geekent's Buy Nothing Year

So my store credit was chopped in half last week thanks to an unwise and yet utterly desired purchase on my part. I mean I could have coasted for months (if not weeks) had I just bought comics and avoided and evaded the peripherals, but no, I the beauty of plaster replicas of ladies in spandex was too much for me.

If we look back at this classic geekent post (geekent retro!), you can see me ranking statues on the tamale meter between "eh", and "hawt soss"... and the two statues I acquired received the following rankings:

Batgirl bust: the classic costume, classic Barbara Gordon, a powerful pose, and hot... reminds me of Aden (probably because she uses Batgirl as an avatar on occasion). Beautiful without being flaunty.
HAWT

Donna Troy bust: I was walking Aden through the various "Women of the DC Universe" busts yesterday, and when I told her that this is the one that most reminds me of her, and she was offended, because she LOATHES Donna Troy. But it's true. Though Donna's perhaps got way too much makeup on, the hair and the body just remind me of my special lady. Red spandex sweetie... :) I don't know why Aden hates Donna so much. I'm a little fond of her because Phil Jimenez likes her so much, and Phil's a cool guy.
HAWT

As you can see, this wasn't strictly hormone-driven lust for imaginary figures, but rather hormone-driven lust for imaginary figures who remind me of my wife, which cosmically must be okay and inoffensive to everyone... well except Aden who get compared to Donna Troy.

Anyway... these little (and I do mean little... they're about 5 inches tall) busts/statuettes now sit on our newly erected shelves next to Adrienne's plentiful statues of Robin and Nightwing and Magneto and Flash and Impulse and...

Hello ladies.

Ah, the trip home, when mom buys all that food she thinks you like and Dad has stashes of snack foods that would make convenience stores look understocked.

Hyperbole.

Anyway, yeah, the trip to Thunder Bay was great, providing my lovely wife with the opportunity to meet most of my extended family as well as some of my friends (the progression of the week ate away our visiting time far too quickly).

Food ate:
Mr. Sub
Turkey dinner (with ham and selection of four Grandma-made pies)
Leftovers + more pie (cherry, peach, pumpkin and raisin)
cheesies (Hawkins, Old Dutch Nacho)
Pogos
Plenty of Chicken wings (at local favourite, On Deck... their Cajun wings are the best wings ever)
A gin and tonic (a moratorium break I couldn't resist)
Old Dutch Potato chips (moratorium break... had to be done for availability of Onion and Garlic in Toronto is nil)
and since I was breaking the moratorium anyway: Bounty chocolate bar
A Tim Horton's donut (yet another moratorium break... I should have had Robin's Donuts, sigh)
Pirogies and pork chops and more pie
Finnish pancakes at the Hoito
A persian in the airport
A cookie on the plane home

I'm certain I gained about three or four pounds on this four-day, four night trip... thankfully the wife and I walked around town a lot (pretty much unheard of around those car-lovin' parts) which hopefully counteracted a lot of the damage.

We had a nice relaxing time. Should have taken the rest of the week off work, oi.

Been doing my budgeting and, yup, I'm out of money, which means extra-frivolous expenses like action figures are right out. It's really too bad because the second series of Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier Action Figures is coming outnext week and they look swee-ee-eet.

But, that's just the tip of the iceberg of action figures I'll lamentably be excluding from my collection in '08. There's also the New Gods line in April (which is the closest I've ever seen Kirby's art so accurately replicated in 3-D... I'm not even a New Gods fan, but my desire to have these is a testament to how innovative still Kirby's artistic and design aesthetic remains).

