I’d even accept a two-pack of O. G. Wotasnozzle and Sappo.

filed under Categories merchandise, popeye 9 Comments

So of late I’ve been trying to get my comic collection at home reorganized and put away properly, part of which is clearing out some material and bringing it to the store for sale. As such, I’m trying to keep the intake of new stuff down to a dull roar, both comics and other related goodies. But there comes a time in every person’s life when one must acquire a full set of high-end fully articulated and accessorized Popeye figures.


Just released from Boss Fight Studio, this figures are “1/12th scale” (or between 4 and 6 inches tall, depending) and come in these nicely designed packages and are accompanied by a selection of accessories (extra hands, hats, that sort of thing).

Castor Oyl, pictured above, needed some extra special accessories to attract the “Castor who?” crowd and thus gets Eugene the Jeep and the Whiffle Hen.

Olive comes with Swee’Pea, as well as an extra head with an angry face:


…which sadly does not quite live up to the swell expression drawn on the packaging.

The most massive figure of the bunch, and rightly so, is Bluto:


…who comes with a few extra hands and his little cap.

The package opens up at the side, where a flap is held in place by a couple of inserted tabs (one covered with a clear sticker to keep it shut). I had trouble opening it up, putting a few tears into the slots in which the tabs go, but I don’t know if that’s a design flaw or just my clumsy, clumsy mitts. If only I had swappable hands like Bluto.

Anyway, this is what it looks like inside:

And here’s Bluto in all his ornery glory:


He doesn’t need an extra swappable head…THIS ONE IS PLENTY:


There was an additional item in this series I passed on, which was a “Popeye Vs. Bluto” set featuring basically the same designs as above but with “battle damage” (bruised knuckles, black eyes) that I passed on.


These are some beautiful figures that I absolutely didn’t need but picked up anyway. The second series should be here in a few months (with the Sea Hag, Wimpy, Poopdeck Pappy, and Popeye in his white sailor suit) and after seeing these, I can’t wait.

If there’s a third series, I’m hoping for Alice the Goon, and wouldn’t it be great to get a Brutus to go with Bluto? Or a Ham Gravy to go with Castor? Or even King Blozo!

I mean, after that we’d really be entering real Deep Cut territory, getting into Olive’s parents and Rough House and the like. More likely we’d see more design variations on the main characters (such as one based on Bluto’s appearance in Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor).

But what I really want is a 4-pack of the nephews Pupeye, Peepeye, Poopeye and Pipeye:

Just don’t do a “Popeye Whistling Through His Missing Eye variant, I’m begging you:

“Suddenly, nineteen years later….”

filed under Categories suddenly... 22 Comments

Yes, you’ve been putting up with me for nearly 20 years (or a subset thereof), through all the comic scans, the retail talk, the ballyhooing of Frank Miller’s The Spirit and All-Star Batman and Robin, though health issues, through leaving one comic shop and opening another, through all the TV shows and movies, through all the fads and NFTs (but I repeat myself), through…well, through one more year of perpetuating this internetally-ancient blog.

Thanks as always to my family and friends, pal Dorian (alas, his site postmodernbarney is no more, but we’ll find a way to get an archive back up somewhere), and as always, to the Founding Father of Comics Blogging, Neilalien. And a special thank you to Bully, the Little Substitute Bull, who filled in for me during a week where I had other obligations. (Links to those posts below!) And yet more thanks to the boys Todd and Joe at Longbox Heroes who regularly plug this site on their podcast!

And of course big thanks to all of YOU, not just because you’re still out there reading comic blogs, but for all your wonderful comments and emails and such. In a world where online discourse has just swirled straight down the toilet, I’m very lucky that 99.9% of my interaction with readers has been very positive. Honestly, I appreciate it a great deal.

Speaking of podcasts, like I was just right up there a few lines back, I made my stunning return to the internet airwaves discussing the 1981 film Heavy Metal on the Vintage Video Podcast. You can find a link to my post describing the experience below…that’s right, I’m not linking it right here, you have to search for it! HAR HAR HAR! Anyway, hopefully I’ll be back on there eventually, when you least expect it!

Now, onto the regular feature of these anniversary posts…what I’ve been getting up to on Twitter. As you’ve probably heard, Twitter’s been taken over by someone whose actions thus far have…inspired less than a huge amount of confidence, and while I don’t expect that platform to immediately crash into an iceberg or anything, the actual user experience there coiuld very well degrade to the point where I’ll do my social media-ing elsewhere. Like, for example, on Mastodon or cohost or Tumblr or The Hive (no web access on the last one, look for user name “mikester”).

