1. Customer buys something that ends up costing $10.83. Pulls 72 dollars out of his pocket. Hands me a ten dollar bill, and asks his friend if he has eighty-three cents in change. Friend dutifully counts out and hands over eighty-three cents. I wonder this whole time why the friend didn't tell the customer "what, would it kill you to just give him another dollar?"
2. I noticed on the cover of one of the science fiction magazines we carry a small blurb ballyhooing an article about behind-the-scenes stuff on the original
Star Trek TV series. Okay, really, at this point is there
anything else we need to know about the original
Star Trek series? Haven't we all seen interviews with every actor, actress, extra, scriptwriter, director, production designer, key grip, lighting tech, make-up artist, "red-shirt," tribble-wrangler, and their spouses by now? I suppose if you went to one of those "celebrity" autograph conventions you might get an actor who played Romulan Guard #3 to tell you some unsavory story from the show that never saw print due to fear of legal action, but that's probably about it.
Besides, shouldn't we all just move on to the vastly superior
Space: 1999?
3. Okay, so
the Hulk has his own weblog, which appears to have inspired a similar
Green Arrow weblog (though the Hulk appears to have a better grasp of capitalization). I was half-tempted to add to the fray with my own
Archie Andrews weblog ("Dear 'blog: I didn't get laid
again today") but I spend enough time just doing this site. So, for any of you enterprising individuals out there, that's a free idea, and
this address still appears to be available.
Archie.blogspot.com is taken, though not updated in three years.
Oh, dear...first
pal Andy links me regarding my
Seven Deadly Harveys post, then
Boing Boing picks up on it...I'm sure my bandwidth is going to go through the roof.
Not that I'm complaining. If you're new to my weblog...hi! How are you? Don't worry, I don't talk about Harvey Comics
all the time. But I think I have a thing or two more to say before I put the subject to rest.
First, about the Seven Deadly Harveys themselves...that's something I came up with a long time ago, and had been joking about with
pal Sean and
pal Dorian for quite some time now. In fact, I'm fairly certain one or the other came up with the idea of Spooky as "Wrath," which I thought was just perfect.
My original intention was to have the Richie Rich antagonist Mayda Munny as "Lust," assuming that she was in pursuit of Richie, but alas, I could come up with neither textual support for that idea, nor even a good image of her...and besides, having Richie's cousin Reggie as "Envy" was probably as obscure as I wanted to get. Anyway, I decided to go with Wendy the Good Little Witch because 1) as we all know, red is the color o' sinnin', and 2) that panel I found was too good to pass up. (I was flipping through the issue with Dorian, and we both immediately spotted and pointed at that panel at the exact same time.)
My search turned up a revamped image of Wendy that I had forgotten about:
Wendy and The New Kids on The Block #2 (1990)
Looking marginally like
Little Audrey, I don't know if this new look Wendy was supposed to make her "cool" or "modern" or what, but the look clearly didn't last very long. And, yes, I suppose I should mention that the New Kids on The Block turned up in Harvey Comics with alarming frequency at about this time.
Harvey still exists as a company, but not as a comic publisher (the last comics hurrah being, if memory serves, a newsstand magazine from a few years ago). Mostly they license their characters out for merchandise (if there's a List of Top Merchandisable Characters, surely Hot Stuff would be in the top 5) or for direct-to-video movies (the most terrifying of which is the
Baby Huey movie which pal Dorian had first brought to my attention some months back...you
have to click on the "preview" link...and
just look at that cast).
Of the various titles that make up our Harvey back issue stock, Hot Stuff remains the most requested...though about half the time it's by people looking for tattoo ideas. There was a bump of interest when
Alter Ego ran an article about Stumbo the Giant, which was a back-up in one of the Hot Stuff series.
It's a shame Harvey is out of the comics business. The industry could always use more children's titles, and half the battle in getting comics into the hands of kids is presenting parents with characters that they themselves might remember.
For more Harvey info, I recommend
The Harveyville Fun Times.