As noted at the San Diego Comic Con, Hasbro has licensed the entire DC Universe for a new line of collectible figures, DC Universe Classics, which will start appearing on the shelves the first week of January (bastards). The big deal about this is they have the legendary figure sculptors The Four Horsemen working on designs (giving the figures all uniformity in style and proportions) and they will all be quite articulated. The DC Direct line of figures have been good for capturing an artist's style, like Alex Ross, Jim Lee, Kirby, etc, but when a Deadshot figure belongs to a Michael Turner line, he doesn't look very good next to a George Perez inspired Cyborg. A lot of the DC Direct figures, like the Justice Society line-up, have been ugly or awkward, with some of the most inane articulation (7 points, two of them ankles? WTF?), but with the Hasbro line, everything will be integrated visually and nicely posable. Oh, and each wave of releases will have a collect-a-figure, which the Marvel Legends series popularized, where you get a component of another figure with each figure in the line, to assemble a new one. Wave 1: a sweet-looking Metamorpho. Wave 2: Gorilla Grodd.

Toy announcements tend to come far in advance as prototypes are drummed up quite some time before they're ready for market, so we often can see figures lined up 6 (or more) months ahead of scheduled release... so expect a few more of these reports, especially since DC Classics are slated for 1 wave every quarter. Oy.

I broke the Buy Nothing Year this week *GASP*
I'd been bending the rules with my whole "store credit" at the comics shop but, yeah, this was a flagrant violation of the rules.
I went for a haircut the other day (the flowing locks are gone, now I'm all naval crewman), and the barber just happens to be across the street from BMV, a local discount/used/seconds bookstore retailer which I frequented when I was living in BOBTown (since it was also on the path on my way home). BMV has not just used DVDs and books and discounted books, but also comics and trades, you know, my weakness?
So I went in to look to see if they had any Planet Hulk or World War Hulk trade paperbacks (as Marvel often releases a glut of trades whenever a movie comes out, and Aden and I wanted to read up on some of the more interesting recent Hulk events after seeing the movie.. and since Aden was also interested in reading them as much as I, I could cheat and say they were a gift for her). They DID have some Hulk trades (and Iron Man, and a whole bunch of various Civil War and other overstocked Marvel titles) but not what I was looking for. What I did find, however, was the first two trades of DMZ for half-price (+$1) and the Hitman/JLA 2-issue miniseries which I missed late last year at half price (+$0.50), all told came to just under $20. I can't resist a bargain, especially since I've been wanting to read DMZ for some time and my Hitman collection felt incomplete without the recent mini.

Well, Adrienne feigned shock, and appropriately chided me on my cave-in, stating she didn't even want to read DMZ so I couldn't even justify it (nope, I caved due to sheer greed and my bargain shopping sensibilities. There is a pang of guilt associated with breaking my own flexible BNY rules, but I'm still happy I got those trades at a really good price. And Aden just read Brian Wood's The New York Four (which will be reviewed on Rack Raids in the next day or two) and liked it so maybe she'll be receptive to his other works and I can "write off" the DMZ purchases.

JLA/Hitman on the other hand, I just plain regret. Awfully written (Ennis made Superman out to be a child, Batman to be an a-hole, Wonder Woman a moralistic prude, Green Lantern a wimp, and the Flash an even bigger a-hole than Batman if you can believe it... pitting them all into Deus Ex Machinas that the characters should never get into), and ugly (John McCrea's never been a particularly clean or attractive artist, but this is borderline unreadable slop). A lot of fandom and reviewers, so jubilant to see Ennis return to one of his best creations, were excessively lenient on this book, and praised it as a great extension to the main Hitman series. Nope, it's utter wankery, putting Tommy Monaghan as the if not ethically, then morally superior character in the story. Plus, do you think Clark Kent is ever going to tell a story like this to anyone other than a fellow hero or his wife or mother? Come on! Like that reporter wouldn't see through the spectacled disguise the instant Clark started telling the story (and so much of it not from his own perspective). Bad character work and sloppy framing sequence, and generally intolerable writing all around.

Wow, somehow this confession turned into a review. Anyway... I cracked, I caved and I should be good for another 5.5 months now.

(of course, I'm getting those DC Infinite Heroes action figures for the stepson... yeah... for him... and the new Millenium Falcon too (it's almost bloody 3 feet long!).