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Last time, jmurphy brought up
“But the good news is that LCE #51 is being reprinted full size.”
And indeed they are! The Limited Collectors’ Edition #51 treasury edition from 1977 is coming to shelves in a facsimile edition next month, collecting together theh original Ra’s al Ghul saga by Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams. Irv Novick, and Dick Giordano.
The only image I can find on the distributor sites for this facsimile is the one I posted above, showing its original cover. I’m hoping the cover is reproduced authentically, and not “retouched” as they did with 2004 reprint of DC 100 Page Super Spectacular #6 (original / reprint). Or (ahem) “recolored” as some other Adams reprints have been.
I realize I’m probably worrying for nothing, as DC’s facsimile editions of late haven’t had that much after-the-fact fiddling and are presented more-or-less as originally printed. (Though to be fair I haven’t really taken that close a lot to see if the Golden Age facsimiles, like the Superman #1, are the redrawn versions that appeared in the early DC Archives).
The big change of course is getting the material on nice, white paper, versus the newsprint of the originals. Of course, yes, I’ve commented before about the dissonance about seeing work that originally lived on newprint suddenly being all bright and shiny, but having it on those nice, big treasury-sized pages will certainly be welcome and much easier on the ol’ eyeballs.
This will be, I think, DC’s first reprint of a treasury duplicating the original format, versus the treasury-sized hardcover edition they did of Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali (which is Peak Neal Adams Superman in my opinion). There was also a smaller “deluxe edition” hardcover published at the same time, with a new Adams cover and extra bonus material not included in the larger facsimile. I don’t know if the smaller book was given the “recoloring” treatment. Anyway, that story needs to be seen at full size, so I’m not sure why you’d want that “deluxe” version anyway.
But back to this Ra’s al Ghul treasury, which is probably about as good as this particular Bat-villain ever got in print form (outside the frankly demented and evil and great usage in the Batman Beyond cartoon). The treasury includes his first appearance and conflict with Batman, including the famed shirtless (but not cowlless) sword fight:
…and c’mon, if anything deserves to be reprinted on bigger than normal pages, it’s this.
With any luck this facsimile will do well enough to open up more reprints of DC’s treasuries (and spur Marvel along to do the same). It’s obvious why they started with this one (Batman drawn by Neal Adams, duh), but it’d be nice if they brought the Superman Vs. Wonder Woman story drawn by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez back into print — it did get a treasury-sized hardcover reprint a few years back, but man, it should always be available.
And personally I’d like some of those Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer treasuries just to get more Sheldon Mayer in my life. Not really holding my breath for this to happen, honestly.
I hope future treasury reprints, if any, will focus on the ones with new stories that have only appeared there, versus reprinting books that contain reprints themselves. Not to say that something like this Adams Batman collection isn’t worthwhile, and nice to have on Big Ol’ Pages, but I’d rather have any new material from these show up in its original dimensions rather than being shrunk down.
Big news is that Marvel and DC are bringing their intercompany crossovers back into print…well, most of them, anyway, as the one pictured above obviously is out, and JLA/Avengers I suspect will come along eventually. Probably too soon after the last reprinting, maybe, but I suspect the demand for that book goosed Marvel and DC into finally realizing “oh hey we’re leaving money on the table.”
Everything else is being reprinted in two of the Omnibus editions, those large, thick, relatively ungainly hardcovers. One will have all the standalone crossovers, including the O.G. (am I using that right?) Superman/Spider-Man team-ups, Batman/Hulk, and X-Men/Teen Titans, along with all the one-shots that popped up in the 1990s. The second volume will include the Marvel Vs. DC mini-series, the Amalgam one-shots (featuring “merged” versions of Marvel and DC characters, like Wolverine and Batman being combined into “Dark Claw”) and the two Access mini-series (starring the character who can cross between the Marvel and DC universes).
On one hand, from a personal perspective, I wouldn’t mind having these for myself, simply because I gave up nearly all of these to the shop when I opened up lo these many years ago. And having them in this larger format would certainly be easier on the eyes…I do still have my copy of the original trade paperback reprinting the 1970s/1980s crossovers, and having those treasury edition-sized comics squeezed down to regular comic dimensions is not so easy on the peepers any more.
