Finally got a chance to post again, the day job has been sapping my strength.  I thought I was going to post a follow up to the Mr. T sticker book from the last Peel Here, but I just caught something on eBay that I want to post with the follow up, so it'll have to wait.  Lets just say it involves crayons that smell like chocolate.  Anyway, for this week I thought I'd do a quickie.  Here's a package of Inspector Gadget puffy stickers from 1983 (by Gordy International.)



Back of the package…



Gordy was the same company that brought us a million other puffy stickers like the Silverhawks, Mr. T (from the cartoon), and the Real Ghostbusters.  If all the puffy sticker companies I think I dig Gordy's work the most because the guys and gals they had designing them added an extra little bit of flair, typically in the form of a colored geometric shape that helps the characters really pop on the stickers.  Other companies try for more basic designs with just artwork or pictures that are closely cropped.  Granted the overall Gordy sticker lacks the nice little accent of being shaped roughly like the character it's depicting, but oh well.

I haven't been able to locate any additional Inspector Gadget puffy sticker packages, but Gordy also tended to release these in sets of four or five, so I'm betting there are some other designs floating around out there, hopefully with stickers featuring Chief Quimby, Dr. Claw, Claw's cat, Gadgets car, and possibly a M.A.D. agent or two.  At least I'd like to think so.  As far as the show itself goes, I was smitten from the first time I heard Don Adams voice.  I was a pretty big fan of Get Smart as it was playing in heavy syndicated rotation on Nick at Night while I was growing up, and I'm sure to my adolescent mind I just figured that Inspector Gadget was a cartoon spin-off, sort of like a reverse to the whole Pink Panther craze.  Of course it didn’t hurt that IG was also played in heavy rotation on Nickelodeon, which was my fall back channel of choice since they concentrated on kid-friendly content for most of the day.  If there were no shows on like He-Man, G.I. Joe, or the Transformers, I was always flipping to Nick to see if I could catch an episode of Inspector Gadget, Danger Mouse, or Count Duckula.

Besides Don Adams, I loved a lot of the conventions of the IG cartoon, from the self-destructing notes of Chief Quimby to the crafty way the producers and writers decided never to reveal what Gadget's arch nemesis Dr. Claw really looked like (all you ever got to see what his gnarly looking gloved fist pounding on the arm of his chair.)  I also loved and coveted Penny's (Gadget's niece) electronic book that she invariably used to uncover the schemes of Dr. Claw and his M.A.D. agents.  Now that I'm thinking about it, I think Inspector Gadget was one of the first 80s cartoon properties to be re-imagined into a live action flick (at least later on down the road and not at-the-time like the ill fated He-Man flick.)  I guess like all his gadgets, he was way ahead of the curve on bumbling pointlessness in terms of becoming a live action parody of itself.  Sigh.

Next time, hopefully, there will be some 25 year-old chocolaty scented goodness, but we shall see…

So I know I've mentioned the Sugary Serials comic anthology before, but I thought I'd take a second to point to it again.  Basically the anthology is build around the concept of all ages comics influenced by the dynamics and feel of Saturday morning cartoons.  There is already a huge variety of stories available in their archive (they've been going for almost a year now.)  One of the more recent stories that I've been enjoying the heck out of it called Switch Runners by Mark Rudolph and Jerzy Drozd…



Mark and Jerzy decided it would be a fun challenge to try and design a comic based on a fictitious story/toy pitch much like the 80s properties G.I. Joe, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Transformers, etc.  They wanted to push themselves a bit out of their comfort zone by molding the idea around a vehicle-based toy line, trying to make the story a bit more interesting than shows like M.A.S.K.  Personally I think they succeeded in spades, creating a really vivid set of characters that are both influenced by 80s action cartoons and yet still feel new and interesting.  They did some swell work on the vehicle designs as well, putting together a concept that I know I would have been salivating over as a kid (basically all the heroes vehicles have 2 modes, one built for transportation/speed, and a second built for artillery and defense, which basically grounds the thing.)



The basic story line revolves around a group of space explorers who are drawn to a strange planet ruled by an evil being called Tritannus (he uses emergency beacons to draw unsuspecting aliens to his planet so that he can enslave them.)  The explorers end up crashing into one of the planets moons (which happens to contain a natural element that is a major source of Tritannus' power), brining their ship and a portion of the moon cascading down to the planets surface.  The explorers salvage as much from their destroyed ship as they can to built a new set of vehicles (with the help of the element from the chunk of moon they brought down with them) and a base while they try and figure out a way to fend off the attacks from Tritannus (who wants to reclaim the moon fragment to regain his full power) and find a way off the planet.



