Borrower #... oh, let's go with 6.

Well, like many of you, I believed this day would never come. I returned home from a weekend away to find a large, puffy envelope crammed unceremoniously into my apartment's mailbox. For those keeping track, this was Monday, April 26th. Truth be told, I had kind of given up hope. But, sho'nuff, there it was.


This is me, just after opening the envelope.

Inside the envelope was another envelope, made up by the man himself, Mr. Josh van Pelt who made all of this possible. It's a large photo copy of the cover, with 50 spots for each of we borrowers to sign. The first four were filled in, but the borrower immediately before me neglected to sign it. I seem to remember that the original # 5 on the list, Sunspot, had at some time ceased to exist, so I left #5 blank for Hordeall and put my John Hancock at slot #6.


mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the book

So I got to feast my orbs on the book's contents, finally. Let me again pause to thank Josh for making this all possible. There is a lot of cool stuff to be found inside, particularly the early sketches relating to the genesis of the vintage line. Frankly, I wish that there were more of that. The book also has chapters related to New Adventures, 200X, Powers of Grayskull and of course, MOTUC. There's also some hypothetical sketches for the hypothetical movie, but, whatever, I think we all realize that is they ever do make a movie, the likelihood of this early, early concept work even being used in the slightest is pretty damned slight. Strangely, IMO, no Princess of Power stuff. I suppose that is for a future artbook volume, but that would certainly a disproportionate amount of material for one book. We had all these eras of Masters crammed into one book, but the, what, 2, 3 year run of POP would get its own volume? I wish that each era of Masters got its own art book, one for vintage, one for classics, etc., but oh well.


A brief tease of what awaits you, future borrowers!

In short, I'm glad I got to read it (and make some scans for personal use) but I'm also glad I didn't pay for it. It's nice, but for me at least, hard to justify the steep price tag.

Fun story: I intended to ship this out Monday the 3rd, one week to the day after I got it (though I guess I actually got it Saturday, when I was away). I live in Brooklyn, NY, which has the worst post offices known to man. I walk over to my local post office on Monday, and it's closed-- emergency renovations! Same thing Tuesday-- apparently this is going to be along term thing. I was beginning to believe that this book had a curse on it, that prevented it from moving on in a timely fashion. Finally, today, Thursday the 6th, I biked over to a sketchy post office in a sketchy stretch of town to send this thing out. The last time I had been to this particular office, a crazy religious guy cut me on line-- when I said something he called me a devil and tried to attack me. Obviously, not a place I looked to go back to. However, today, I was in and out in under 5 minutes (fellow Brooklynites will know how unheard of this is) and everyone in the Post Office was sweetness and light. Curse lifted , I declare.

Borrower #6, George (geooco) O'Connor, signing off.