On the other hand, this is a terrible way to rerelease everything. Will the small number of sales at the much higher omnibus price point equal out to selling more copies at a cheaper price point in a more standard comic book format? I could probably sell tons of most of these crossover comics as, say, individual $7.99 facsimile editions. Or even $9.99 ones, versus the tiny handful of omnibus editions that, by the way, generally only sell at discounted prices. Even a series of trade paperbacks gathering all these together would be preferable.
On the third hand, I suppose this is easier on the publishers, not worrying about some trades selling better because they had the choice team-ups, and letting other trades fall out of print right away. Or having to go through the trouble of soliciting for individual reprints. The omnibus lets ’em say “here’s everything in two books, you want that Steve Rude Hulk/Superman, you gotta take that Punisher/Azrael-Batman crossover too.”
I am sort of curious about how they’re going to arrange the comics in the volume with Marvel Vs. DC and Amalgam. The first wave of those Amalgam comics take place, and were released, between a couple of issues of the Marvel Vs. DC mini. I wonder if they’ll keep ’em that way in the book.
Anyway, if you want these, order ’em now. Like the ROM and Micronauts omnibuses, they’ll likely not be in print for very long. Again, they’ll almost certainly be discounted upon release, but once they’re out of print and “collectible” — urgh.
Just a brief almost-Low Content Mode today, so what I have here are some of the oldest digital images I have in my possession, downloaded via my America Online account. I think it was from an official DC Comics section on AOL.
The date in the subject line to this post appears to be when they were acquired, or at least copied to an old floppy disk before getting backed up to a CD-ROM. As such, I’m not sure of the exact date, but regardless it’s still about three decades ago.
Of course among these pics (converted from their original giF format to these here newfangled jay-pegs)would be some Swamp Thing, like this neat color-hold image:
…and a more traditional preview panel from the comics:
Here’s another color-hold pic, this time from the Vertigo Jonah Hex books:
Here’s an interesting illustration of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman:
…and here’s an image from (I believe) Jerry Ordway’s Shazam! graphic novel:
This is the sort of thing where I’d wished I’d kept better notes as to what has going on at the time re: the online comics world in the early World Wide Web days. If only someone would have told me then I’d start doing a comics blog about ten years later, to which I’d say, of course [old joke coming in], “what’s a blog?”
I’m pretty sure the DC area on AOL was what you’d expect, “coming attractions” and blurbs and images promo-ing their product, but at this late date I can’t even picture what it looked like. I do have a better memory of the general comics message boards that AOL hosted around that same time (I can even remember a screen name or two of other users), where there seemed to be a lot of focus on price speculation. (That may have been earlier than 1994, before the market crash began to take hold.)
I’m sure someone out there has a better retrospective of the early comic book presence on AOL. But all I have are these images, backed up decades ago to floppies, then backed up again to CD-ROMs, and probably someday backed up to whatever new file storage format I end up using next. Not sure what I’ll use them for again, since posting them to this site is probably the only real use I’ll get out of them aside from occasionally pulling them up on my computer when browsing old files and feeling nostalgic for a time I barely remember.
So I’m always processing back issues at the shop…I have enough old comics just sitting in the boxes in the back room that I can probably spend the remaining few years of my life just bagging and tagging funnybooks for sale. Usually it’s a pretty quick process and I don’t get held up on any single item, puzzling over what I’m going to price it. But once in a great while, I hit bit of a roadblock that’s got me wondering.
In this case, it’s a copy of Superman und Batman (or just Superman according to the indicia inside), a German comic published in 1968:
This issue features a fairly important story in comics history, the introduction of the modern version of Batgirl (Barbara Gordon). The original English edition was released with a cover date of January 1967 (so likely very late in 1966):
Most striking of course is the color change, from the dark background on the U.S. version, versus the bright white background on the German edition.
