"These DC stars can’t be LICKED — but you’re bound to be STUCK on them!"
I’ve always had a particular fondness for this ad campaign of DC’s from back in 1980, where they were ballyhooing the addition of eight additional story pages to all their books. To an eleven-year-old Mikester, that sounded pretty cool…I mean, look at these characters DC was going to be featuring with all that extra space:
There was another ad in Green Lantern, specifically plugging that book’s forthcoming Adam Strange back-up, which had the same stamps surrounding this image:
I remember being a bit puzzled by this stamp:
…with “Batman and Robin appearing in Batman,” until I realized that Robin wasn’t always in the Bat-books during this period, and it was a special event when Dick Grayson wasn’t away at college, or hanging with the Titans, or whatever. There’s at least one issue of Batman or Detective with the cover-blurb “guest-starring ROBIN” which must have baffled at least some casual comic readers unfamiliar with the state of the Bat-books at that point.
Let’s see….the Wonder Twins popped up in Extreme Justice, DC’s “look, we can be like Image Comics, too” series, and Jack O’Lantern showed up here and there in the regular DCU, usually in the Justice League comics, with a new version featured in Primal Force. The Seraph’s most recent appearance was an issue of Justice League Quarterly, as far as I can tell, but maybe one of you folks know better than I do.
In case you can’t read what that says in the next scan, it reads “The Misadventures of Superbaby:”
Remember when we could have silly stories about, say, a Superbaby going off and having wacky adventures? Imagine DC trying that now, and the resulting message board hoohar: “DEAR DC i find that the Use of superbaby is INNAPROPRIATE and UNDERMINES the seriosness of earths number1 superhero SUPERMAN plese have SUPERMAN fight DOOMDAY again.”
Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh, but I know that’s how some people online react to the very idea of Krypto, too. I’ve seen it. How can anyone not love Krypto? That boggles the mind.
Oooh, mysterious:
I never really took to the character, myself…I wanted eight more pages of Batman team-up in my Brave & The Bold comic, not a guy in a black turtleneck runnin’ around shooting people. But these stories did have some nice Dan Spiegle art, and I thought maybe they’d make a nice black and white Showcase Presents volume except for the fact the Nemesis run is about 200 pages short of the usual Showcase size, at least.
That white-haired guy on the left is far too smug for my taste:
Yeah, yeah, laugh it up there, buddy, but who still has a planet? Oh, that’s right, I do.
So, let’s see:
Hourman’s back in the Justice Society, thanks to some time-travelling whoop-de-doo. Sargon appears up in multiple issues of Swamp Thing, briefly shows up in the Books of Magic mini, and his sorcerous mantle is passed on to a relative of his during the whole Helmet of Fate thing. And Congorilla had a four issue mini (which writer Steve Englehart briefly discusses, along with featuring scans of all four issues), and he turned up in that all-gorilla Swamp Thing annual. It all comes back to Swamp Thing with me, doesn’t it?
