Another story "lost" to a reboot.

§ January 9th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized Comments Off on Another story "lost" to a reboot.

This must be where Vibe got his skills:


You know, I would have gladly paid $3.45 plus $1.25 shipping just to have a Champion Breakdancer certificate. Not that I need a certificate to tell me that.

Anyway, I was just going to post the ad so we could all get big laffs out of it, but I pulled it out of a copy of Superman: The Secret Years #3 (April 1985), and I thought I’d say a couple words about the comic itself.

The Superman: The Secret Years four-issue mini-series takes place in that time period of the pre-Crisis Superman’s history, between his life as Superboy in Smallville and the beginning of his career as Superman in Metropolis. It’s a good series, written by Bob Rozakis…a transitory tale of a young Clark Kent suddenly faced with some very adult decisions and tragedies. (Hint: don’t be a friend of Clark Kent that’s not part of the main cast, or dire things will happen to you.)

In terms of the art, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that it’s Curt Swan on pencils, and Kurt Schaffenberger on inks. The bad news is that the entire series is saddled with that Flexographic printing process, which I’ve gone on about before. Lettering is blotchy, color is off-register and also blotchy…here’s a sample splash that doesn’t look too bad:


Also, at least one of the two text pages at the end of the issue are rendered almost unreadable due to the poor printing.

It’d be nice if this could someday get a nice trade paperback reissue with a real printing job, except it’s perhaps a little too out of continuity (made moot almost immediately by the big Superman reboot about a year after this series came out), which is a minor issue compared to the more important reason this won’t get reprinted: the disputed legal status of the Superboy comics and related elements, which feature prominently in this series.

I also liked Frank Miller’s covers for this series, a marked contrast from the artwork inside:


You can see scans of all four covers, at larger sizes, over at the Grand Comic Book Database.

So, in conclusion…hey, a breakdancing ad! Pretty funny, right?

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