Pages inside are good ‘n’ bright. with all the text machine-relettered verus hand printing:
And here’s the back cover because what the heck, I scanned it so here you go:
The original sells for several thousand dollars in good shape. But what of the German reissue? I’ve sold lots of non-English translations of older American superhero comics over the years, and in general they’re priced relatively low to move as more novelties than anything else.
Now, comics in Spanish do well since I live in an era with many speakers of it. But the few German comics I’ve had sit around a bit, but this one may be the exception.
Now, the original Detective #359 can sell thousands of dollars, depending on condition of course. But a reprint of a (cough) “key” story released overseas? This is taking some research as to what the potential price would be, but it’s going to take a while. In the meantime, thought I’d show it to you, because it’s pretty neat!
Also, the title should more accurately be Superman und Batman und Flash, because between the stories featuring Supes and Bats was this Flash story:
“Hey Zack, what’s up.”
I miss being able to flip open a comics ‘zine and seeing a pure and simple news blurb like this:
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like reading about scandals and shenanigans in the comics industry as much as the next guy, but it’s…just nice where the item is entirely “this dude got a job on this comic.”
And whatta comic it was:
I bought this new off the rack in 1981, where 12-year-old me was still learning about the back continuity of DC’s heroes. And Tales of the Green Lantern Corps went deep into the history of that particular franchise. Between this, reprints of older stories in DC’s digests, and seeing that Golden Age/Silver Age GL team up against Krona on the early Nickelodeon show Video Comics, I knew pretty much everything I needed to know about Green Lantern.
I really ate up that stuff as a young Mikester, trying to find out about the histories of all these characters. It’s probably why I really appreciated Roy Thomas’ work on DC’s Golden Age characters at the time, as that fan feared no footnotes, exposited every exposition. I loved it all. Now, going back as Old Mikester, approaching it as storytelling versus an educational textbook, that early ’80s Golden Age material doesn’t go down quite as smoothly, but I’ll always appreciate the lessons of Roy ‘n’ pals.
Those aforementioned digests helped a lot too, reprinting from DC’s vast back catalog in themed releases…”here’s the Justice League one, here’s one with a bunch of secret origins, here’s one with Batman villains.” I grabbed those whenever I could. Even if they weren’t necessarily “educational” in the sense of explaining pertinent details of the past, it was still fun to see these tales of yesteryear, and even so E. Nelson Bridwell (or someone) usually had a small text piece providing historical context for the contents.
Sometimes the digests were like mini-graphic novels, like this one which included this whole “Batman – Murderer!” storyline. Or this whole “Warlord versus his arch-nemesis Deimos” one.
And then, going back to supplying some background to their currents series, there’s that one pictured to the right…a digest focused on the Justice Society, released shortly after the debut of of Roy Thomas’s Golden Age-centric All-Star Squadron, It not only featured an origin of the Justice Society, but also included the first Per Degaton story, a character that would again rise to some prominence during the ’80s.
Look, I wasn’t sure where I was going to end up when I started writing this post…it’s just that seeing that ancient news blurb made me nostalgic for a simpler time as a comic collector. One where I actually did wonder who was going to write/draw what title, and one where I still eagerly awaited any glimpses into the past either via reprints or flashbacks.
news blurb from Comics Feature #9 (1981)
An update to Friday’s post about Bill Willingham declaring his Fables comic to be in the public domain: in a shocking turn of events, the publisher of Fables, DC Comics, has a problem with that. They released an announcement that basically says “Fables is ours, don’t even try it, we’re looking at you Rob Liefeld” and okay I added that last part, but still, they’re not into the whole “public domain” thing as one would expect.
And like I said, this ain’t gonna be settled ’til there’s been a lawsuit or three, so…um, don’t make up stories based on public domain fairy tale characters that even slightly resemble those published under the Fables label, I guess? And certainly don’t call it Fables.
Anyway, there may be a lot of probable…grey area to this story, as has been brought up in the comments to Friday’s post. We’ll see how this plays out.
