In the last post I featured the Wizard Superman Tribute Edition. While Wizard was the most popular of the comic book magazines of the early ’90s it wasn’t the only one. Just about all of the periodicals concerning the four colored world had some sort of Reign of the Supermen article or interview and a few of them even made it the cover feature. Here are three of those.
While not as epic as the special they released around the time of the death (which I covered a few months back) the cover to this issue of Comics Values Monthly on this issue is awesome. I was and still am a big fan of the various S symbols they created for the various Supermen and wish they would re-issue the T-shirts that Graphitti Designs put out in the summer of 1993. The article by Neil Hansen is brief but solid and is mainly an interview with Mike Carlin with black and white preview images of the four Supermen to serve as the visuals. It even makes a brief mention of Lois and Clark, which I thought was rather cool.
There was a time when I was a faithful buyer of Comics Scene Magazine. 1992/1993 was not one of those times. I don’t know what led me to stop picking the magazine up every two months but I was not the collector then that I am today. The preview images look great on the slick paper and the article not only teases Reign of the Supermen but also discusses the reactions to the death storyline and the commercial realities of comic book publishing. Lois and Clark gets a mention and Superboy even gets his own sidebar with some quotes from Karl Kesel. Maureen McTigue wrote the article and she would go on to work at DC. I remember seeing her names in the letters pages in the late ’90s so it was neat seeing it here.
Comics Interview began publication in the eighties and was a fantastic magazine that featured, as the name suggests, interviews with comic book creators. I managed to get my hands on a decent run of these back in the late ’90s thanks to the manager at the comic shop I went to at the time. I was surprised to see that Comics Interview went on for as long as it did because most comic book magazines of the eighties were long gone by 1993. I am glad it hung in there because this interview with Roger Stern is twelve pages long and not only covers Reign of the Supermen but also a bit about his run on Spider-Man and other fun bits of business.
And that is all for today. I have recently scanned some more fun Death and Return related goodies and will hopefully be getting them out on a more regular basis now that Jeff and I are nearing the end of Reign of the Supermen. I can’t believe we’re almost there as it seems we have been covering the story forever. It’s been fun, though, and I know I will miss it when it is over.
More to follow…