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12 of Superman’s Most Absurd Pre-Crisis Super Powers

Posted in 80s, comic books, nostalgia, pop culture, Superman with tags Cavalcade Comics, comic books, DC Comics, humor, nostalgia, pop culture, Superman, Superman Week on July 4, 2011 by Paxton

Everyone knows the many standard powers of Superman; fly, super-strength, super-speed, super-breath, invulnerable, heat-vision, etc. Not everyone knows, though, that he didn’t always have many of these abilities. Not only that, Superman has several other super powers that are less used, but still kept in his back pocket for just the right moment when he can whip it out and dazzle everyone.

As the years went on, and writers kept getting more…”creative”…Supes powers were quickly growing and getting more out of control. These little known powers had stacked up over the years until finally DC had to say, “Dammit, that’s enough” and launched the massive Crisis on Infinite Earths event to just level the playing field.

Let’s take a look at some of the lesser known, and therefore more humorous, of Superman’s Pre-Crisis abilities . I’ll include panels of Superman using the ridiculous powers when I can. If you have trouble reading the text, click the images to make them bigger.

Super-Ventriloquism and other voice “powers” – Not only Super-V, he had a whole bag full of voice powers that writers tended to wield at their hip like gunslingers. Superman could throw his voice over great distances and also possessed super-voice-mimicry, which means he could make his voice sound like anyone else. That power must come in handy at parties when you are stuck talking to the guy who won’t leave you alone and keeps asking you to come check out his “sweet van” out in the parking lot. The one painted all white with no windows (aka RAPE van). If you were Supes, you could throw your voice across the room as someone else calling your name and you can get the hell out of there. Nicely done, Superman. Or, you could just punch a hole in the rapist’s face because you are, you know, SUPERMAN.

Super-Mathematics – Super Mathematics? That looks a lot like regular mathematics to me. By the way, Super Douche, isn’t 20 x 16 x 10 = 3,200?

Super-Weaving – Yes, that actually happened. Super weaving. Not weaving at super speed. Super-weaving.

Super-Hypnosis – Apparently this is why no one recognizes Clark Kent is Superman. And it apparently works even when he isn’t concentrating on using it (I guess that’s what makes it super hypnosis?). However, I prefer to ignore this power and assume that everyone in Metropolis is just that dumb to notice they are the same person. Or they really just don’t care.

Super-Telepathic Will Control – In an early issue of Superman where he’s kidnapped by aliens, he whips out telepathic will control, which allows him to override someone’s mind and make their body do whatever Superman wants. If he can do this, then why would he ever need Super Hypnosis?

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My elementary school sticker collection Part II: More Mr T and bumper stickers

Posted in nostalgia, pop culture, stickers with tags collecting, nostalgia, pop culture, stickers, vintage on June 7, 2011 by Paxton

Back in March, I took a look at my elementary school sticker collection. It consisted of some scratch and sniff stickers, puffy Mr T stickers and a crap load of Michael Jackson stickers. It was pretty popular and I got several requests for more awesome 80s sticker goodness. So I’m delivering.

First off, I had a few requests for a better look at the Mr T puffy stickers on the front and back covers of my sticker album. To refresh your memory, here’s the cover to my sticker album.

So, I scanned the Mr T stickers again and tried to clean them up a bit with Photoshop. Here they are.

On the left we have cartoon, puffy Mr T bending a pipe with his bare, manly hands. The one on the right is probably my favorite, Mr T lifting a f’n semi over his head. It looks like the two truck tires are reaching down to hug the awesomeness that is cartoon, puffy Mr T.

Here are two stickers I didn’t actually share in the earlier article. They were on the inside cover of the sticker album. A full body shot of Mr T looking like he’s about to tackle some poor fool (left) and Mr T’s giant head (right).

So, those were the awesome Mr T puffy stickers. They are obviously based on the Mr T cartoon from 1983-1984 that featured Mr T traveling around the country with a group of young gymnasts (!?). Now, let’s take a look at another faction of this sticker collection, bumper stickers. I collected a few bumper stickers around the same time I kept the above sticker album. The majority of the bumper stickers I obtained as prizes/giveaways at my elementary school’s Fall Festival. They were an easy way to promote stuff to us kids.

Here are some of the better ones.

Here’s a Putt-Putt Golf & Games bumper sticker from the mid-80s. This particular Putt-Putt was located on Hwy 31 in Birmingham right in the middle of Hoover. It was there for me like a good friend all through elementary and high school. It later turned into a Krispy Kreme donuts and then something else which I can’t remember. I’m not sure what is there now.