To answer the question Sean brought up regarding who owns Willingham’s superhero team the Elementals: I actually Googled the phrase “who owns the elementals comic book” and up popped the name “Andrew Rev.”
“Comico’s publisher, Andrew Rev, purchased the Elementals property from Willingham in the 1990s.”
So I presume ol’ Andrew is still just sitting on the rights, and doing nothing with them. Or trying to do something with them and none of us know about it because it hasn’t been going anywhere. Ah well.
• • •
In other news, I’ve got medical stuff going on in the mornings for the first part of the week, so…posting may be light on Wednesday. I’m only getting this much typing done right now because I got an early start Sunday evening. But at least I wanted to show you this picture:
Believe it or not, I thought I was smiling. But I guess comics are Serious Bizness so my stern look of disapproval at all of you is the best I can manage.
So anyway, those comics. That Amazing Fantasy #15 and Amazing Spider-Man #1. About a year and a half ago a gentlemen brought in some Silver Age Marvel for sale and I purchased them from him. He and his family had inherited these and over a few weeks he offered up several comics to me that I of course had to buy. Then one week he showed me those two omics in the picture there. He wasn’t quite sure if he wanted to part with them just yet, but we talked about them and how we’d sell them and so on.
I saw him a few more times over the following months, buying other comics from him but he still wasn’t ready to part with those two books. Until he was, just recently! And before you ask…no, they’re sold, I don’t have them hanging around the store, so keep your Ocean’s 11-style shenanigans out of my shop. But I guess after all our dealings together he decided he liked the cut of my jib and asked me to handle these two beauties.
More and more stuff has shown up from this collection, and one of the unintended consequences of letting people know I had an Amazing Fantasy #15 is that I’m seeing and hearing from a lot of people about what I have to offer in my shop. Now, while I’ve been in this business for three and a half decades, I’m not a Big Name Retailer. I’m probably not even the biggest retailer in the county. So it probably came as a surprise to a lot of folks that this nobody with a tiny shop out in Camarillo, CA is suddenly awash in The Big Books.
This won’t last forever, of course. This collection will eventually run out (though there’s plenty of good stuff I still need to process) and once I no longer had The Big Books folks will move on. Unless more people bring me stuff like this after seeing…um, that I had stuff like this. I don’t know, we’ll see. But it’s been fun looking through these books that I haven’t had in my hands in a while.
…Like that Amazing Fantasy #15. Last time I held one of those in my hands was just before the big price jump in the…1990s, I think? Back when we had it for a few hundred dollars, as opposed to the…quite a bit more it commands now? Quite the item, and it was good to see it in person once again.
So I suppose the big, surprising news of the week is Bill Willingham announcing that he is giving Fables over to the public domain. According to his press release (warning: Substack link), his frustrations with the current publisher of Fables, DC Comics, has brought him to this decision.
There has been an enormous amount of commentary on this already, and here I am slopping more on the pile. You’ll see a lot of people saying things like “I’m not a copyright lawyer, but” and then pontificating on the ramifications of this, and look, I’m only human. I’m gonna ramble on about it myself, because there are a few questions I have, a few responses I want to relate, and so on.
First off, can Bill Willingham even do this? Can you announce that something is just “public domain” now and that’s that? A few years back Tom Lehrer put all his music into the public domain, and apparently it was quite the chore on his part to do so. Granted, I’m getting the “quite the chore” part second hand, since I’m not finding a primary source for that, but Tom definitely dood it. And I presume the hard part was getting any record labels with whom he had prior arrangements to play along.
But what does this Fables announcement mean, exactly? Various commentators have noted dumping a thing into the public domain isn’t necessarily a thing you can do. The Techdirt article link I posted suggest that really the best you can do is say “I won’t, and no heirs (if any) will, sue you if you use this thing I own.” As pal Nat said on Bluesky, maybe Willingham can offer what amounts to a free license to everyone to use his Fables material…which may conflict with preexisting contracts Willingham has with DC.
