MORRISON MONDAYS meets TOYHEM — again! — Welcome to MORRISON MONDAYS and welcome to TOYHEM! For the sixth straight holiday season, we’re bringing you a series of features and columns celebrating the toys of our youth, which often made for the best memories this time of year. And Bill’s here for the festivities! Click here to check out the complete index of stories — and have a Merry Christmas, a Happy Chanukah and Happy Holidays! — Dan — By BILL MORRISON In celebration of the new 1982 DC Comics Style Guide book, I decided to show some examples of Batman merchandise from the wild and wooly days before a standardized guide existed. This was a time when licensees were given access to existing art from comic books, but also allowed to create their own images with little to no approval process, especially for those outside the US. The result was a mix of Batman toys, apparel, books, and other items sporting images of the Dynamic Duo in three basic categories: exact reproductions of comic art, drawings from comics that were retraced by another artist and modified to suit the product, and images that were drawn from scratch, often by artists who were unfamiliar with the characters. It’s the third variety that I’m focusing on today, a subset category of my collection that I fondly call “Batman’s Off-Model Merch! — Red Tin Batmobile. This tin litho and plastic Batmobile is from Taiwan and was made in the 1970s by Cien Ge. It features Bump-N-Go action, working pistons, and flashing lights. The car itself is spectacular, but the box graphics offer a wonderland of off-model, off-brand magic. The weirdly decorative fonts, star filter photography, badly drawn Dynamic Duo, and wrong costume colors are all working at peak efficiency to create a graphic mess-terpiece! — The Official Adventures of Batman and Robin Record. This is the Australian version of a US Batman and Robin record from 1966. The Batman and Robin poses are inspired by the Sheldon Moldoff cover to Batman Annual #1, but the artist has chosen to elongate the bodies, giving the Caped Crusaders legs that a super model would kill for! And if you think this is an example of a non-US licensee getting the colors wrong, look again. This is a great illustration of what happens when printing plates get...