These bumper stickers are great for the logos alone. This is a MADD sticker (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) that is sponsored by local TV station WBRC6 and Big B Drugs. Big B Drugs was owned by the local Bruno’s Supermarkets and was the precursor to stores like CVS and Walgreens. Big B was bought out by Revco then CVS in the mid-90s. I love that they passed out drunk driving bumper stickers to elementary school kids.

What would an 80s bumper sticker collection be without a “Just Say No” sticker? It would be dead inside. So here’s mine, and it has a great 80s Pepsi logo too.

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Vincentennial: 10 Vintage Vincent Price movie ads

Posted in advertising, movies, pop culture, Vincent Price with tags advertising, Held Over, movies, nostalgia, pop culture, vintage on May 27, 2011 by Paxton

It’s the Vincentennial! Vincent Price would be 100 years old this year, so people all over the net are celebrating the films of the godfather of horror. Strange Kids Club has been having Price-centric articles all week. I wrote one about Vincent Price and the origin of the Michael Jackson song Thriller. Today, I thought I’d continue the celebration with a look at some awesome and vintage movie ads for some of Vincent Price’s films.

Some of these movies are his most popular (The Fly, Masque of the Red Death) and some may surprise you (Beach Party?). Regardless, they are an awesome bit of marketing and movie history. So without further ado, here are 10 vintage ads for movies starring Vincent Price. I’ve put them in chronological order.

The Fly (1958) – One of his most famous. And a suitably creepy movie on its own.

Return of the Fly (1959) – Rushed sequel that can’t really live up.

The Bat
The Bat (1959) – A serial killer called The Bat terrorizes the residents of a creepy mansion.

Beach Party (1963) – Yes, Vincent Price played Big Daddy in this Annette Funicello-Frankie Avalon beach comedy. I love the art and how busy this ad looks. The ad itself is huge, so click the image to see it FULL SIZE.

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12 comic book covers featuring super heroes and their secret identities

Posted in comic books, pop culture, Superman, The Flash with tags Batman, comic books, nostalgia, pop culture, Superman, The Flash on April 22, 2011 by Paxton

I was perusing one of my favorite sites, Cover Browser, the other day. It’s great. It has hundreds of galleries of comic book covers. Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age as well as more modern comics, you can see it all. Some of the images are of great quality and some are blurry scans that look like they threw the comic book into the air and tried to take a picture with a cell phone from 2001. But it’s great fun to look at old issues of Superman, Batman, Hulk and Iron Man. You can find some real gems.

Looking through you can see all types of trends and gimmicks companies used when creating their covers. Anything to capture the public’s eye. One of the more prevalent gimmicks is to have the superhero appear on the cover alongside their secret identity. I’ve gathered 12 such examples of superhero and secret identity co-existing harmoniously on a comic book cover. Not only that, I’ve split the list into two sections. In the first section are 5 comic book covers featuring super heroes fighting their secret identities. The second section will feature the superhero interacting with their secret identity.

So here are the first 5 covers featuring superheroes fighting their secret identities. Thanks to Cover Browser for the majority of these images.

Action Comics #341 – Battle of the Alter Egos. Turns out the “extra” Clark Kent is another survivor of Krypton that DC loved to throw out in the ’60s and ’70s. He took over Clark’s identity and Supes had to straighten things out.

Flash vol 2 #15 – Wally West trashed by The Flash. This is the second Flash series. Wally West had taken over the Flash costume. There was a drug called Velocity-9 that gave the users temporary super speed. A junkie got a fake suit and totally sucker punched the living sh*t out of Wally.

Web of Spider-man #117 – Spider-man vs Peter Parker. This is the beginning of one of the most controversial Spidey storylines ever – the Clone Saga. A clone of Peter reveals himself. He’s this homeless vagrant who then names himself Ben Reilly. Arguments develop over who is the clone and who is the real Peter. Peter is discovered to be the actual clone and Ben the “true” Peter. Clone Peter becomes so outraged he “accidentally” hits Mary Jane in the face. It’s pretty much insanity incarnate and due to high sales Marvel’s upper management kept the creative teams churning out the story for much longer than was originally planned.

