Collectibles!

[Front-Ranger]

Just now catching up on these super collectibles! Wow, you must have to have a big Christmas tree every year!

[CellarDweller]

I use the same tree every year, it's about 6ft tall, but not very wide.  It doesn't make sense to have a huge one in a small apartment.

[CellarDweller]

While I was working, the last statue I needed for my Super Friends collection arrived (Aquaman) and I was able to put him in his proper place.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I guess it really is true, if something is out there, somebody will collect it.

I was on eBay last evening, and I decided to check out the "store" of a seller from whom I had bought some things in the past. Turns out that among the things this guy has for sale are issues of the old International Male and Undergear clothing catalogs.  Based on the username, I assume the seller is a guy. Undergear was a sort of spin-off of International Male.

There used to be a joke that whenever a guy came out of the closet, he immediately got on the mailing list for those catalogs.  That's the sort of catalogs these were. The models were all drop-dead gorgeous hotties, and the merchandise included lots of skimpy underwear, swimwear, and workout clothes that only a gay man could love or wear. Sometimes I even wondered how even some gay man would wear some of the clothes in those catalogs.

They did have other clothes, too. Yes, I was a customer, and the first thing I bought from International Male was a short-sleeved cotton shirt in a kind of slate blue color with vertical white pinstripes. I loved that shirt; I wore it until it finally wore out.

A couple of anecdotes:

Back when spandex was "big" for workout gear, International Male sold lots of spandex tights, bike shorts, and such. In one catalog, the guy who was modeling one of the pairs of tights had an obvious crotch bulge. The same picture subsequently appeared in the Undergear catalog--except that the crotch bulge had been removed.  Thing was, I'm pretty sure this was before Photoshop, and whoever removed the crotch bulge from the picture had done an imperfect job; if you looked closely enough, you could see the "ghost" of the crotch bulge. 

Anybody remember "the puffy shirt" from an episode of Seinfeld? International Male featured that shirt for a couple of years.  I recognized it as soon as I saw the Seinfeld episode and nearly fell down laughing.

Some of the models went on to successful acting careers. Cameron Mathison and Shemar Moore come immediately to mind. When I did the first clean-out, I was looking at the cover of one particular issue of International Male, and the cover boy looked vaguely familiar. At that time the catalog featured a one- or two-paragraph bio of the cover model. Well, that guy on the cover should have looked familiar: It was a young Kevin Sorbo, who went on to star as Hercules in a TV series in, I guess, the early aughts (oughts?).

There was a time in my life when I was almost pathologically unable to throw out a catalog or magazine with a cover guy I felt was really hot. I held on to those catalogs for years until I had a box full of them. Finally,about 10 years ago, maybe more, when I was doing a winter clean-out, I faced up to the fact that I never looked at any of these catalogs, so I got rid of most of them. If I'd ever imagined they would become collectibles, I would have held onto all of them! Then, when I finally got a printer that was also a scanner, I scanned the covers of the issues I had kept that I particularly liked, and I got rid of the last of the catalogs. Boy, was that a stupid move! 

[CellarDweller]

I guess it really is true, if something is out there, somebody will collect it.

Yup, very true.  I've seen some odd things to collect.

[CellarDweller]

Newest item for my collection arrived today.

It's a hardcover book called "Super Friends - Saturday Morning Comics" and is a full color collection of the Super Friends comic series that ran from 1977-1982. This is volume 1 (Issues #1 - #26). Volume 2 will be released later this year, and collect issues #27 - #47, when the series ended.

Front cover.

[CellarDweller]

back cover

[CellarDweller]

What it looks like inside.   This pic gets larger if clicked.

[Front-Ranger]

That looks like a high-quality comic book!

It's buyer beware now with books. I ordered The Reluctant Dragon by Graham Greene for my grandsons. I had seen a copy in the church library that was beautiful with an ornate illustration of a dragon on the front cover and high quality printing, papers, and color illustrations inside. When it arrived, it was a slim paperback, staple stitched with a photo of the cover on the front, and a very sloppy, amateurish layout with no separations of the chapters and not a single illustration inside. I complained and the bookstore gave me a credit, but why were they selling it anyway? They said that stories in the public domain were being reproduced in low quality by an overseas company owned by Amazon.

I also ordered two copies of a book I have called The Great Adventure of Wo Ti about a cat that jumps over the wall of the Emperor's Palace in Beijing and terrorizes the prized carp who live in the pond. THe books were $17 each so I thought they would be of high quality. But no. Slim paperbacks with flimsy covers, smaller size and the illustrations, which are the highlight of the book, are all in black and white! I don't even know who to complain to about this terrible situation! Have you ever had that problem, friend Chuck?

[CellarDweller]

Hiya Lee.

I have to say, I've never had that happen with a book before, sounds like a cheap knock-off of the real deal.

I do know there are a number of action figures out there, that are just repaint custom made figures, and not real licensed figures.