Tag Archives: 2012

Throwback Thursday: Bazooka gum!!

It was always the cheapest candy at the store — it cost a nickel in the 1980’s, if memory serves.  And you got a free comic strip too, along with a fortune!!  We had an unwritten rule on the street I grew up on — you had to pass the comic around to whatever kids you were with so that they could read it too.

It tasted pretty damned good too.

They actually stopped including the comic strips in 2012, and now there are puzzles in the wrapper.  (Rome burns.)  But now, confusingly, you can buy a “wallet pack” of the gum in which they do include the comics?

I got a bunch of it in my Christmas candy.  That was awesome.



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Photo credit: Parka Lewis at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

This is an honor.

I discovered something incredibly cool this afternoon — it turns out that the good people over at Dark Horse Comics quoted me in their 2019 promotion of Matt Wagner’s superb Grendel: Devil’s Odyssey.  The eight-issue limited series marked the return of the iconic Grendel Prime, who I last followed as a zealous young fan in the pages Grendel Tales (1993-1997), Batman/Grendel II (1996) and Grendel: Past Prime (2000).

Dark Horse quoted a review I wrote of Wagner’s Grendel: Omnibus Volume 1 (2012), which was a compilation of the writer-artist’s brilliant early work on the title.

I’m thrilled.  Wagner’s a genius — and while Grendel’s dark, violent content is not for everyone, it’s always been a seminal title for the medium of comics.  I remember greedily snapping up back issues when I was a college student in 1992 — I never thought the day would arrive when a review of mine would be referenced to attract new fans.



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