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Looking back at my elementary school sticker collection

Posted in 80s, collecting, Ghostbusters, Michael Jackson, movies, pop culture, stickers with tags collecting, Ghostbusters, Michael Jackson, movies, nostalgia, pop culture, stickers on March 29, 2011 by Paxton

Shawn over at Branded in the 80s has a great feature called Peel Here that showcases his amazing 80s sticker collection. I was cleaning up my garage a while ago and found my own sticker collection in one of the boxes. It was complete with even some extra pages full of stickers stuck inside, plus my collection of bumper stickers and tons of my old Garbage Pail Kids.

So, in the tradition of Shawn’s Peel Here I thought you’d like to take a look inside a mid-1980s elementary school sticker collection. It could be awesome, it could be totally embarrassing. Today I’ll look at the main sticker collection. Later I’ll take a look at my collection of bumper stickers and finally I’ll go through a bunch of the Garbage Pail Kids.

So, without further to do, let’s see the types of stickers I liked to collect in elementary school. You can click all these images to see them bigger in Flickr.

Here’s the cover of my sticker album. I honestly can’t remember where I got this sticker binder. It was probably a gift from my mom or my grandmother. I covered up it’s puffy, purple-ness with badass, macho Mr T stickers. The Mr T stickers are pretty awesome. They feature Mr T doing manly things like bending a steel pipe with his bare hands and lifting up a f**king semi over his head. But, for some reason, they are…puffy stickers. Puffy stickers were the girly cousin of regular stickers. Mr T puffy stickers are like painting a Corvette pink. WTF? If you ask me, the makers of those stickers are sending mixed messages to kids.

I don’t remember what the giant white ripped sticker on the cover was before I tore it off. I apparently changed my mind about liking that particular sticker. I was a fickle elementary school child. The faded white stickers with the green border under all that mess were for Mr B’s delicatessen. It was located in Independence, KS and owned by my aunt and uncle.

Let’s look inside this awesome tome of sticker archeology. First up is a separate page (front and back) of stickers I had shoved into the binder.

These are not a part of the actual sticker album. I think I acquired them separately in a trade. They mostly consist of “scratch and sniff” stickers. You can see candy apples in the right hand page and cinnamon rolls and bumble bees in the left hand page. Okay, these pages are slightly embarrassing. Not exactly the type of stickers I remember liking. “Scratch and sniff” stickers of cinnamon rolls and candy apples are about as manly as pink fluffy toilet seat covers. That is to say, not very.

The yellow “Cheap Thrills” sticker and the white Putt-Putt sticker in the right hand page are mine. Cheap Thrills was a “mom and pop” record store a friend of the family owned in Birmingham, AL. The sticker was a price sticker used on LPs. We had huge rolls of these stickers at home. I remember putting them on nearly every surface in the house. Lightswitch covers, walls, furniture, pets. They were EVERYWHERE.

The Putt-Putt in which I obtained the white sticker was located in Hoover just off Hwy-31. It turned into a Krispy Kreme a few years later, but I think even that is closed now. The sticker appears to be a 1 free game coupon. I must have got a hole-in-one. I wonder why I never used it.

Here’s the front and back of the first page in the sticker album. It’s actually not a page, but a clear plastic case that would hold the actual page. I don’t know what happened to the page. However, I needed the real estate so I started putting stickers all over it. My favorites of this group are probably all the McDonaldLand stickers. In the center and in the corners on the left as well as the corners on the right. You’ll see forgotten characters like The Professor, The Captain, The Fry Guys, and Officer Big Mac. As well as stalwarts The Hamburglar, Birdie the Early Bird and Grimace. If I’m not mistaken, the Reese’s Pieces sticker on the right page is from a group of ET stickers. I’m not too happy with the hearts behind them, though.

Okay, here are the actual first pages of the sticker album. We start off with some Michael Jackson puffy stickers. I loved MJ so you’ll see a bunch of those (and of course, these are puffy). There is also an Orko (puffy!) on the left and two Ghostbusters stickers under that. The red and white “Mi” sticker is from a company my dad worked for, Motion Industries. The black and gold Racing Team sticker is taken from a remote control Smokey and the Bandit Firebird. You can see the top and bottom stickers from the Rubik Missing Link puzzle. On the right you can see a bunch of generic 80s “exclamation” stickers. Good Show! Fantastic! Dynamite! Super! I have no idea where those came from. Or the giant ice cream cone (the hell?). The two rectangle stickers in the upper right came from the Cracked Monster Party magazine. The tennis ball stickers came from my parents. They were avid tennis players when I was growing up.