Card Show: Christmas 2023

I'm not sure why I keep posting greeting cards, but it's seasonally appropriate at the moment.

Up first is actually a photo from my Aunt Judy.  They're in Springfield, Missouri and this the main Bass Pro Shop store done up for Christmas.  

Here's her card.

Her dog, Tucker, also sent a card.  He's a great dog.

And I thought the envelope was cute.

These are a couple of cards from thoughtful co-workers.  

One of my other co-workers gave everyone in the department a pair of socks with pictures of her face on them.  They even came in the little plastic gift box.  She definitely "won" Christmas.  We're loosely planning on all wearing the socks for a meeting sometime.  I'll update the post if I get a group picture.  

And this is a card from my dad's neighbors, who had us over for lunch on Christmas.  That was very nice of them.  Their two dogs and their cat also signed the card, which was a nice touch.    

And these are from some various charity giveaways.  

MLB Hot Stove and Texas Rangers Victory Celebration

Thank goodness the Rangers won the World Series this year, because the Dodgers made moves this offseason with the intention of winning it for the next decade.  They picked up Shohei Ohtani ($700M), the biggest free agent available, Yoshinobu Yamamoto ($325M), the most sought after available pitcher, traded for Rays’ ace, Tyler Glasnow (and signed for $136M), and picked up the hatred of the fans of every other team (they got that one for free).

 

The deals to Shohei and Yamamoto are long-term (10 and 12 years respectively).  Shohei deferred most of his money to allow the Dodgers to swing deals like the ones they made (and possibly avoid California taxes).  The Glasnow deal was for five years and is considered a risk given his health.  For all the hype about Shohei, he seems even more fragile to me.  Yamamoto has a tremendous pedigree from Japan, but hasn’t pitched in the MLB yet.  The back of these guys’ bubble cards says they should be really good, but given the money, they have to be great.

 

With all of this money being thrown around, why is it that it’s other teams in financial trouble?  The Padres traded Juan Soto to the Yankees, probably mostly because of monetary issues.  The Padres’ baseball network went bankrupt and wrecked their balance sheet.  They ended up having to take out a loan to finish the season, because they didn’t get the postseason money they were been expecting.

 

How about those Rangers?  They spent a lot over the last couple of years and were rumored to be in the hunt for Shohei.  Suddenly, they pulled out.  They lost their TV partner and suddenly weren’t sure what their broadcast income was going to be.  There was a deal with the current TV rights holder for several teams to prop them up for another year, but that didn’t include the Rangers.  The Mariners are in a similar situation as their network has bumped their coverage up to premium cable. 

 

Not everyone has been hamstrung.  The Royals have picked up several free agents with their owner opening up his pocketbook.  They’re also trying to get a new stadium.  (Maybe they should have tried swinging that deal the last time they won a World Series.)  They did pick up Will Smith, which means they’ll win the World Series next year (because he’s been on the last three teams that have won).  Orioles picked up Craig Kimbrel to help their bullpen.  If they were willing to trade some of their great minor leaguers, they could probably bolster the team a lot more.  The Diamondbacks are trying to prove this year wasn’t a fluke.  They signed Eduardo Rodriguez and resigned Lourdes Gurriel Jr.  The Dodgers might be meeting the D-Backs again in the playoffs in the future.   

 

The Giants finally landed a big free agent, Korean star Jung Hoo Lee.  Only a foreigner would consider signing with San Francisco without having been there.  They reportedly offered Shohei the same deal the Dodgers did and were turned down for quality of life issues.  Even Buster Posey, who recently moved back to the City, admitted the place has problems.  (When is Buster gonna be a manager?  I’m tired of waiting.)

 

I don’t know if I should be rooting for the Dodgers to fail catastrophically, like the Padres and the Mets, and be a laughingstock, or for them to win the next four World Series and ruin the league from their profligate spending.  Certainly the worst case scenario for the Dodgers would be for them to win the NL West for the foreseeable future, but fail to win the World Series.  

But, forget about that.  Let’s instead celebrate our champions: the Texas Rangers!

