Baseball Super Freaks

Here are some trading stickers from my childhood that I thought were long gone. These are from the 1973 Baseball Super Freaks by Don Russ. There were 44 stickers in the series but I only have 40 of them. They bring back memories of summertime when we used to get these and Slurpees (in DC comic book heroes collector cups) from the local 7-Eleven store.

So, who do you think "Henry the Horrible" was based on?

Champions!

A young relative of mine recently posted a picture of their Champions Online character on Facebook. The game has changed a lot since my friends and I played Champions back in the early 1980s. It’s probably easier to set up a character and keep track of all of its super powers and other attributes. The characters and backgrounds look pretty cool, too.

Dan and I found some of the old character sheets that we used back then. We would create our characters by looking up the various super hero powers, skills and disadvantages in the game book. The sheets were filled in with all of our character’s information and we hoped they’d never get lost as we seldom made copies. The sheets also had rudimentary figures sketches that we would customize with character’s costumes.

Here are some of the characters that were created by me and some of my friends that played back then.

“Pixie” was my character. She was an alien that could fly, but only when she was tiny. She also had bracelets that shot energy beams.

Rick was inspired by Greek mythology when he created “Polyphemus”. This was the big, strong guy.

Wheatie Man was by Brian and I have no idea what he was thinking about when he created this. It’s been years since I’ve seen Brian so I can’t ask him.

The last one was by Jennifer, another friend I lost track of. She didn’t write down her character’s name and I don’t remember what it was. He looked like a smaller version of the Thing and had martial art skills. I don’t recall her being into comic books so maybe she borrowed a few for ideas.

DC Comics Superhero First Day Covers Part 2

Here are the other DC Comics Superhero First Day Covers I made. These four had special commemorative postmarks. The Batman postmark is the coolest and the Flash postmark is amusing but I really like the name of the post office that canceled the Superman envelope. The Wonder Woman envelope was a bit of a disappointment as they used the regular postal cancel over the commemorative postmark.

DC Comics Superhero First Day Covers

Well it's Comic Con time again. Dan and I were not able to get down to San Diego so we went to see the Zap! Pow! Bam! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938 - 1950 at the Skirball Cultural Center. It has a very long name but was a fun and interesting show. Dan posted a review of the show on his blog.

Here are some first day covers I made for the DC Comics Superhero stamps that came out in July of 2006 at a special event at the San Diego Comic Con. They made stamps for ten DC comic book heroes. I only made covers for seven of the heroes. I included Walf with my favorite, Plastic Man. This is the third appearance of Walf on a first day cover.






I will post the other heroes soon.

Distractions

Here are some pictures of my desk. Some things have changed since this post from August.

The First photo shows the shelves on my desk. There isn't a separate photo for the very top as the photos I took didn't come out very well. Some of my dolls are displayed on the very top including my "Clueless" dolls from the T.V. show. There are also some of the McDonald's Madame Alexander dolls depicting characters from the Wizard of Oz to the right. You can see the Wizard and one of the Lullaby League dolls at a table and chair set from Re-ment. The Totoro is a paper toy that I downloaded from Cubeecraft.

The second photo shows part of my Re-ment collection - The "My Sweet Recipe" series and the "Donuts to Go" series. Also shown are some small vending machine toys.

The third photo shows toys mixed in with office supplies. Actually, a few of the toys are also office supplies. The cat is a marker pen, the alligator head is a staple puller, and the Felix tin contains paper clips, binder clips, and push pins.

The last photo shows an array of vinyl toys, wind-up toys, and small action figures.

Note: This post was edited because it had been brought to my attention that I hat not listed information about the first photo.

More Walf Illustrations

Here are some other Illustrations of Walf that I did. The Walf story was done in 1992 but never made it to an actual comic book. It was based on a story that my roommate told me when I joked about getting a hamster ball for Walf. I'm sure he made the whole story up to dissuade me from getting one...

The Walf Tarot card was made for a mini comic series called Kardz, made and published by my friend Keith O'Brien back in the early 90s. The series was based on tarot cards with an anthropomorphic theme. Various animals were used in the different suits and many artists sent in their artwork. At the end of the series a special custom deck was made with selected cards and a limited number were printed for those who were interested. Walf didn't make it to the deck but another illustration of mine was chosen instead.

Walf Mini Comic

This is a story Dan and I did back in 1989 about Walf, a hamster that belonged to a roommate of ours. The story was based on some facts but mostly embellished. It was for a mini comic called Acorn Comics which was self-published. Rick Schmitz also contributed a story and the back cover illustration. The comic was somewhat primitive looking and was published for fun.