What’s that you say? You’d like to see the Incredible Hulk swing on a trapeze with a big dopey grin on his face?
BOOM!
A little too surreal looking? How’s about some standard super hero fare… robot shooting lasers, evil looking business dudes, scientists, a happy child… and a panda bear.
The seller is the Bedrock Comics store in Framingham, MA. I used to stop there after work when I lived there, always good stuff on the shelves. Be sure to browse their other auctions.
My Incredible Hulk will almost always be written by Peter David.
That’s just what I see when I see “THE INCREDIBLE HULK” on the shelf. My mind automatically flashes to “Written by Peter David.”
But I don’t think Mr. David wrote this one. He didn’t need to. It was good enough to just go, “Okay, we’ve got the Hulk, and we’ve got the Gray Gargoyle. Hmm. Nuff said.” Well actually he did. But you know what? I should have known. The title is too witty to have been written by anyone else. “Still Life.”
#93 – The Incredible Hulk #363
There’s a great Patton Oswalt bit about Tivo, in which he compares Tivo to a special needs child who desperately wants the scratch n sniff “Grape Job” sticker.
Now, I was never a special needs child (yes, I know it’s hard to believe), but as a little kid, I too was often rewarded with stickers. We’re talking like 1st and 2nd grade here. And while I got my fair share of scratch n sniffs, a lot of the stickers I got were more akin to these:
A 4 inch high Spider Woman makes for a grand reward. But even better than that would be if the sticker was one of the cherished PUFFY STICKERS:
Don’t pretend you don’t know the awesomeness that was puffy stickers. Stickers today just don’t measure up. I was in a store the other day, and the stickers I saw were going for some sort of 3D thing… it was the suck.
Sandman, Sandman. What were you thinking?
This was NEVER a good look for you.
I know you were trying to step your game up by moving away from the street level, Spider Man attention getting crimes and into the upper echelon of villainy by going up against the Fantastic Four and the Hulk, and I know the whole deal with the suit was that it was supposed to boost your powers, but really man, who’s gonna take you seriously when your costume makes you look like a leaky ant farm?
I woke up Sunday morning and The Defiant Ones was on TCM.
Just a great, great classic movie. Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as fugitives from a chain gang, joined at the wrist, who hate each other. Both got nominated for Oscars for it.
But what if, instead of getting Oscar nominations, they got their wrist chain replaced with an alien weapon that bonded them together for life and gave them superpowers?
Well, then you’d have Hammer and Anvil.
That’s their first appearance right there. It tends to go for pretty decent bucks. Why? It’s called star power.
Hot Wheels. A staple of every boy’s childhood since the 60s, and if you didn’t have Hot Wheels you had Matchbox cars. The Marvel superheroes went the Hot Wheels route, to varying effects. The best one I think belongs to the Mighty Thor…
A van with a Thor mural on the side? They should make them in real life.
Ok, Captain America and the Human Torch get speedy lil’ race car numbers, I can see that.
Yikes. Cool looking vehicles these are not, even with the rad Hulk Smash pose on the side of his car. Spidey doesn’t even get any noticeable logo, just what appears to be some sort of giant bubble spider in lieu of a roof.
Still could be worse. The ever lovin’ blue eyed Thing? He has to squish himself into a Pinto.
Not going to lie, when I started looking for old Hulk comics featuring the long forgotten villain the Gremlin (perhaps better known to fans of Iron Man as one of the men behind the Titanium Man armor), I really wasn’t expecting to find anything. So imagine my surprise to see that not only are there 3 cover appearances of the Gremlin up right now, but that all three currently have bids!
Sure, they’re all only 99 cents, and probably won’t go much higher, but still.
The Gremlin was basically someone’s attempt to bring back the Hulk’s first ever super-villain, The Gargoyle. And when I say first, I do mean first; the Hulk wasn’t even green yet when Gargoyle showed up:
Yup. Nobody ever really seems to remember it, but Incredible Hulk #1 did in fact involve Hulk getting kidnapped by Russians, who were led by a genius dwarf with a giant head caused by radiation poisoning. This of course was the Gargoyle. Bruce Banner cured him of his deformity, and in return the Gargoyle made a suicide run that enabled him to escape. And that was literally it for the character. But I guess he struck a chord with someone, because some 160+ issues on down the line, his mutant son showed up. Said mutant son basically being the exact same character, just with a different name and origin.
Other then eventually joining the Soviet Super Soldiers, the Gremlin never really did any more than his father did. Sure, he was involved in battling the Avengers and the X-men for custody of Magneto during the X-men Vs Avengers limited series (which I will cover later this week, along with X-men vs Fantastic Four), even showing up on the cover of issue 3 drowning Wolverine while getting choked out by Captain America, but he was in the Titanium Man armor by then, and as far as the average newsstand comic buyer was concerned, that meant he could have been pretty much anybody.
Like I said, the Titanium Man armor meant it could be pretty much anybody inside it, so when Marvel sent Tony Stark on a world wide quest to destroy everything made with the stolen designs for his Iron Man armor, the Gremlin ended up as the token “character that gets killed”, with Tony accidentally blowing up the Titanium Man armor with his booster jets mid fight.
Such a lame death. So it’s nice to see that someone actually cares about him enough to bid on those three cover appearances.
I always will have a soft spot in my heart for comics that haven’t been vacuum sealed up and packed away to sustain their CGC rating. There’s something about them that just seems more pure, more connected to actual love for comic book then to love of it’s value. So seeing a comic this old, that’s still in a good condition and would probably sell in the thousands of dollars range were it graded, being put on sale with out all the rigmarole, makes me pretty psyched that maybe someone not named Nicolas Cage might actually be able to afford a classic comic for once. Maybe. Possibly.
I had literally no idea that Sci Fi legend and noted curmudgeon Harlan Ellison ever wrote for comic books. I can only imagine what the plots of these two issues are, and what his thoughts on working in the comics industry were afterward.
*- Don’t get the title? Do yourself a favor, find a copy of this:
Not being into sneaker collecting or BAPE, I can’t really say if these are cool or not. I know that as someone who actually wears his sneakers, I wouldn’t be into them (though I’m pretty sure I had a Gotcha surf wear tank top in the 5th grade that would match these 100%). But I guess if you’re a sneaker head or a BAPE collector, you’re not going to be worrying about what to wear with these if you buy them, so more power to you.
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