are probably kicking around in garage sales, flea markets and thift stores all over the place. I would recommend this figure for any Spider-Man fan as a must have, especially if you can get him for a quarter and can avoid the unwanted pounds caused by junk food.

You know what they say, simple things...



Here's the random cards I received for posting Lulu and the Phantom on Squirrel Duty in the backyard! How cool this swag has a little bit of everything, my very first Star Trek cards, a Peter Parker, Planet of the Apes and a set title card! Sweet. I can't wait till I start getting extras and can post some contests or start trading.

I knew keeping this guy in the package and buying one to open would come in handy one day. I don't tend to do this anymore, but I did at one time and I did keep a few of those packaged goodies around.

Well not too long ago a fellow blogger, Reis O'brien, at Geek Othodox sent a call out for help with his new gig as Action Figure Guru at About.com. He needed some photos of different Spider-Man action figures through the ages. I happened to have one he was looking for and so I volunteered some photos for his article. So today I read that he has it up and ready for the world to see. So go forth and check out his wares, he really needs some help as well getting hits on his site, he does have some good tips and some fun articles, I know I've bookmarked his page. Just remember to come back for more fuzzy toy memories, Spockcation and Basset goodness!

Hey I just realized I shot pictures of Spider-Man and had them published just like my man Peter Parker! Sweet!

I had these scans laying around from when Plaid Stallion's Brian Heller asked for submissions for his mall appearances section of his blog. Not technically a mall appearance he was looking for, he was nice enough to include it on his site. This is a promotional comic from back in 1985, when Northstar Mall in San Antonio added Foley's Department store as one of their anchors. These comics were included in the Sunday Newspaper at the time, plus I threw newspapers so you think I would be swimming in these things. Wrong I have two. One from my parents newspaper, and a second I acquired from another collection. Which is how it should be, I would hate it if I didn't get a complete paper on Sunday morning.

Some cool things to note, the cover building actually looks like the Foley's store that was added, come to find out that was a signature look for that store so the Marvel artist probably got a picture of one of the other stores. I don't think we had a rodeo going on at the time, but if we did it probably wasn't too far fetched that there would be a little parade going by the mall. During that time we used to have a little event called a Cowboy Breakfast that sort of kicks off the rodeo, held right across the street at a neighboring malls parking lot. Trail riders with covered wagons and the whole nine yards make a trek into town and stop at the breakfast, where everyone that attends is served free breakfast tacos at about five in the morning. Thousands show up for this event, makes the news every year. This past year was the first time it was held in a new location, just outside of town, but at that time it would have been close to where it is depicted on the cover. Also the newspaper's name in the comic was the newspaper that the comic came in, the San Antonio Express News, now the only paper in town. Back then there were two rival papers the Express News and the San Antonio Light, those Light paper carries could be jerks, they would steal your papers, throw them in water, you name it.



The story goes, Peter Parker and J.J. Jameson make a trip to San Antonio, Parker to cover the rodeo, Jameson to catch a break from Spider-Man, plus there happen to be a new Foley's store opening up in town. A crook makes way with the rodeos ticket money, Hulk happens to be traveling through town and chases the guy down, the Spider-Man joins in. San Antonio's a pretty jumping town! The money is recovered, the store remains standing, Hulk gets away, Spider-Man saves the day, and Jameson gets a headache! through out the comic the only ads are for children's clothing sold at, you guessed it Foley's! The ads even follow a comic style story line.



At the time this had to be the coolest thing in the world, your home town, your newspaper, being featured in a Marvel Comic! I realize now these were done a paid promotions, but the magic doesn't seem to fade, it's still pretty cool. To this day you can go into just about any comic book shop in town and they have these issues, not worth much, but you couldn't be a comic book collector in San Antonio with out one of these! I often wonder if there are others out there, if they followed the same format, or if they were personalized. How many towns have a rodeo that Hulk helped get the ticket money back?

