The Unexpected # 202

When I was a kid I enjoyed collecting comic books. Back in those days comic books were affordable on a child's budget. They were also not designed for an adult audience as they are today. Baseball cards were also designed for kids to collect and enjoy. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw baseball cards and comic books turn from a child's hobby to an adults greedy investment opportunity. The market became saturated with the stuff. A collectible craze took hold in the United States. Big pot-bellied American men with cigars in their mouths rented warehouses and stocked up on cards and comics as future investments. They were going to get rich...or so they thought. The card and comic people gladly smiled and raised the prices on their wares knowing what would eventually happen. Anybody with a rudimentary knowledge of economics is familiar with the concept of scarcity. These cards and comic books printed in that era of gluttony are worthless today. One only has to go visit E-bay and do a few searches to see this. Before this era of opportunistic lust for money at the kid's expense each years set of baseball cards and monthly issues of comic books were eagerly anticipated. Comic books in the late 70s and early 80s were not 3 or 4 dollars like they are today. A kid could go to the local convenience store and buy a candy bar, drink and comic book for about a buck.

                                                       The Unexpected # 202
I still have my old comic books. My favorite ones were the ghost and horror comics like DC Comics; The House of Mystery, The Unexpected, Ghosts, and the House of Secrets. I also enjoyed the old Charlton Comic westerns, and Gold & Key Comics issued The Twilight Zone, and Ripley's Believe it or not. Sometimes there would be advertisements for the next issue which would show the cover. I can remember eagerly awaiting the latest issue of a particular comic. One particular issue stands out. In the summer of 1980 I was 11 going on 12. My brother and I saw an advertisement promoting issue # 202 of The Unexpected. The cover showed a large white Easter Bunny menacing a group of unsuspecting children hunting for Easter eggs in the woods. The caption on the cover read "What Comes Hopping Down The Bunny Trail." Every time that we were able to make it to the store we would look and see if the issue had arrived. A killer Easter Bunny...how could you beat that! Some of these stories were pretty warped, but warped is what we enjoyed. One day my brother and I went to the store and there it was in all it's glory on the comic rack. Scooping it up we paid the clerk a couple of quarters and went outside to read it. We were disappointed. The story was mediocre and left a bad taste in our mouths. We had been duped. How could a cover be so good and the story itself suck? As 11 year olds we were getting a good lesson in marketing. What were we expecting? The killer bunny to jump from the pages of the comic and chase us down the road? 32 years later I still have the comic...it is a classic. I have read it as an adult and really it is not that bad...In fact, the older I get the better it gets...Why? I cannot say....perhaps it has something to do with a more remote time in my past when I was younger and not as cynical of the world around me?...Maybe it is the sea monkey add on the page following the story? I do not know...but every now and then I sit down, sometimes with my own son and read about a killer Easter Bunny that dunks kids in a vat of chocolate before biting their heads off.