There are shades of all sorts of 80s cartoons and other kid's shows within the story and influences on the character designs (from Thundercats and M.A.S.K., to Bravestarr and the Muppet Show), but the world does not feel recycled in the least (it could totally hold it's own on the DVD shelf next to Voltron and the Silverhawks.)  It's also very natural in its influences and doesn't resort to overt or snarky cartoon references, which seem to be about as far as most 80s influenced contemporary cartoons go.  That's something that I enjoy about the anthology in general…



The team of heroes consists of five characters led by a slightly frustrated Ramp (who bears an intentional striking resemblance to Tom Selleck), and includes the distant Anchor (in the first picture above), the lively Talika, enthusiastic Rondo, and the hard nosed Farz (the redhead driving the vehicle Dispatcher above.)

As far as the villains go, they're a little stronger in number (with six), including Cyndrl (a creature of fire housed in a containment suit who talks in excited run-on sentences), Crass Reptillicus (the narcissistic know-it-all) and his admirer Shila (who is equal parts lovely lady and Baby Huey in a powerhouse of a dinosaur body)…



…as well as Tackle (a scheming half rock, half robot cyborg) and Terzo (the ex of Anchor and a turncoat traitor to boot.)



As I mentioned above, a screeching power hungry trio of aliens that combine to form the mighty Tritannus leads the villains…



The comic is still updating on the Sugary Serials site (it's up to page 11 as I type this), so if you have a second and enjoy 80s action adventure cartoons you might want to give it a try (as well as the rest of the comics in the anthology), you won't be sorry you did.  I can almost hear the 80s hair metal influenced theme music in my head as I read each page…

Though I don't think I've mentioned it here on the site all that much, I'm sort of going through a period of being utterly obsessed with buying toys again.  I wish I could say they were vintage, but I haven't quite gotten over that hump yet (of owning other kids once cherished action figures and vehicles.)  No I've been totally sucked into the hysteria that is the 25th Anniversary line of G.I. Joe figures that Hasbro has been releasing.  It started about a year ago around this time when the first waves of figures were hitting toy shelves around the country.

Now for the most part I've managed to suppress the itch to buy a ton of action figures in general because I'd both go broke and run out of room in the living domicile (not to mention putting a strain on my marriage most likely), and when the news first hit about these new G.I. Joe figures I thought I'd end up looking but not buying.  At first I was only aware of a couple of 5-pack sets that were being released (one Cobra, on Joe team members), and though the sculpts on the figures looked really cool, I didn't really like the packaging and thus felt I'd be able to fight the urge to buy.  Then the single carded figures started to hit stores, and the packaging design was like a sledgehammer to the gut.  Hasbro decided to go with a very similar look to their original card layout and art designs, close enough that I couldn't fight the nostalgic feelings welling up inside and I bought in.  The next thing I knew it was a year later and I've picked up almost every figure in the line so far.  I have them neatly arranged in rows on the wall by my computer desk sort of recreating the look of the back of the packages (with the pictures of the available figures in rows.)

Anyway, to get to the meat of why I'm posting about this, Hasbro recently announced the remainder of the line-up of figures expected to hit stores this year and toward the end of the list was a curious entry, a figure named Specialist Trakker.  Now this wasn't a Joe or Cobra figure, at least not from what I remember of the figures available in the original line, and the spelling on Trakker seemed to point to a character from another toy line in the 80s.  The fan community was mildly abuzz about who it might be, and people like me were keeping their fingers crossed that it might just be a 3.75" version of Matt Trakker from the cartoon and toy line M.A.S.K.  It did sort of seem crazy though, I mean why would Hasbro intermix 20 odd year-old toy lines even if they did own the rights to both?  We never saw G.I. Joe vs. Transformers toys (though there was a comic book series.)  Well, I received an e-mail from my friend HooveR this morning with some links to the HissTank.com site with some pictures of the Hasbro booth from the San Diego Comic Con, and finally I have pictorial confirmation that there indeed will be at least one new M.A.S.K. figure coming to toy shelves this year…





To say that I'm excited about this upcoming 2 ounces of plastic bliss is a bit of an understatement.  Not only does the figure look awesome, but Hasbro has done a great job once again of throwing the fans a bone by including a small M.A.S.K. logo on the packaging, and not just forcing the character into the G.I. Joe line.  The idiotic demon-nerd inside of me kind of wishes the overall card art reflected the feel of the M.A.S.K. packaging from the 80s, but honestly, I'm not enough of a stickler really care all that much.  My hope now is that we get a chance to see a few more characters from M.A.S.K. show up in future G.I. Joe lines, in particular Bad Turner and Miles Mayhem (who were my favorites.)

