Categories
Back Issue Haul Comics

This Week’s Comics Haul 7/1/23

It’s shockingly rare that me and my pal David’s every-other-week trips to Joplin to poke ’round the big chain stores for action figures and the two Vintage Stocks for back issues and current comics that I failed to order via my usual mail order place actually coincide with the big holiday weekend sales, but it did hit just right this past weekend, so I came home this time ’round with one hundred and fifteen comics, many of which were buy-one-get-one dollar books. Bear in mind, once again, the weird way Vintage Stock handles these during the holiday weekend sales is that it’s buy-one-get-one per price point, so I find myself fishing around for one more $1.99 comic because I’ve got nine of them and dang it, I need just one more free one, c’mon!

Now that I’ve gone through all of these for the blog, of course, I now also have to stick these in their right & proper spots in the ridiculous piles I’ve got all around my apartment — or, to banish them to the short boxes ’til such point as I decide I’ve got enough of whatever run to actually sit down & read ’em. Why do I make this into so much work for myself? Ugh.

Categories
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!