Another week, another slice of life at Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash courtesy of AMC’s ‘Comic Book Men’. On this week’s episode, the guys are presented with some toys, some trading cards, some cosplay, and more.
To start off the episode, Walt tells Kevin that he’s never seen an item like this come through the doors. A customer comes into the store and places a droid on the altar of Flanagan. Noticing the confused looks on the guys’ faces, he says, “Not the droid you’re looking for’. What is sitting before them is actually a R2-Q5 custom X-box 360. Modeled after a droid that very briefly appeared in ‘Return of the Jedi’, no one really knows about this black version of R2-D2 except Ming. The custom built gaming system features all the specs of a regular X-box, plus a built in projector. The customer, who makes them himself, wants $1,300. After a demonstration, Walt likes it, but is unsure about the selling price. The guy says that the lowest he’ll go is $1000. Instead, Walt offers consignment, which means that The Stash will display the piece and sell it through the shop. Then, once the sale is made, they get a portion of the sale and the customer gets the money plus advertisement in the shop for other customers to get info on getting their own custom built droid X-boxes. The piece was certainly impressive, but I have a hard time believing that R2-Q5 will be flying off the shelves.
Next, a guy comes in with some Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. Walt is pretty turned off by them, but Mike informs him that Art Spiegelman, the man behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel ‘Maus’, created them. Still pretty disgusted by them, Walt tags out, but Ming steps in. These cards were popular when he was a kid, so Ming shows interest in buying them. Since they’re not really high priced collector’s items right now (not that they ever were), the guy is looking for $30. Ming says that he can’t go any higher than $10. They strike a deal and Ming buys bang a piece of his childhood.
Kevin talks about card collecting and points out that he had all kinds of cards, except any that had to do with sports. Out of his collection, the weirdest ones were ‘Jaws II’ cards. Walt had cards for the ‘Planet of the Apes’ TV series, and ‘Welcome Back, Kotter’. Instead of cards, Mike collected DC stickers that used to come with loaves of Wonder Bread. Then they dwell on the fact that kids aren’t into things like that anymore since they find more interesting things on the internet.
Walt is not amused by Garbage Pail Kids.Next up, two girls cosplaying as the TARDIS and the 10th Doctor come in looking for some Deadpool books. The gang then talks a little cosplay by revealing who they’d dress up as if they decided to do so. Mike says that he’d be a death trooper, while Ming says that he’d be Frank the Bunny from ‘Donnie Darko’. Walt says that he’s into furries, but when Kevin asks what that actually means, Walt explains that he wasn’t aware that that is the actual meaning behind “furries”. Awkward times for Walt make for a good time. Back at the store, Walt recommends ‘Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe’ as a starting out point for them. Throughout their visit, Bryan relentlessly teases them for their costumes, but Walt suggests that Bryan try sporting a TARDIS dress of his own sometime.
During some down time in the store, Walt and Ming bring out the foosball table for a quick game. After a hard-fought match, Walt and Bryan beat Mike and Ming.
Finally, one last customer comes in with a bin of ‘Marvel Legends’ figures and one ‘Marvel Icon’ Wolverine variant figure. They talk about how popular these figures were 10 years ago when they first came out and how they’ve decreased in value since then. Originally, the customer bought them in anticipation for kids, but then he had a daughter who wasn’t really into action figures. He says that he found a couple of them going for around $200, but Walt says that is unlikely these days. Instead, Walt offers $150 for the lot since the value of all the figures have greatly decreased since 2005. After some contemplation, the customer reluctantly takes the offer.
And suddenly, foosball.After a pretty great episode last week that saw the guys help out long-time customer Gary Conover sell his comic book collection, we got another filler episode this week similar to ‘Stash-teroids’ from a few weeks back. Once again, things were pretty disconnected and uninteresting. For example, the random game of foosball. They couldn’t have put in another customer at least? That game didn’t really add anything to the show and was there to take up time.
Also, Bryan teasing the girls for wearing their ‘Doctor Who’ cosplay in the shop took up more time than it should have. I’m not really offended that Johnson was making fun of them because he makes fun of everybody, but I was more disappointed that Walt didn’t spend more time offering some options for Deadpool titles, which is what they came into the store for in the first place. This segment could have been an excellent opportunity for Walt or Mike to drop some Merc-y knowledge, but it was wasted on playful teasing. And while I wasn’t offended by it, I know for sure someone out there is going to complain about Bryan’s treatment of those girls. Well, Bryan treats a lot of people like that, boys and girls alike. I recall a few occasions where he made fun of me for a few things. That’s how he is and it’s part of why he’s so entertaining. It just seemed like this instance in this particular episode was a bit much because it brought down the segment, which could have gone better if arranged differently.
Since the switch to the half hour format, it seems like we’re getting more filler episodes than the past season. Back when it was an hour long, we only got the best stuff, but now with a lot more time to fill, we’re bound to get some filler, I guess. I just thought that it would be spread out over a few episodes instead of thrown together to form their own episodes. Hopefully the rest of the season is better and we get some episodes that are more interesting. One place they could start with is Mike Zapcic dropping some comic knowledge more often. I thought that we were going to get some of that here, but Walt got tagged in instead. Not that Walt isn’t knowledgeable, but this season has been a little light on the Zapcic. Just saying.
Well, that’s it for this week’s recap of ‘Comic Book Men’. Make sure to check back next week for a new recap of the latest episode. Until then, feel free to go back and check out my past recaps and our other ‘Comic Book Men’ related articles.
