Toys From The Batcave! Super Putty Edition

You may think putty is something silly (couldn’t resist) for children, but you’d be very wrong!

It would seem the big three at DC use the stuff as an important part of their crime fighting arsenal.

A couple of uses spring to mind that aren’t listed on the back of the packaging like:  lifting finger prints, using it to attach a listening device, telling your teenage sidekick it’s chewing gum (for laughs).  Also, I wonder which compartment of the utility belt does he store it in?

Great Hera!  Wonder Woman uses fun putty, too!  I LOVE the art on these packages.  There really wasn’t much consistency in the way the characters were licensed in the 1970′s.

So, you’d often have a Silver Age image of the character on the product in the middle of the seventies.  Being a Silver Age fan, this was completely fine by me!

The Batman and Wonder Woman putties were produced in 1977 by a company called Durham Industries, out of New York.

While Durham also produced a Superman Fun Putty in 77, I’m choosing to go with the 1966 Superman Print Putty.

Why, you ask?  Because of the super tasty package artwork.  Little bit of trivia:  The art on the cover of the Super Print Book was also used on a Whitman frame tray puzzle in 1966.  The original art was sold a few years ago on ebay, and sold for well over a thousand dollars.

What the package never bothers to tell you is that you’re taking the ink off the paper of the comic book or newspaper, and once you peel it up, the image is really distorted when you go to print it on something else.  Plus, YOU’RE TAKING THE INK OFF YOUR COMIC BOOK.  It will look crappy from then on.  I know this because I have comic books that have huge discolored blotches on the pages.

Not to mention the fact that after you’ve transferred the image from the putty to the new paper, some of the ink remains on the putty.  You now have gross putty.  Ok, maybe this didn’t bother other children, but it really bugged me.

Why didn’t anyone make Plastic Man Putty?  Seriously, it just makes sense!  Or Elongated Man.  Somebody needs to get on that, STAT!