Back in 2005, Toy Biz released a wave of Marvel Legends figures that each included a portion of a Galactus figure. If you bought all the smaller figures in that particular wave, you would have all the parts to build your own Galactus figure, which stood about 18" tall -- three times the size of the regular Marvel Legends figures. They did that type of thing for several waves to try to encourge fans to buy every figure in the line, rather than just the three or four that they wanted. They also did a Sentinel, Apocalypse, Annihilus, Giant-Man... but Galactus was the only one I had enough interest in to get the complete set. He was part of my action figure display for years.

In 2009, Hasbro made a 19" figure exclusively available at San Diego Comic Con. This one include light-up features as well but was otherwise not appreciably different than the one I had already gotten, so I certainly wasn't about to pay extra for the exclusive nature of it. In fact, when they released a mass-market version the following year, I was still disinclined to pick that up. (I feel compelled, for the sake of completeness to also mention the Galactus figure Toy Biz made in 1995. It only stood 14" tall and you could only move the arms and head. I did have that one at one point, but I never cared much for it.)

But in 2022, Hasbro did a new Galactus figure as one of their "HasLab" offerings. This one clocked in at a massive 32" and also had light-up features, but had the price tag to go with it. I believe the original price for $400 US but if you missed the sale window (which was only about a month, maybe two?) then you were out of luck. You can find them on eBay and other after-market venues now, but they generally float more in the $600-$700 range. I couldn't bring myself to justify the $400 expenditure, much less a $700 ome.

But I still thought it would be cool to have a Galactus figure that could so overwhelmingly tower over my Fantastic Four figures. I have a 3D printer, so I toyed with the notion of downloading a simple Galactus model and trying to tweak it to add a little articulation, but all the ones I could find were barely a couple inches tall and would lose all semblance of detail when scaled up to a reasonable size. Not to mention the sculpts generally looked pretty stiff and awkward to begin with.

But I recently discovered that ToyMakr3D released an articulated Galactus-type 3D model (technically, not actually Galactus to avoid copyright problems) that was able to be printed on your own printer. I had seen their work before, but as they focused almost entirely on Transformers and Transformers-style mechas, I paid little attention to them. But it would seem they branched out a bit more late last year and released "Battlegeus" which, when printed and assembled, comes in at about 30". I figured that, for a considerably cheaper price than the HasLab figure, I could finally have my own Galactus roughly in scale with my figures. And, after about two weeks of printing and assembly, I finished the figure last night...

I have to say that, as impressive as the asthetic design work on the figure is, I was infinitely more impressed with the engineering. There are, if I didn't miss any in counting, 71 points of articulation and every one of the 360-some parts fit together perfectly. Furthermore, all of the larger joints include a built-in tensioner so you can adjust how tight/loose each joint is. The instructions were a tad confusing in places, but the way the parts are designed, it's hard to not fit them in the right spots.

Even though I built it myself, the cost wasn't nothing, I will admit. The STL files for printing were $22.40 US and I spent another $120 to get enough of the blue and metallic purple filments. But that's obviously considerably cheaper than even the $400 price tag of the original HasLab figure. And it occurs to me that even if you add in another $300 to get a brand new 3D printer on top of the costs of the filament and 3D files, that's still less than the current asking price for one of those HasLab figures on eBay!

Anyway, I wanted to give a shout-out to the fantastic design work on the figure for anyone else who couldn't pull the trigger on the HasLab Galactus. There's also a (legally, not actually a) Sentinel as well. Maybe they'll be encouraged to do other large-scale characters -- some Celestials, the Shaper of Worlds, Eternity..? Lots of possibilities seem open now!

One thing I've noted more than a few times on this blog is how I've spent much of my adult life unlearning the bullshit I was taught in school. Particularly when it comes to history, everything that was in my textbooks was heavily propagandized and incredibly white-washed. I've told the story before of when I was in middle school, my father brought home a small stack of Golden Legacy comics and within a week of reading about the importance of Frederick Douglass to freeing enslaved people, he happened to pop up in my history textbook at school... for exactly two sentences. So it's no surprise that when Junteenth was declared a federal holiday in 2021, a lot of folks -- particularly those not descended from enslaved people -- just scratched their heads and didn't have the foggiest idea what Junteenth was for.