A few more pages from the Spider-Man Animated Series Style Guide. I have yet to watch an episode of the new Spectacular Spider-Man, but back in the 90's I tried to catch all the Spider-Man Animated Series. One of the villains that I thought had a cool character design was the revision of the Vulture. I thought the much younger looked worked for the cartoon, plus the addition of the higher tech costume.



These type of pages always appealed to me, not only because the gave all the color references, but some pretty cool action shots and situations so you could get a feel for the character.



I remember being pretty excited that the toy line was coming out, I had an image of the prototypes burned into my head thanks to Toy Fare, Tomart's, and Lee's magazines. I had planned on getting the series, but as usual budgets and lack luster actual production, plus the fact that I was trying to collect other lines at the time always squashed those plans.

Still, I find the Vulture figure from the line pretty cool (peeped here at Marveltoys.net, one of the best resources around for older Marvel toys) and since I missed it the first time around I could make a trip to the bay to see what bargains are to be found! Who needs a nice cushy retirement right? Hell I could do as the Vulture when I get old and fly around busting up superheroes!

Venom is one of those characters that you either love or hate, at least that's the way I feel about him. When he first made an appearance back in the nineties I, like so many other fanboys, gobbled up everything venom. That was till he started to appear in everything.

Venom was one of those characters that I like to refer to as being a victim of "the Borg effect". You know the Borg from Star Trek the Next Generation, every time our heroes were to face overwhelming odds, it turned out to be the Borg, who like Venom was cool at first till they rode that pony into the ground. So while I was excited at the prospects of seeing Venom on the silver screen in Spider-Man 3, I cringed knowing that he would be in every toy and cereal aisle across the world. What makes it worse is it's always hard to find a cool looking Venom.

So my buddy Bill pops into my office this past January with a Super Hero Squad two pack featuring two of the villains from Spider-Man 3, Sandman and Venom. Bill knows I dig these little figs from Marvel and Star Wars, so when he sees one that looks interesting he'll grab it. I have to say this is the coolest version of Venom I've seen from the line, let alone the movie toys. Strange thing is this is a übber rare set, that I had never seen before and is turning up at scalper prices. The only thing I can figure is, it's because of the Venom figure itself. Super Hero Squad has a few Venoms mixed into various two packs, but non that look, feel, and have the size of this one, it is truly the best Super Hero Squad Venom to date. Too bad his appearance in the movie was not as exciting.

I purposely skipped the whole Marvel Civil War story line, it seemed like it had been done before, plus I really had no interest in the direction some of the characters were taking in the story. The Iron Spider-Man is one of those characters, but I do have this figure of him since I wanted to try and get a least one of all of Hasbro's new Signature Series line. The figure itself is pretty cool, I think they could have done something better with the spider legs coming out of his back, but all in all he's pretty nice. The costume on the other hand can be chunked into the ever growing pile of "let's re-design the heroes look to sell more books!" train of thought that always seems to rear it's ugly head time and time again in the wonderful world of comics.

Much like the recent Captain America design or the Superman Blue design, Spidey seems to have a costume redesign every time something major happens to him. There are times they work, the black costume, other times they don't. This being one of them. None the less I was not going to let this figure slip my grasp like it's cousin Superman Blue from Hasbro's earlier attempt at Mego-like figures. Even though I dislike the costume I still wanted to complete this series of figures for some reason, and I don't even consider myself a completist, now to find a cheap Superman Blue so Iron Britches Spidey has a buddy on the shelf!

This is kind of a "I found Something New!" and an "anniversary post" all rolled into one. One year ago today my wife and I were sitting in the middle of the Sony Pictures Lot in Los Angeles enjoying a sneak peek at all that was going to be Spider-Man 3! I just remembered that we made this trip last year at this time. The cool thing is that what ties all this together is we got to mingle with Thomas Haden Church who played Sand Man in the movie, and is pretty funny in real life. This was also the first time my wife said I totally "geeked" out when I got to shake hands with and speak briefly with Avi Arad (don't worry if you are not familiar with the name, true geeks will know and that's all that matters). She said it was a site to see, the inner Fan Boy sneak out and make an appearance. Oh well. I got to meet Avi, we made away with a cool freebie and a few months later Sony sent me a cool Spider-Man 3 Poster, but I'll always remember being able to share the experience with my wife. Okay onto the toy...

