GREAT MAKER! What a great geek find!

Holy crap y'all....I had one heck of a FANTASTIC geek-find today at one of the local comic shops!

I went to a place called the Great Escape. They also sell toys and collectables as well as comics. While poking thru the stack of clearance and loose figures I noticed a lot of Babylon 5 figures. This was pretty odd since the show has been off the air for around a decade now, and not much in the way of merchandise was released since then either. Apparently someone sold their collection of stuff to the store recently and they had a fair amount of B5 stuff in the collection. Well I went looking thru the pile of stuff and found a few cool things .... a varient figure here, a hard-to-find figure there, one each of Londo and G'kar loose for Christina's desk at work. I took my find up to the register to check out, paid and left the store.



End of story right? NOPE!


Christina needed to go to the tanning salon, and The Great Escape is nearby. So I went back to the store later and poked around some more. Hey I had time to kill while Christina was "baking".....what the heck else was I gonna do? Well I dug around in another pile of stuff, and found a mint-on-card Micro Machine version of the Babylon 5 station! Pretty darn cool since they were pretty darn hard to find when they were first released.....never mind the fact that it's TEN YEARS later! Even better...it was marked $2.00 !!! So naturally I picked it up and headed back up to the register.





OK...so NOW the story is over right? WRONG!!!!!!!!!!


I took a closer look at the toy as I headed to the register I noticed there was some writing in black sharpie marker on the clear plastic bubble on the packaging, and DAMN if it didn't look like someone for the cast had signed the darn thing! Now as we all know 99.99% of all autographs from celebs are pretty damn hard to read due to the fact that they sign so many so fast. Especially at conventions and the like. So I really could not make out who's autograph it was at first, but yet it seemed oddly familiar somehow....kind of like I had seen it before.

Now I've been to my fair share of conventions over the years, so I've been able to collect a few autographs from some of the B5 cast members. Well I rushed to the "recording studio" where we record the podcast and I have most of my geeky autographs hanging up. I compared it to all of them and came up with zilch...it looked like none of them.

Could I have gotten one somebody had just scribbled on? Perhaps....hell for two bucks...it wasn't like I was out any real money anyhow, but I just could not shake the feeling that I had seen the signature before. So naturally the geek in me went online and I started searching for Babylon 5 related autographs, so I could compare signatures. You could sorta-kinda make out the first letter of the signature on the toy, and it started with "J" so I started there. ran thru a couple searches with no luck. Then all of a sudden it hit me! I had a sneaking suspicion of who's signature it just might be! But I thought .... NO WAY! .... it couldn't be him .... could it?

One trip to ebay's website and a quick search confirmed my suspicion. I had found a mint-on-card Babylon 5 station autographed by none other than the great maker himself: J. Michael Straczynski! Now I haven't had a chance to take a picture of my find just yet, but I compared teh signiture to the one I found on this official autograph card....and they match exactly:




So needless to say I'm pretty damn pleased at the "hidden treasure" I found!

Peace,

Brad