Category Archives: Mashups

Mashup 4: Mr. Creepy and Baja Wally

This week's "Random Monday Mashup", wherein I take one (and only one) panel from ten randomly chosen comic books to try and make a story, features the adventures of Baja Wally, sex-ed teacher from the future. Plus roller skaters!

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Mashup 3: Ranker than baked sewage

This week's "Random Monday Mashup", featuring one panel only from each of ten randomly selected comic books, begins in a seedy London bar with a conversation between a bartender and a thrill-seeking young motorcycle salesman named Tommy:

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Mashup 2: Pompous, Preening Animals!

Each Monday I try to make a somewhat coherent story by taking one and only one panel from each of ten randomly-selected comic books. For this second edition, I'm going to introduce a couple of brief text transitions, hopefully that's still within the spirit of the idea.

This week's random bag of fun featured demons from the pit of Hell, a Native American super-hero adventurer, aliens from Venus, and a children's book illustrator / freelance bounty hunter. Throw them all into a blender, mix with a couple of shots of Tequila, and you get the exciting adventures of an insane young man on the prowl for love in Sin City, Las Vegas!

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Mashup 1: The Mosquitoes are TERRIBLE!

Welcome to the first edition of the Monday Mashup! Each week I'll take one bag of ten random comics I purchased for ten cents apiece at Half Price Books and, by scanning one panel from each, try to create some sort of story that almost makes sense, if you don't think about it too hard. I don't know if this'll work, but here goes!

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Geek gone wild

I had the best comic-book-geek weekend. First I went to "StapleCon", a convention here in central Texas for independent comic book publishers, where I met some outstanding talents working to make their dreams come true. It was as inspirational as it was costly, since of course I couldn't resist buying one of everything. Plus, I got a lead on a new gig just in case this UGO thing doesn't work out:

Lord Vile Henchmen Wanted

I also got a book signed by Mike Baron, which was pretty cool. But that wasn't the end of my comic-buying adventure, my friends, oh no! For I still had money in my account, and there's nothing more dangerous than a geek with disposable income. So after the convention, my friend and I headed to Half Price Books to trade in a huge stack of old sci-fi novels that had been gathering dust. I put my box on the counter, and spied from the corner of my eye a gigantic stack of comics being bagged by one of the Book Dudes.

"Excuse me," I said politely, "but can those be purchased now or do I need to wait until you've processed them all?"

"You can look through the bagged ones, they're in lots of ten for a dollar," he said.

"A dollar apiece?" I replied, thinking that wasn't a bad price, since on the top of one stack was a Number 1 issue of "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs", one of my all time favorite comics.

"No, a dollar for the whole stack of ten," he corrected me.

Blink. Hang on, ten for a dollar that's ... no, wait, don't tell me ... "Hey Dave," I finally said to my math-major friend, "how much is that apiece?"

Voice heavy with despair for the future of our math-illiterate nation, he said "That'd be ten cents apiece, Einstein."

My eyes goggled at the large stack already bagged, and the even larger stack still waiting to be processed. "I'll take 'em all!" I heard myself say.

"Even the ones I haven't done yet?" the Book Dude said. At my nod, his face beamed. "You're my new favorite customer!"

And so, awash in the glow of geek gone wild, I returned triumphantly to my home with this enormous box of comic books:

Box of comic books

The "Bone" and "Concrete" collections didn't come with it, those were separate. But still, that's a big stack! Unfortunately my wife wasn't quite as impressed with my geeky haul as I was. "Didn't we just sell a ton of books to make more shelf space?" she asked shrewdly.

Instantly my brain went into husband overdrive. Superman can have his super-speed and ice-breath, I'll take quick thinking any day of the week. It's the one indispensable survival tool for any married man. "Yes, but these ... aaaahh .... these are for ... um ... work! Yes, work, that's it!"

"You mean the same way it's for work when you stare at good looking women, so you can 'draw the human form better'?"

"Exactly!"

So as you can see, I had a problem. A gigantic, enormous, profound, disturbingly massive stack of comic books that I need to figure out some sort of work-related use for. And so, starting tomorrow, I will be introducing a new feature here on the HeroMachine Blog -- Mashup Mondays. Each week I will take one panel from each of the ten books in the randomly collected bags. I will try to assemble those panels into an order that almost seems like a story. It may suck, it may be funny, it may accidentally unlock the secrets of the multiverse, I don't know. But it will definitely make it seem like those books are, in fact, needed for work, which is all this husband is really looking for at this point.