Monday, November 16, 2009

What's On Rickey's Desk?


So as you may have surmised, I was in New York a week back visiting the offices of DC and Marvel. Beyond chatting up as many staffers as I could in an attempt to squeeze out some exclusive info for CBR, I took a few minutes to stop by the work stations of my illustrious co-bloggers and thought I'd share what I found as a killer way to waste five minutes of your time. Let's start with Rickey (because I went to DC on Thursday)!

As you can see from the wider angle shot above, Rickey's desk is anchored by a ton of comics (including a rad Blue Beetle trade and equally rad but lesser-read issues of Teen Titans Go!) but more importantly it holds a copy of Diamond's Previews catalogue where every month retailers and fans with too much time on their hands read up on the coming comics. For everyone who still hadn't figured it out, a big chunk of Rickey's day involves writing DC's solicitation copy for Previews so it's nice to see he can admire his own hard work up close.

More importantly, Rickey rocks a whole crazy crap load of...er...crazy crap picked up from over his years in service to comics. While his small work space certainly doesn't hold a candle to his chock-full apartment, there was plenty of knick-knackery at play. Aside from some crazy Scott Pilgrim promotional sticker I've never seen anywhere else, you can see a photo of Rickey and his lady friend (and great blogger) Sam from Christmas. Rickey's the elf. He's also got some nice J.G. Jone Final Crisis which for some reason looks different than the other versions I've seen. This could be some promo piece DC did, or it could be a Rickey original. Back in the Wizard days, he used to draw over the covers of comped comics to create things like a special "Blood and Thunder Driven By The Knives of Donkeys" variant for Dave. Anyway, nice to see a little Marvel love in there too.

As for the bevy of action figures...I've got nothing. Sorry, gang, but I know next to nothing about toys and see very little there that jumps out at me as "totally Rickey!" in terms of character picks. Any comments on why they're cool is welcome. Also: I don't get what's up with the bag of change.

Swinging to the left towards his computer monitor, Rickey's rocking a neato-rific (do you think I'm going to run out of 4th grader adjectives by the end of this post?) statue of Superman going toe-to-toe with Darkseid. Again, I'm not sure who made this or designed it or whatever (DC Direct?), but I do know that Rickey and I both crush super hard on Jack Kirby's Fourth World stuff and particularly love Darkseid as one of DC's premier villains. Still, I hope he didn't pay too much for that thing. Statues are too expensive!!!

On the other edge of Rickey's desk, I spotted this totally bizarre Batman hat. I mean, I guess it's perfect if you want to pretend your face is Batman's junk, but otherwise it's seems a little silly to rock a Batman hat with neither a picture of Batman or his logo clearly visible. When I pointed this out to Rickey, he said, "The logo's under the bill. You can see it on the one I put on Alex Ross Superman..."

So, um...mystery solved!!

The last thing Rickey insisted I show all of you was what he looks at out of his window all day: a creepy little wooden boy who lives in a window chewing on a giant piece of string!

It's kind of unnerving, and so rather than just explain what it's all about, I'm hiding dude's reason for sucking on that thing behind the jump. Give it your best guess before you click!


Yeah, It's a soup billboard. New York City is a strange place, right? Anyway, for more fun with Rickey, check out his newly-minted Twitter account, and come back later this week to see what's on Ben's desk!

6 comments:

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  2. Great post! I really enjoy stuff like this. Getting a glimpse of the less glamorous side of comics let's us know it's not all about writers and artists. It takes a lot of hard working dudes (to include women) to bring us the stuff we look forward to every month. If my desk at work looked like Rickey's, not only would people think I was weird, but I would probably get fired. If Rickey's desk didn't look like that, his boss would probably think he wasn't doing his job, and his co-workers would think he was a strange cat. Oh, to have a cool job!

    The New Era Batman hat is pretty random. It does depict the punchline of a bad joke that goes something like, "...Batman's nuts on your chin!"

    I'm guessing the bag of change is for the over-priced shit in the vending machines? How much is a can of Mt. Dew in New York?

    I bet Rick hasn't ate Campbell's Soup since he's worked at DC. That is a disturbing advertisement.

    I also noticed that I can't spell.

    Looking forward to Ben's desk next, to see how the other side (Marvel) lives.

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  3. Thanks, Kiel! If I'd have known you were gonna do this, I woulda tossed some cooler stuff around like a gun or 3 more computers or my NKOTB albums.

    That Darkseid art is from when we ran the Final Crisis cover in Previews. That was one of the first issues I worked on, and when I was about to toss out a color correction copy, I just clipped it out cause it looked so cool. But, yeah, there IS something different on it than was on the final version. But I'm not telling you what. :)

    Those figures are mostly these lead jobbies some people at work get. I've been snagging all the bad guys I can. My collection is pathetic, though, compared to some guys who have 20-40 of these bastards. Otherwise, I have my Shia LeBouf figure hiding behind my big-ass Despero (which I just found out is pronounced "De-Per-Oh."

    The change is for the vending machine. But it's mostly all pennies now, which defeats the purpose.

    And I totally didn't but that Darkseid statue - someone at the office didn't want it anymore, so I grabbed uit thinking I'd give it to someone, then opened it and fell in love. Sorry, friends-who-could've-gotten-it.

    Man, thanks for doing this, Kiel. This is a great idea. You should do your desk, too!

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  4. Just stumbled across spacify.com, for the best selection of Childrens Desks

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