The other day I found scans of a Seventies toy catalog and in it were all the Mego brand super hero dolls. To my mind these ones were not “action figures”, they were dolls. They had real clothing and the way they were built led me to believe that someone at Mego crawled in through a window at Mattel and ran off with a couple Ken doll molds. They were even anatomically incorrect.

I had the Batman. I bought him at Bargainland and he was previously loved. He had a broken leg that I splinted with a toilet paper tube and stretched his tights over to get him back into the game.


One day when I was playing with him, Batman was into some high flying action and got stuck in one of the trees in Grandma and Grandpa’s front yard. I was sad and couldn’t get to him. I don’t know why I didn’t get Grandpa to help me get him down since that would have been right up his alley. Years later, in college, I was asked to trim those fir trees and when I did I found Batman chilling in the tree like the Steadfast Tin Soldier. I was at a point in my life when I was wasn’t necessarily nostalgic about my childhood yet and I can’t recall now what happened to poor Batman after i brought him back into the comic book continuity. It could have been like Captain America getting found in a block of ice all those years after WWII, but I was all Rock n Roll or Bloomsburian or whatever and so the Eskimo blood in my veins probably compelled me to detach and trash-bin Batman. To be fair, Batman was getting molested by Joel Schumacher at the box office at that time so I suppose there should be a little bit of forgiveness for my nineties counterpart. Still, looking at that catalog makes me ache to know his fate and to get ahold of little old one-leg Batman. If anyone sees one-leg Batman on that thrift store aisle, please say “hi” for me and tell him I miss him.


Boy toys never come with outfits anymore. I think that needs to change. Maybe my next comic strip will be about one-leg Batman. (BTW, Batman is really monkey slapping the Joker in the picture above, which draws my attention to those gloves. I am all for real clothes on boy toys, but what gives with those flippers for gloves!? Those are oven mitts. Try getting at your utility belt while sporting those humdingers.)


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