May 2004 | Comic Man!

In a last-ditch attempt to milk content from the boxes of my childhood crap my parents recently mailed, I would like to unveil a scanned subset of my modest comic book collection numbering around 50, of various Disney titles from the 70's and 80's. My favorite was Uncle Scrooge, as he often took himself and his other duck relations on absurd, fully-funded adventures to exotic lands to recover loot inevitably lifted from his money bin (a vault the size of a city block, featuring as you may know, a diving board from which to launch oneself, spats and all, into a sea of cash). The scans I've provided here however cover lesser and weirder titles, including Scamp, Super Goof, Chip & Dale, and most weirdly of all, Moby Duck.

I was reminiscing with my brother today about a certain phenomenon known as Comic Day, when he would, on rare and random occasions in his youth, suddenly appear in the kitchen doorway of our childhood home with a plastic A-1 comic bag, fezlike, upon his head, declare that he was Comic Man, and would then fan every issue of his own billion-comic collection across the living room floor in a heinous carpet of mylared cover art, much to the consternation of our mother, who was known for dumping newly poured glasses of Coke down the sink to keep things tidy.

It was the completist in him that needed to survey every last copy of his comic domain, all at once. Thus in tribute to Comic Man, who hasn't in fact been seen in many a year, I shall display a few random issues of my own collection for you here today.

A letter arrives

A certain Comic Man! sent a letter to the offices of tiny dog just this morning to report on the possible genetic root of the compulsive need to catalog random objects. He offered his own rather staggering peice of evidence, known as the Atari Safari (you have to read the letter to see it), that may render you speechless with horror, the distant digi-roar of pixelated dragon-ducks from the epic Atari game Adventure echoing in your repressed memories.

Comic man, may we note, uncovered the easter egg in Adventure many eons ago, whereby the tiny square representing your own character within the game finds an even tinier square, sticks it into a wall, and a wiggly shimmery name appears, the name apparently of some turbo geek programmer from the mists of computing history. This stood at the time as an accomplishment akin to setting foot upon an untouched world, and actually in recollection surpasses any accomplishment I can think of that has occurred in the last quarter century. Don't even try to think of one. It won't measure up.

Hey, peeps. Send mail to mail@tiny-dog.com.