Many thanks go out to Hisstank.com for getting out the scoop on the new Joe figures introduced at the SDCC…

Well, I recorded another show, though I'm kind of iffy about it.  Basically I'm trying to get back into the swing of podcasting on a regular basis and I thought it would be best to just record anything that I'm currently thinking about.  At first I was just going to keep recording shows without posting them, but after thinking about it some more I decided that if I don't post them I'm not going to get off my ass and record them in the first place.  I'm a goal-oriented person in this respect.

So what's in this episode?  Well it starts off with me getting cranky about the upcoming complete Real Ghostbusters DVD release (see the previous post for more), and that I slide into a one sided conversation about story telling conventions, in particular the whole idea of alternate history as a concept.  Is it in depth?  No.  Do I ramble like a goon?  Yes.  It is 50% shorter than the last episode though, which brings me back to my more normal running time.  Next time, there will be some research, or at least some notes to guide me along. Enjoy!

Oh yeah, I also mention the Art & Story podcast with Jerzy Drozd and Mark Rudolph, but I forgot to give a link to their show in the episode, so here it is!

Recently Time Life announced that they would be releasing the complete Real Ghostbusters Cartoon on DVD sometime this fall (including the later re-named version Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters.)  On the one hand it's pretty cool that all 140 odd episodes of the show are finally coming out on DVD (instead of those annoying 4-episode discs that came out a couple years ago), but on the other, the set being released is sort of a behemoth, the type of DVD release that could very easily hit shelves with an astronomical MSRP, not get purchased, and then find it's way quickly to out-of-print DVD hell. 

Personally I'm not a fan of complete series sets, unless of course the show in question only lasted a couple seasons. Typically they're released after all of the individual seasons have come out and for folks like me that pick them up bit by bit, the complete set is pointless.  What's worse is that these sometimes come with the best special features (as in the case of Seinfeld which came with a nice coffee table book put together by Jerry and the producers of the show which is only available with the complete set.)  Also, there's that whole pesky price issue.  Who wants to drop over a hundred dollars on a set of DVDs, no matter how much material is on them?  It took me forever and a day to convince myself that it was worth dropping $80 on the complete Monty Python set (a show that I adore), and that was after it had been out for years and the price slashed in half.  I don't mind paying this much in the long run, it's just the all-at-once deal that really gets on my nerves...

Getting back to the Real Ghostbusters, I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of having to choose between either three 4-episode discs that would run around $15 total, or a 25-disc set that will probably cost in the neighborhood of $130.  Since when is targeting only the uber and extremely casual fans a good business plan?  Anyway, that's quite enough griping from me. 

**Update**  Well, apparently I was being way to conservative with my $130 estimate on the complete series.  TVshowsonDVD.com just updated with the release date, price and extras on this set and it's going to clock in at an ungodly $179!  Again, I ask, who has 2 bills to drop on an 80s cartoon series all at once?  Oh, and you have to purchase it thorough Time Life much the way they held the Muppets hostage for so many years.  Ug.  This coveted, yet overpriced, set drops on November 15th...

The reason for this post is to point to a news story on TVshowsonDVD.com, which give fans the opportunity to vote on possible cover artwork for the complete series set.  There are two possible choices, both of which will probably feature some sort of lenticular motion action scenes on the outer slipcase.  Personally my favorite of the two is the simpler art featuring the gang against a flat black background with a lenticular slime effect at the top of the box…



The other choice features the trademarked home base of the Ghostbusters, the renovated fire station (which is going to feature lenticular motion action in the windows as well as having the Ecto-1 pulling out of the garage.)  I think it's just a bit wonky, I don't know…



Anyway, you can head on over to TVshowsonDVD.com and vote for your favorite…

I m starting to get to the end of my personal 80s sticker collection (but don't worry, I think I have enough material to at least take me through the rest of this year), so I thought I'd share my last Antioch sticker/storybook this week.  I've certainly talked about these before (with the Karate Kid II, Bigfoot Monster Truck, and the various Ghostbusters books; GB, GBII, and the training manual) and they'll always have a special place in m heart if only because with these books I purchased some of my very first stickers as a kid.  Unfortunately these are also some of the hardest stickers to track down because they were mostly a premium that came with a story book and were most certainly ripped out and stuck all over sticker books, dressers, and wherever else kids had the gumption to stick 'em. 

