Thanks for the well wishes. My tooth is still achy, and will continue to be so until Monday, when I go to the dentist (stupid M-F hours…apparently they don’t realize people have dental problems on the weekend). It’s more tolerable now, though.

This strip would have been up hours ago, but we had our first day of actual warm weather in western Washington today, and my computer decided two panels in that it was done for a while. With no AC to keep the house cool, I had to wait until nature did the job.

I wrote an interesting (to me anyway) little mini-rant about Green Lantern Series 3 on the blarg. That’s right…I spend even more time on this hobby horrible addiction than what you see in the strip.

It is the weekend! Hooray for time to work on customs! If I can pull myself away from Link to the Past, that is.

Time flies.

It’s hard to believe I’m already at a hundred, but then it’s hard for me to believe I’ve been doing this for almost four months now. I mean, seriously. I play with action figures. And you people are amused by the results! There is clearly something very wrong with the lot of you.

I’ve done a (very) little bit of work with the site this week–namely, updating all the links to prettier permalinks. Go ahead and look through the archives–each strip now has a link that states the strip number and title, rather than that ugly ?p=x thing I had going on earlier.

None of you people responded (and I know you’re out there, I do watch the web traffic) last time I asked, so this time I’m going to simplify things with a poll, in the sidebar over there. The question is easy–pick who you think should be in the new header bar, up at the top, from the choices at hand.

EDIT: Here are the rules for the contest!

1) Read strip 104.

2) Come up with answer for what the green rock is made of.

3) Leave the answer as a comment on this post.

4) ??????

5) Profit!

After Friday, May 2nd, Amber and I will judge everyone’s entries and award the winner a Legendary Comic Book Heroes Conan vs. Wrarrl two-pack!

Throughout the current story arc, you’ve been seeing a lot of the Black Suit Superman figure. Now, for anyone who doesn’t follow comics too closely, it simply appears to be Superman in a black suit, and so for the purpose of the strip, that’s how I’m treating it. But the real truth of the character is murkier. Also, more headache-inducing.

In 1992, DC Comics killed Superman. Lots of publicity–it was even on the evening news (an event that was later mirrored in the death of Captain America–though the increased quantity and quality of the reports is indicative of how much superheroes become vogue again). Of course, this was only a setup for DC’s crossover event of 1993–Reign of the Supermen. The story is prefaced with an event depicting Jonathan Kent, Superman’s adoptive father, traveling to the afterlife in order to convince Superman’s soul to return to life. While designed to appear as a near-death hallucination, it was also made deliberately ambiguous by the coincidental appearance of four new Supermen–The Man of Tomorrow (or the Cyborg Superman), The Man of Steel (AKA John Henry Irons, a construction worker/retired arms designer who Superman once saved), The Last Son of Krypton (in actuality the Eradicator, another Kryptonian weapon, dedicated to preserving Kryptonian culture by destroying all other forms of life in the universe), and the Metropolis Kid (a teenaged clone of Superman who hated the name Superboy). The essential premise let readers assume that one of these four Supermen would turn out to be “The” Superman, and the suspense was in finding out which one it would be.

Of course, in a classic comic book plot twist, it was none of them, as the original Superman crawled out of a regeneration matrix in the Fortress of Solitude, wearing an all-black body suit with a silver S-shield emblem on the chest, no cape, and a mullet (party on). Given the occasional inaccuracy of design translations into action figure form in the past, this black-suited Superman figure could reasonably be assumed to be that Superman, possibly updated outside of canon.

But wait! There’s more. See, in the recent Infinite Crisis story arc, an alternate version of Superboy, who, along with an alternate Lex Luthor (Earth-3), Lois, and Clark (both Earth-2), had been consigned to a sort of pocket dimension after the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, then promptly forgotten, turned out to be very much still alive. He also turned out to be rather insane. He was dubbed Superboy-Prime, though, during the story arc (and perhaps in response to DC’s ongoing legal issues), he was aged and became Superman-Prime.

As an adult, the character has worn a few different outfits (including cutting the S-shield into his bare chest). Of course, the outfit relevant here is his black suit–a perfect copy of Superman’s, all in black, with a silver shield emblem, just like the earlier one. However, this one has a cape, and of course, the character lacks Superman’s awe-inspiring mullet of the ’90s. So, since the figure more closely resembles Superman-Prime, one could assume that the figure in question represents this design.

Once again, there are flaws, less apparent though they may be. First, Superman-Prime’s cape is black, not silver (or grey, as the figure’s cape is made of a soft plastic which probably does not hold metallic coloring so well). Also, that cape, from what I can tell, doesn’t have the S-shield on it, like the figure does (more on THAT later). The figure is missing the silver bands on the forearms, and the s-shield emblem is on a black background, rather than an actual raised metal-on-metal emblem found on both suits in the comics. If the figure IS based on either comic appearance, this seems lazy, since the Steel figure they made features exactly the sort of raised metal shield they’d need.