Willingham’s take is that, while he’s under contract to DC, he himself can’t do anything with Fables outside their purview…but by offering Fables up for free, everyone else can. Now I’m sure there’s going to be a test case for this eventually, as, say, Dynamite decides to publish their own Fables book, and DC/Warner/Discovery says “hold on there, pardner,” and slaps a big lawsuit or, at minimum, a cease and desist on them. The legality of “anyone can use Fables is going to be settled by courts, I’m almost positive.
It’s that contract with DC that I’m now wondering about, after Nat pointed it out. I am presuming Willingham’s lawyers looked over everything and gave him the “sure, go ahead” with this announcement. As he says repeatedly, he is the sole owner of the property, and outside the agreements he has with DC, he can do whatever he wants with it. But I suspect DC is going to spend at least a little money in legal action deciding if in fact this is the case. Willingham said that part of what moved him to this course of action was that he couldn’t afford the time or money to sue DC, but he may end up in court about this anyway.
As anther Bluesky user said (and Neil Gaiman concurred), this may be less about getting Fables into the public domain than about basically putting the screws to DC regarding their own ability to make new Fables comics. After all, ol’ Bill was pretty pissed at DC. (Given that he lost control over a previous comic he created, Elementals, I imagine he’s pretty sensitive about ownership of his work.)
Also, as many folks have joked, “at last, we can do stories about Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf!” I know, I know, Fables primarily concerned itself with characters from fairy tales, all of whom were already in the public domain. The situations, stories, and character interpretations are all Willingham’s, of course, and that’s what he’s offering up. It’s like, anyone can do Frankenstein’s Monster, but only Universal Studios can do the Frankenstein’s Monster you immediately thought of when you read the name.
I’m reminded a bit of Dave Sim, who has said that Cerebus would enter the public domain upon his death. Again, this is likely the “no one will sue you” option more than actual public domain, but Dave owns Cerebus outright and, far as I know, has no legal contracts involving the character with outside parties. Quite a different situation than that with Fables, where an entertainment conglomerate has at least some minor interest in the property.
Basically what I’m saying is, nobody knows for sure how this is going to work until someone tries to make it work, and we see how DC reacts. Like, don’t look for “Stan Lee Presents Fables” from Marvel anytime soon. Though…if Marvel still has publication rights to comics based on Once Upon A Time, maybe we can get that crossover we’ve always wanted…!
Picking up on Monday’s “Trial of the Flash” post, Daniel T links to an interview with its writer, Cary Bates, with relevant info. Daniel T has a choice quote from the interview about Crisis and how it affected his story (and what could have come afterwards).
And Scipio…ah, Scipio, fellow veteran of the early 2000s comicsweblogosphere, the horrors we’ve seen. Anyhoo, Scipio popped in to remind me of one of the more…out-there elements of the whole “Trial of the Flash” storyline: Nathan Newbury:
Okay, SPOILERS for a nearly 40-year-old story just below.
Mr. Newbury was an accountant who was serving on the jury for the Flash’s trial. But, as we learn eventually, Mr. Newbury was…”psychically possessed” by a mind from the distant future who was convinced of the hero’s innocence. And also spoke in an overly elaborate manner that I think was said future mind having to communicate using Newbury’s ingrained speech patterns, but I don’t know if that was ever made explicit. (Sorry, I just reread #350, wasn’t going to dive back into the whole series, like, tonight.)
Now by any reasonable standard, once ths court found out about this level of jury-tampering, it’d all be declared a mistrial and they’d start over, right? Well, not according to this news report:
I’ve said before that the nightly news in the Marvel Universe would be indistinguishable from watching wrestling, and that the televised news reports in the DC Universe would instead inspire fear and madness in those who watched. I think this bit of insanity supports the argument. Though I suspect a certain forthcoming Big Trial in the real world may surpass even these wild events. I’m putting my nickel down on “space aliens” in the office pool.
From what I read of Nathan Newbury’s appearance in #350…I mean, it wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t quite the deus ex machina it feels like it should be, if only because the future mind in question has a prior connection to the Flash. And it’s not like Flash comics haven’t been rife with time travel shenanigans over the decades.
