Velvet Touch LIFE SIZE Dolls

COMICS-HEADVelvet-Touch-Life-Size-DollsI tried to do a search for Velvet Touch LIFE SIZE DOLLS on some of the major search engines and, as anyone would guess, my search came back with an astounding assortment of sex toys. After a few pages of rubber appendages, life-like appliances and guarantees of feeling like the real thing, I abandoned my search.

I’m still left to wonder if these life size celebrity dolls actually existed. If they did, I could only imagine what would arrive when the $10 plus shipping was spent and the 6 to 8 weeks passed. A Velvet Touch Life Size Doll should be so much better than the tiny two-dimensional pictures in Tiger Beat! Disappointment dawns as the pre-teen aged child receives a box entirely too small to contain a life-sized Elvis, Travolta, Shaun or Donny.

Shouldn’t it be like the size of a coffin or something?

It would only get worse as the kid opened the package.

Wait…what is this? Am I supposed to blow this up? How is this “velvet touch?” What do they mean by that?

Naiveté trampled. A lesson is learned. The kid was ten dollars plus shipping and handling poorer. This is the getting of wisdom.

This ad appeared in the pages of Superman No. 334 published in 1979 by DC comics.

Superman-334-1979I bought Superman for a short while after the Christopher Reeve movie came out. I was more of a Marvel fan, and although I enjoyed the movie, these comics didn’t move me any further towards the DC Comics camp. Superman losing his eyes seemed a horrifying thing but it all turns out to be a clever ruse cooked up by Superman and Lois in order to nab some robbers. It’s a typically goofy Superman story capably drawn by Curt Swan, but neither it nor the Green Arrow backup story did anything for me. The movie was epic, but this felt like stitched together Sunday funnies. Mild weirdness upsets status quo. Weirdness dealt with. Status quo reinstated with a wink and a grin to the reader. Safe, harmless and boring despite the scary cover.

I don’t mean to pile on DC because Marvel wasn’t really doing it for me at the time either. X-men was pretty good, but it seemed like most of the comics I read were being cranked out by dependable hacks and the stories were just variations of stuff written a decade before. I grew tired of Peter Parker’s incessant whining; the “I’ve lost my powers” storyline that kept rotating between members of the Fantastic Four and the displays of Hulk’s infantile temper tantrums as he swatted battalions of Keystone Cop-like soldiers somewhere in the American Southwest. The cover price went up a couple of times when I was first reading them, and it seemed like I was getting less bang for my change. I think it was about this time when I pulled the plug.

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