From what I can gather there were at least 10 other Antioch sticker/story books available (other than what I've shared on the blog that is) including 2 Garfield books, 2 Mr. Byte Presents books (which centered on early 80s computing), a couple WWF wrestling books (Hulk Hogan Wins the Belt and one for the cartoon Hulk Hogan's Rock 'n' Wrestling), a couple that centered around the 80s BMX and skateboarding craze, and two more in the series I'm going to share today which centers on the Mr. T cartoon…



Mr. T starring in Pirate's Gold was published in 1984 by Antioch and was part of a trilogy of books, which also included an Everglades and Wilderness adventures.  Though I'm not positive, I don't think these three book were adapted from episodes of the Ruby Spears produced cartoon (at least not from reading through the episode titles), so for anyone seriously hooked on the show there are at least three more adventures awaiting you…



Unfortunately the artwork for both the storybook and stickers wasn't culled from the cartoon.  I say unfortunately because the un-credited artist who worked on both is lacking a bit in the quality department.  Actually the artwork isn't that bad, it's just very flat in places and I think a lot of it has to do with the style they were going for.



The drawings on the title page aren't bad at all, but the interior art, which isn't just pen and ink, but rather fully painted pieces, is where it all starts falling apart for me.  I guess the artist just doesn't work well with paint…



Even though I loved Mr. T as a kid (growing up on a steady diet of the A-Team, as well as his appearances in TV shows and films like Silver Spoons and Rocky 3), I never really bought into the premise of the show.  He just doesn't seem like the type of guy who'd be coaching a team full of teenaged gymnasts. Throw the whole Scooby Doo archetype into the mix with them always solving mysteries as they travel around the country and it gets even sillier to me. I think I was also wondering why he didn't just ditch the kids, pull out a machine gun and REALLY solve some mysteries if you know what I mean.

I guess it's just the Ruby Spears touch as they were also responsible for the Rambo cartoon which is another perfect example of taking a concept that was way more for the adults and trying to shoehorn it into a cartoon for kids.  The silliest thing is that I still watched the show whenever I'd catch it on USA's Cartoon Express (along with another Ruby Spears produced favorite of mine, Turbo Teen.)

As for the story in this book, well lets just say that it's lacking a certain something.  I didn't have the heart (or the patience) to scan the whole thing, but here's a taste of what it was like…









I love that the book ends on a moral much like in the cartoon, which featured live action segments of Mr. T going over what happened in the episodes and what you could learn from them.  I know it's heavy-handed and all, but it still an aspect to growing up in the 80s that I'll always love. I guess it's the price we had to pay to get action back into cartoons…



As a last bit of trivia, while looking through the wiki entry on the Mr. T cartoon I noticed that the voice actor that played Spike (the precocious little red-haired upstart that idolized and dressed like Mr. T) was none other than Teddy Field III, the same kid who played Bobby the Barbarian on the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon.  I wonder if he cared that he was typecast into this type of annoying kid role?

Though Warner Brothers announced this a couple months ago, I thought I'd go ahead and post the news about the impending release of the Silverhawks cartoon on DVD, October 14th later this year…

Like every other cartoon I loved as a kid it's been forever and a day since I've seen the show and from what I've been hearing it might not hold up all that well.  Personally I'm not worried about it holding up.  When I was a kid this is one of the shows that I was so pumped to watch in syndication after school that I memorized the theme song and would sing along at the top of my lungs when it came on.  Silverhawks was the Rankin/Bass follow up to Thundercats, and though I don't remember exact plots I do remember how much I loved the fact that nothing was off the table in terms of content.  Mark Rudolph describes this factor best in the Art & Story podcast, but the show was very Jack Kirby in this manner featuring villains and heroes that used space-aged guitars as weapons (Melodia and Bluegrass respectively), a villain with a giant tuning fork as a weather controlling weapon, and Poker-Face who has slot machines for eyes.

