







When I was a kid I filled my room with pictures cranked out on this little plastic lathe, characters from comics and movies as well as my own creations. (I remember in particular a spectacularly ill-advised "updating" of Lone Ranger in the modern day that I cooked up at age nine or ten.) I have no idea what became of my "Mighty Men & Monster Maker", but I'm now deeply tempted to hunt down a second-hand set on eBay or elsewhere. And what's this? According to the internets and his official site's Dave Stevens ?! Holy cow!

I remember now thinking about this a few years ago when stumbling across an online applet that did much the same thing, but apparently promptly forgot it again.When I was a kid Imy room with pictures cranked out on this little plastic lathe, characters from comics and movies as well as my own creations. (I remember in particular a spectacularly ill-advised "updating" of Lone Ranger in the modern day that I cooked up at age nine or ten.) I have no idea what became of my "Mighty Men & Monster Maker", but I'm now deeply tempted to hunt down a second-hand set on eBay or elsewhere. And what's this? According to the internets and his official site's checklist , the figures stamped on the plastic were the work of?! Holy cow!

I'm still trying to get back up to speed after WFC. As I mentioned obliquely last week, both of my working computers were not-so-working when I returned from Calgary, and I've spent most of the last few days reloading all of my software on a new (well, "new to me") laptop, restoring from backup, etc. (And how awesome is the introduction of hardware that can turn a Serial ATA drive into a USB drive with a brushed aluminum enclosure and four screws?!)I've also been trying to catch up on what the internets got up to while I was traveling. Just before Halloween the nostalgia blog Plaid Stallions posted a bit about a toy I'd completely forgotten about owning. Behold, "Mighty Men & Monster Maker":Looking back now, I realize I probably spent more time futzing with this thing than any other single toy I got as a kid.The idea was simple but brilliant. In the box you got all of these little bits of plastic, on each of which was stamped a head, torso, or legs. You could mix and match them to creature different figures, and by putting them in a little plastic frame with a piece of paper clamped down under it, you could do a rubbing, creating a little print of that figure. Then with pencils, markers, crayons, what-have-you, you could fill in the details as you liked.