Hey, Nick!

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

Here we’ve got Nickelodeon’s weekly 8:00 lineup. I wasn’t a kid at this time, so while I’ve heard of Hey Arnold! and Rugrats, I’m really not familiar with any of these shows (in fact, I’d never even heard of the others before this ad!). Sorry, but I’m kind of at a loss here! Did any of you watch these shows? If so, what did you think of them?

This is the last ad from this issue of Thunderbolts, and I think I’m going to take a break from posting ’90s ads for a while. The ones from the ’70s and ’80s are the ones I really love, and it seems like most of you do as well. If I run across a ’90s comic with some great ads, I’ll post it, but for now I’m going to stick to what I’m passionate about. (Yes, I really am passionate about vintage ads. Because I really am that much of a dork!)

 

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More Coastal Comics

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

Yeah, I know ads like this aren’t super exciting, but I’m a historian and a completist, so I feel compelled to share all the ads from the books I’ve scanned.

Anyway, here we’re visiting East Coast Comics again, almost a decade after the last ad I published from them. And I thought I had a lot of tags last time – well, I think I broke my record again, because in addition to all the regular series, they also listed all sorts of limited series and special sets!

I’m sure a lot of these titles can be found in quarter bins today, but I wonder just how many of them have skyrocked in value.

 

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The Science of Gross

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

Since last week we had “GROSS!” Madballs, I thought this would be an appropriate followup: Grossology. This is software (based on a book) that tries to teach kids about biology by presenting it as something gross – and therefore fun. So if you want to learn about snot, pee, pimples, scabs, or other sorts of bodily substances and/or functions, this is the place!

Just in doing a quick search on this, I found out that there’s an official website for Grossology that’s still active… and while it says that it was last updated in 2010, it looks more like it was last updated closer 2001! This is a seriously vintage website, and great for a walk down memory lane to the good (?) ol’ days of dialup. It’s also great for showing to the kids/grandkids so you can tell them, “Back in my day, this was what our internet looked like! It took five minutes to load, and we were grateful for it!” (and feel free to add “you young whippersnappers!” for extra effect).

 

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Ain’t No Party Like a Deadpool Party!

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

I wasn’t really into the whole card fad in the ’90s (either trading cards or card games), so a couple things surprised me about this ad: 1) The section for Image is actually advertising a game; 2) There was a subset of X-Men cards called “Deadpool Party”!

Upon doing a little research, it appears that Image, Marvel, and DC all had versions of the OverPower card game, which was kind of similar to Magic.

And as far as the Deadpool Party – that just sounds cool! While they would be very cool to have, a quick check of eBay shows that they’re going for about $10 each, so I think I’ll pass. However, on an amusing note, when I Googled “Deadpool party cards” I got a bunch of results for children’s party invitations featuring Deadpool – really, people?! Even I, a hardcore fan of Deadpool, think it’s wildly inappropriate for little Gavin to have a Deadpool-themed seventh birthday party! Though now that I think about it, I am generally a fan of things that are wildly inappropriate, so maybe it would be entertaining!

 

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Heroes Return… To Your Mailbox!

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

It’s another subscription page – this time from 1998. This one seemed to have far fewer titles than other subscription pages, but upon comparing it to one from 1997, I guess they’re actually pretty close.

X-Men aren’t quite as dominant in this one as they were in the previous year, and the number of Star Trek titles has been cut in half – and speaking of cutting Star Trek in half, here they have “Star Trek: Star Fleet Academy” listed as one of the titles – all good Trekkies should know that Starfleet is one word!

So at this point, we’ve got subscription prices ranging from $1.66 to $1.83 per issue (or $1.25 for Marvel Vision) at a time when cover price for comics was $1.99. While saving any money is always a good thing, that’s only a discount of 8% to 16%. Without doing any official research on this, I’d say that this is probably a low point (or close to it) for subscription savings.

 

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CBA IRL – Lethal Enforcers II

I’ve got a bunch of CBA IRL things I’ve been meaning to post, so I’m going to try to get caught up with some of these.

Here we’ve got my copy of Lethal Enforcers II: Gun Fighters for Sega CD, along with the Justifier… and the pink Justifier! You see, on the Lethal Enforcers games, if you wanted two players, you couldn’t just plug in two of the regular Justifiers (the blue ones), you needed one blue Justifier (which plugged into the game system) and one pink Justifier (which plugged into the blue Justifier). Because of this odd setup, the pink ones are kind of hard to find.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the pink Justifier back in the day – I actually received it as a Christmas gift about ten years ago. I’m still pretty happy to have it, though!

 

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I’d Trade a Frantic Family for a KitKat! Or for a Regular Cat…

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

KitKats have always been one of my favorite candy bars, so I’m excited to finally be posting an ad for them! And in a historical note: This ad features a kid taking a selfie – long before selfies were a thing!

This one is done in the style of a Mad Magazine fold-in – but who wants to fold up and crease their classic comic books?! Well, thanks to the magic of photo editing software, I’m able to show you the finished result without having to harm my book:

 

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Defeat Thanos With Your Game Controller!

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

I guess back in the day I was still too busy with my Mortal Kombat 3 to realize that this game was around, because I certainly don’t remember it! Apparently this was a predecessor to all the Marvel vs Capcom games.

Something that’s pretty cool (and pretty timely) about this game is that it loosely follows the Infinity Gauntlet story line – all the characters are fighting to get the Infinity Stones, and eventually defeat Thanos. One thing that sounds pretty cool about this game is that once characters obtain an Infinity Stone, they also get a special move/power related to that stone.

So I guess this means there’s no need to wait for the next Avengers movie – just play this game to see how it all turns out!

 

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Wanna Join the Mile High (Comics) Club?

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

So, this seems like it’s supposed to be a two-page ad, since it lists all of the Marvel Comics but only gets to C in DC, but I swear this is all there is! I guess since this was in a Marvel comic, maybe that’s why they focus so heavily on Marvel titles, and just use DC as space filler.

In going through and adding tags for all the different titles, I was surprised by how many I’ve never heard of – I mean, I expected there to be quite a few, but not this many!

So these comics are only 50¢ each – not a bad price! However, there’s a minimum order of $20, which means you’d have to order 40 books in order to get anything! I guess for hardcore collectors that probably wouldn’t be a problem, but when I go digging thorough a bargain bin, I usually only pick up a few issues – a couple times when I’ve really gone nuts, I might’ve gotten up to 20, but I don’t think I’ve ever bought 40 comics at a time!

 

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Quaking in Their X-Boots!

January 1998

Thunderbolts #10

It took me a minute to figure out exactly what this was – I didn’t really do any PC gaming, so while I’ve heard of Quake, I’m not really that familiar with it. This seems to be a package that lets you re-theme your Quake game to X-Men.

So it seems that in this game, you go around, taking out evil clones of X-Men… but don’t actually have contact with the real X-Men themselves? Seems like kind of a cheat to me.

 

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