As a result of this online tumult, I’ve revamped the mikesterling.com site showing all the places I’d been and am currently at. And, new as of just a few weeks ago, mikester.net will take you there as well. (Mikester dot com, alas, is on some domain sale site for stupid amounts of money.)

Anyhoo, back to the Twitters. Here are a few (final?) bon mots from that service for your perusal, demonstrating, for example, my customer relations:

…as well as my incisive breakdown of DC’s publishing strategies:

…and my ability to hold a grudge:

…plus my love for things that are bad for me:

…as well as my remembrance of the good ol’ days of comics blogging:

…with a little room for recalling the halcyon days of my youth:

…along with my inability to take a compliment:

…and those excellent marketing skills that Marvel always keeps calling upon me for:

…not to mention that my eyeball stuff is still a thing:

…and my crushing self-awareness:

…or some of these people’s lack thereof:

…plus my occasional run-in with a colliqual conundrum:

…and my encounter with a gentlement with excellent taste:

…as well as my insightful pop culture commentary:

…with a tad of skepticism:

…wrapping up with not just a clear delination of my fate upon this Earth:

…but a mysterious message as well:

So there you go…will those all be screenshots from my Mastodon account next year? We’ll just have to see!

Now, let’s see just what I’ve been up to here on this very site over the last year:

DECEMBER 2021

Let’s get lenticular, an appreciation of George Pérez, the sneaky way Marvel made you decide you wanted more expensive comics, those bait ‘n’ switch-y LEGO variants, I thought I picked a pretty good Booster Gold cover for this vaccination post, I sold the majority of these within a matter of a week or two, hey somebody wrote in these comics, some words on authenticating signatures.

JANUARY 2022

Some talk about the original black bagged Death of Superman comic, speaking of autographs pal Ian totally ruined the value of this comic, uh oh it’s looking at 2021 predictions time (parts 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 EPILOGUE).

FEBRUARY 2022

Detroit-era Justice League, putting the Marvel back in the Man, [Homer Simpson voice] “Especially YOU,” my previous place of employment becomes a previous place, yes it’s true the new comics rack has no Tick, “don’t kill trees” says this comic made from trees, SPOILER: my allocation was 10%, dueling witches,

MARCH 2022

Still have this sign on display at my shop, meanwhile the clock is still on a shelf at my house, one of my more subdued birthday posts, some questions about that sign, on ordering those ratio variants, CUTE SWAMP THING, who could forget “Birthquake” with promos like these, autographed by the real Spawn, the Turok mystery is solved with help from Longbox Heroes, so long Garry Leach.

APRIL 2022

An old Matt Wagner Mage promo, I deserve an Eisner for the title of this post about the EC Comics counter dump; Solson Comics – I have, won’t you; slow days at the shop; printing errors and the worst comic; talking to me is always a mistake; the only good thing featuring Azrael; what’s Metron’s deal anyway.

MAY 2022

Goodbye Ivy and Neal; Goodbye George; this year’s Free Comic Book Day postmortem; lookin’ at Marvel and DC’s African benefit funnybooks; more Death of Superman talk with extra bonus offense of Canadians; Swamp Thing International; ordering suggestions from ye olden tymes (and part two).

JUNE 2022

(And part three and part four); BULLY THE LITTLE STUFFED BULL WEEK: intro – Superwinks – bullvertising – Batstrips – Marvelous – c-c-c-colors – Sluggo – Angel – EPILOGUE; hey someone let me on their podcast for some reason; comic collecting in the ’90s was its own weird thing; BEWARE THE TOAD; seriously I’d still be selling these #1s if they still had codes; H.P. Bushmiller; Cerebus and Sale; that Wonder Woman dot-to-dot is still funny; the implied question of “why is your store still around?”

JULY 2022

DC promo stickers; Swamp Thing vs. the Hot Comics App; this year’s Freak Out Post; still not sure what the point of Dark Crisis is; didn’t think it’d be Plastic Man that would get me to revive the “racial sensitivity” tag; decided against buying all these variants; a rough rough rough Superman joke; the best Megaton Man panels; important Gelatinous Cube news; the Wedding of Superman – no, not that one; the whole numbering-of-Marvel’s-Earth thing; the Marvel multiverse vs. the DC multiverse.