It's this type of thing that I think comics are particularly well-suited for. To catch people up on the history they either weren't taught at all or were actively taught incorrectly. Using comics to close these gaps ("chasms" might be the more appropriate term here though) makes learning more engaging and memorable in a way that a Wikipedia entry does not. And when it comes to issues around racism and slavery, let's face it -- Americans won't even acknowledge them unless they're heavily sugar-coated to begin with so, by and large, they're not just going learn anything about Juneteenth by casually reading through Wikipedia for the sake of their own edification.

OK, so what comics are actually out there that talk about the origins of Juneteenth and what it means?

To begin with, I can't find any webcomics touching on this subject. I'm really disappointed that there aren't more history webcomics in general, but I suspect that has to do with the origins of webcomics in the first place. (The medium itself tends to be more forward-looking, so its biggest proponents also tend to direct their thoughts to the present and future with technology.) But what about print?

I've been able to find four comics specifically focused on Junteenth. I haven't had a chance to read any of these yet -- one was only just announced and won't even be published until next year -- but I have to believe they all have something worthwhile for you. Check them out!

	The Adventures of Juneteena Freeman "CROWN": Graveyard in the Attic by Dr. Phyllis Tucker-Wicks Learn how a regular African American teenager stumbles upon a mystical crown that bestows her with the incredible powers of her ancestors. Juneteena embarks on a thrilling journey of self discovery, empowerment, and justice as she learns to wield these newfound abilities. Dive into this captivating adventure and witness Juneteena's transformation from a regular teen into a formidable superhero.
	KEMET The Time Traveller - Juneteenth by Joe Young Imagine discovering ancient realms through vibrant illustrations and captivating narratives—this is the essence of KEMET. It's more than a comic; it's a portal to understanding and cherishing our cultural roots. As we unveil each chapter, children are not only entertained but educated about Black history in a way that sparks curiosity and pride.
	The First Freedom: The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth by Angélique Roché, Alvin Epps, Millicent Monroe and Ben Glendining The incredible journey of activist Opal Lee—known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth—is brought to life in this biographical graphic novel that not only explores Opal’s remarkable path, but the history of the holiday of Juneteenth itself. (This is not due to be published until February 2026.)
	The Tree That Splits: A Juneteenth Story by Davian Chester Set during the final days of slavery, The Tree That Splits follows Levi and Celia, two enslaved lovers who are separated the day freedom arrives.

Like, I suspect, many of you, I've been following the trials and tribulations of Diamond Comics throughout their bankruptcy. Some days more closely, some days with little more than a passing glance. I'm probably a little more comfortable than most comics fans in keeping track of what's going on -- I've been actively following comic companies as a business interest since Marvel went through its bankruptcy back in the '90s and many of the papers and studies I did for my MBA centered around the comics industry. But I've got to ask you...

What the hell are they doing?!?

So Diamond declared bankruptcy in January, right? That basically means that they have more debt than they'll be able to pay off. So they put the company up for sale. Someone could buy everything that Diamond owns, but they'd also be liable for that debt. Diamond was put up for auction and it was bought by Ad Populum. (I am waaaaay over-simplifying this for the sake of getting to my actual point more quickly.)

Typically, there are two reasons that one company would buy another. The first is to gain their assets for extended use. That might be because they have material (which could take the form of raw materials, finished products, intellectual property, or just data) the larger company wants for their own business; that might be because they are a competitive threat and buying them allows the larger company to literally own the competition; that might be because the CEO of the larger company always just thought it might be fun to run a newspaper. (That's a Citizen Kane reference, not a Jeff Bezos one.)

The second reason one company might buy another is to sell it. They typically will fire a bunch of employees, switch to inferior materials (maybe more 'filler' for real world items, maybe trying to wrangle AI to do the bulk of the creative work), sell off some of the key assets under the guise of "returning to core competencies," and try to run the business as bare bones as possible for a couple years before turning around and selling it to someone else. The idea is that they try to get rid of some of the major ongoing expenditures to bring costs down, but sell the company quickly before customers turn sour on the inferior goods/service. It makes the company look good on paper for a very brief time, and the goal is to sell during that small window. It's kind of the business equivalent of house flipping; putting in just the smallest amount of work to make everything look good superficially but without addressing any of the serious structural issues.

