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Back Issue Haul Comics

This Week’s Comics Haul 4/22/23 & 5/6/23

I started to write this round-up of the as-ever ridiculous pile of comics I walked away from the two Vintage Stock locations with on the Thursday following that weekend run; it was the first time I’d felt clear-headed and wide-awake during an evening all week long. Heaven knows this ain’t ever happening the night after — no, Saturday evenings after a successful outing are spent doing the ritualistic peeling of all the tape and price tags off the comic bags. Maybe if I’m lucky, actually opening one of the action figures I bought. Deeply silly how exhausting peeling a bunch of labels and tape can be, but after the twentieth time a piece of Scotch tape has decided to rip instead of cleanly come off of a poly bag, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to expend a lot of extra effort for the rest of an evening either …

Then the rest of that week and the following week got away from me, and … well, at first I thought wouldn’t it be funny if I pulled this whole thing off on a Saturday evening, like I said I couldn’t? And, reader, I did manage to finish writing up the pile from April 22nd, but I only managed to get this past weekend’s books unstickered and organized before crashing.

Let’s dig into the piles, shall we?

Categories
Movies

My Year of Movies, 2021

If there’s one thing I can say for 2021, it’s: thank the heavens, at least the movie theaters were open again. Sure, you might still catch a life-altering contagious respiratory illness while packed in with a bunch of strangers all, together, staring up at beautiful faces larger than your house — but in a place the size of my hometown, and me being as vaxxed as one can be, I’ve considered the personal risk as slim as it could be given the state of things. So in the back half of the year, I did see a pretty fair number of films as the filmmakers intended, outside the comfort of home. What follows are cross-posts of the reviews I wrote on my Facebook page from July all the way through the week of Christmas covering almost every theatrical outing (plus, oh yeah, two somewhat notable streaming flicks) that I took in during that span of time. Enjoy!

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This Robotech Thing

This Robotech Thing: Everything Changes

In which Captain JLS discusses the biggest Robotech-related news since the announcement of The Shadow Chronicles in the early 2000s — Harmony Gold & Big West have, hopefully once & for all, settled their differences and unreleased Macross material and merchandise, new & old, can reach these shores through official channels starting … well, apparently about a month ago. Also featured: bits & bobs of Robotech & Robotech-adjacent merch ranging from the very recent all the way back to late last year.

Categories
Movies

Movies 2019, Part 2

It’s part two of my round-up of all the movies I sat in front of in 2019, whether at home or in the theater. Ten movies, presented in release date order, starting off in the 1990s and making it into 2018 — which, as I said last time, just goes to show that I mostly saw stuff from 2018 & 2019 last year. (I’m really hoping to do better this year.)

Categories
Action Figures

Gundam Universe RX-78-2 Gundam

It’s absolutely terrifying to realize in the awful dystopian future year of 2020 that it’s been about sixteen years since the end of Bandai’s big push to get Gundam toys into American toy aisles, an effort that ended with a last-gasp cough of 4″ Gundam SEED figures in the style of the Wing, Universal Century, and G Gundam figures that had previously littered Walmarts, Targets, and Toys ‘R’ Us stores nationwide. What a time that was — when you could walk into Walmart and come out with a sturdy plastic Zeon Gallop and a handful of Zakus and Doms! (Seriously, Bandai really wanted the original Gundam to be a thing in the early ’00s — it was nuts, but the good kind of nuts. The kind that got us a deluxe Zaku set that came with a Magella Attack Tank so you bash them together into a Zaku Tank. I miss those days …)