AUGUST 2022

Turned out this wasn’t the gangbuster success the original was; this toy is terrible; it used to be pretty easy to explain DC’s multiple Earths; the forgotten parallel Batman; a rare original drawing from my mini-comics days; the parallel Earth that wasn’t a parallel Earth; making plans for Power Girl; the Joker vs. Hot Comics Apps; the non-mystery of Bruce Wayne’s age in Dark Knight; the history of Earth-S (or is it 5?); comic-age talk again.

SEPTEMBER 2022

Nancy and Sluggo kid’s book; SLUGGO NO; JSA health and beauty tips; the Joker’s real name ’til the next time they reveal his real name; Fantastic Four error variant; fighting for your publishing rights in your satin tights; Thrasher Comics; original art from the Swamp Thing board game; Popeye and the Adventure of the Missing Numbers; Lex Luthor and hair; more super-villain motivations; noted ASS man Roy Thomas.

OCTOBER 2022

Featuring the second-best Superman theme; now entering the Swamp Thing Zone; that whole Supergirl mess; whatever the Joker’s deal is; Batman Beyond for your amusement; a Magic Mountain post just for me; the optimism of filling a whole Miracleman box; Big Peanuts vs. Little Peanuts; no really it almost scared me; more on Mixie-Plick or whatever it is.

NOVEMBER 2022

The only issue of 1963 people might actually want to buy; goodbye Kevin; the return of the Death of Superman (and also, goodbye another Kevin); surprise more Death of Superman talk; Wedding of Superman and Lois orders; this Hero Magazine video is somethin’ else; the Flash is smooooookin’; someone else’s video on variants and the death-question-mark of blogging; still working on this collection.

DECEMBER 2022

I wish I’d scanned the pic of the dentist getting on Doctor Octopus’s case about his oral hygiene.

• • •

And there we go, one more year down, the big 20th anniversary on its way at the end of 2023! Will I make it? Will some of YOU make it? That remains to be seen, but in the meantime I’ll keep blogging, hopefully you’ll keep reading. Thank you for spending a bit of your time with me, and I’ll be back later in the week with CONTENT™.

For reading all that, here’s a pic of me from many years ago, sitting at my computer desk late at night, University of CA Santa Barbara mug in hand, probably working on a post for this site:

I’ll see you here again in a couple of days. Thanks, as always, for reading.

“Don’t be a chump!”

filed under Categories scans 9 Comments


“…And use your webbing to floss out those food particles!”

From the Amazing Spider-Man Aim Toothpaste Giveaway released in 1982.

Well, “sorta friendly” anyway.

filed under Categories retailing 10 Comments


So this is what I’ve been busy with at the shop since Sunday…a sizable collection acquired from someone just trying to clear out space in the house. It was something inherited from a family member and that he didn’t really have any use for, thus it was to his local friendly neighborhood comic shop for unloading.

This ended up filling about four and a half long boxes, having been delivered to me in a variety of plastic storage bins that, I should remind you, are not the ideal place to keep comics. I could tell a lot of time was spent sorting, organizing, and cataloguing these comics, but alas not as much attention was spent to keeping them in nice condition. They’re…pretty rough, by and large. Intact and readable, but…well, I’ve already processed a big stack of these and the highest grade I’ve given to anything so far is a single VG+.

It’s mostly late ’70s/early ’80s, but it’s material I’ve been short on from that period. Lots of Spider-Man, Jonah Hex, Warlord, war comics, that sort of thing. While low grade, it’s all sellable goodies and even if they average out only a buck or two apiece, I should do pretty well on these. The trick is finding the time to get them all processed…I’ve been spending pretty much every spare moment I’ve had trying to work on these, but spare moments can be hard to come by, especially with holiday traffic.

But that’s a big part of why I like running a comic shop: getting to play with old comics! Even if they’re a little beat up, they’re still deserving of some love and a good home.

This isn’t really a variant covers post.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, jab, variant covers 2 Comments

So I apologize…I’ve been getting home lately feeling under the weather and pretty worn out, so “typing out long-form commentaries at the computer deep into the night” hasn’t been a huge priority for me for the last few days. It’s just a bug I’m fighting (NOT COVID, I ASSURE YOU) and I should be back to whatever passes for normal within a couple of days.

In the meantime I’ve been lazily watching a lot of television, with a good dollop of YouTube mixed in. Now, I don’t usually watch comic book-related YouTubery, preferring instead to let the sound of this video drape over my wearied brow.

