A Lifetime Of Disappointments Gathered In One Book

If you've hung around here for very long, you know that I am obsessed with the wonderful (yet crappy) ads for wonderful (yet no doubt crappy) merchandise that used to festoon our comic books.

Fortunately, I'm not the only one so obsessed. And even more fortunately, he's far more ambitious than I:

Mail Oder Mysteries by Kirk Demarais collects bunches of those disturbingly tempting ads, full of grand-looking trinkets that you dreamed of blowing your allowance on.

But he goes on better, and actually finds most of the...ahem...quality merchandise, and shows how what you got compared to what you ordered:

Oh, the high hopes and crushed dreams of our youth...hey, look, there's one of my obsessions, the "Polaris Nuclear Submarine":

Ah, the memories...

The book's not for everyone, but if you have some of the same peculiar interests I do, perhaps you should go to Amazon and get yourself one. And if you don't trust me, Mark Waid endorses it, too!

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go track down my fake Kryptonite rocks and bloody finger...