I celebrated by going out and getting this ESPN commemorative magazine that was on the racks a couple of weeks after.  I was glad it was available in my area.  I don’t know if it was distributed nationwide.  This was $15.  The pictures inside were good quality shots.  There were a couple good articles on manager Bruce Bochy and GM Chris Young assembling the team.  After that was a recap of the postseason.

In the back was a listing of Ranger greats from the past.  I showed this to dad and he had a moment of nostalgia for Frank Howard.  Honestly, I’d never heard of this player before, but dad had fond memories of him.

I had to over-do it and I ordered another one online from Lindy’s Sports.  I have a couple of other commemorative World Series magazines from them.  This one was $13.

 

I just like this picture.  The magazine has a history of the franchise, a regular season review, profiles of Bochy and several players, and a game-by-game recap of the postseason. 

 

Which one is better?  The ESPN one is probably the better picture book.  The Lindy one is more detailed.  You might look for a Yearbook, which would be produced by the team.  I have a couple of Dodger ones and a Yankee one.  Yes, I hate those teams, but the yearbooks are kinda cool, especially that Yankees one.  It’s huge.  (They were bought for me by friends who were in LA and New York.)

And here I am looking like a total geek.  Boy, khakis and dress shoes do not go with team t-shirts and baseball hats.  My boss went to the Dallas area on a business trip in November.  I asked him to bring me back something from the Rangers.  By luck, the lady he went with wanted to go to a sporting goods store to get something for her son, who is a Rangers fan, so that gave him the opportunity. 

 

It was really nice of him to get the hat and t-shirt for me.  The hat is my new favorite with the World Series Champion patch.  (I have a whole crate-full of hats.)  The shirt is a bit small on me and it’s actually an ALCS t-shirt, but it looks good.  I look forward to wearing this ensemble (with blue jeans) out to an Aggie ball game this spring.  

Comics Review: An Archie Christmas Part 2

Continued from Part 1.

In the Archie Christmas store, they were offering a couple of Christmas digests for $5.  Unfortunately, the Christmas digest I bought last month was also listed for $5, which was half price of what I’d bought it for.  (For that matter, they were offering a 22% discount when I made my order, which mostly paid for the shipping.  A couple of days later, it was 26%.  Right now, it’s 30%.)  When I got these digests, I couldn’t help but notice the prices on the covers.  The one from 2021 was $7.99.  The one from 2022 was $8.99.  The one I’d just bought was $9.99.  I don’t like where this trend is going.       

 

The two digests I got were Archie Showcases.  At my Barnes & Noble, they stock the four monthly-ish Archie and Betty & Veronica digests and Archie Milestones digests, but for some reason, they don’t stock Showcase.  This has been too bad, because there have been several issues I would have liked to have gotten like these two Christmas issues. 

Archie Showcase Digest #6: Archie’s Christmas Stocking

The first thing I noticed flipping through this digest was that it looked awfully familiar.  It was.  A lot of the material had been in had been a trade, The Best of Archie Christmas Comics, that had come out a year before this digest.  That’s pretty lazy effort and this material wasn’t that great to begin with.  That said, this did have some highlights.   

The volume starts off with a classic 50’s story.  I wish they’d reprint more of this material. 

 

There’s a fun Kennedy Brothers illustrated story. 

 

The centerpiece of the digest (literally, it’s in the middle) was my favorite story out of all of the new comics.  Noelle and Sugarplum are fighting over Archie and he ends up taking a trip to the North Pole.  Its 12 pages of pure fun.  Mostly because of this story (and the nice cover), I’m not completely disappointed in this digest.   

 

Archie Showcase Digest #11: Archie’s Christmas Stocking

This was the last comic I read.  Thankfully, it features almost all material I hadn’t seen before.  It was generally pretty good.  I’ll hit some highlights. 

It starts off with a Harry Lucey drawn story from maybe the early 60’s and features Jingles. 

 

The first story with Sugarplum.

 

Jughead macking on Ethel.

 

Santa (Reggie) macking on Veronica and Betty.

 

Yet another great panel by the Kennedy Brothers.

 

Reggie wearing a shirt that might induce blindness in real life.