I found this during a fluke trip to Target. We actually just finished having a little break from working on the house and ended up at Target with my wife's parents. We were heading out of the store and I noticed a Sand Man in someone's basket so I told everyone I would meet them up front and immediately hoofed it back to the toy isle. There on an end cap being cleared out at five bucks was Sand Man, along with Cyclops from the X-men (which I bought at full price, doh!). I had never even seen these at full price, so I grabbed one and ran back to the front of the store.So now Spider-man has another arch villain to fight.

Compared to the other figures in the Signature Series line he is short on style, articulation, and I found some of the paint applications to be sort of disappointing. Although, he is fairly easy to stand and pose, which amazed me because of his giant sand fist. I am probably one of a very few that actually enjoy this line, and I have gone on record that I enjoyed the DC version of this line as well. I'm really sad to see this Marvel line fade out like the later mentioned DC one, without seeing Iron Man, the Thing, Doctor Doom, Hulk and others join the ranks. I understand that Mr. Fantastic and Johnny Storm have made prototype appearances on the web, so hopefully these will surface somewhere. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for an Iron Man in the classic armor, that would be sweet. Oh well, maybe I can go get a clearance Cyclops and do some sewing and modifications and cobble something together. Stay tuned true believer.

Just a little update for Freebie Friday. The Spider-Man Handbook, given to me by a friend for just doing some design work and helping get some stuff sourced for print. I have a couple of these books (The Batman Handbook and a Robot Survival Guide), all are pretty fun reads. Not meant to be serious, but written in the style of an instruction manual, also includes some pretty nice illustrations.

It is my understanding that the subjects in the book are researched some and this would be somewhat accurate if the hero was based in reality, still it's all tongue and cheek, I wouldn't really try to leap from a skyscraper and swing to safety using the flag pole or awning. This book has some great sections though on "How to build a web shooter" and "How to develop your Spider Sense". I'll be swinging around town in no time.

A few weeks prior to the great flood of 2007, I was waiting for my car to get serviced at the dealer and I walked over to a nearby Big Lots. As I usually do, I wandered up and down the toy aisles just looking around. Now I'm not sure how everyone else's Big Lots are organized, but in Texas it's sort of like a big Flea Market, so you have to look down almost every aisle because stuff is jammed in there with no thought of organization.

That trip yielded several little goodies to add to the collection, one being this crazy little Spider-Man wind up. I'm pretty sure I can speak for most of the older collectors out there when I say that it's the off the wall stuff that is really the coolest. I happen to also believe that sometimes it's the simplest of toys that are the best, wind-ups being near the top of the list.

This wind up is no exception to that rule, give him a wind and Spidey "crawls" into action! Look out for big headed, crawling Spider-Man!

Today for your viewing pleasure I have a couple of style guide pages.

First up since Spider-man seems to be on everyones minds these days I have a page from the Spider-man Animated Series Style Guide. Spider-man's Animated series came along around the mid nineties on the heals of another great superhero animated series. I'll admit I was a fan of both, and the Spider-man series did seem rather well done for younger market. Characters where bright and colorful, even the villains, and the toys that were spawned for this cartoon matched the animated versions quit well. even today these are some of my favorite toys from any Spider-man show or movie.

This page is the main Logo and Character detail page. It gives commentary on logo colors as well as the main colors of our hero, Spider-man, and is one of the "upfront" materials of the guide. This style guide is similar to most, giving you the main details of the heroes first, some poses in black and white, villain colors, situational art, repeat patterns, and some alternate logos. All in all some nice artwork, very clean and ready for scanning. When this guide was produced, you would have to scan and streamline your artwork, then color and place on a given product. It was sort of rare then to get artwork CDs accompanying style guides and even then it was some of the larger licenses that did this.

