"With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility."

The title of this blog post is a quote from Peter Parker's (aka Spiderman's) Uncle Ben.  If you don't know what any of that means, you just might want to move along now...


This is how it started.

RJ came home from his weekly visit to the local comic book shop all a-glow.

RJ:  "Guess what I just bought?"

Me: Oh, shit. "Uh, what, honey?"

RJ: "Well, this guy who works there had a bunch of comic book figures for sale and he was really short on cash and he gave me a great deal."

Me: "How many did you buy?"

RJ: Looking dumbfounded that I would have to ask. "Well, I bought them all, of course."

Use your imagination and insert some words here: passive-aggressive drivel from me about "finding a place for them SOMEWHERE" and super-cajoling "But they're really cool!  And a good INVESTMENT!" from RJ, until a compromise was reached.  I would sell them all on eBay, return the initial blue-gazallion dollar investment to RJ, and  pocket the profits as my own, to buy vodka, wine and cute shoes with.


Easy-peasy, no?

Uh, no.

Because when I saw the boxes and boxes of things that looked like this:

It's kinda possible that my head blew completely off and I seriously considered tossing the entire lot in the trash, "investment" be damned and I was unsure where to begin.

See, in case you were unaware of this, in order to sell things to comic book geeks online, you must be able to correctly identify them.  And not only must you be able to identify them, you must know what if they're a variant,  or possibly a limited edition or what series they were part of.  Oh. Dear. Lord.  I could get as far as naming some of the figures.  I knew Ironman, and Wolverine, and even some more obscure ones like Apocalypse and Blob.

But this guy (and a million more like him)?

Not a flippin' clue.

Zj just happened to wander by as I was Googling "red and purple guy with spikes" - don't ever do that, by the way - and muttering under my breath about investments-my-ass, and yelled "Mama!  Where did you get that cool Onslaught figure?"

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Suddenly all the hours I basically ignored zj and let him watch YouTube videos of comics book figures while I was busy playing on Twitter were going to pay off!

He grabbed it from me and started to talk about things like the details of the spine, and the "rotation and articulation of the torso," whatever the hell THAT meant.

So I put his little ass to work.

Several hours later - hey, I feed and clothe the kid, it seemed like a small price to pay on his part - we had correctly identified many of the figures, and my eBay store was exploding with what could only be described as a Geek-gasm of epic proportions.

And when it was all said and done, I saw that it was going to be a breeze to recoup the initial "investment" with plenty of wine-fund money left over for me.

I paid zj for his time in random figures.

And I don't think he minded one bit.