Random Happenstance

We interrupt our regular programming:

I have a dial-up. Yeah, I suck, thanks. Anyway, sometimes photos won't load right away for me, so the ongoing rambling about Avengers #211 will continue hopefully tomorrow. For now, here's a photo I managed to load last week. Hey, Kitty Pryde was stuck in that thing for three months. Thank god they didn't have the internet in 1984.

Currently, I'm broke as all hell. Crazily broke from paying for stupid adult things like the mortgage and insurance and electricity and useless wastes like that. So, unless I sell some of my precious crap on eBay (wow, the spellchecker made me replace ebay with eBay. Weird.), no new toys or comics for a bit. Which means, to kill boredom, I'll be digging in the old stuff for said bit.

Pros and cons of my stupid life: I have a complete room in my basement for my comics, toys, and bricabrac. Unfortunately, the room is not baby safe, so I can't take the baby down there, which means I can't go down there. To be fair, it's not so much not babysafe, as not safe safe.

One example would be Baron Karza, of Micronauts fame. I read the comic sporadically as a kid, and had a few of the toys. I was not the sort of kid that easily let a toy go, but the pieces were remarkably easy to lose, and I lost the Micronauts' assorted weapons, helmets and parts bit by bit over the years. Karza, the main "big bad" of the series, was not one I recall ever actually seeing as a child; but I was all over the reissue from Palisades Toys a few years back. Strictly speaking though, I believe he is now some kind of "adult collectible," rather than a toy or action figure. Semantics? Well, kind of.

The good (well, evil) Baron has detachable parts held together by magnets, as well as spring loaded launching fists and missiles. So he's a choking hazard, can injure your eye if you're unwise or clumsy enough to shoot yourself in the face, and there might even be some pointy bits somewhere: a trifecta of child safetiness, or something. Hence the Baron's status change from toy to collectible: if referred to as a collectible, it's your fault if little Billy manages to choke on him.

I thought Baron Karza was a pretty good villain in the old Marvel comics, in a very, very Darth Vader vein, but without any sissy redemption or love interest. Karza was evil, and that was that. One of his better schemes was the Body Banks, which apparently ran more or less unchecked for hundreds of years. The poor, oppressed underclass would be harvested for organs for the lazy elite and their Dog Soldier enforcers. The poor could either gamble in rigged games to try to win organs to extend their lives, or enlist as a Dog Soldier and fight for them. (As oppression goes, stealing a guy's kidneys has got to take the fight right out of 'em.) Brilliant in it's horribleness, I could totally see it happening. Anti-rejection drugs are getting better all the time...

(Aside: Judge Dredd also touched on this with "organ-leggers"? Or was it "organ-sharks"? If you needed money, you could hock an eye or kidney or limb, and then buy it or a new one back later...if you could afford the interest, of course. I live in a town infested with Money Tree style check cashing places and title loan car traps; it's not a huge stretch of the imagination to picture this coming. Organ ursury, if that's the right word. Try to imagine the inhumanity of selling actual chunks of your body, piecemeal, to make enough money to keep what's left of yourself and your family from starving to death. Of course, Judge Dredd comics regularly bring up points of future shock like this in the space of a few pages, in order to set up the villains Dredd will ventilate before the end.)

As usual, I start somewhere, and end somewhere completely different. Hope you enjoyed the mental scenic route.