[NOTE: due to medical stuff and other commitments, I’m on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule this week. I should be back to the regular routine next week.]
So funny that I was talking about digests last Friday, when on Saturday some came in and sold me the following collection:
And in that collection, a whole lotta digests:
Now, this collection wasn’t in the best condition. It was hauled in by the seller within a couple of pieces of wheeled luggage, piled kinda every which way, and not pictured in that first image are the two sizeable piles of comics with heavy water damage. Those were just kinda dumped on me along with the comics I actually wanted, so I’ll be figuring out what to do with those in (hopefully) short order.
But back to the digests. Boy, that’s a pretty good pile of them, including many that I remember buying myself. A brief perusal through a handful of them demonstrated to me that my aged peepers are no longer quite up to the challenge of their printed contents, but I can still admire these wonderful covers with (usually) new art on the front and back.
That said, I did keep one digest for myself, despite the fact I can feel my eyes throw up their hands and declare “I give up” when I look inside. It’s just I’m still in the process of finishing a run of Turok Son of Stone and I feel I need this, Golden Comics Digest #31 from 1973:
This reprints Turok’s first two appearances in Four Color Comics plus material from a couple of other issues…I have those comics, so I can read the stories if I want, but it’s nice to finally have the digest in my weary hands.
As for those other giants…you folks reminded me in Friday’s comments section about Adventure Comics, which changed format from a regular-sized comic book into a digest, starting with #492 in 1982:
This anthology title focused heavily on reprinting Legion of Super-Heroes stories from the 1960s, as well as re-presenting Aquaman stories, Plastic Man, the Challengers of the Unknown, and several others, rangings from the Golden Age even up into the very early 1980s. Alex Toth fans may want to know that there’s a Black Canary story he drew into that very issue I have pictured here.
This run of Adventure was of particular interest to me because, well, yes, those Legion reprints, I wanted those, but there was a new Captain Marvel/Shazam story by E. Nelson Bridwell and Don Newton in that first issue (wrapping up the run of their stories that had been in the regular-formatted comic). After that, there were several Golden Age reprints of Shazam! stories in later issues. With the DC Archives for the Legion, and the hardcover collections that continued that chronological reprinting, having those stories in those digests is largely redundant. Plus, those hardcovers are a lot easier to read. (And the new Shazam! stories by Bridwell/Newton were all reprinted in this series of books.)
I gave up my copies to the shop when I opened, and like with other items I put in the store to sell, I regret it just a little bit. It was a nice little 13-issue oddity to own (with DC ending this, one of their oldest titles, at #503 in September 1983), and I liked a lot of the new covers. I mean, on that #492, there’s Captain Marvel being chomped on by Satan, as depicted by Keith Giffen and Mike DeCarlo. Friends, I know art when I see it, ande we’re all lookin’ at it right there.
Aside from the digests, there was one other particular comic of note that showed up in this collection, and that comic is, of course, Superman #369, featuring my one and only letter of comment to a comic book:
If you want to read what Young Mike had to say, I put a scan of that letter in my very first anniversary post. Guess maybe that was the origin of my blog, that one letter I wrote when I was 12 years old.
Anyway, that copy of Superman #369 is for sale. Only $1,500, cheap! $2,000 if you want it autographed!
That “Horrible Eyesores” button on your Progressive Ruin, Sr. blog… I don’t put much stock in Dave Sim’s Comic Art Metaphysics approach to lit-crit, but in this case? Yikes!
Hey, I have that issue of SUPERMAN!
I don’t know exactly where it is, but I know it’s somewhere!
@ Chris
Send your copy to Mike Sterling so you can have it autographed.
@ Mike
If you stumble upon a cache of ten or more copies of Superman no. 369 you should have an official “Mike’s LOC” signing at your shop! And maybe add a little doodle of Superman’s head or “S” emblem or whatever.
Also, I might be interested in purchasing that Green Lantern/Green Arrow paperback, unless it is already spoken for.
If anyone cares, the very start of my writing career was with a letter to the editor that appeared in MARVEL TEAM-UP#48.
I wonder how many older readers of this blog have written letters, printed or not, to DC or Marvel. I think the last real letter columns I saw were in THE WALKING DEAD and POWERS.
Marvel brought their letter’s columns back in a lot of their monthly books. Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four, Thor…at the very least I know they have one currently.
Cool. The secret origin of Wayne Allen Sallee. You’re in good company. Luminaries in the comic world such as JM DeMatteis got their start writing letters to comic editors.
I never wrote any letters to comics. Mayhaps that is why my short fiction writing career never progressed beyond local small press publications no one outside of my milieu ever read. Perhaps a telling lesson for any aspiring fiction writers.
The Toth Cananary story from Adventure 418/419 is a thing of beauty! That one page where she is beating up the thug is a masterpiece on its own. If the repring were in black and white I imagine it would read perfectly.
