THE QUEST FOR THE GLOWY GRAIL: Dig the TOP 13 MARVEL BLACK LIGHT POSTERS
MORRISON MONDAYS! By BILL MORRISON When I was around 11 years old, there was a head shop in my hometown of Lincoln Park, Michigan, named The Poster Pit. This hippie mecca had a large variety of posters for sale, from blowups of black-and-white movie stills of Dracula and Humphrey Bogart, to pictures of grandmas smoking weed and cats hanging in there (baby!), to peace and ecology symbols. But the best ones were in a small, dark room, lit by an ultra-violet light. I don’t recall the occasion of my first visit to the store, but I do remember that I was instantly hooked on the glowing, fluorescent posters in that little room, and I began to decorate the walls of my bedroom with them. On my 12th birthday, I received my first black light, along with a fluorescent poster of the Roadrunner and a psychedelic lamp that projected swirling optical designs on my bedroom walls. On one visit to the head shop I discovered something new and awesome! Amid the glowing graphics of Jimi Hendrix, Mr. Natural, and the Zigzag Man were several vibrant visuals that I couldn’t look away from. They were fluorescent images of Marvel superheroes! I had always been a DC kid, mostly because A) I was crazy about Batman, and B) the bookstore where I got my comics carried pretty much everything but Marvel. I had seen Marvel characters on TV in the animated Saturday morning shows and the weekday afternoon syndicated Marvel Super Heroes cartoons by Grantray Lawrence Animation, but had never really read any of the comics. But one day I was given a short stack of Marvels from a friend of my sister and was just starting to get familiar with Spidey, Cap, Thor, Iron Man, etc., when I saw them in all their psychedelic glory on the walls of The Poster Pit! The weekly allowance of a 12-year-old boy has to be split many ways, so between comics, model kits, trading cards, etc., there’s only so much left for wall décor (and only so much wall space) so I had a few of the Marvel posters by The Third Eye, but no hope of collecting all 24 of them. And as I became an adult, I sort of forgot about them. However, in the early 1990s my passion for black-light posters...
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