Four years of working there, you bet I have! ;)

The toys are produced overseas in Asia. The Philippines is much closer in proximity to the countries which produce the toys than we are, so The Philippines and Hong Kong typically get things before us.

Its funny because after I wrote that...I was like "oh yeah that's why." lol

Still haven't seen anything in stores, and that includes shelf tags. I'll check at lunch today, so we'll see.

Well, if your friend Sean was a super hero and picked that as his code-name.....;)

And he did eventually drop the "Black" part and went by just Goliath after Pym returned to the role of Giant-Man, albeit briefly.

That's actually closer to the truth. Remember Stan Lee created Black Goliath and the X-Men (which is widely considered to be an analogy of real-world racial issues in the U.S.), so it wasn't like he was insensitive to racism or discrimination.

The term "Black" just didn't have the same racial overtones back then as it does today.

This is true. Getting the figs early are definitely great. However, there are also some drawbacks in being a collector in the PI. Some of the figures also don't make it on our shores. We never had the Mandarin wave in the IM2 line. Some of the MU waves like the Vision wave didn't make it here either. The revision/variant wave didn't make it here either so we don't have the Moonstone Ms. Marvel, Phasing Vision, etc.

Another drawback is that the figs are more expensive here. At SRP, the MU singles cost 11.50 USD; 2Packs cost 20.70 USD; and the Gigantic Battles cost around 50 dollars. If we miss the figs from the market, our only chance is to cater to the hoarders... so just imagine how much they (hoarders) markup the price from the already expensive SRP.

So, getting some of the figs early is probably just a consolation for being a Filipino collector. LOL. The latest 2packs (DP/TM and Patch/SS) were actually released yesterday here in our country so props to our local distributor (Playkit) for another 'early' release. :)