This week’s Thrift Store Find is Superman: Miracle Monday, written by Elliot S. Maggin and published by Warner Books in 1981.
Cover price was $2.50, I got it for a quarter.
This is the second in a series of paperback novels Warner Books published, presumably in conjunction with their Superman franchise of movies starring Christopher Reeve. Superman II was released in theaters in 1980; presumably this book was in bookstores to capitalize on that film.
Elliot asked me to draw him a Batman and a Superman and here it is.
Happy New Year! I still have two days of break left… I should probably start grading and preparing for the second semester, huh?
In our final Christmas Comic Cavalcade of 2012, let’s look at DC Comics Presents #67, published in 1983. This yuletide comic was plotted by Len Wein and E. Nelson Bridwell, illustrated by Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson.
That gorgeous cover is by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, by the way…
Fast becoming an annual geek tradition, I’ll be spending Saturday and Sunday at the Cincinnati Comic Expo.
As regional comic shows go, the CCE has been growing like crazy in the past three years and 2012 promises to be the biggest yet. The Guest of Honor include four of the artists (Steve Bissette, Rick Veitch, John Totleben, Thomas Yeates) who worked with Alan Moore on Saga of the Swamp Thing, a comic I loved as a teenager. It’s a nice get for the show and I’m looking forward to getting all four gentlemen to sign my hardcover collection of these comics.
Geoff Darrow is also going to be in attendance at the show. Darrow’s probably best known for his work with Frank Miller on Hard Boiled or his own creation, The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot. Back in 1995, I met Darrow at a comic convention in New York where he signed a “suitable for framing” poster print for me.
Now, this print’s been through a LOT in the past seventeen years. It’s hung on walls in Western New York, Boston, and Ohio. Ellen and I hung it on Elliot’s wall when he was a baby! I’m pretty attached to it, and my kids are too. I’m hoping I can get Darrow to add Elliot and Henry’s names to mine at the margin at the bottom.
Of course, those of you who read here regularly already know, the real reason I like going to comic shows is the shopping; those dollar back issue bins are like catnip for me. I’ve also a few “holy grail” comics I’ve been looking to acquire for years. They’re always ridiculous things though, with no real monetary value. For example, this CCE, I’m hoping to locate a copy of DC Comics Presents #67
…the issue where Superman teams up with Santa Claus. I realize that is a pathetic “holy grail” but it fits perfectly within my spectrum of interests, no?
I will, no doubt, regale you with my finds next week.
I debated long and hard as to whether I wanted to continue posting my chalkboard doodles for the upcoming school year. After three years solid of Sunday postings, I’ve done just about every character or situation I can think of. Further, I often draw the EXACT same drawings, year in and year out. It’s the nature of the job. Just as I teach Romeo & Juliet to every new group of Freshman, I’ll continue drawing myself as various superhero characters on the blackboard.
I’ve decided to keep posting these however, because… quite simply, they’re popular. I understand very little about “site views” and all that jazz, but when I do look at that widget, these are always amongst the most viewed of my posts… and that includes the comic. Over the past six months, a number of these have become popular on the website Pinterest. I know less about Pinterest than I do about site views, but if people are liking something I do well enough to share it somewhere, I should probably keep doing it.
Anyway, here’s the first drawing of the year. I decided I wanted to go big for the first week so I designed an elaborate Welcome piece for the Class of 2016 which took up the entire space of the classroom’s chalkboard.
I have to be honest- this was a larger undertaking than I anticipated! I thought I’d only need a half an hour to draw this beast, but it took double that when you figure in the sketch planning I needed to do to fit in as many characters as possible. I tried to run the gamut of cartoon characters that I found interesting and were relevant to someone who’d be in 9th grade this year. The only one I might have missed the mark on is Yakko Warner, but as established this summer, the characters are making a huge comeback, if only with my sons in our house.
Once a month, we take a look at some crazy-ass gimmick comic book companies used to get idiots (read: ME) to buy comic books in the 1990′s. Last month we looked at The Guardians of the Galaxy… this month, we’re taking a gander at Superman #75, published in 1992 by DC Comics.
I’m excited about this one because it involves me opening up my copy of the comic for the first time EVER. I bought this sucker TWENTY years ago. Let’s tear into it!
I’ve talked about this before here, but I wanted to make sure I had it in a comic. Henry loves Masters of the Universe, the Fleischer Brothers/Famous Studios Superman cartoons, and recently he’s been watching a lot of old Spider-Man cartoons. Funnily enough, we don’t watch the Spidey cartoons form 1967; I find them to be pretty unwatchable. No, Henry (and Elliot) go in big for Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, the cartoon series that aired on NBC in the Eighties.
I was too young for that one when it was originally on, but I’ve watched a couple of episodes with the boys and it’s not horrible. As a superhero comic book fan, I would have appreciated how many guest starts the show accommodated if I had seen it then. Via Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, the boys are now fans of Thor, Captain America, and The X-Men. In particular, the show seems to be X-Men crazy, with a bunch of episodes focusing on them. I know Marvel had been trying like crazy to get an X-Men cartoon series off the ground at the time… perhaps this was their sneaky, backdoor way of getting the characters into cartoons.
(I should also point out, theme-wise, we’re only four comics into the summer and this is the SECOND strip about my kids watching old superhero cartoons. THEMES!)
A bunch of stuff piled on one page.
Have you ever seen the original Fleischer Brothers Superman cartoons? I picked up a set of them on DVD for Christmas and the boys have been obsessed. They’re quite beautifully produced and I can see why they remain so popular (although their existing in the public domain doesn’t hurt anything). I love that squinty-eyed, he-man version of the character.
A doodle of the Eleventh Doctor… I colored a sketch of the Tenth Doctor sometime last year, so I thought I’d follow suit here.
Today we’re going to look at DC Universe Holiday Bash III, published by DC Comics in 1999.
I’m going to break down the individual stories behind the cut.
