I started going to the comic book store every week and seriously collecting at some point in 1983. I love margarita night these days. I love it a lot, and I look forward to it all week. But it can never compare to the excitement of waking up at age 11 and knowing that new comics were just a few hours away.
I got to know the good-natured misfits who worked and/or hung out there. They saved my books for me and put aside books and posters and other stuff they thought I might like. I worked there for a couple of summers and was paid in comic books. It got damn hot in that little store, and we would all drink ice cold bottles of Coke and Mexican soda and talk about our favorite artists and writers. It was the best job I ever had.
I stopped collecting when I turned 16 and got my license. It happens. I started reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Carl Jung, Thomas Jefferson. I was really into punk and post-punk and all my money went to records and concerts. Nothing makes you grow up quite like having to choose between the things you love in the face of limited resources.
In 1999 or 2000, I took a look at the collectibles warehouse by my mom and discovered a number of comic dealers selling the stuff I used to read, and it was cheap. I bought a few Iron Mans, a few Captain Americas, and it was over. I’ve been collecting, extremely selectively, ever since.
It’s 1941, and a Nazi regiment has been sent to defend a mountain pass—anchored by a creepy and ancient keep—in the Carpathian mountains. The creepy keeper of the keep warns the Nazis not to mess with the thousands of gleaming crosses embedded in the walls, and even tries to convince them that said crosses aren’t silver (nickel, I tell you, nickel!). But, as we know, Nazis absolutely must possess all that gleams, and they can sniff out the rich stuff as easily as if it were bratwurst. Schnell, Olaf! To the crowbars!
Problem: Prying out just one of the silver crosses unleashes a demon of some sort, which promptly begins tearing apart Nazis on a nightly basis. You see, the keep was built, way back when, not to keep something out, but to keep something in. To keep something in the keep, I mean. The evil thing, that is. What?
Enter the Jewish historian (Ian McKellan) and his pretty daughter (Alberta Watson), who are spared the concentration camp on the condition that they figure out what the hell is tearing apart Nazis on a nightly basis.
Enter Einsatzkommando Major Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne), who, scoffing at the somewhat sympathetic Nazi Captain (Jürgen Prochnow) for buying the supernatural demon theory, begins executing the “partisan” villagers posthaste.
Enter some guy (Scott Glenn) who woke up in Greece with bright lights in his eyes and hauled ass to the keep to stop the demon and have sex with the Jewish historian’s daughter about 20 minutes after meeting her.
Enter the ultimate battle between good and evil, etc.
The Keep is a pretentious mess, directed and adapted by Michael Mann before he decided to insert some substance into his style. Still, it does look dreamy, and the demon in humanoid form is an overlooked makeup effects masterpiece courtesy of Nick Maley, who worked on Star Wars (the Cantina sequence), The Empire Strikes Back, and Krull, among others. The Tangerine Dream soundtrack (listen here) has achieved cult status in its own right, and rightly so.
According to urban legend, a stupidly long director’s cut exists that, if released, would remedy the theatrical release’s incoherence (referred to as “dream logic” by the film’s admirers). Somewhere in the vaults of Paramount, there’s a door marked by a silver (er, nickel) cross. Dare they unleash the beast?
1980 was a rough year for Scott Baio characters. If you recall, Chachi burned down Arnold’s as well!
I desperately want to watch these Afterschool Specials again, but only under the condition that I have too much to drink beforehand. Such is the legacy of moralizing fluff.
At the Dungeons and Dragons tourney each table had a dragon master and six players. This is one of the intermediate groups. There were three divisions: beginners, intermediate and advanced players.
The “dragon” master’s shirt is awesome. I bet he still has it.
According to NASA, an asteroid about half the size of a football field and with a mass of about 130 metric tons “will pass very close to Earth on February 15, so close that it will pass inside the ring of geosynchronous weather and communications satellites.” In fact, this will mark “the closest ever predicted Earth approach for an object this large.”
The asteroid is called 2012 DA14 (I prefer EARTHSHAKER!, but those damn scientists are so set in their elitist classification systems), and it was discovered by the La Sagra Sky Survey in Spain last February.
So, in honor of 2012 DA14, I give you these righteous paintings of extinction-level impacts from the eminent space artist, Don Davis.
This one is circa 1953, which explains the quaint phrase on the side of the box—“Have you all of them?”
Why, no, Marx Toys, I do not have quite all of you at the moment. But I shall do my best to rectify that oversight. In fact, as soon as I finish my tea, I’ll ask grandmama to drive me to the toy emporium…
That’s a lot of wood paneling. I’m getting warm just looking at it.
The store directory is fun, yet kind of sad. Kaybee Toys is long gone, as are B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, Record Town. I thought Radio Shack was gone too, but they’re still hanging on—somehow. I worked various mall jobs in high school, and I remember all those weird cheese and specialty grocery stores—Hickory Farms, etc.
The Gap is listed under “Specialty Fashion”? Was it that cutting edge in ’82?
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