Second, but not by any means second to Spider-man, is a situational artwork page from Batman: Carnival Capers Style Guide. This guide was a continuation of the Batman: The Animated Series Style Guide, and was one of many attempts by Warner Bros. to come up with stories or situations to place there animated heros in, and use villains that were featured in movies to help continue the brand. I would say that Warner Bros. along with Disney were two of the best at doing this, the idea was to keep the characters fresh and up to date.

I actually used this piece of artwork, though in it's black and white form and streamlined and then colored, to produce an amusement show poster for Play By Play. Later, a year or so after the line was finished we were cleaning out the art department and we all had a chance to grab a poster or two to take home, they were going to be trashed. These posters probably set the company back about 80 to 120 bucks each, we would produce one or two of each license, for a total of about 20 to 40 posters at about 2 foot wide by 4 foot tall. We had these things printed out on something like a high gloss dura trans and mounted on foam core, they were nice, too nice to be trashed. The one that I kept was this one and I still have it today, the design is not that great (not the artwork itself, but the design I set up), but it was my first of many show signs and it was of my favorite hero. I'll drop a pick up of it later on in another post in it's new home.

Just a quick note on this past weekend. Besides helping the ever lovely Judy plant some new foliage in the backyard gardens, I did steal some time to hit a comic book shop on Free Comic Book Day and participate in making Sony Pictures richer by attending a showing of Spider-Man 3.

This would be my first Free Comic Book Day that I have attended and I have to say it wasn't what I expected. After reading all the hype and events that they have in other cities I was thinking it would be sort of a little comic book party. So I took a lunch break from the yard work and on the way to pick up some take out I stopped at my local comic haunt. There were about three people in the shop, two clerks and the usual Magic card player chatting it up with the guy behind the counter that specializes in card games. I was greeted by the second clerk and he immediately let me know it was Free Comic Book Day.

So here's what I thought going into this for the first time. I knew that the comic industry printed comics specially for this day so I wasn't going to walk away with just any comic for free, so, so much for making it away with Detective Comics #27. Like "my" shop even had that, right? I did think that maybe that they would give you a chance to pick up two or three various titles, some variety if you will. So I asked "what's the limit?" expecting to here a couple. One, one per customer. Okay so at this time I'm asking all three of my readers if, one, they attended Free Comic Book Day? and two, what is your comic book shops policy on Free Comic Book Day?

Needless to say I walked around the shop, they had rearranged a few things since I had been there last, and ended my journey back at the display of free comics. I looked over the titles and selected one that I liked the illustration style of the cover and said "I'll take that one". Now I wasn't aware that I would also get a choice of a free mini poster, so that was a bonus. Transformers or the New Fantastic Four Flick. Silver Surfer won on that one. The comic? Lets just say that later that night I decided to do my research and was checking out LOG and low and behold my comic wasn't listed as one of DC's finest that were to be given out this year. You guessed it I got a recycled Free Comic Day comic. Yep, none other than the 2006 Free Comic Book Day Justice League Unlimited comic. A side note my son went with me and so I thought if he didn't want his comic, I might have a chance for a second, but he left empty handed, saying nothing peeked his interest. Kids, you can't even give them free comics.

Lesson, do your research before hand and make arrangements with your accomplice before you go into the shop to grab you a second comic, even if they don't see anything they like. Oh well at least I did get a cool mini poster and a free comic to read and pass along to some younger reader who will just thinks it's cool to get any comic. Hope everyone had a cool Free Comic Book Day and I'll give some of my readers a chance to see Spider-Man 3 before I go on about it. Oh and the pic on this post is of the Spider-Man 3 plush that the company I work for produces for the amusement market. You can check out more plush goodness here!