Super Hero

Welcome Pez preservers, Superheroes hounds, Movie Memorabilia moguls, Barbie Doll delighters, Jewelry junkies, Dinosaur diggers, Star Wars students, Die Cast Vehicle virtuosos, and anyone with a drawer or closet stuffed with stuff. Thanks for bringing your personal interests to CQ, your place to show and share with others your collecting passion.

You are proving many of my peers in the antique business totally wrong. First we heard from them that Ebay would be the death of the sellers’ market, lowering the value of collectibles as more and more items were uploaded for sale. Then came the crash of the Beanie Baby craze – and that we were assured, was the death of all collecting, as many novice collectors/ dealers were caught with vast quantities of the B-B’s, mass produced and declared retired.

The latest pronouncement from the antiques selling community is the lack of collecting by younger folks. That’s because they just want new stuff. Well, gentle readers, collecting is alive and growing and we are here because of your desire to learn and share information on collections, whether new, vintage or antique.

As a youngster I collected sports cards, Cracker Jack trinkets, Hoppy toy guns and a wrist watch, comic books, radio premiums, Lionel trains, and plastic models of cars, airplanes and navy ships. Young girls collected dolls, doll houses full of furniture, stuffed toys, trading cards, 45 records and figurines of dogs and horses. (gee, wish I had my stuff now).

Today my collections are useful or decorative, and sometimes considered over the top. Can you have too many ice buckets? Not me. Sill adding to my Depression glass Modern Tone, cobalt blue dish set? Sure, if the price is right and I don’t have the example already.

I’m accused by friends of having more flatware serving pieces than many good restaurants including a pastry server, cake server, asparagus tongs, sugar cube tongs, olive pincher, grape shears, and cheese shaver. But many were picked up on our antique hunting trips to the South and East coasts and considered souvenirs of those adventures. 

 We ignored each prophecy of the impending collapse of the collecting market, by selling antiques and collectibles on the web, and even with a down economy, collectibles still sell. Collecting is collecting and when the bug bites early, collections grow. So I salute your efforts in hunting for your next addition and hope your plan is to share your finds with the Collectors’ Quest community. And if you do upgrade or switch your collecting direction, you can now take advantage of the new feature on Collectors’ Quest and offer your extra items for sale on the CQ Marketplace. See the tab at the top.

The Nerdiverse hath been torn asunder by the Sci Fi Channel’s original six-episode reality miniseries, ‘Who Wants to be a Superhero‘. We’re talking a deeper rift than Kirk vs. Picard. Marianas Trench deep, folks, and the denizens ain’t none too pretty. At times painful to watch, at other times slightly less painful to watch, I fell in love with WWTBAS from premiere to season finale, and I bought the DVD as soon as it came out (which was about a week ago). Give me a cheap season of ANY show on DVD and you’ll find it on my shelf. I’m an enthusiast of especially bad video, which is an inexpensive and inexhaustible hobby to get into, since you’re basically collecting undesirable garbage. Lionman II : The Witchqueen? Yes, thank you.

The premise of this show posited that a dozen average humans costumed as heroes live in a house together for a few weeks. During this time, they’d be faced with challenges that would determine their true mettle and worthiness of the ’superhero’ moniker, all while their ranks were being whittled down by the floating head of living comic legend Stan Lee, for whatever insane reasons he saw fit. After six episodes, one hero would remain, and that hero would earn the right to appear in their own Sci Fi Channel movie, as well as a comic book penned by Stan Lee. And, thankfully, we get to watch the whole thing. Oh, they’d cry and fight and fail and succeed, and you probably couldn’t be convinced of its ultra-scripted veracity for more than a moment, but it was a fun watch.

Being the inaugural season of a highly experimental show, it lacked many of the more interesting reality show details, such as the selection process behind the initial twelve heroes and their post-show reactions. It was edited in such a way that enormous, relevant swaths of information and entertainment were clearly left out, cutting abruptly between different incarnations of the heroes’ costumes and referencing things that didn’t appear in the final show. The real names of the participants were clearly listed on IMDB, and it came to light fairly early on that a majority of them were out-of-work actors who were likely cast based on their obscurity and acting ability rather than their superheroic ideals.

While the ‘heroes’ were infinitely fun to watch, especially the voluptuous female ones, the reasons behind Stan Lee’s criticisms of their characters always rang specious. At one point, Major Victory (my personal favorite character) removes his cape to assist a woman stepping over a puddle and is later chastised by Stan Lee for removing an article of his costume, claiming that Superman would never, ever remove his cape. Allow me to put my nerd-hat on and state that this fact is simply incorrect, as the Man of Steel has never hesitated to remove his cape to serve as a fire blanket when rescuing someone from a blazing building, or should some enormous supervillian have it in his clutches. At another point, Stan Lee proclaims that Spider-Man would never, ever reveal his identity to a stranger. Curiously, a few weeks before this episode aired, Spider-Man, embroiled in the Civil War of the Marvel Universe, had held a press conference and revealed his true identity to the whole world. And in the process of digging through the heroes’ respective pasts for dirt, it’s completely ignored that Creature has nude photos of herself on her website, while Feedback is lambasted for having a cluttered office space. All of these things tore larger holes in the already paper-thin premise of the show. Surely drinking games could be formed around the questionable decisions of Stan Lee, jarring editing jumps and how many times Cell Phone Girl needs to get smacked, but I’ll leave that to you. I’ll start you out – two drinks every time Fat Momma steals food from someone ‘in character’. Oh, and three drinks every time Stan Lee pronounces Lemuria’s name wrong.

Have I made this sound agonizing enough yet? Truly, the best parts of the show were left out of the broadcast, with SciFi.com holding hours of interviews and deleted scenes that were genuinely revealing and interesting, without the pretense and the incongruity. The 2 DVD set does not include any bonus materials that are worthwhile. The ’see the audition’ footage is a montage of repetitive promo materials, and the Stan Lee ‘interview’ says nothing at all. So why would you subject yourself to this blissful agony? Because there’s nothing else like it, and praise Hera, the show was picked up for a second season, this time with 12 episodes.

Secretly? I shed a tear for our heroes. I continue to follow them on MySpace and await the moment that the Sci Fi Channel unleashes the surefire abomination that will be the movie promised to the winner. I’ll be there, popcorn in hand and perpetual grimace across my face.