Ok, how about this for an idea. We take it in turns to post a favourite (British spelling) comic cover every day. This went really well on the comic fan website that I used to frequent. What we tried to do was find a theme or subject and follow that, until we all got bored with that theme. I'd like to propose a theme of letters of the alphabet. So, for the remainder of October (only 5 days) and all of November, we post comic cover pictures associated with the letter "A". Then in December, we post covers pertaining to the letter "B". The association to the letter can be as tenuous as you want it to be. For example I could post a cover from "Adventure Comics" or "Amazing Spider Man". However Spider Man covers can also be posted when we're on the letter "S". Adventure Comic covers could also be posted when we're on the letter "L" if they depict the Legion of Super Heroes. So, no real hard, fast rules - in fact the cleverer the interpretation of the letter, the better, as far as I'm concerned.
And it's not written in stone that we have to post a cover every day. There may be some days when no cover gets posted. There's nothing wrong with this, it just demonstrates that we all have lives to lead.
If everyone's in agreement I'd like to kick this off with one of my favourite Action Comic covers, from January 1967. Curt Swan really excelled himself here.
Discussion and voting on future monthly themes takes place on the "Nominations, Themes and Statistics for A Cover A Day" thread. Click here to view the thread.
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Nice design, on top of Cardy's other great skills.
I almost forgot: Brave and the Bold #121 had Batman and the Metal Men deal with Native American activists or "Indians on the Warpath" from destroying the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution aboard the Liberty Express train!
The 70s had many heavy-handed portrayals of Native Americans and their struggles but this one had them go "native" and use bows and arrows and tomahawks! Luckily there was a happy ending though Mercury did call himself a "redskin"!
Little Lulu #21 is my transition cover. The ghosts seem to be horrifying Lulu.
My transition cover. (I mean, the GHOSTS of the Titans?) I may still throw in another Cardy or two... he did it ALL.
Challengers of the Unknown #73 (April-May 1970). According to the GCD:
On that basis, I'm considering this to be a horror cover on a (previously) non-horror comic, and so a transition cover. Though, to be honest, there are lots of horror-adjacent covers on earlier issues of Challengers.
My transition cover: The Flash is genuinely terrified by reading that book!
While it might just be a future copy of "The Trial of the Flash", it was just a Captain Boomerang story!
Interesting. I never knew that there a time when GL was a back-up feature in Flash's book.
Really? I grew up with Green Lantern as The Flash's back-up. There were two issues of DC Special, #17 (Sum'75) and #20 (Ma'76) that reprinted Silver Age GL stories that sold so well that they brought back GL in his own book again with #90 (S'76) yet co-starring Green Arrow who was one of the back-ups of Action Comics along with the Atom and the Human Target.
I loved the Adams/O'Neil Green Lantern/Green Arrow series in real time, and had to really work to get issues -- distribution of that particular title was no bueno in Memphis. I had to follow on the calendar to keep track of when one was due, and then pedal all over East Memphis until I found a copy. Sometimes they were delayed and I'd go months without an issue, then find a couple at once, or even, mysteriusly, a back issue I was missing. One time I stopped at the Memphis Athletic Club to eat lunch, and my bag of recent discoveries was stolen. So I had to do it again -- only I never could find another copy of #78. Years later I got it as a back issue at some flea market or other.
So it was a disappoinment and a shock when Green Lantern mysteriously vanished ... and then later the series appeared to continue in the back of Flash! Diappointment, because it meant the title didn't sell well, and to me it was one of the best on the stands. Shocked because Green Lantern was one of the Big Five. Sure, Atom and Hawkman can get canceled, because they are the very definition of B-list superheroes, one-trick ponies whose books were a lesser priority for my back-issue purchases. But Green Lantern? He's A-list! And his book was great! This troubled the young Captain exceedingly. What awful things were happening in New York, and what did it portend for other books I liked? Was this artist I liked (Neal Adams) going to go away? There was no internet, so there was no way of knowing.
I've written elsewhere that I'm convinced the GL backup stories in Flash #217-219 were, in fact, intended for Green Lantern #90. They comprised a single story, a turning point for Oliver Queen, and were were written by Denny O'Neill and drawn by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano -- the usual crew from Green Lantern/Green Arrow. With issue #220, Ollie and Dinah were abruptly gone from the strip, as were Adams and Giordano. And Green Lantern became, more or less, a space-based strip. This is where the Emerald Guardian picked up "Itty," one of the more colossally awful sidekicks/pets in comics history. DC brought in Adams clone Mike Grell to draw the strip, with O'Neil continuing on scripts, but for me the magic was gone.
Green Lantern #90 did eventually get published, but not with story above. O'Neil and Grell revived the series in 1976. They returned Green Arrow to the book, but I don't think Black Canary was a regular. And, like in the Flash backups, the "relevant" aspects were pretty much gone.
The story I heard was that several popular books, usually drawn by Neal Adams thus Green Lantern/Green Arrow never made it out of the dustribution centers and were instead bought in bulk by dealers and sold at conventions/neophyte comic book shops. Thus there was limited sales numbers and as a result GL/GA got cancelled.
Apparently, this was what happened to New Gods as well.
Was it true? Was it legal? Was it ethical? And did DC know about it?
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