But I happened to find this one, discussing the history of variant covers:


Unlike my long-running and currently waiting-for-new-content series on this here site, where I jumped all over the place discussing this, that, and the other thing, this video gives more of a chronological context to what was going on.

What surprised me was that I was cited in the course of the video, when the Jab #3 from Adhesive Comics was featured. You know, the one the publisher straight up shot with a real bullet. Specifically, the usage of a panel scan from that post was noted in the video, and a link back to my website was provided in that video’s notes, which was nice. I do feel like that post provided a lot of the info used in that specific segment, beyond the one panel, but eh, Information Wants to Be Free an’ all that. Happy to be a research source.

I should also note not all those Spider-Man #1s were the same price, as the black bagged version was two bucks. Why was it two bucks and not $1.75 like the others? Because they could charge two bucks for it, that’s why. I wrote about this infamous first issue here.

Anyway, it’s a good video and you should watch it. Also, kudos to the fella for pulling a Silver Surfer #50 off his rack and revealing a U.S. 1 underneath.

• • •

A couple of brief responses to comments here:

Scipio asked

“Any idea why the Comic Treadmill old posts are inaccessible?

“All of H and Mag’s work.. .gone?”

I just took a look, and yeah, the last few posts are on the one page, but the post calendar is way out of date on the right there. I feel like that may be a page template error or something, like it hasn’t been updated for current browsers or something. I’ve been in contact with H recently, so I’ll send him another email and ask what’s up.

And then Gregory Burgas said on the topic of the comicsweblogosphere

“I think the ‘Golden Age’ was around 06-11/12 or so. Before that, it was a bit Wild West, but around 06, everything seemed to be humming, but around 11/12, people began to drop off. Of course, those years are fluid, but that seems about right. I’m glad you’re still cooking!”

I’m still standing, as it were. I don’t plan on going anywhere soon, I’ve still got posts about the Death of Superman and Frank Miller’s The Spirit to write.

But yes, the 2006-2012 timeframe sounds pretty close. I started this site in late 2003 (with BBS stuff and LiveJournal before that), and there were a few earlier than me (like the immortal Neilalien). The late, lamented Journalista daily linkblog by Dirk Deppey from the early 2000s on drove a lot of traffic to sites, including mine…and I’ve told Deppey plenty of times that a lot of what I’ve accomplished today, including opening my own shop, stems from him pointing out my dumb site in one of his updates. The exact quote:

“…Definitely one of the better new comics bloggers to emerge so far this year.”

…made me very happy, particularly coming from The Comics Journal, a magazine I’d long read and admired. Hopefully my long decline since hasn’t made him regret his statement.

But I can’t say when I first noticed the dropoff. I know a lot of my online pals with whom I most directly interacted started to cut the blogging habit as the years wore on, and boy, I sure heard “blogging is dead” a whole lot over the last few years. I know the big thing is video, or image-heavy stuff on Instagram and the like, and giant blocks of text like the one you’re currently enduring being somewhat on the outs. But folks are still out there writing and posting on their WordPress installs and their Blogger sites, so The Blog is still hanging in there.

I mean, for your sake, it better…you don’t want to have to look at my face on TikTok or whatever for your comics content.

Anyway, I said I wasn’t doing a long post since I’m feeling yucky, and here I am still trying. I do tend to be a creature of habit, which may be as much a reason as any for my continuing to write here, even when I should be in bed sleeping off my sickness. So, thanks for reading pals, and we’ll all meet back here again in a couple of days.

A most sinful post.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin 5 Comments

Look, I know I still owe responses to some old comments, and that said responses will be a bit time-intensive for me to slap together so I’m doing lazy posts like today since I’m still a bit not-altogether-there and extended thought processes are falling into a jumble of nose fish bicycle, so please bear with me while I get my act together here.

Let me respond to a couple of comments re: blogging from the other day.

Walaka of Earth Two crosses the dimensional barrier to say

“…The comixweblogosphere was robust and diverse with snark over here and nostalgia over there and scholarship in the corner. And none of it was homogenized or monetized or corporate. That era was way too short.”

I think I’ve mentioned in the past that during Peak Comics Blogging, before I’d write my post for the day I’d zip through all the blogs in my sidebar and make sure I wasn’t duplicating anything my blogging brethren or sisteren had already covered. Of course that’s the behavior of a complete madman, particularly when I realized the value of “a personal blog” is one’s…well, personal insight and perspective. Sure, we were all talking about ALL-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, but was anyone talking about it the exact same way I was talking about it? I think not.

