Found: The List Of Superhero Standee Figures I Made/Sold In The 80s (Patreon)

In October, 2021 I posted about the paper figures I made while I was attending college in Manhattan and working at The Fantastic Store comic shop on Staten Island. I wanted to post the "master list" of all the figures I had made but couldn't locate where it was filed.  I found it tonight while going through some envelopes of archived papers and, well, duh, you know I posted it because it says so up there along with the posted list. Duh!

Here's the very important information you were all clamoring for I am sure:

I cobbled together 96 figures, four short of the Galactus I meant to do  as big, in-scale special whoop-de-doo figure #100 (with the heralds filling slots #97-99, then restarting at #101 until I got them all done. Surfer, Firelord, Destroyer, Air Walker, Terrax the Tamer and maybe Frankie Raye, at that point? Gosh. But I burned out before starting on that nerd scheme. Oh, that Evan Dorkin, never finishes anything. Except Eltingville and a few mini-series, and ruining certain aspects of his life and career. But not 100+ paper standees. Nope. I'm no Chris Schweizer, that's for sure, and that is for certain.

A few things you might notice on your own without me pointing them out but anyway I'm going to point them out:

1) I am still in the deepest throes of nerd list-making and annotating and cataloging stuff. Check out the symbols for "sold/ordered", "not for sale", etc. "Smashed silly"! Duh-weeeeb! Call the nerd police, we got another one for the loony back issue bin. 

I am still into this sort of thing for making want lists and cataloging the movies I've seen for the podcast. because I don't know how to do a spreadsheet or a list on a writing file that isn't an immensely long mess. I am probably always going to be an ink on paper guy.

2) The incredibly crabbed and tiny handwriting, using a thin rapidograph. I always wrote small. I sign my signature small. When I remember to sign things. I forget to sign a lot of my covers. 

3) The preponderance of Mighty Marvel figures as opposed to DC or anything else. A lot of these were requests but DC was doing well back then so I'm surprises how off-kilter the Big 2 representation was. X-Men was still king, of course. 

4) Even back then, I leaned towards some characters that weren't exactly commercial superstars in 1983 (or ever). An A.I.M. Agent, Nova, The Whizzer (twice!), The Radioactive Man, Peeper, Princess Python, Shaman, Doctor Spectrum, The Mimic, Mister Miracle, Oberon, Stingray, Flashback -- Flashback? Hold on...

4a) I had to go look the character up, he's a mutant Beta Flight member from the Alpha Flight series. Yikes.

5) Mutants did indeed rule the roost. The multiples are The Beast, Cyclops, Wolverine, Phoenix, Nightcrawler and The Juggernaut. And Spider-Man. Is he a mutant now? Didn't they at one point make almost everybody a mutant at Marvel to goose sails and editorial royalties. Jeez whiz. Fucking WIlly Lumpkin was probably a mutant ear-wiggler and mutant zip code memorizer.

Out of the 96 finished pieces I sold 77 of these things at about 5 bucks or so a pop. I started raising the price towards the end as I started doing ore complicated designs and losing money on each one. And I gave a bunch away. And wrecked a few if I was unhappy with how they turned out. All three components of my brilliant approach on how to run a cartooning career, which I held on to tightly until somewhat fairly recently.  

If you look under the listing marked "Original" on the far right, a number of those characters are player characters from the Champions TTRPG campaign my friends and I were involved in (after our years-long D&D campaign petered out). The Mutable Man was one of my main villains in the campaign I ran (we folded all the mainstream characters into the Champions world, and this goof's origin tied into the anti-mutant hysteria stuff, a surgical program to eliminate his mutant ability, which of course, went spectacularly wrong, and his shtick was a vendetta against the program developers including Henry Peter Gyrich and blah blah blah blah blah, biff, bam, pow, hurry up and finish the fight it's almost 2 a.m and we're getting kicked out of the house). Stargate was my friend Rob Beck's character, Pylon was Steve Tirone's character, Polymorph was Pete Farrell's character. We had several other players but i never got around to making a standee for everyone's character. I had a character that I played in a campaign run by Karl Allini and never got around to making one for myself. Fun times, fun times. No drinking, no drugs, no proms, just lasers and rockets and pumpkin bombs. I wish I didn't throw out my game book with drawings, stats and rules written down after borrowing a copy of the Champions rules book. I didn't have the money to buy a copy. Years later I looked at the notebook and the drawings and the depressed me and I tossed it. I regret that, I had a running diary of the plot and everything. I felt embarrassed by it. Dick.

The "Harlie" figure listed under them is, if I remember correctly, the Pirate Corp$! character, who existed in my sketchbooks at the time along with Ron, Blue, Halby, the TANC and Datsun. The "Alien" figures and the "Little Alien" on the list were prototypes of the Manny, Moe and Jack characters from Pirate Corp$! (wearing armor in the figures, not vaudeville suits). "Goog" was my little puffball bouncing guy ripped off from those puffy things with googly eyes, sticky feet and antennas that people stuck on shelves and cash registers in the 70s. He was my signature kidhood character that kids asked me to draw for them at school. I loved him. One day when I was a teenager I realized I couldn't use him as a "real" character because he was based on an existing thing and I busted out crying. 

Oh, well. Maybe I'll make a list of all the times I had a memorable bust-out ugly-crying session. I can make a guide with symbols and everything!

For the story on the standees and how they came to be and all that nerd stuff, here's a link to the original post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/i-made-and-sold-58032332