Adventures of Superman #444, 480, 488, 489

I have a “junk pile” of comics. These are, mostly, made up of comics that I owned before I began “collecting” comics; a motley assortment of random drug-store purchases and hand-me-downs from who-knows-where. They used to sit in the bottom drawer of the desk in my old room in my parents house. When I began collecting, these comics were kept separate, from what I was buying and bagging in protective sleeves. If you asked me about these comics when I was a teenager, I’d probably say they were comics in either very poor condition (a few are missing their covers outright) or that they were so corny that I would be embarrassed to include them in my “real” collection. (This junk pile included, among other things: a half dozen random Marvel Tales, Marvel’s three-issue A-Team mini-series, and about twenty semi-random issues of Marvel’s Star Wars comic.) And yet these comics stuck around, because my collecting-mentality couldn’t bear to discard even the comics I had essentially already discarded. When my wife and I bought our house three years ago, my mother unceremoniously handed over four or five boxes of my old crap that she had been wanting to get rid of, and among those boxes was my “junk pile”. I weeded through those comics and ended up pulling out a few dozen issues that, as an adult, I had a nostalgic attachment to. I now have a “not-really-junk pile” and a “junkier pile”; the whereabouts of the latter is unknown, either donated to some Goodwill store, or buried in a basement closet, while the “not really junk pile” sits, unbagged, on a shelf; part of my comic collection but, still, not really part of my comic collection.

I mention all this for two reasons: to explain why I own issue 34 of DC Comics Presents and the why it is not counted as one of the comics in the 5,600+ that are part of this project. This comic is from 1981, featuring a team-up between Superman, Captain Marvel, and the rest of the Marvel family, as they battle Mr. Mxyzptlk , Mr. Mind, and King Kull. Among other things, it also included Supes and Marvel being transported to an alternate dimension populated by talking bunnies, one of whom was, of course, Bunny Marvel. (A serendipitous bonus: the “next issue” blurb promised a Superman/Man-Bat team up! Man, now I need to track that sucker down!)  It’s all played straight—even Marvel Bunny—and clearly meant for a young audience. But I got to tell you: I enjoyed reading this issue more than I did these four Adventures of Superman comics.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons #1 / Adventures in the Rifle Brigade #1

I was never a role-playing geek.  There was one time, in my early teens, that a group of friends got together to play the Marvel Comic’s Superheroes role-playing game; but we got into an argument over some aspect of the game and we never got started. Beyond that, I wouldn’t role a d10 until college. I’ve always been somewhat surprised that I didn’t find my way into the gaming world as much I have with comics and sci-fi. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I was a solitary kid and comics gave me the chance to escape into fantasy alone without having to socialize if I didn’t want to. 

I mention all this to preface the fact that when Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hit the stands, my knowledge of D&D was limited to the advertisements I saw in comics.  These ads for D&D were ubiquitous in comics in the 80’s. Painted images of menacing dragons staring intently at the reader, or a band of adventurers fighting sorcerers or monsters in a cave or on a castle parapet were as common as letter pages.   Again, I was more a sci-fi geek than a sword-and-sorcery geek, but I knew a dwarf from a dragon.  Escapist fantasy is escapist fantasy regardless of the setting. So when DC Comics put out a line of comics based on TSR Inc.’s role-playing games, of course I wanted to take a look.

Action Comics, #601

So here’s a hypothetical for you: You publish the longest running comicbook in America. It features one of the most popular/recognizable fictional characters of the 20^th Century. You’re about to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of both the comic and the character, and you want to do something to commemorate the occasion, beyond a single “special anniversary” issue. What would you do?

If your answer is: “I’d turn the comicbook into a weekly anthology featuring second- and third- (and occasionally fourth-) tired characters and put the previous main attraction in a two-page back-up,” well, you were obviously working at DC Comics in 1988.

Action Comics #600

As I mentioned in my first Action Comics post, I was more of a Marvel Zombie than a DC . . . um . . .what are DC fans called? Well, whatever they were, it wasn’t me. Just didn’t look interesting to my 12 year-old-brain. And yet, with the impeccable logic of a 12 year old whose head was spinning with the heady potential of collecting, the idea of having a comic that I bought today become valuable in the future had me willing to buy anything that had the potential to be worth money down the road. Such a topsy-turvy view of economics and investment strategy is why I majored in English and not Accounting.