So which is it? The original, post-death Superman? The mentally unstable Superman-Prime? Or is it just Superman in a black suit? Given Mattel’s propensity for variants, even this is not out of the question (though it’s definitely tame by their standards).

Regardless, the jury’s still out. The one thing that’s certain is that Superman-Prime does not, in fact, transform into a semi-truck. Prime indeed.

There is The Collecting, and there is The Wait. All dread The Wait.

I’ve posted before on collecting, but there’s another part–the part in between those bursts of frantic aisle-scouring.

The Wait both is and is not a fun time for collectors. It’s that point where one of two things happens–either the collector has caught up on everything that may be easily acquired at retail (this is, of course, not counting those online searches for things already off the shelves), or the collector has run out of money to catch up on things on the shelves.

As you can no doubt see from that simplified explanation, there are both Good and Bad Waits (Tom Waits falls somewhere in between). Even the Good Wait, though, can be agonizing…I mentioned in that earlier writing that we struggle with the internal debate over whether our passion constitutes addiction. This is where that comes from. You see, when we’re not buying toys, we’re planning it. Our store visits may drop off slightly, but we track toy news sites, we keep personal lists–the messiest and sloppiest of us have a neatly organized approach to “the hobby.” Every moment during The Wait is made of anticipation, anxiety; we play it down because in our rational minds we know they’re just fucking toys, but frantic flashes of thoughts sometimes make it through–What if stores around here don’t carry the next wave? What if someone else gets there first? What if the scalpers clear it out? Yes–we brood. Even in the Good Wait, we worry, and we watch, like circling vultures, for the first report of a shipment, so that we know to start checking the aisles on our drives to and from work. To get up early on a Saturday and catch the store when it opens, before the kids and other collectors (otherwise known as “those bastards who take all the good toys”) descend. It is an obsessive behavior, yes. Trust us, we know.

Sometimes, if the Good Wait is long enough, and we’ve got some money set aside, we’ll use the time to catch up on older things on the list, scouring for online deals and receiving package after package (I am a testament to this–sometimes they all arrive the same day, and there is quite the pile of empty shipping boxes. I’m amazed the other half tolerates it). However, unless one collects only one line, this usually happens rarely, if at all–we end up playing almost continual catchup.

Worse than the Good Wait, though, is the Bad Wait (wow, who would’ve followed THAT train of logic?). Granted, Bad Waits are usually shorter, lasting until the next paycheck or so, but there is nothing worse than knowing that what you want is THERE. It’s staring you in the face (and yes, we will go to the store just to stare it down), and you can’t afford it. You know that one of those “other bastards” is going to get it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And of course, by the time one is paid, those toys are gone. If one is lucky, there will be another shipment soon, but there’s never a guarantee.

Of course, this worrisome time gets to us. It may come across as something else, or we may hide it entirely, but The Wait takes its toll regardless. We get a little moodier, some of us may even begin to question why we collect in the first place. We’ll look at the piles of toys we own and think, what’s the point? Others of us will instead obsess over those same toys, arranging their display in intricate and neurotically executed fashion. Woe to anyone who disturbs the display.

Still more of us won’t even associate our doldrums with The Wait itself. It must be the weather, we’ll think, or perhaps I haven’t been sleeping enough (being an insomniac who lives in Western Washington, these are my two default excuses for everything). But the truth is, scouring the aisles, finding that one thing we’ve been waiting and looking for over the course of months, is an experience of joy for us. We savor, if not the hunt, then the acquisition–holding that toy in our hands is a reward for patience, diligence, and attention to detail. It’s a reward, and a peculiar kind of happiness, that we’re denied during The Wait. This isn’t to say we aren’t still happy with other aspects of our life, but the thrill found in collecting becomes conspicuously absent for periods of time. It’s almost as though we’re missing a part of ourselves.

All dread The Wait.

Are in the link to your right. There’s only two right now, but they’ll keep coming. I’ll probably pull the GL sometime in the next couple of days and redo it, a) because I’m not happy with the way it turned out, and b) because I actually took the shot for a strip, and it looks MUCH better at 512×384 than it does at 1024×768.

Also, there’s a bit of specialness with newsposts…when I or Amber post one, the ‘First’ and ‘Previous’ navigation links along the header bar sort of cease to function on the main page. They start working again once a comic is posted, though. I’ll probably fix it sometime this week, but if you can’t use those, that’s why. Fortunately, there are ‘First’ and ‘Previous’ buttons below the strip as well, and those are unaffected by the issue.

If there’s a character you’ve seen in the strip that you’d like a wallpaper of, let me know! The addy is Pete@fanwank.net, like always.

And don’t forget that header bar vote, listed here!

My name is Amber and I will be your hostess when Pete is not available! Thanks for reading!