(via) I must admit to being more than a little wary of the ongoing trend of < HISTORICAL THING > + < ZOMBIES/VAMPIRES/MONSTERS/ET AL > = COMMERCIAL BONANZA, but this trailer for Seth Grahame-Smith’s upcoming novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has got to be the best goddamned book trailer ever.

I’ve been meaning to pick up Michael Chabon’s new nonfiction collection Manhood for Amateurs since I read the titular essay last year. But with one thing or another, I haven’t got around to it yet. Then this morning, Andrew Wheeler posted the following quote from the book (specifically from the essay “Normal Time”), and it stopped me in my tracks.

“I am forty-five years old. By even the most conservative estimate, it has been nearly a quarter of a century since I climbed eagerly aboard this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood and left the planet of my childhood forever in my starry wake. I know this. My grandparents, my boyhood bedroom furniture, a miniature schnauzer of admirable character named Fritz, the dazed and goofy splendor of bicentennial America: I will never see any of these or a million other things again. And yet always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind is the unshakable, even foundational knowledge — for which certainty is too conscious a term — that at some unspecified future date, by unspecified means, I will return to those people and to those locales. That I am going back.

No, that’s false. The delusion is not really that I believe or trust that I will be returning one day to the planet of childhood; it’s that the world I left behind so long ago is still there, somewhere, to be returned to; that it continues to exist, sideburns, Evel Kneivel, Spiro T. Agnew, and all, like some alternate-time-line Krypton that never exploded, just on the other side of the phantom-zone barrier that any determined superman would know how to pierce. When I watch a film or a television show from the period and see again the workingmen wearing short-sleeved shirts with neckties, or the great wide slabs of Detroit automobiles, or the blue mailboxes with the red tops, or when I happen to hear from some random radio the DeFranco Family singing “Heartbeat (It’s a Love Beat),” I do not think merely, Oh, that’s right, I remember that or the more pathetic I wish I could go back there again. What I feel is something more like gratitude, a sense of relief, the way you feel when you wake from a dream in which your beloved has died, and the world is grief and winter, and then you find her warm and snoring in the bed beside you.”

I know precisely what Chabon is talking about here. For me, this sense that the past is a place that still exists often manifests when I think about places I haven’t visited since I was a kid. There’s some part of my brain that thinks that, if I were to go back to Central Elementary School in Duncanville, the inside of which I haven’t seen since the year Reagan took office, that it wouldn’t have changed. Or at least, that it might have changed but not in unrecognizable ways. The books I remember would still be on the shelves of the school library, the same motivational posters would be hanging on the walls of the hallways. Heck, even though the Gibson’s store in Duncanville has been out of business since before Reagan took office, the building is still standing, and there’s a nagging thought in the back of my head that if I were to walk in the building, there would still be racks of 8-inch Mego action figures on display.

Maybe we feel this way because, in one sense at least, the past isn’t gone. If Einstein was right, and space and time are both functions of the same thing, then somewhere in spacetime the past is still there. We just can’t get there from here…

For years, we had a strict No Action Figure rule in our house, after I went a little nutty in the 90s. It wasn’t my fault, I swear! But come on, if you’d told me as a kid that one day I’d be able to buy incredibly detailed and accurate toys based on anything I wanted, my head would have exploded. So I got the Tom Strong action figures, the Madman, Mage, Hellboy, you name it. I finally crossed the line when I bought the entire range of Austin Powers figures, and that’s when the rule went into effect.

And things were fine for years. The better part of a decade, in fact. But then Georgia came along, and as she’s gotten older she’s come to like a lot of the same geeky things that I like. So when the Secret Saturdays toys hit the shelves, or an amazing line of Batman: Brave and the Bold action figures is released, well, I’m just buying them for her, aren’t I?

But I’ve still kept up my end of the deal, and only bought things that are essentially for Georgia (but that she and I both get to play with, naturally). Well, I did get the reissue of the Mego Captain Kirk last year, and the anniversary editions of the real GI Joes (you know, the Adventure Team era). But otherwise, I’ve kept on the wagon.

Then Mattel announced their line of retro “Mego-style” 8-inch DC Comics action figures.

I couldn’t help myself! I just couldn’t. I mean, look at them!

Now, like any geeky kid growing up in the 70s, I probably had just about every Mego superhero toy at one point or another, but with the wear and tear I put on them, none of them survived. In fact, the only Mego stuff I have at all from my childhood is a naked Captain Kirk, a few of that smaller scale guys and a Batmobile, and a Flash Gordon (with playset) that I picked up much later in life at a flea market.

These “retro” figures aren’t exactly Megos, but they’re pretty damned close. And they are a lot cheaper than buying the original toys at collector’s prices.

So now Superman, Green Lantern, Sinestro, and Lex Luthor have taken their place alongside the other bits and pieces I have on my office shelf. (As you can see, the reason I bought the reproduction Mego Captain Kirk was so I could steal his clothes and give them to my 30-plus year old naked Captain Kirk. Let the repro be naked for a few years, the old guy has earned a little dignity.)

I completely missed the fifth anniversary of the Interminable Ramble when it rolled around last Wednesday. So now it’s been five years and one week since I started this blog. Five years and one week of me blathering on about superheroes, puppets, cartoons, and anything else that drifts through my disordered thoughts. (Apologies on the relatively silent running lately, but I’m elbow deep in a couple of secret projects I can’t talk about yet, and so I’m keeping quiet in general. Soon, though, regular service will resume.) Five years and one week of me bloviating, in essence.

Not exactly five years, then.

Well, close enough.

You loved the comic, you thrilled to the animatic, now enjoy the brand-new motion comic.

Ruben Procopio, whose sculptures I’ve raved about many times before, shares this fetching design for a Tron statue, forthcoming from Electric Tiki’s Classic Heroes Collection.

Nice, no?

Last Friday was Georgia’s sixth birthday, and after spending the morning enduring Chuck E. Cheese’s, we returned home to abuse the SpongeBob SquarePants pinata that Georgia had insisted we buy.

Georgia and her cousins each took turns whacking at the thing with an old kendo sword left over from my college days, doing a fair bit of damage along the way.

When everyone had taken a few turns and the pinata had stubbornly refused to give up its bounty of candy and trinkets, the adults took turns, with Allison finally delivering the coup de grace.

Then the kids all gathered around to feast on his innards.

If you’ve got seven minutes to kill and you want to see the last moments of a pinata’s life, here’s a full video of the event. Warning: contents may be disturbing for those upset by images of graphic human-on-paper-mache violence.

(via) This looks well worth checking out, and I hope I get a chance to see it soon.

The fine folks at “Transmissions from Beyond,” the podcast of TTA Press, have posted two little goodies with my name attached to them.

First up is a reading of my story “Metal Dragon Year,” originally published in Interzone, read by David Rees-Thomas. And if that weren’t enough, they’ve also posted an 8-minute video interview with me conducted the year before last at the WorldCon in Denver.

What the heck is this?

Cyndi Lauper singing the theme song to Electra Woman & Dyna Girl, obviously, but… When? Where? Why?

(Apparently there was some TVLand tribute to Sid & Marty Krofft. Anybody know where I can find the rest of it?)