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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Golden Glider always struck me as one of the dumber supervillain ideas. It's like someone important said, "There aren't enough ice-skating villains!" And some random artist drew an ice skater, and then they just started throwing super-powers at her, most of which had nothing to do with ice skating, and used the ones that worked best for the plot or random covers. Up above we have the "pearl barrage," which ... come on, it's stupid and implausible. Especially since launching projectiles (including bullets) at Flash is (or should be) completely ineffective.
Apologies in advance for those who hold Golden Glider as their favoritest character. Every character is someone's favorite.
Ha, that's me!
Well, Golden Glider isn't my favorite character, but let me mount a defense of her anyway.
First -- the figure skating thing? I like that for a villain for Flash, because it incorporates motion in a way that most of the Rogues don't. The Pied Piper plays music; the Weather Wizard points a want' Mirror Master makes illusions and reflections. Golden Glider moves. She makes ice trails with her skates, a nice visual. (And the ice is slippery, making it easier for her to get away.)
She's also, from what I remember, Flash's first female recurring antagonist, which is another point in her favor.
The figure-skating motif allows her two different skillsets (like the Penguin has both birds and umbrellas). She's got ice skating, but she's also got gems, from the bedazzled costumes figure skaters wear. And the different gems have different properties: some are projectiles, some are hypnotic, etc. She's got a lot more versatility than say, Heat Wave or her brother, Captain Cold.
But speaking of which -- she's got relationships with the other rogues! Her brother is Captain Cold, the group's leader. And her boyfriend was the Top...who never did anything better than die and give us the Golden Glider. It's the Golden Glider's presence that cements the Rogues as a coherent unit, a family/friend group that isn't interchangable with whatever new villain that comes along. The Rogues have history together, and Golden Glider embodies that history.
And finally, her motivation! Unlike the other Rogues, who either wanted to kill Barry or just rob banks without him around, Lisa Snart wants revenge on Barry for the death of the Top...but she doesn't want him dead, she wants to break his heart. She found out Barry's secret ID early (but won't tell anyone else), and uses that knowledge to target Iris, not Barry. Sometimes she tries to kill her. In one memorable story, she tried to break up their marriage by using hypnotism and having her fall for a new hero in town, the Ringmaster.
Yes, she looks silly. And taking Flash's powers seriously nerfs pretty much ALL of the Rogues, including Golden Glider. But she was absolutely well suited for the time she was created, both in Flash history as well as in reflecting the surge of interest in figure skating in the 70s. (Peggy Fleming's televised gold medal win in 1968 made the sport more popular here, and then ice dancing became the olympic sport we know today in 1976 -- so debuting in 1977, Golden Glider was more on top of the trends than most faddish comic characters. Which is faint praise, but praise nonetheless.)
Then again, she debuted in 1977, when I was 8. She was a character whose first appearance came two issues before the first issue of Flash I ever picked up. I was on the ground floor with the Golden Glider in a way I wasn't for most comic characters of any stripe. So I'm definitely biased toward her... but I still think she had a lot to offer, especially in those pre-Crisis days. Efforts to reinvent her for modern readers haven't been very successful, I think -- partially because without the figure skating motif, she's a character without a hook, and partially because her beef is with Barry, not Wally, and Barry's not always around.
Not sure golf is usually a winter sport, but hey-ho. Incidentally, here in Worcester, we currently have two inches of snow on the ground here.
More ice sailing, but I don't think Batman and Robin have a chance against Superman in a race. (Image courtesy of the Grand Comics Database.)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've found a lot of Scandinavian (mostly Norwegian) comics with covers showing winter sports. Here's one of the oddest: Blekkulf (November 1991), featuring a purple octopus called cosplaying as Santa Claus while skiing.
Yes, the Original Teen Titans were so bad even a guy on skis could take them down!
Biathlon is an Olympic sport. There aren't many biathlon covers out there.
Showcase #25, Rip Hunter's third try-out.,
Medieval?
Anyway, Scooby skiing:
And après-ski:
The second cover could have even been a transition from last month.
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