I do miss the cross-pollination of blog posts and comment sections and all that jazz between the comic blogs at the time, and I look at (as Andrew points out) my almost entirely-rotted links page and lament the loss of many of those voices. Which is why I’m lamenting the possible loss of Twitter, as several of those folks turned up there so they’re not entirely gone.

Someone, and I’m sorry but I forget who, was going through all the old comic blogs, indicating which ones were still going, which were still up but clearly ended, which were gone entirely, what happened to the folks running them, etc. I thought that was a pretty interesting, if sometimes depressing, series…though that person ironically enough shut down his own site before getting to me and this ancient blog of mine. Dang it, the site name is on the tip of my tongue and I just can’t remember it. I even plugged it here once or thrice. Ah, well, I’ll think of it eventually.

But anyway, I’ll reiterate a pledge I made to y’all before, that I promise not to disappear on you with no warning. When I take my rare-ish break from the site and I say “I’ll be back soon,” that’s not the death-knell we’ve seen so many times on other blogs. I really will be back, honest! As long as I’m in this terrible industry, and still slinging comics, I’ll keep this site going. Or if for some reason all traditional blogging software goes kaput and I have to move to a new platform, I’ll let you know. I mean, I suppose if I am retired…you know, permanent-like, against my will, the site’s done, but I wouldn’t be able to help that. But if I can run this site from beyond the grave, I will.

I suppose being in comics retailing as long as I have is what’s kept this blog alive all these years (coming up on its 19th anniversary in just a couple of weeks!). I can’t imagine it surviving my departure from the business…for one thing, I suspect I’d not want to talk about comics after that. But, with any luck, that won’t be an issue. So long as, you know, people keep buying comics from me.

Okay, that’s enough of that. Not sure what I’ll be posting for Black Friday, as who’s gonna be reading blogs on Black Friday, but I’ll come up with something. Thanks for reading, pals, and I’ll talk again with you soon. Honest. No foolin’.

I could always go back to LiveJournal.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin, how the sausage is made, video 7 Comments

Hi pals…I’m a little under the weather (not COVID, don’t worry) so I’m going to try to keep this reasonably short today.

Just to touch upon a topic I’ve noted before, the social media hoohar is still going on, as everyone is casting about trying to figure out what the new Twitter is going to be. Frankly, I think the new Twitter will be “the old Twitter, only worse” but in the meantime I’m trying out Mastodon, I’m there on Cohost, and I’m also on The Hive (user name: “mikester” natch), which is phone-app only but looks promising. I even revived my Tumblr, for Pete‘s sake.

I don’t know where we’re all going, but we’re certainly going somewhere. I do expect Twitter to survive, even despite current ownership, and as someone said they’re going to discover themselves engineering back to the solutions that already existed when their thoughtless whims all come crashing down. The trick is whether or not the advertisers and the power users will stick it out ’til everything settles down.

But whatever happens, you can always find me here, and you can see what else I’m up to (or had been up to) at mikesterling.com. And that reminds me…I’ve long lamented the fact that “mikester.com” was registered only a few short months before I thought about doing so, and after years of being what appeared to be a mostly-inert webpage it is now in the hands of some domain sales site at the low, low cost of nearly $4000. So, for about 4% of the price I registered “mikester.net” instead. It just forwards to mikesterling.com. Hey, that’s a whole four characters less! A real timesaver!

Okay, so this isn’t just me blabbing about social media and domain names, here’s some actual comic book content. It’s the Wizard-a-like Hero Illustrated‘s video magazine #2 from 1994! Warning: may be hard to take all 25 minutes in one sitting. Features a Rob Liefeld interview and commercials for a video game I don’t remember.

Maybe I was thinking about Twitter a little bit when I wrote that last line.

filed under Categories death of superman 5 Comments

So let’s do a little more about the Death of Superman (which I write as I’m listening to the Longbox Heroes special Patreon-only Previews podcast as they cover the original solicitations for the event)….

Wayne wonders

“Question for everyone, young and old: was it ever, ever explained how it came to be that Doomsday was buried in a field in Ohio?”