At first, I thought Ad Populum was taking this second approach; they fired a bunch of employees on Day One. Normally, this is done a couple months after the purchase to give time to the larger company to identify who they can get rid of and hurt the business the least. If you're firing a bunch of employees as quickly as Ad Populum did, that means they put very little consideration into who does what and just got rid of whole departments and/or anyone drawing a salary of more than an arbitrary dollar figure.

What next sturck me as odd is that they just shut down Diamond Select Toys. They haven't sold off that part of the company, which has existing inventory as well as deals for future products already in the pipeline. There was most definitely some value in all that, and Ad Populum effectively just chucked it in the garbage.

They then cancelled all orders set for after next week. Not rescheduled to a later date. Not delayed until further notice. Not even just canceling for a couple weeks while we sort out the warehousing situation. Everything canceled, full stop. That included material from Marvel, Dark Horse, Tokyopop, IDW, Kodansha... every company that had an agreement with Penguin Random House basically. They didn't even offer short-term suggestions for getting products through alternate means. Just "June 25 or later? Nope." They just effectively killed their entire business. If they're cancelling orders on major publishers' work like that, why would any retailer trust to order from them again? All the retailers that continued to order, for example, Marvel comics from them -- probably out habit/inertia -- now have to scramble to another distributor. They have to do some hard work they were hoping to avoid. Now that Diamond is forcing them to do it, what's their incentive to return?

They've also axed their no-cost reorder service, they've cut retailers off from any data of any sort that they might've used to operate their businesses better, and in fact they seem to have cut off communications altogether -- publishers are hearing nothing, not to mention they're not being paid for anything sold since Ad Populum bought Diamond, and reporters (like industry stalwarts Heidi Macdonald and Rich Johnston, mind you, not just any yahoo with a blog) aren't getting any responses either.

In short, they seem to be doing everything they can to run the business into the ground. I honestly don't know what they might do differently if that was indeed their deliberate intention. I mean, if they had strip-mined the company's assets -- sold off Diamond Select, subcontracted distribution work to a cheap third-party, canceled the lowest profit contracts, etc. -- they would still have some measure of value in the Diamond brand and logo. Diamond was literally THE comics distributor for the entire country for three decades; that name and identity carries some value to it even with the bankruptcy. Well, "carried (past tense) some value." As I said, their business decisions are royally screwing over their client base to the point where retailers literally have no choice but to run to a competitor.

I can't see what the business angle is here. This is not just incompetency; one or two of these decisions, maybe, but all of them? In so short a time period? Diamond's value is estimated to have dropped by $10 million since January. Ad Populum is making the company worth less and less by the day. I don't think there's a Producers-level scheme possible in this scenario. Maybe it's a limitation of my own imagination, but the only rationale I can come up with for this extended series of phenomonally bad decisions is that someone at Ad Populum is seeking out the most two-dimensional, petty, Snidely-Whiplash-type revenge scheme against someone at Diamond, and they want that person to watch Diamond turn to absolute ash. Which I wouldn't be upset with except that it's hurting thousands of comics retailers and publishers and fans in the process.

I debated a fair amount with myself on whether or not I should write a review of Victoria Lomasko's Other Russias for my blog. Not that I didn't have opinions on the work itself, but in the first place, it was published in 2017 so there's no doubt plenty of other reviews online that have covered this, but more significantly, it's debatable on whether or not the work is, definitionally, comics. The publisher calls it "graphic journalism" and there's a great pull quote from Joe Sacco on the back, so before cracking it open, I thought it'd be perfect for here. But I started second-guessing myself once I started reading.

What Lomasko set out to do with this book was capture the lives of Russian citizens whose voices aren't generally heard. Not just by us here in the States, but even within Russia itself. School teachers in towns so rural that they have class sizes sometimes as small as 1, middle-aged sex workers in mid-sized cities, teenagers in juvenile prison convicted of murder, women who had been tricked in becoming slaves at a Moscow grocery store... People who most of society would like to collectively forget exist. Perhaps because it highlights failures in their society overall. Perhaps because it hits too close to home. Perhaps because those people's lives are so full of pain that to even acknowledge it would bring an immense amount to them vicariously. Regardless of how and why these people got to where they are, though, they are on the fringes of Russian society, and that's what Lomasko wanted to get to.

