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That Much, Really?
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Word has gotten through the grapevine that the 25 miniature set based on the Watchmen movie and comic book is going to be $100 retail. Good lord that is a lot of money for 25 fixed miniatures that we have no idea of what the stats are going to be. Yes it is the Watchmen, one of the most popular comic limited series and graphic novels ever, but does Wizkids/NECA think I'm going to shell out $100 for something that I have not tried to read in a long time and pay for their clix? I don't think so. I cannot understand why they are putting this out now because it is over a year late and other than a lot of other stuff that is coming out towards the middle of the year is DC related I have yet to see why Watchmen is coming out now. This is why I'm sticking with Warhammer and Warhammer 40K. Because I know exactly what I'm getting. For $10 (or more) less than that I got an entire Skaven Battalion and that is 45 figures. Sure I have to glue them together and paint them myself, but my paint jobs are generally a little bit worse than the ones they do on HeroClix, but that is okay because I know they are all my own. I can field them without having to worry about a cheese team that has no theme coming in and wiping the floor with my Skaven Battalion or Imperial Guard Squad. Yes I have to buy a Codex or Army book as well as a hardback rulebook, but at least I'm getting some rules that have been time tested since the middle of the 1980's. Half the fun of a game like Warhammer and 40K are that you make them your own and don't have to wait for two or three sets to come out to get an entire play set of Thunderbolts or Runaways, and then you need a piece of cardboard to make them work well. That and that you get to become your own painter and customize the look of your Squad/Army with a paint job you do yourself.
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GI Joe Special Missions TPB
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I was clicking on random stuff on Amazon looking at the GI Joe trade paper backs and found that they are releasing the first seven issues of the Marvel G.I. Joe Special Missions comics. Special Missions was a spin off of the G.I. Joe title that was billed as: The missions they could not tell us about until now. The series only ran 28 issues and had some neat stories in it. One of them (I think it is in this first trade) has Outback trying to outwit and at the same time navigate his way out of a Soviet Block country on foot and later by helicopter. Some of these stories make the characters look awesome (like the Outback story mentioned above), while others show how Cobra does not take care of their soldiers and equipment. I'm considering picking them up because I don't want to dig through my long boxes and break out the individual issues just to read them once. The link to the Amazon page is here and I hope you go and pick it up so they will release the other three TPB's.
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Catching up on Comics
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I have gotten around to reading the latest issues of Amazing Spider-Man and they are good, but not super good. There was the Mr. Negative story which was okay and was all about Spider-Man and Black Cat breaking into some storage area that had a vial of Spider-Man's blood so they could make a genetic bomb that would only kill Spider-Man. There's the usual talking a mile a minute and witty one liners from Spidy while fighting. They get the vial back and take off after the NYPD shows up. The second issue was a one shot double sized issue featuring a Spider-Man versus Morbius, the living Vampire and a Flash Thompson story as the back up feature. The Spider-Man and Morbius story just seems kind of lukewarm and I'm sure there is some kind of shot at the Twilight series somewhere in the art, but darned if I can find it. The Flash Thompson story is what this issue should have been all about. For those of you who have not been keeping up with the issues, Flash has been retconned to being in the Army and fighting in Iraq. While in Iraq, Flash has his legs blown off and he's now stateside rehabbing with prosthetic legs and a wheelchair. The crux of the story is that he was going backwards through the stages of grief and we are along for the ride. He starts by asking Peter Parker to ask Spider-Man to talk to all of his contacts and see if there is any way that they can help him get new and better legs rather than prosthetics or a wheelchair. After Spider-Man tells Flash there's no help for him he gets a laptop thrown at him and we flash forward to a week later and it is Flash's birthday and a nurse at the hospital rolls him out of his room before he can answer this e-mail he received about getting new bionic legs "free of charge" from a company. Flash finds that Peter has arranged a get together of Flash's best friends and army buddies as well as an ex-girlfriend who is a Physical Therapist. The ex is going to be his new Physical Therapist. It ultimately ends with a good montage of Flash getting back on track mentally and physically and rejecting the offer from the company for the Bionic Legs. Why do I have this feeling we are going to hear more about the company that makes the legs in a series of future issues? The last issues I read start with the new Electro breaking the new Vulture out of prison. What does the Vulture do first but go after the men who created him? In this case, it is the mafia, but after kidnapping and killing a low level mob boss he finds out that Jay Jonah Jamison (Triple-J) Jr. may have had a hand in creating him. Triple-J Jr. is now Mayor of New York City and the Vulture goes after him. After some artful combat by Spider-Man over these two issues and driving off the Vulture who is going after mobsters again, Peter has a picture of Triple-J fighting off the Vulture which ultimately vindicates Triple-J from the creation story. Triple-J has Peter fired from the Mayor's press staff at a public press conference where Jamison says the photo is a fake. The writing is the usual fare for Spider-Man, which is to say it's not that deep. If you are wanting deep, go read a Sandman trade. The art seems to be hit or miss. In the first three issues it seems to have been done by artist mentioned on the cover, but on the last issue on the last five pages or so the art just looks completely unfinished and is not very good by comic book standards. Next month I'll cover Deadpool's 19, 20 and 21 which includes the introduction of Hit-Monkey. (I cannot make this stuff up either.)
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Eight Very Rare Video Games
| This link at CNN.com is a list that Mental Floss put together of the eight most rare and expensive video games from the 1980's and 1990's. Sadly I never owned any of them, and a couple of them are from tours that they did to find the best gamers in the USA from Colleges and regular kids at the time. I'm happy that three Atari 2600 games are on there because that is the game system I cut my teeth on when I was little. #6 on the list (Star Wars Ewok Adventure) sounds kind of fun and I wish it was made. I would have played the hell out of it. Mostly because I liked the Ewoks when I was a kid and saw Return of the Jedi (RotJ) and the alternative game they made about the space battle in RotJ really blew chunks. #1 on the list made news recently because of auctions of the game on E-Bay that were garnering bids in the tens of thousands of dollars range. I just wish I had more money than common sense to spend on a NES game that is that rare. I like the games I played when I was a kid like Bionic Commando, Contra, Super Mario Brothers 1, 2 and 3. We used to rent those every chance we got from the local Tom Thumb grocery store. It was a dollar a night per game and you had to get it there before the section closed or you would be stuck with a really crappy game or movie for another night. (Believe me we got saddled with some really crappy games over the years because the box art looked cool and the screenshots looked really neat too.) It's a fun article I hope you check it out. |
A Little Tooting of My Own Horn
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This link is to my Photobucket account that has a slide show of my latest project in painting miniatures. They are a couple of Space Marine Damned Legionnaires from the Warhammer 40K line of miniatures. I've had the minis for a little while now, and just got around to painting them in February. They still have to have that certain something added to the base so they don't look so dull, but I thought I would show them off now. I have some more that I am going to paint up and show off next month so stay tuned.
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