H/T to my brother finding a case of Original New York Seltzer at Costco and Eater for doing a write-up on its comeback for bringing my attention to this tiger-filled advertisement.
You guys, SMIF’BEAU IS REAL
(Hawkworld #20 by John Ostrander and Gary Kwapisz)
“If there’s any justice, Squirrel Girl would be the next hot character. But I know better. The next hot character will probably be Smif-Beau, a cross between Lobo and Yosemite Sam who made his debut in Hawkworld #20. Within three years, Smif-Beau will have fought every major character in the DC universe and then get his own mini-series. And Squirrel Girl will be forgotten. But I can dream, can’t I?”
1) It took more like twenty-five years Kim, but your dream has come true.
2) John Ostrander throwing mad subliminals at Beau Smith in Hawkworld, apparently?
3) SMIF’BEAU is a real character! DC, look what Marvel has done with Squirrel Girl! Where is your Smif’Beau revival???
(originally published in Comics Buyers Guide #993 in November 1992)
Powerballin’
I kept my streak of not buying lottery tickets alive this week, but with all of the Trumpin’ and Kochin’ and general Oligarchy in the air lately, I did start to wonder if there was anyone out there who would be willing to spend the $292,000,0000 or whatever the odds were to buy every Powerball combination in order to win and just keep that money from the unwashed masses. I feel like Donald Trump might have been up for it a few years ago, when he was just playing a super villain on television and not trying to be a populist demagogue. I’m sure that spending hundreds of millions of dollars to win the Powerball would be a money losing proposition after taxes and amortization and other things I don’t understand, but the type of baller who would make this baller move isn’t the sort of person who’s worried about losing money to impress people. Or they can just declare bankruptcy on Fuck the Poor LLC or whatever shell company they win the Powerball with. It would have been a bold move, but sadly no one is stepping up.
I was also reminded of the best and pettiest “what I would do if I won the lottery” plan, told to me by a co-worker at one of the many dire retailing jobs I worked in my youth. It was a similar scenario, where Powerball had risen to a then-unprecedented $300 million or whatever, and people were Powerball crazy. We’d both been up for 20+ hours, and were locked in the store overnight to perform an arduously inefficient inventory process. His plan:
1) Keep working the job until the first lottery check comes in. Quit immediately.
2) Come into the retail job and purchase literally every item in the store, which during inventory we’d figured would be well within the price tag of the first lottery check, especially factoring in our employee discount, which was effective for two weeks after you quit. Having to key in the employee discount on every item would make this an even bigger hassle.
3) The way this store ran, the computer would automatically re-order anything that is sold, but only after it is sold. This was really bad for new releases and perennial best sellers because it means we’d frequently be sold out since there was no anticipatory “well maybe you’ll sell all 100 copies of the new Harry Potter the first week, we’ll just wait two weeks to see if you need more” and also kind of terrible because if *one* person special orders a copy of Richard Allen’s Skinhead trilogy and never picks it up, and then I buy it off of the shelf a few months later, guess what we’re going to reorder because it was part of that cycle’s sales? Then it would sit there for six months, at which point we’d have to send it back. This was one of the major tasks of this overnight inventory shift, to pull all of the chaff, chaff we knew was chaff, and clear it all off in one swoop. And then shelf all of the new products we couldn’t fit onto the shelves because this garbage sat there for six months.
So anyway, Step Three was to wait two or three weeks, until the automatic inventory system re-ordered the entire store.
4) Return every single item.
While I am reasonably sure that even though this unnamed retail chain was comically mismanaged and outdated on all fronts, they probably had contingency plans against people trying to purchase 15,000 items on their employee discount, how to handle a store literally cleaned out of its inventory, and probably even on people trying to return 15,000 items.
Nevertheless, this was a classic tale of sweet revenge, save for the fact that the people we’d be striking back at would be ourselves. Also none of us played Powerball. It kept us warm that night.
During his time with the Cincinnati Reds, Sabo would often be seen in small, “hole-in-the-wall” type of bars. He garnered a reputation for not being a very nice guy at these bars, as he would regularly leave the establishments without tipping the bartenders, and in many cases, leave without paying his tab. He once attempted to charge $50.00 for an autograph on a bar napkin at The Bowl Pin Lounge inside of Poelking Lanes South bowling alley in Centerville, Ohio, that the bartender was trying to get for her 8-year-old son, who was a big fan of Sabo.
CITATION NEEDED, Wikipedia. CITATION NEEDED. I would probably pay $50 for that napkin now if its provenance could be traced.
Source: Wikipedia
Q:Is there a comics equivalent of Jay Electronica? A guy or gal who only drops a morsel of their media every six months or so and will possibly never release a big project as long as they can get away with their current level of output?
Mannnn…nobody in comics can even quote Today’s Mathetics as far as I can tell, so Jay Electricomics must still be slouching toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born
I am never sure (in music, comics, anything) if this is a “can get away with their current level of output” or “has other things going on and can only put out so much stuff in their sidejob/hobby” or “is only inspired to create irregularly” or “is tied up in some legal red tape” or “is stuck in some sort of Ranma ½ thing and sometimes transforms into a raccoon and can’t rap or draw until they someone pours hot water on them” situation or what.
Regardless of the cause, the person who that most reminds me of in comics is probably Paul Pope, especially before he finally put out Battling Boy.
Hulk Hogan gains access to Gawker computer system
Macklemore Is The White Eminem - A Short Essay About Hip Hop Duplexity - Max Landis Writes
1) I guess Max Landis’s “Word of the Day That Isn’t Actually In Standard Use And Just Sounds Like a Malaprop But Shows Up Mostly in 19th Century British Astronomy Journals” calendar landed on duplexity and he took it as a writing challenge.
2) If that is not the totality of the motive behind this, I am baffled as to why Max Landis (a successful professional writer who writes things for money I guess) took the time out of his busy writing and PUA schedule to write this essay.
3) The essay can be summarized by “Black rappers only rap to brag about fucking and crime. White rappers will never brag or mention fucking or crime in their raps. Eminem sometimes raps about crime, and Macklemore sometimes raps about fucking, ergo Eminem is black and Macklemore is white.”
3a) “PS I WAS USING BLACK TO MEAN NEGATIVE AND WHITE TO MEAN POSITIVE, WHAT DID *YOU* THINK I MEANT? Makes you think about your assumptions, doesn’t it? *folds finger into pyramid, sighs wearily*
3b) The totality of white rappers are Eminem, Macklemore, MC Chris, Lonely Island, and Lil Dicky.
3b1) “No no, I was only talking about MAINSTREAM TOP 40 RAP” which is why the lens you choose to explore the character of white rappers to be a bunch of white comedians who also rap sometimes. It’s totally valid, like when I explore the nature of horror films by dissecting A Haunted House and the Beetlejuice cartoon.
3c) “White rappers, by and large, since we first heard Eminem on Forgot About Dre, have near obsessively defined themselves through self conscious apologia, fanatically insisting on their own harmlessness.” So that Eminem feature where he talks about burning down houses and watching children die in cars was a shot across the bow of harmlessness, a moment so epochal in its harmlessness that it made the world forget about Eminem’s quintuple platinum album the previous year, and effectively wiped the Beastie Boys and a hundred other white rappers out of the history books.
3d) This essay is so dumb I had to modify my numbering because it doesn’t deserve more than a three point critique.
3e) David Uzumeri, I would threaten you with harm for linking this shit in my direction but I’m too white to verbalize threats of crime.
Comics Outreach, 1990s Style!
(Full page Elquest ad from Comics Buyers Guide February 25, 1994)
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