And that is very much what she does. The book contains dozens of short vignettes. Captured from "interviews" she conducted. I use quotes there because she didn't set out to have a formal sit-down interview with them; she would just talk with them and record the conversation. She wasn't collecting stories for this book, really; she was just sitting with them and being an empathetic human being. She even notes that several of these vignettes started out as her just sketching someone on a park bench or at a cafe or something, and they would come over and start talking to her. Accordingly, some of their stories are longer and more in-depth, some are very cursory; but in every case, it still gets across at least a snapshot of who these people are and how they came to their station in life.

But it's debatable, as I said, of being called comics. The vignettes are all written out in text, and illustrations of the individuals accompany each piece. So a casual flip-through would likely put this in the "illustrated prose" categroy. But most of the illustrations depict the individuals speaking via word balloons, and the longer vignettes have the same people drawn several times over several pages, suggesting a "deliberate sequence" to borrow from McCloud's definition. Not that McCloud's definition is the end-all-be-all when it comes to how we define comics, but my point is that this isn't a comic in how you'd typically think of one.

But here's why I ultimately landed on the side of doing a review here. The stories Lomasko tells here come from the period of 2008-2016. This is a particularly interesting timeframe because Vladmir Putin served as Prime Minister of Russia from 2008-2012 and then took up the office of President, a position which he has held since then. Putin had been in national politics since the late '90s, so he was very much a known quantity to the people of Russia before he was elected President, but there were a good number of people -- including multiple international bodies -- who pointed out some "irregularities" with the election and, significantly for my interest here, this led to a large number of public protests, the likes of which hadn't been seen since the '90s. The Pussy Riot concert is perhaps the most famous, with the band's arrest and trial gaining international attention for what very much seemed like a kangaroo court. Lomasko covers both some of those protests and the Pussy Riot trials here.

But here we are, well over a decade later, and Putin remains in power. The protests have dwindled to almost nothing because Putin's been pretty ruthless in silencing opposition voices. The loudest ones have been literally been thrown out of high windows, poisoned, or otherwise 'disappeared' and that has, in turn, convinced others to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. These people that Lomasko was trying to hard to shine a light on are still largely kept at the periphery, barely eking out an existence in many cases.

In many ways, the snippets we see in Other Russias is pretty close to the propaganda the US promoted about the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. (Except for the bread lines. They really pushed the Russians-have-to-wait-in-long-lines-just-for-bread narrative back then.) But more stikingly, I see a lot of parallels between Other Russias and what I see here in the United States today. Peacful protests that are met with violence. Police who are willing to look the other way when it comes to illegal sex work... provided they themselves are able to partake of a few "favors." Underfunded schools with any slightly-outside-the-middle-of-the-bell-curve kids being left to fend for themselves. Teenagers who try to kill people because they think they'd be literally rewarded for their 'political' stance.

The issues facing Russia today are the result of any number of different factors than what we have in the United States, so I'm not suggesting that we'll have stories just like the ones here in another few years. But it did feel a little like reading 1984 or Brave New World and thinking, "Oh, damn, this hits closer to home than I'm comfortable with!" Not only just the empathy Lomasko clearly has for her subjects, and which she does an excellent job of passing on to the reader. But the situations, I think, will start to look more and more familiar to people the further we get into the current US collapse.

Other Russias came out in 2017 from n+1 Books, so it should be available through your favorite bookstore. The might not have it in stock but they'll no doubt be happy to order it for you. The book retails for $20.00 US.

So apparently "616 Day" is a thing now, I guess. If you're thinking, "What the hell is 616 Day" Bleeding Cool has a good run-down of how/why the Marvel Universe began to get referred to as 616. And since the universe is known as 616, why not celebrate on the sixteenth day of the sixth month -- June 16. Today.

I don't recall precisely when/where I first heard the Marvel Universe referred to as 616. Certainly sometime in the '80s. Probably from something Chris Claremont wrote, but it's possible I picked it up from The Official Marvel Handbooks. I don't recall using it much, but it was a handy shorthand when I needed to differentiate the 'main' Marvel Universe and a story from What If or another timeline or something. But it never really got brought up unless you needed to make a distinction.

And that's how it stayed up until 2008 or so. Because that's when the Marvel movies started coming out and becoming popular and, when you were in Marvel fan circles, you could be talking about two very distinct versions of, for example, Captain America. The characters' origins were similar, but different. Their power levels were similar, but different. The construction of their shield was similar, but different. If someone asks you trivia about the character, you need to make sure they specify which version they're asking about because that could change your answer. So whereas the What If stories relatively obscure, even within fan circles, the movies very much were not. Since the "616" appelation, though not widely used, was already in place, it made sense to bring that to the fore when contrasting that against the MCU.