Well, coming the older-end of the spectrum, I’ll take a shot at answering this the lazy way, i.e. Wikipedia-ing it and looking at digital comics on the DC Universe app. I have all the relevant Doomsday appearances, but it’s late and my back hurts and I don’t want to go digging through boxes, so Wiki ahoy and all that. And the answer there is after being finally defeated on some alien world, his “dead” body was shot into space where it eventually ended up on Earth. So, basically, it just happened to show up on the one world where a surviving Kryptonian would also live.

I don’t know if there was more to it than that ever revealed…like, maybe there was some ancient Kryptonian presence on Earth thousands of years ago, and even in his inert “death” state Doomsday sensed it and subtly guiding the capsule he’s in towards the planet. If someone out there remembers a specific explanation, please pipe up, but I don’t recall.

• • •

DK sez

“Those post Man-of-Steel Superman books really do hold up decades later, the 10 years after the Crisis was a DC Renaissance for sure.”

and on a related note, Nicholas sez

“30 years (ugh) later, I still really like the majority of Death/Funeral/Reign – re-reading it now, it’s such a bananas story, and I think it’s amazing how much they focused on Lois’/the Kent’s grief.”

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that I was listening to the Longbox Heroes boys talking about the push for the original Death of Whatshisname. In the course of their discussion they noted the interviews with the event’s creative teams where they pushed this as a “story,” not a collection of pin-ups or shallow guest-appearance machines, stuff like that. And that was certainly the case, that while the focus was on the action and making sure y’all knew how much of a threat Doomsday was, there was enormous focus on how other characters in the book reacted to the goings-on, which only ramped up as the story entered the “Funeral for a Friend” phase that followed.

It was a big ol’ stunt, sure, but it was a stunt flavored heavily with characterization and with inclusion of guest-stars that make sense (like, of course the Justice League would show up, this is a Justice League-type problem). Tack on the almost movie serial-esque feeling to the proceedings (which really drove the “Reign of the Supermen” part of the story later on) you had yourselves some good comic-bookin’, a creative peak in that period of Super-books that DC continued to try to replicate, not just in those titles but elsewhere across the line. I mean, “The Death of Clark Kent,” c’mon son.

• • •

JohnJ returns with

“Mike, someday would you write about how your store did with the ‘Marriage of Lois and Clark’ I really over-ordered on that, hoping for the same type of press coverage the ‘Death’ storyline got. It turned out to get next to none which I blame on the ‘Lois and Clark’ tv series having their wedding episode at the same time.”

Yeah, we overdid it just a little too, in that we still have plenty left over afterwards. But it still sold as a back issue, so our overstock did eventually dwindle. Not disappear entirely, mind you…when I left the old store there were still plenty in the backroom awaiting their day in the sun, but certainly fewer than what we started with. Even now, when I get copies of those in stock at my shop, they tend to sell fairly quickly (though “event” books with gimmick covers are an easier sell now than they were when shelves were just overwhelmed with them).

That was a real problem for a while, second-guessing yourself on orders and on whether or not this event would be the one to get real-world attention. It did feel like the Supes/Lois wedding would have been a big deal, but if there was media attention, it wasn’t a patch on the Death of Superman. That’s why I just order what I think I can sell, and don’t speculate on whether or not some late-night talk show is suddenly going to promote the book the day before release. Can’t predict it, can’t count on it.

“Also, how weird is it that Bendis’s big idea of revealing Superman and Clark Kent as the same guy really fizzled since he did next to nothing with the premise. It’s part of the reason why I finally stopped reading most Superman comics after having read them for several years.”

I said before it’s funny they went this route so soon after the New 52 Superman made the same reveal (after the long-time-coming Superman-telling-Jimmy-he’s-Clark story that I wish had been done with, like, the Real Superman Drawn by Curt Swan).

Also funny, I just took in a collection Thursday afternoon that had a lot of the Bendis Superman in it, and I got to thinking about how both the Byrne run and the Bendis run started with a six-part Man of Steel mini, followed by a short run on the books themselves before those Big Name Creators bounced. I thought it was funny that Bendis was all “okay, Superman reveals he’s Clark Kent, bye y’all” and stuck everyone else with that plot twist. Anyway, they’ve done a little here and there with the idea, though it’s weird seeing him in Clark Kent clothes…which to be fair, is weird to characters in the comic, too. Maybe now that the whole “Superman on Warworld for the Last, What, Eight Years” story is over, we can get more work done on the whole exposed dual identity thing, and what that fully means for everyone involved.

