This was the week that I decided to partake of the Vintage Stock buy-one-get-one Batman back issue sale — but by the time I was digging in, I’d already amassed a sizable pile of other books, so I didn’t exactly go nuts on them, nor was I doing a targeted haul the way my pal David did two weeks ago. Mostly my decision-making process was, “oh, this is a Batman issue I could’ve grabbed off a grocery store spinner rack. Let’s toss it in the stack.”
Let’s look at what I got.
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 …)