For whatever reason(s), Marvel -- the comics publisher, not the movie studio -- tried to dissuade the name's use. Perhaps because it was originally just meant as a joke. Perhaps because it harkened back to a type of continuity that they had been trying to deliverately move away from since around 2000. Perhaps there was some form of professional jealousy against the movie studios, and how they were 'requiring' the 616 designation just to make a distinction, even though the 616 universe came decades before the MCU. It doesn't really matter; the problem was that fans were routinely and actively talking about two different Marvel Universes now and they needed some way to offer a readily understood distinction.

But beginning, as far as I can tell, in 2023, Marvel Comics began embracing the 616 name and even leaning into to the idea by designating "616 Day."

And I think that's what bugs me about 616 Day. Marvel is hardly the first company to create a pseudo-holiday to bring attention to their company by taking advantage of some weird quirk of the calendar. Star Wars has May 4 ("May the Fourth Be With You") and Nintendo has March 10 ("Mar10"); there's nothing significant that happened on those days as far as the companies are concerned. Their "significance" for the intellectual properties is merely a quirk of language, and doesn't really work outside certain regions. And in those cases, it's a quirk of language that fans picked up on first, and it took several years for the company in question to capitalize on what was already a grass-roots celebration of sorts. I don't believe that's the case with 616 Day. As outlined in that Bleeding Cool piece, the 616 designation was created specifically for Marvel stories by one of the writers and -- as far as I know -- fans had never really suggested June 16 be a day to celebrate Marvel Comics. It didn't come about organically; it was put together specifically as a marketing tactic,

Don't get me wrong; it is a clever bit. Kudos to the marketing person who came up with it. But because it wasn't really a thing that came from the ground up... because it feels it's being handed down from Marvel itself, it feels more cynical and artificial.

At least to me. I was also really skeptical the Avengers movie would work when it was first announced since the sum total of MCU movies that had been released at the time of the announcement was: Iron Man and Hulk. Neither Captain America nor Thor had made it to theaters (I think both were still filming at the time of the Avengers announcement) and fans were expected to line up and celebrate a big movie with all these heroes -- only two of which had made it to the screen, and one of those had the main actor being replaced. It smacked of "you'll enjoy what we tell you to enjoy."

There wasn't organic buzz being generated; it was being pushed down from the studio. Now, to be fair, Avengers was a good film and probably would have generated a fair amount of buzz naturally anyway, but it felt very artificially inflated to me initially. And I feel that with 616 Day as well. The promo materials being sent from Marvel to comic shops, and the Marvel Rivals promos I've seen ads for point very much to that.

Now maybe I'm being overly cynical here. Maybe Marvel fans will embrace 616 Day as much as Star Wars fans have embraced May 4. But me? I'm certainly not going to any comic shops, and I probably won't even have time to read any Marvel comics today. Right now, I'm curious to see if 616 Day will have legs from year to year, but honestly, I'll probably forget about it this time next year unless Marvel does some MAJOR promotions for the first half of June.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: The King is a Fink
https://ift.tt/XpsVKcZ

Jack Kirby Collector: Incidental Iconography
https://ift.tt/fa9sk3C

Kleefeld on Comics: In the Land of the Lacandón Review
https://ift.tt/npCBNQF

Kleefeld on Comics: G.I. Rocky
https://ift.tt/ALU9X7f

Kleefeld on Comics: Loving Day
https://ift.tt/hQ5ET23

Kleefeld on Comics: Same As It Ever Was
https://ift.tt/pW5mgBH

With the events in LA over the past week -- particularly the borderline inherent ability of the police and the military to radically escalate otherwise peaceful situations by both instigating and inciting violence -- I thought I'd share a collection of politicial cartoons from from the late 1960s and early 1970s. If you were unaware, the police forces in the United States are a direct descendant of slave patrols from the 1700s. The people who were charged with re-capturing enslaved people and beating them into submission before returning their all-but-dead bodies back to the plantations they escaped from. The police force as we know it in the United States was born out of violence, and the notion of "to serve and protect" was very much limited to the wealthy plantation owners who paid them.

The notion of excessive police brutality is not new, and these political cartoons from roughly a half century ago show it carried on through the 20th century. And that these cartoons still resonate a half century after they were made shows it carries on to today.