I always used to love it when the team of heroes would "get into battle mode" by wiping their hands in front of their face which would bring down a pretty cool looking mask.  It was a feature that was dearly missing from the action figures (though most of the Silverhawks had a function where you could squeeze their legs together or something to extend their arms out and unsheathe their wings.)  Anyway, coming from Warner Brothers the set is a little pricey ($49.99 suggested retail), but you can pre-order it from Amazon for only $29.99 right now.  The set is going to feature 32 episodes over 4 discs and should be volume one of a two volume series (as there were only 65 episodes produced.)

Also announced by Warner Brothers is the release of the second volume of the Smurfs DVDs.  They haven’t set a release date yet, but here is the packing art (swiped from TV Shows on DVD.com.)



The set should contain 20 more episodes from the series, most likely broken up into shorts to remove the repeated shorts from the previous set.

It just occurred to me that it's been weeks since I posted a new Peel Here column.  I guess this past vacation has really got me turned around as I'm still sort of lost on what day it is.  I thought I'd tie in this week's stickers to the WW: Chicago experience a bit, though very loosely.  One of the bits of fun I had at the show was taking a break from the table on the last day to hunt through some quarter bins with Jerzy Drozd looking for both some fun stuff to eventually share on the site as well as catching me up with some comics that I missed out on back when I was heavily collecting and only had eyes for the various X titles (X-Men, X-Factor, New Mutants, etc.)  I rewarded with a stack of Walt Simonson books (bits and pieces of his runs on both Thor and the Fantastic Four) as well as a handful of 80s toy and cartoon-centric comics (like M.A.S.K., G.I. Joe, He-Man, and a few issues of the Spiral Zone), but one that I was really curious about was the Saga of Crystar the Crystal Warrior.

I think the reason these jumped out at me in the bins is because I found a sheet of Crystar stickers awhile ago when I was first starting up the Peel Here column and to be honest, it's an 80s property that I don't know all that much about.  It's probably because of the fact that there wasn't a cartoon associated with the brand; instead Crystar was developed by Marvel comics so that they could license the brand to a toy company, essentially reversing the normal process of brand marketing (at least as far as 80s toy and cartoon lines were concerned.)  Since the comic debuted in '83 and the toyline (which Marvel managed to get Remco to pick up) the year before, I think I was too young to really glom onto it considering I was still a few years off of really discovering comics and I really only had eyes for Star Wars at this point.  I'm not sure how much Marvel attempted to merchandise the property, but as I mentioned above, it at least made it into the realm of stickers…



Again, I'm pretty unfamiliar with the world of Crystar, but after flipping though the two issues I found in Chicago and reading up on the story via its Wiki entry I'm intrigued.  Though the story seems to be centered on the age-old concept of two princes taking opposing sides to conquer/save a fantastical world, there are still some really fun elements to the plot.  For one, each prince chooses (or in Crystar's case is forced) an element to wrap their battle around; Crystar is wounded and is turned into a crystal like material to save his life, while his brother Moltar allies himself with a demon lord and is turned into a lava form.  There also seems to be a rich back-story behind two of the lower tier characters, Warbow (who I believe is the green crystal warrior in the sticker set above) and an evil wizard who both shoot the other's left eye out with arrows.  I can't explain it, but I find bits of character data like that fascinating.

I'm not sure if this is the only set of Crystar stickers or if their might be a second page. From what I gather this page features mostly the good characters (fighting on the side of Order) including Crystar in the middle, Warbow in the upper right, Feldspar in the upper left (who is actually the uncle of both Moltar and Crystar and is a neutral character which explains his half lava, half crystal appearance), and Ogeode in the bottom right (who is the wizard responsible for turning the crystal warriors into their current mystical form.)  I'm not sure of the lava dude on the bottom left is Moltar or just one of his lava minions (though judging from the cover to the first comic I'm guessing he is Moltar…)

Anyway, I'm intrigued by the whole concept, so I guess this will be another comic title I'll have to add to the list for future quarter bin sessions…

I had such a great time taking the Branded in the 80s magazine on the road this summer that I figured one more stop on the tour couldn't hurt (and by extending the total stops to two it's starting to feel much more like I can actually call it a tour), so I wanted to take a second and announce that I'll be setting up a half table in the artist alley section of the Atlanta Comic Con this coming Sunday, the 13th of July.  You can find information on the show at their website (admission is $5, though you can save 2 bucks if you print out a coupon from the site.)  It's going to be held at the Marriott Atlanta Century Center located at 2000 Century Blvd, NE, Atlanta, GA, 30345 (404/325-0000) from 11:00am till 5:00pm.

