This is an older post from my other site, discussing my love of mini-comics.

When I say “mini-comic”, I don’t mean the ones a lot of independent publishers make. I’m referring to the pack-in mini-comics (or is it “minicomic”?) that you get with toys, or various snack and cereal promotions. Or at least did. The last time I saw these used were Marvel’s “MegaMorph” line. Some toys now are coming with special edition reprints of large-size comics, or you get digests.

I love these things, which is why I try to fit at least one into the “Friday Night Fights”. (I’ll be doing another one for tomorrow night.) You get a story that you may not get elsewhere. The origin of M.A.S.K.? Introduced in one of the pack-in comics, and later used in the animated series. (During the lackluster “racing” season, for any fans that drop by.) Some of the best Masters of the Universe stories were in the pack-in comics that came from DC (who also made comics for cereal promotions and their own Super Powers line). In the days before cartoons based on toylines were allowed to air, the mini-comics were the only way to see your favorite toys characters in action.

So why do I bring this up, and what does this have to do with storytelling? On the latter, nothing, really. But at least I can pull back from the drama for a minute. Too many ranting posts to start 2009. For the former, this article at The Weekly Crisis about trying to find bags based on oddly sized comic books is the spark of this article. These mini-comics weren’t even mentioned.

As you can somewhat see here (buy a cheap camera, get cheap pictures), I store most of my mini-comics in a Ziploc bag which is old and might need replacing. However, at least I don’t lose the little things as easily. They’re not even in the longboxes I have now for my comics. I keep it in a drawer so I can find them.

The one exception are my Transformers: Armada/Energon mini-comics, produced by Dreamwave for Hasbro when they still had the license. Dreamwave also did the box art for the two lines before crashing and burning–but that’s a rant for another time, and plenty of Transformers blogs and at least one toy-centric webcomic have done a better job with that one. (Suffice it to say many TransFans don’t like Pat Lee all that much. Especially Mr. Willis. I mean he REALLY doesn’t like the guy.)

Anyway, I put those eight comics in a regular comic bag because I wanted to put them in my Transformers-exclusive comics box (which by the way is so full that the regular IDW comics are sitting in a pile in the floor–I need a new storage system for the entire comic collection, which is really too big to manage ), even though they barely fit into Dreamwave’s continuity, if at all. On the other hand I like having all most of my collection in one spot. Oddly, I don’t do this for the other ones.

Above is the one Peter Pan Spider-Man comic I own. I think there were four, attached to the lids of Peter Pan peanut butter. This one has Spidey fighting the Vulture, which at the time had the ability to absorb people’s youth and not be an old fogey. Now I fully don’t expect to ever see them making a comic storage bag at that size (even if it was square it would still be smaller than the MOTU minis), but what about the others?

The Masters of the Universe comics are typical, or close to typical, sized comics. Most of my mini-comics are this size. The Transformers ones are. Why aren’t there any usable bags at this size?

This is the promo comic for DinoZaurs, a Transformers wanna-be, that suffered from a rather poor anime. How poor? The 12 mail-away VHS (which I have) is way better than the entire series (or what I could watch of it). This comic came with my lone DinoZaur, Dino Sabre. (Voiced by Robotech‘s Rick Hunter, I think.) Now it has a perfectly good storage bag. I really should trim down an unused backing board to go in there. Really, all I need are some decent bags, and I can adjust the boards accordingly.

These are some other mini-comics I have, the aforementioned M.A.S.K. comic, a promo for Viz’s Zoids comic (that came with a Zoids video from a different storyline), the Beast Wars pack-in comic that came with the bat version of Optimus Primal which I renamed “ShadowWing”, Primal’s top infiltrator* (this is part of the origin of my screen name, the toy rename came first) and the crocodile version of Megatron that I redubbed (and forgive me) “Croc-Kill”, Megatron’s chief sniper.

(*note for Beast Wars fans: Rattrap was a sabotage expert, spy, and data thief. ShadowWing would mostly be his back-up for getting in and out, or a substitute. Otherwise I probably had him as an aerial scout, backing up Airrazor or something.)

Finally we have the Marvel specials that came inside boxes of Drake’s Snack Cakes. (I love me some Drakes Coffee Cakes.) Those actually came in bags, but unlike the DinoZarus comic, they weren’t very strong, and fell apart since they weren’t really designed to be storage bags once you got them opened.

So these are some comics that Matt missed in his article. Anybody else have a method of storing these things? I’m thinking of getting a recipe box so they’re not all squashed in there so tightly. (Having a paperback book style Flash Gordon comic, a few stories taken out of Disney Adventures, Some Bongo promos, the GoBots illustrated book that K-Mart was giving away–same one that came with Zod–which has seen better days, and an actual promo comic from the History Channel about a comic book special they were airing.) Alternately, anyone have some more mini-comics? I’m still missing the other two M.A.S.K. comics, plenty of MOTU, the Super Powers and Starriors stuff…….

What? I love those little promo comics.