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SAN FRANCISCO — Comic conventions like WonderCon aren’t just great places to meet celebrities, get sneak peeks at movie trailers, and gawk at awesome (or awesomely bad) costumes. They’re also excellent venues for parting with your entire disposable income, and some of the indisposable income, besides — who needs to eat when you can have that limited-edition 1/8 scale Slave Leia statuette?
With economic times as they are, I (mostly) kept my wallet in my jeans while walking the WonderCon show floor last Friday. But here’s what I would have bought if I felt I needed even more junk.
Left: For comparison purposes, all prices will be compared to the cost of an autograph from Mark Hamill, who charges a cool $100 for his silver-penned signature.
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1. As the popularity of Japanese animation, comics and films continues to grow in the West, so does the presence of Japanese otaku swag at WonderCon. From the scatological brain of Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama comes the adorable bou tsuki unchi (literally, poop on stick). This plush toy sold for $10, or just 1/10 of what it costs to get Mark Hamill’s autograph.
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2. The obscure indie comic adventures of Sam and Max are much more popular these days thanks to the videogame from Telltale Games. Symbiote Studios was selling this $75 statue featuring the dog and rabbit team of freelance police. If that sounds expensive, consider that $75 would only buy you three-quarters of Mark Hamill’s autograph, and you would have a signed picture of Luke Skywalker that read simply, “Mark Ham.”
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3. Plush hearts are one thing, but plush lungs? Plush livers? And — my God — even a plush spleen? I Heart Guts, the creation of artist Wendy Bryan, is a collection of stuffed toys, shirts, stickers, etc. made of cute versions of the internal organs and glands that make up the fascinating human body. Our favorite shirt depicts two amorous kidneys with the slogan “When Urine Love.” Prices range from $14 to $18, roughly equivalent to the approximate sales tax and handling fees for one signed photo of Mark Hamill.
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4. Street Fighter is back, and so are Street Fighter action figures. You know, back in the day, we had to make do with ugly G.I. Joe–branded Street Fighters that barely resembled the characters they were supposed to. Today’s Street Fighter toys, like this limited-edition figure of one-eyed Muay Thai fighter Sagat, are much more awesome. The statue costs $120, making it 20 percent more valuable — as if such a thing were even possible! &mdash than the autograph of Mark Hamill.
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5. A tiny handful of WonderCon vendors sold collectibles that extended back from even before the Golden Age of comics. This unlicensed, horrifically ugly Popeye chalkware statue would have been given out as a prize for winning a carnival game in the 1930’s, said vendor Kookie Enterprises. Nowadays, it sells for $75, the same price as the much more attractive Sam and Max statue and still cheaper than you-know-what.*
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6. Immediately around the corner from where Mark Hamill sat and hawked his John Hancock was this giant box of naked G.I. Joes. They could be yours for the low, low price of $5 each, even the headless one. An experiment we forgot to try was to see if we could trade Mark Hamill 20 naked G.I. Joes for one autograph.
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7. Mattel is currently, for about the third or fourth time, attempting to resurrect the groundbreaking He-Man toy line for an audience of adult collectors. I am somewhat ashamed to say that I bought into it the last time they tried this, and am now the proud owner of five giant plastic bins full of the redesigned He-Man figures. The Masters of the Universe Classics collection goes back to the series’ roots, which has apparently resonated with fans: The aftermarket prices on these limited-print $20 figures have skyrocketed. He-Man costs $80 — equals “Mark Hami.”
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8. Let’s not worry about No. 8. You know what? There is no No. 8. Moving right along …
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9. The most valuable comic book ever is still Action Comics No. 1, the first appearance of Superman. But gaining value these days as the character gains more notoriety is Amazing Fantasy No. 15, the first appearance of Spider-Man, pre-hyphen. The comic originally sold for 12 cents. That’s a whopping 84 cents in today’s green, but get this: High Grade Comics was offering three different copies at its booth. One in merely “good” condition costs $5,000. This restored near-mint copy fetches $17,000. But the question remains, if you had 17 G’s to blow, would you buy this, or 170 signed, 8×10 glossies of Mark Hamill? I think we know the right answer.
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10. Actually, forget the Sam-and-Max statue; if I could buy anything at WonderCon I would buy Sam-and-Max creator Steve Purcell. When I asked him how much he would cost if he were for sale, he replied that it would be the cost of the individual elemental building blocks of his body, which are only worth about $1 combined. I would recommend he instead go with the price of his body organs on the black market, which Wired magazine actually estimated, in 2003, to be worth $46 million. This, coincidentally, is approximately how much money Mark Hamill cleared in three days of autograph-signing.
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