I thought I'd also take a second to mention that there are a few comic shops now carrying copies of Branded in the 80s:

A Comic Shop
114 South Semoran Blvd.
Winter Park, FL 32792
(407) 332-9636
(I talked to the owner and one of the guys who works in the shop and they seem like some really great people.  The shop is really nice and they stock some great stuff.)

Titan Games and Comics (Duluth, GA location)
2131 Pleasant Hill Road
Duluth, GA 30096
(770) 497-0202
(This has been one of my local shops since I moved to GA back in '90, a mainstay.)

And soon…
Criminal Records
466 Moreland Ave, NE
Atlanta, GA 30307
(404) 215-9511
(Great music and comic shop in the Little Five area of Atlanta, right next to Junkman's Daughter.)

Also, I wanted to say thanks to all of those who have picked up copies of the book online from the Indyplanet store!  (You can order a copy by clicking on the picture of the magazines above or right here…

End pimping the magazine transmission…

One of the things that I always look forward to on vacations out of town is tracking down new and interesting foodstuffs.  Whether it's some local flavors that are new to me (as a fer'instance scoring some Cincinnati chili and Chicago-style deep dish pizza recently), or something that's even more exciting to my pop culture obsessed mind, new brand name product offerings (in particular new soda and snack flavors.)  As I've mentioned on the site before we tend to visit Florida an awful lot and I am convinced that the Orlando area is a test market for some of the larger snack, soda, and candy companies.  We always tend to find new stuff there, and it's always months (if ever) until we see this stuff filter up to Georgia.

This past trip was no exception even though pickins were sort of slim.  Besides finding some single bottles of the all-in-one A&W brand Root Beer Floats (which are only available in hideously expensive 4-packs here), the big score this time were a couple bags of very odd flavored Combos snack crackers.  Now I say very odd, but only one of them was really weird, so I'll start with the more normal Cheeseburger variety…



Now I grew up with some weird flavored snacks all my life, as there always seemed to be Snyder's brand chips in our area.  Snyder's was the brand that had flavors like Steak & Onion, Meatball Pizza, and the almost normal Dill Pickle, so I'm familiar with the idea of savory beef-flavored snacks.  The complexity of intermingled flavors that companies are trying to achieve with Cheeseburger these days though is a little more out of the ordinary.  I first saw this last year when Doritos held their first mystery guess-the-flavor contest.  The above bag of Combos has this zany flavor intermixed with the cheese filling and it tastes almost exactly like last year's Doritos did.  The problem I see with this odd Cheeseburger flavor is that the food scientists aren't shooting for any one common cheeseburger flavor (like a creamy beef to simulate the burger and cheese), but practically every possible flavor you might have on a fully loaded burger.  There are the obvious hints of cheese (as the filling is cheese-based, well at least a close approximation of a cheese-like substance) and a more subtle beefiness, but there are also strong hints of pickle, ketchup, and mustard, which end up skewing the overall taste towards a very tart place.  All in all, it's not as much weird, as it seems to be a misfire, and would be better labeled as "Cheeseburger Condiment Flavored". 

The second new Combos flavor on the other hand (Bacon, Egg, & Cheese) is just downright evil in both concept and it’s all too accurate flavors…



First off let me just say that snack crackers/chips should never, EVER, be egg flavored.  There is a certain spoilability to the thought of eggs, though maybe it's just me.  I've always been of the mind that eggs should be eaten fast (unless hard boiled, and even then it's certainly not a tempting idea for a snack chip flavor), and in small quantities, as they tend to get cold and sort of sickening the longer you leave them out.  It probably doesn't help that bacon flavoring has always been something you'd typically find in either soup mixes or dog biscuits, and it just seems a little weird in chips (though I think Pringles has managed to pull it off in the past.)