Eventually there’s going to be a story where the secret ID is made secret again, which I hope will be an in-story thing and not just another reboot/relaunch. Frankly, with both Superman and Batman having biological sons running around in the DC Universe, I still feel like it’s only a matter of time before everything gets rebooted back to the previous status quo anyway. I mean, it’s all working now, but all it takes is someone higher up the food chain at Warner Bros. taking a look at what DC’s doing and telling them to knock it off. I don’t htink it’s likely, as Jon and Damian have embedded themselves quite well into DC’s output, but you never know. Wouldn’t be the first time someone took something that was working and fixed it ’til it broke.

Come to think of it, that’s a pretty morbid cover on that trade.

filed under Categories death of superman 7 Comments

JohnJ jams in

“Important thing about the 1992 Death of Superman story was its coverage on the Today Show and other news sources. There was a lot of interest by strangers but they were the kind of a-holes who thought that meant it was the very last copy of Superman ever to be published. I sold a hell of a lot more copies of the quickly collected $4.95 paperback than I did of Superman #75.”

I wish I kept note at the time, though I suppose the answers are somewhere in the piles of old invoices I inherited from the old store that I keep meaning to data-mine. But I *do* recall we ordered 10x the number we usually did on Superman, which was quite the risk given that Superman sales weren’t terribly strong for us at the time and if this stunt flopped, we’d be eating a lot of polybags and armbands.

SPOILER: 10x our regular numbers wasn’t nearly enough, and 100x would have been closer to what we could have used. Why I wish I had better recall of sales of the time was that I do not recall exactly how well that quick ‘n’ cheap Death of Superman trade sold. Yes, it sold very well, $4.95 being a shockingly low price point for such a high demand storyline, but did we sell more of it than we did of the actual issue #75 in which they dood the death? I’m thinking maybe we did, if not within the initial sales rush period of the storyline, but certainly as the years wore on and the book remained available.

I can’t remember if I noted this here or on Twitter or, God help us, on LiveJournal, but I realized at some point that while later reorders of the Death of Superman book were, like, 12th printing or whatever, the follow-up cheapie Funeral for a Friend trade had first printings coming in our reorders for years afterwards. There must have been a huge initial print run on that thing.

Now as JohnJ says, Real World Media pushed the general public into comic shops seeking that issue, though I perhaps had a more positive experience with some of these new customers than JohnJ seemed to. We had a ton of people come through the shop that day, with a giant line out of the door that, as I recall, former coworker Rob had to stand at to regulate customer entry. And yes, while we did have many pushy and annoying people come through (one particular person I still remember, and of course she was the one featured in the full-color photo of the local paper covering the event), most people were cool about the whole thing. I do remember a very nice elderly couple coming in for the Death of Superman storyline (not just #75, but they were in from the beginning of the storyline) and kept following the books for years. And we picked up several other regulars due to the event as well. I still get people telling me that it was the Death of Superman that got them into collecting.

The belief that this would be “the last ever Superman comic” was rather prevalent, despite our attempts to inform everyone otherwise. The day #75 came out, we smart-alecky employees made a window display of many previous Deaths of Superman to sort of drive home the point. And, as I’m sure many of you readers who’d been around a bit, I heard for a decade or more afterward surprise from folks not in the comics scene that Superman comics were still coming out. “I thought he died!” they’d exclaim, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t being facetious. I’d said that I thought it was an unusual promotional move to convince everyone one of your most famous characters was going away forever. To be fair, I haven’t had anyone mention that to me lately.

• • •

Ray Cornwall stalks in with

“Silly question- what if DC sold a new version of the bagged issue? Would that sell? Is there a market for such a gimmick?”

Given how the two comics they did release — the 30th anniversary special with new stories, and a reprint of the non-deluxe Superman #75 — a full-on reissue of the original bagged edition of #75 probably wouldn’t have been a huge deal. As I’ve said, these books are only selling fair-to-middling for me as is, and even the bagged version of the 30th anniversary special is hardly flying off the shelf (though it is selling better than I thought it would).

So while there is a market for gimmick covers still, I suspect the Superman thing being mostly callbacks to a 30-year-old story instead of a New Hot Thing dampened enthusiasm. “Yes, yes, we’ve seen all that…whattaya got that’s new?”

• • •

Okay, I’ll move on to the next batch of Death of Superman responses Friday. Thanks for reading, everyone, and as always for your great comments. They’re much appreciated.