Happy Birthday, Superman!

Superman can blow out all the birthday-cake candles in the world at the same time! Probably.

Most Popular Posts of 2020!

Looking back on Rusty Staples' most popular posts of 2020!

Oddities: The Great Red Dragon fridge magnet

I don't know whether this is a particularly rare item, but it's certainly one of this household's most favourite things... Our largest fridge-magnet, this baby measures a colossal 140 x 145mm! This is the Great Red Dragon from Jeff Smith's comic Bone, which just happens to be one of the best comics ever published. Bone …

Oddities: Judge Dredd movie promo badge

Judge Dredd badges are not that odd as such -- I'm the proud owner of the best part of a dozen of various different styles -- but the one we're featuring today is a little unusual because it's fairly rare, and it's rather large. But first, a bit of a preamble (it wouldn't do at …

Oddities: Goody Goody comic

Long before The Young Ones deigned to (dis)grace the TV airwaves, and longer before I'd even heard of Monty Python's Flying Circus, my comedy heroes were Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, AKA The Goodies. They were silly, inventive, childish, slightly subversive, much more accessible to younger people like myself, and above all they …

Oddities: Superman coasters

So, remember those X-Men coasters I featured last year? Well, guess what? That's right, you guessed correctly, even though there's a pretty big clue in this post's title... Today we're looking at Superman coasters! But these are no fantasy, no careless product of wild imagination, no beermat-like cardboard discs churned out as a cheap promotional …

Oddities: Daniel Rand IS Shang-Chi: Master of Kung-Fu!

Marvel's mysterious martial artist Danny Rand -- AKA The Immortal Iron Fist -- premiered in Marvel Premiere #15 (May 1974)... The cover was pencilled by Gil Kane and inked by Dick Giordano (with alterations by John Romita). It's a great image and a fantastic way to introduce a new character. Later that same year, this …

Oddities: Indiana Jones vs. the V.S.W.K!

Last week, as I was preparing the August 2020 Hatch, Match and Dispatch feature, I was paging through my (sadly incomplete) collection of Marvel UK's Indiana Jones comics when I encountered a mystery that I'd spotted back when the comics were new but about which I'd subsequently forgotten... Indiana Jones Publisher: Marvel UK From: Oct …

Oddities: Beneath a Steel Sky

Beneath a Steel Sky is a highly regarded 1994 computer game developed by Revolution Software and released on the MS-DOS, Amiga and iOS platforms. I bought it a couple of years after it was published but I never managed to get it to install properly, even though my PC at the time was a top-of-the-range …

Oddities: Captain America fans

Mrs Rusty and I have been lucky enough to attend the famous San Diego Comic Con on three separate occasions -- in 2008, 2011 and 2014 -- and it's always been a great holiday, but mostly that's because one of my oldest friends lives just outside San Diego and getting to catch up with himself …