Personally, as they Combos are almost as bad for you as eating a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese biscuit, I would much rather just go ahead and eat one that a very disturbingly close flavored approximation of one in snack cracker form.  I wonder if Jones soda will ever come out with a set of breakfast flavored sodas?  If so, I hope they contact the food scientists working feverishly at the Combos Company because they certainly nailed the flavor…

Alright, I'm still not convinced that this is the brightest idea I've ever had, but I recorded a podcast last night talking about some of my experiences during the 2008 Wizard World Chicago comic con.  It's a little different than the normal Branded in the 80s podcasts as it's mired in the present and it's pretty freaking long (for me at least.)  So be warned that it clocks in at just over an hour.  Mainly I discuss how much WW surprised me in contrast to conventions that I'm more used to like Dragon con, as well as how easily (relatively) I was able to break out of my more normal introverted shell in the convention situation…

Well, I'm finally back from vacation (both from a trip to Florida to visit the family, and from our exciting trip up to Wizard World Chicago), so I thought it was about time I update the site.  It doesn't feel like two weeks have gone by, but then the wife and I did our best to pack each day with stuff so the time just flew by. The whole point of this vacation was to take the trek up to Chicago to both meet a bunch of people I'd been conversing with online as well as to debut the print edition of this very website, the Branded in the 80s magazine.  So how did it go?  Well, I figure I might as well start at the beginning and work my up to the meat of the post…

The wife and I had originally planned on attending this year's San Diego Comic Con as a belated honeymoon, but after pricing out the trip and finding out that hotel rooms were pretty damn hard to come by, we opted instead to hit WW: Chicago.  My sister was gracious enough to dump a bunch of her frequent flier miles on us, so the airfare was taken care of.  Even though the cost wasn't a headache, the idea of flying in general was.  I hadn't been on a plane since I was about 8 years-old, and certainly not in the post 911 climate.  I took every single security check in horror story to heart and expected the worst, not to mention the whole fear of heights and freaky gremlins (the type that drove John Lithgow to near madness in the Twilight Zone movie.)  I was pretty tense when we were dropped off at the Orlando International airport.  Funny thing is that aside from a short wait to do the initial check-in (the signage was amply confusing), everything else went off without a hitch. Security check in was no big deal (aside from having to take my shoes off, but then again I tend toward laziness), and we ended up having about 40 minutes to sit around in the terminal waiting for the flight to start boarding.  Here's a picture of our plane waiting on the tarmac…



The flight itself was no big deal. It probably helped that I didn't have the window seat, so at most I could only get a glimpse of the horizon out of the window.  The flight time seemed to slip by as well (it was admittedly a short flight at and hour and forty five minutes), though part of this had to do with Delta, as they had installed TVs in the backs of all the seating, so I had the Food Network to keep me company though most of the flight.  We had a stop over/connection in Cincinnati, and then a much shorter flight (45 minutes) to Chicago on a smaller plane, but again it was pretty uneventful.  My only other worry was catching a shuttle to our hotel in Chi town, but again, no big deal.  In fact, I think part of me was looking forward to some kinks in the trip as we only every really drive down to Florida from Georgia which can get pretty routine and boring.  Some snafus up to Chicago would only have reassured me that the trip was a little farther and more of a big deal.  As it was when we stepped out of the airport in Illinois we didn't even really have that feeling that we were in a different place.  The temperature was very similar (hot and humid the first day) and we hadn't really heard anyone talking so there were no local accents and flavors.  At most there were a ton of Cubs displays in the airport, but I'm not a sports guy so again, it could have been Atlanta for all we knew.

It didn't start feeling like a strange city until we hit the hotel (we stayed in the Sofitel because it was both close to the convention center were WW: Chicago was held, and because it was the only hotel that had rooms available for the entire weekend.)  The Sofitel was a bit, shall we say ritzy compared to what we were used to (I grew up on Super 8s and Holiday Inns), and as a perfect example of this all of the staff spoke in French (French first and then English second, how utterly ritzy.)  Actually, to add to the almost pretentious atmosphere in the place, there were HD TVs lining the wall above the Check-In desk that were playing old French black & white silent films.



At the end of the day, even though the place was nice as hell, there were a lot of simple drawbacks that made it feel like it was grossly expensive.  You had to pay for daily wifi service, local calls, and way too much to get a mini fridge in your room (I've never had to pay to get a mini fridge in a hotel room before.)  There were also pointless amenities in the room like an HDTV with no HD channels, so everything looked like piss poor quality.  It was however connected to the convention center via a very convenient sky bridge, so it gets some points there.

