A very rare Marvel variant cover for Avengers (2018) # 53 has appeared!

It seems that the variant cover comic book pictured below was given away free to attendees of the March 5 Flyers / Black Hawks game.
As of this writing only two of them are up on Ebay, so this should be a pretty (and cute?   ) rare variant.  

Is it "rare" as in "people are embarrassed to admit they own a copy"?

Sorry, but I'm not a big fan of the NHL, and even if I were, it's doubtful I'd be a fan of "Gritty" / the Philadelphia Flyers.
I'm too much a New York City-area person and there are three NHL teams in the NY/NJ area.

Barry_Allen wrote:It seems that the variant cover comic book pictured below was given away free to attendees of the March 5 Flyers / Black Hawks game.
As of this writing only two of them are up on Ebay, so this should be a pretty (and cute?   ) rare variant.  

I have no idea who that is...

tony ingram wrote:

Barry_Allen wrote:It seems that the variant cover comic book pictured below was given away free to attendees of the March 5 Flyers / Black Hawks game.
As of this writing only two of them are up on Ebay, so this should be a pretty (and cute?   ) rare variant.  

I have no idea who that is...

It is "Gritty", the mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League. (And I had to look that up myself.)


It looks like they use to have a mascot named "Slapshot" for about a year back in the 1970s.


And by the way, Philadelphia's Major League Baseball team, the Philadelphia Phillies, have had a mascot called the "Phillie Phanatic", who's been around since 1978.

I was thinking about how silly these mascots could appear now but....then I remembered "Ciao", this Italian mascot to Football World Cup of 1990, just see below :

Barry_Allen wrote:I was thinking about how silly these mascots could appear now but....then I remembered "Ciao", this Italian mascot to Football World Cup of 1990, just see below     :

But at least it wasn't a human being in a costume.
(Or was there a costumed human version?)

No, I did not remember that from 1990; now I have checked and luckily, it was not, in Italy it has been considered the ugliest mascot ever since...

MajorHoy wrote:

Barry_Allen wrote:I was thinking about how silly these mascots could appear now but....then I remembered "Ciao", this Italian mascot to Football World Cup of 1990, just see below     :

But at least it wasn't a human being in a costume.
(Or was there a costumed human version?)

I was re-reading these old posts and maybe I didn't specifyto answer correctly your question, the one in small characters, whose correct answer is that (luckily...) there was not a costumed human version of this Ciao mascot!