I’d say that a funny thing happened on my way back from a long-overdue visit to
family in California, but it involves the Transportation Security Administration and wasn’t really funny — except insofar as it was Batman’s fault.
At the Bay Area fixture Cost Plus World Market, I picked up a figure like the one
shown here.
I was in line at a store earlier, barely moving, with a full interior wall on the left and half-wall division to the right.
When I arrived the woman in front of me was slumped against the left wall; as people shuffled forward she slumped against the right, then against the left wall as we shuffled forward again, back to the right, etc., repeat, all the way to the front.
It was the slowest homage to the video for “Take On Me” I have ever seen.
Related: 23 Skidoo • Hell No • Coin Drop
This one’s been percolating for a while.
And there’s no time like the present. Not only have we reached the once-far-off date
to which Marty and the Professor traveled in the second Back to the Future film, but this year saw the 30th anniversary of the first movie in that trilogy as well as the (somewhat less heralded) 40th anniversary of Welcome Back, Kotter’s premiere. Thus, in the grand tradition of my poster for Captain America and the Maltese Falcon and DVD case for Tarzan of the Planet of the Apes, here’s a Golden Books tie-in to that hit TV show from another dimension, Welcome Back to the Future, Kotter.
Teddy Sears as Jay Garrick in The Flash Ep. 2.01 “Flash of Two Worlds” © 2015
CW Network. Photo: Cate Cameron. Character TM/® DC Comics.
I didn’t see Tuesday’s Flash episode until after midnight — so it ended up a birthday present. And it was a gift to all the fans who’ve loved DC’s multiverse for decades. I’m honestly not able to put my reaction into words, because it basically involved giving
the astral projection of my 6-year-old self a high-five.
My contributor copy of Michael Allred: Conversations, edited by Christopher Irving for University Press of Mississippi, arrived yesterday. The longest of its 13 interviews — some Q&A, some article-style — is the wide-ranging talk that Stefan Blitz and I had with Mike for Comicology in 2000. It’s a smart little hardcover sure to be a fascinating read.
Allred made a bit of noise with Grafik Musik before really turning heads on his creator-owned pop sci-fi existential superhero adventure Madman. Even a cursory list of his credits wouldn’t be complete without mentioning his Marvel work on X-Force, FF, and most recently Silver Surfer or the Vertigo series I Zombie, created by Allred with Chris Roberson and now a hit CW show whose cool opening credits feature his art.