 

A fun little story with Jughead and Santa by Fernando Ruiz.

 

Here we go!  It’s the magic battle of the century: Jingles vs. Sabrina.

 

Finally, a nice Al Hartley Christmas panel.

 

This was a sort of disappointing order altogether, but with some bright points that I enjoyed.  Reading these over two days was probably an overload of Archie Christmas. Given how much of this material I’ve read and how similar a lot of it is, I may not need any more.  Just as a practical matter, I suddenly found out afterward I don’t even have room for any more digests.  

Comics Review: An Archie Christmas Part 1

I have sort of a tradition of reading my Archie Christmas comics in December.  I was buying a couple of things online and spontaneously decided to get a few Archie Christmas comics from their website.  Specifically, I was interested in this years’ Christmas floppy comic.  While I was there, I picked up a couple of Christmas digests that were half price and a previous years’ floppy was like a dollar.  I was in a festive mood.  

 

Everything came in good order in the package and was delivered quickly.  The order was only delayed because the new comic in the order hadn’t actually released yet.  I got it on the day it came out.  

There was also a new Sabrina Holiday special.  It has a great cover, but I was questioning the contents.  (It’s closer to an occult horror comic.)  From the preview pages I saw later, I think I made the right call in passing on it.  I did look at some non-Christmas comics and nothing jumped out at me, but after getting that big Sabrina volume, I’m not sure there’s much else I’d really want.     

Archie Christmas Spectacular (2024)

I read everything from the order over last weekend.  This was the only full price item I got and I read it first.  Boy was I disappointed.  What I was interested in was the lead story featuring evil versions of Jingles and Sugar Plum drawn by Holly G.  Those two characters are Archie Christmas staples that I enjoy for reasons I’ll list a little later.   

What I got was a five-page story with fairly crude art that simply trotted out the new characters and that was basically it.  I think the sample page speaks for itself.  Frankly, if I’d seen preview pages of this beforehand, I wouldn’t have thought about ordering anything.

 

Holly G. is a good artist and Tom DeFalco is a good comic book writer.  The story features Grumpus as a villain, a takeoff of Krampus, sort of an evil Santa Claus.  He was introduced in a previous story that I haven’t read that was apparently inspired by Stranger Things.  The evil versions of Jingles and Sugarplum, Jangles and Sourplum, seem a bit unnecessary as both original characters already cause mischief whenever they appear. 

 

Still, this should have been a fun story.  I think the short page count likely hobbled the story severely.  It also may have been rushed.  It was a bad effort and not a good start to my Archie Christmas reading.       

I think the rest of the issue was several short reprints.  Jingles and Sugarplum are in a few of them, along with Noelle, Santa’s daughter.  None of them are all that great, though Veronica is very stylish in one story.     

Archie Christmas Spectacular (2023)

This toss-in issue was about the same in format and quality. 

I did like Dan Parent’s art for this story about Noelle.  Of course, Santa’s daughter looks like Marilyn Monroe. 

The only story I really liked was this Jughead story drawn by the Kennedy Brothers.  These guys (one of them recently passed away) really had a flair for making great large panel action shots.

Betty & Veronica Spectacular #86

This comic was not a recent purchase.  It’s from 2008.  Since that time, it has become my favorite Archie comic.  (The Archie Daily Newspaper Comics 1946-1948 is my favorite Archie book.)  BVS was my favorite Archie title.  It was only quarterly, but I’d pick it up at Hastings whenever I saw it.  It is printed on newsprint, unlike the new comics, which are on slick paper.      

 

Half the issue is a great-looking Dan Parent story featuring Jingles and Sugarplum seducing Betty and Veronica and Archie, but ending up falling in love with each other.  Dan’s art, with the enhanced coloring and shading, really pops.  The story is fun and romantic.  This story really made me like the characters.

 

The rest of the issue features nice pinups and a couple of shorts: Archie gang greeting cards and gift ideas.  They weren’t really stories just quick funny gags.  For an Archie Christmas comic, this is the standard by which I judge the rest.  It nails the season and the characters. 

 

On to Part 2.