Mike, does it still read as good in color at that size? My vision is fine (with glasses) but there’s no way in hell I’d try to read any Perez Teen Titans at that size.
@Wayne
I wrote to G.I. Joe, my “gateway drug” comic. The letter simply pointed out an art error that I’m sure 1,000 people must have written about too. I didn’t even try for a No-Prize, just a complaint. It understandably never saw print.
“Canary”
I guess Cananary would be an ancient Middle Eastern crime fighter.
I always scan the letters column when I’m reading old comics, to see if any later luminaries of the comics scene turn up in there. Jamie S Rich had letters published in Grendel, and both Joe Casey and Broadway actor Anthony Rapp had letters in the Helfer-Baker run of the Shadow.
Myself? A letter in The Invisibles… can’t remember what issue or even what volume, though. Maybe the second?
@Tom W :go back to the 70s to see Elvis Orten of Dawson Springs KY or The Mad Maple from Canada, sometimes multiple times per month they had letters out there. One of us people reading Mike’s column (or more) could have written in, there was a time when LoCs even published ENTIRE addresses, should I ever have wanted to, ah, visit Elvis Orten. Then it was changed to name/town. Then name and email. Kurt Busiek did that with ASTRO CITY. You’ll find my old AOL email address in the Barbie one-shot.
@Chris V: it was Spider-Man and Thing vs. Basilisk.I did get an autographed sketch (illustrated by help me out here) the guy who did Rozakis’s Answer Man and Bob also signed it. The page looked like company letterhead but the LoC art was often above Bob’s answer. “How many issues of Rima, the Jungle Girl were published?” Bob: “Too many.”
This is 40 years for me as a published writer in paperback and then hardcover by 1989. But I filled a void for Chicago writers and in the 80s and 90s there were so many small press magazines. But I also lucked out with there being countless theme anthologies, including VAMPIRE DETECTIVES(!), so I’m in 174 anthologies but no one notices short story writers anymore. (I’m neither whining not bragging because I’m ambidextrous.) In the days of pulp magazines and sci-fi, most certainly.
And let’s not forget that GALAXY, ASIMOV’S, and still on the stands FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION were/are…digest-sized. Just to complete the circle of Mike’s posting.
In my pre-teen years I wrote a bunch of dumb LoCs in the early 80s, and maybe a half dozen saw print. It felt prolific at the time. My first one was in an issue of Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, where my careless hand-printed use of “funnest comic” got printed as “funniest comic,” which had to seem bizarre to any intelligent reader. I actually got a short-term pen-pal out of that because, as Wayne noted, they ran full addresses. And when I stupidly signed a letter sent for E-Man (First Comics) with a fake name that deliberately made fun of another frequently-printed letter-writer, they ran it and the writer-fan in question far-too-graciously wrote to call me out for that.
I grew up to write LoCs to rock critics in the Bay Area free weeklies, some of which were quoted and responded to in subsequent columns. I guess they needed content!
Then the internet arrived.
Of the three letters I wrote to letter columns, two were published. Both were to CrossGen books, Scion and Crux. The one that didn’t see the light of day was to Avengers during the Busiek/Perez run. I think I stopped writing letters to comic book letter columns because I discovered blogs and found being able to share my thoughts and opinions with fellow readers more fulfilling.
I think I had a total of five letters published, all complete and (unfortunately) unedited. The first was in SLG’s THE COPYBOOK TALES #2, then a month later in ASTRO CITY #4.
Somehow managed to get three letters in the eighteen-issue Steven Grant run on CHALLENGERS, including the very last letter in the very last issue.
I had a letter- well, technically, an email, published in an issue of Manifest Destiny!
““Canary”
I guess Cananary would be an ancient Middle Eastern crime fighter.”
and Cannery would be a hero who hits criminals with cans of beans!
““How many issues of Rima, the Jungle Girl were published?” Bob: “Too many.””
Such unrealized potential in that book!
“And let’s not forget that GALAXY, ASIMOV’S, and still on the stands FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION were/are…digest-sized”
Are those still around?
@Snark Shark
That DC run from the ’70s of Rima the Jungle Girl actually had some outstanding art by Nester Redondo.
Also, it’s interesting that she popped up in a few All-New Super Friends Hour episodes.
There is also a bas-relief sculpture of Rima in the Hudson Memorial Bird Sanctuary in Hyde Park in London.
And, I think I mentioned this once before, Audrey Hepburn portrayed Rima in the 1959 film adaptation of W. H. Hudson’s novel Green Mansions. The novel was also adapted for Classics Illustrated no. 90.
Very cool buy for all of those digests. One of the first comics my parents bought me was the “Secret Origins of Super-Villains” digest when I was 9. It took my years but I own all of the digests that DC published. Found quite a few at the Island Fantasy Comics that was once in Victoria, BC.
“That DC run from the ’70s of Rima the Jungle Girl actually had some outstanding art by Nester Redondo”
The art was great!
The story was…OK.