The con was held at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, which was by far the best comic convention experience I've ever had.  I've been going to Dragon Con here in Atlanta since I was a junior in high school and it's always been a headache of multiple hotels and con floors that were sometimes 2 to 3 blocks apart.  At Wizard World though, everything was in the same building, which for convenience's sake was much appreciated.



Wizard World was also about 2 to 3 times larger as far as the floor and attendance goes, so it's the largest convention I've ever attended.  Of course, considering that I was exhibiting for the first time ever, I didn't really get a chance to get wrapped up in the experience like I used to back in my Dragon Con days.  I was expecting to see throngs of humanity and insane lines for everything (which was certainly the case for every Dragon Con I've ever attended), but with the exception of the line to get in on Saturday morning it seemed like quite the opposite.


(The line to get in on Saturday)

When my wife and I first walked into the convention center lobby and we saw the two areas for attendees to buy tickets and sign up we were shocked.  Not only was there one on waiting in line, but bother area were planted right next to the entrance to the actual con floor.  In my experience, there is usually a registration area on a completely different floor (if not in a separate building) to house the thousands of people vying to get inside.  It's not uncommon to wait in the ticket line for three to four hours at Dragon Con.  I guess most people pre-order there tickets to WW: Chicago.



Our second surprise came after we picked up our badges and made our way onto the con floor to set up our table.  WW ran from Thursday afternoon until Sunday evening, but there were hardly any people setting up in Artist Alley 2 hours before show time on Thursday.  Though that evening was only for people with four day passes, apparently not many of them show up.  Suffice it to say that we were a little perplexed by this, again because of our experiences at Dragon Con (where people wouldn't think twice about ripping your arm off and beating you with it if it meant they could get onto the exhibitor or dealers room floor an hour early.)  WW was just a little too laid back in this manner.  Also, we were also a little worried at this point because no one we were supposed to meet at the con (and exhibit with) had showed up yet.  It didn't stop us from setting up the table post haste though…



It might not look like much, but making everything in the picture above a reality has been keeping me from updating Branded as regularly as I'd like for the past two months or so.  Getting the two magazines written, typeset, and working on the layout and design took a lot more energy that I had anticipated.  Not only that, but I spent a lot of time agonizing over the cheapest yet most semi-professional way of filling out our half table space.  My friend Daniel at work suggested the collage as a way to catch people's eyes as they walked by and my wife suggested the vintage lunch box to house the buttons we were selling.  Then there was the matter of finding and designing cheaper color fliers and business cards.  Again, it might not look like much, but it sure did take a lot of trial and error to get that table set up looking as good as it did, and for as cheaply as we did it (I'll never tell.)

All in all I was pretty happy with it, happy enough that I actually look like I'm smiling for real in the photo below (a very rare occurrence, at least in photos of me.)



Like the lunch box, practically everything on the collage was culled from vintage materials as it was sort of my theme when creating the table.  I tried to get a nice overview of imagery to convey what it is I talk about on the site and in the magazine, and surprisingly it ended up working pretty well.  There were quite a few times when people walked by the table and you could see the gears turning in their head as they first dismissed it, and then something stuck and they'd slowly walk back and do a double take.  Strangely enough, the pictures of Scott Baio (from Charles in Charge) and the unmasked lizard trooper from V hooked people the most.  I think I'm actually going to leave the bulk of my con going experiences for another post (or perhaps a podcast, we'll see.)

Anyway, like I mentioned above, one of the main reasons we picked WW: Chicago was to get a chance to meet a whole mess of people we'd run into online over the last couple years including Jerzy & Anne Drozd (of Make Like a Tree Comics, Sugary Serials, and Boum Art)…



Mark Rudolph of CV Comics and Sugary Serials (pictured in the middle, in between Jerzy and Anne)…



Chet Lucero of Storm Corps and Sugary Serials…



Diana Nock (of Sugary Serials, not to mention some great work up at Jinxville), and Barry Gregory of Ka-Blam digital printing (pictured behind both Diana and Jerzy's quizzical head.)



Here's a shot of the Ka-Blam booth for completeness' sake.



I'm getting a typing cramp, so I think I'm going to end it here.  Hopefully I'll be able to force myself to do a part 2 (or a podcast) tomorrow…