I don’t know what made me want to write about this. Slow news day, I guess…
So I was one of the what I can only assume were countless Gen Xers who owned a Marvel Comics’ Super Heroes lunchbox when we were kids. I couldn’t tell you how many years I possessed this particular relic of a bygone age, but it was at least a few years of my elementary school career. Yeah, I had the thermos, too…
There were other Marvel lunchboxes, but for some reason I feel like this one might’ve been the most ubiquitous. Maybe that’s just because this was the one I had.
I never took actual comicbooks to school. Not that I can remember, anyway. Certainly not when I was younger, in grade school. I can imagine I was afraid that they might get confiscated by some ignorant, ill-informed teacher or some other annoying authority figure… and there’s no way in hell I was going to risk that. But I guess this lunchbox was the closest I would allow myself to get to being close to the things I loved so much.
And I still have sense memories of being in the lunchroom at Oak Hill and just… staring endlessly at this goddamn thing. Even the simple, tactile sensation of its thin, metallic shell is all-too-easily accessible in my mind.
Some of the art on display seemed to be fairly decent approximations of actual artists working for Marvel at that time (if not their actual artwork)… Kirby, Buscema and Starlin, to name a few. Even a Frank Robbins-style Falcon was included on there…
… so I suppose that made this thing as close to “authentic” as you could possibly hope for.
Interestingly, I believe this particular lunchbox was designed and sold just around the time when the “all-new, all-different” X-Men had just recently debuted in the actual comicbooks themselves, but it was a little too early to know what kind of massive impact they would eventually make. Accordingly, there are no X-characters to be found on this particular piece of merchandise.
I absolutely remember that this particular side perturbed me, even as a dumb kid. From the misspelling of “Dare Devil” to the cape-less Scarlet Witch to the wrong coloring on Yellowjacket’s skullcap…
… it was just another annoying reminder of how not everyone took these characters as seriously as I did. Having said that, I was more than appreciative of the fact that, on the whole, the lunchbox was particularly Avengers-heavy. Hell, it had Hawkeye featured on the handle side, a significant pop cultural endorsement of my favorite Avenger if there ever was one (even if the “H” on his skullcap wasn’t colored completely accurately).
I couldn’t tell you what happened to my lunchbox. I really have no idea. Maybe it fell apart. Maybe it got accidentally destroyed. Maybe it just got lost. I know that -- as a piece of cheap, tie-in merchandise -- I didn’t value it nearly as much as I valued the comicbooks themselves. I mean, it wasn’t even close. So I guess it didn’t matter too much whenever I let this thing go to whatever fate it eventually met. Still, it’s a nice memory, all these decades later. Especially considering the fact that I grew up to write these characters as part of my professional writing career…!
Those were the days, huh…?
Joe Casey
USA
This brings back similar memories, but with a Transformers one instead. Ironically, I, ultimately, did find out what happened to it. After my Mom died, I was sorting some boxes with “Memories” on them, and there it was my old lunch box. Granted, being metal, it was a bit rusty and beat up, but my Mom must have thought it have been something worth keeping of me, for all of those years.