So ultimately the most troubling thing about Mr. Newbury is his moustache. That’s a moustache that challenges you. And frankly, the true surprise villain of the piece has a sidekick in this issue with the name of “Snurff,” and that, my friend, is the real crime.
What’s nice about Flash #350, the last of the series, is that Bates (according to the interview linked above) was given enough warning and time to lay groundwork for events coming in Crisis on Infinite Earths via foreshadowing and fore-blatantly-just-saying-he’s-gonna-die-ing.
Plus, there’s the fact that the issue’s villain (I don’t know why I’m being coy, I said there’d be spoilers) is trying to resolve “time turbulence” caused by all the time-traveling bullshit that had been going on (like the Reverse-Flash dying centuries before he was born). For selfish reasons, he’s actually trying to do a good thing, even somehow, it’s implied, saving the Flash from his impending death. He’s practically begging the Flash to let his plan play out even as he’s caught, but to no avail, adding to the coming tragedy that Barry Allen could’ve escaped but for his own actions.
Pretty wild stuff for the final issue of the superhero that ushered in the Silver Age (unless you’re one of those Martian Manhunter truthers). The final caption boxes on the last page read “And they lived happily ever after…for a while…” just to twist that knife a little more. Ah well, it’s all moot now, as thanks to DC’s ongoing plan to make Crisis “never not was” it’s mostly been undone, with Barry being dragged back into current continuity with varying levels of success.
Back then, though, before all the death and return and death again of characters, some of whom don’t even have the decency to stay dead a full month or so before being brought back after their highly publicized demise — it’s a little hard to convey the uncertainty DC fans had, knowing that characters could die or at least be fundamentally changed in this coming Crisis event. And that if the Flash could go, who else is safe? It was quite the feeling, one that was unique to superhero comics of the period.
Update to the William Messner-Loebs talk from last week (reminder: here’s his GoFundMe) — a couple of you noted that DC has announced a new omnibus reprint of his (and Greg LaRocque’s) run on The Flash.
I haven’t found an issue listing yet, but that’s definitely the cover from the first issue on that omnibus there. That has me wondering if they’re going to include the first 14 issues of this Flash series written by Mike Baron, or just pick up from #15, Messner-Loebs’ first. I mean, I presume not, I just see Loebs’ name there. It’s good stuff, regardless, and Loebs picks up from Baron’s run, fleshing out situations and characters and keeping things weird and exciting.
I would kind of preferred paperbacks, but as was noted in my comments, maybe those will come later. But so long as some money is getting to Loebs from this, it’s a welcome move from DC.
So every once in a while I take a look on the eBay for 1996’s Flex Mentallo #3:
…not because I need a copy (I bought mine way back when it was new), but out of perverse fascination with how the book gets listed. Specifically because of this cover detail:
…featuring the signatures of the book’s writer and artist, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Not actual signatures, mind you, but part of the actual cover image. If you look closely, you can see the comic book coloring details in the “penlines” of the signatures:
But if you only ever see the one copy of this comic, and didn’t, say, unbundle a giant pile of them after arrival from Diamond to put them on the shelf and seeing the dozens of copies with identical autographs on each one, then at first glace maybe, just maybe, you might thing you had some genuine hand-scribblings.
Such as the person who listed this item for sale:
Currently it’s just the one listing, which is unusual given that in the past I could usually find four or five at any given time. Maybe folks are learning, maybe I just caught eBay at a good/bad time, maybe enough buyers have complained in the past, I don’t know.
Which does have me thinking about buyers who did purchase one of these off eBay as a “signed” item, believing to this day that they have a rare collector’s item. Ah, well. I don’t remember anyone thinking this when they were buying the item new off the rack (because they could see with their own eyes that every copy had identical “inscriptions”). I do recall having to explain once or twice over the years when buying collections that these weren’t actually hand-signed.
To be fair, this isn’t a common cover design element, so I can’t blame people for being momentarily fooled. And I wouldn’t put it past Morrision and/or Quitely if that wasn’t a planed prank on their part, still playing out all these years later.
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