- #1-2 - Origin: Etrigan, Merlin, Jason Blood; (Morgaine le Fey, Warly). Intro: Randu Singh, Harry Matthews, Glenda Mark.
- #3 - The Reincarnators
- #4-5 - Ugly Meg and the Iron Duke (Kamara, #4)
- #6 - The Howler
- #7 - Klarion the Witchboy (last Merlin)
- #8-10 - Phantom of the Sewers (Farley Fairfax)
- #11-13 - Baron von Evilstein (Rakenstein)
- #14-15 - Return of Klarion the Witchboy
- #16 - Morgaine le Fey, Warly the Warlock
I have been trying to remember the first "Demon" comic I read. I bought the Matt Wagner mini-series new off the shelves, so that may have been it. I was buying Alan Moore's Swamp Thing as backissues right around the same time, so #25-27 of that series may have been it as well. I was also buying backissues of Jack Kirby's original series right around then, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't it. I bought Amazing Heroes #93, which cover-featured the then-upcoming Matt Wagner series, and I know I read that before reading any of Kirby's. In that issue, J. Vance provided a "Hero History" of The Demon which I found fascinating. He didn't like all of the issues (he classified them loosely as "The Peak" (#1-6), "The Plunge" (#7-10) and "The Pits" (#11-16), but I found even the descriptions of the issues he didn't like to be fascinating. For the record, I disagree with his assessment, or at least his conclusions; I find the entire series to be of a kind, and you either like it or you don't.
Vance went on to detail all of Etrigan's appearances between Kirby's series and Wagner's (Brave & the Bold, Detective Comics, Wonder Woman, DC Comics Presents, Swamp Thing, Blue Devil), which I used as a roadmap to plot my near-term backissue purchases. I found most of them and read all the ones I did, but I've read few of them since. Later this month DC will publish a "DC Finest" collection of the original series plus a good number of the follow-up stories I mentioned. What took me weeks (if not longer) to acquire on the backissue market back in the late '80s, will soon be available in one swell foop... and if you tell modern fans they're living in a Golden Age of comics, they won't believe you. But I digress...
I have read the original Kirby series quite a few times over the years, but what I'm really looking forward to (re-)reading are those post-Kirby stories. Yet I nevertheless felt the need to refresh those first 16 issues in my mind before jumping into Detective Comics #482. So review (or not) as you see fit, and I'll see you back here on February 25 (or thereabouts).
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