Author: Michael Bailey

…about the Siegel ruling, but there is a whole heck of a lot of research and reading to do before I post about it.

It is a dramatic turn of events, though. I will say that.

More (definitely) to follow…

I’ve done this in some of my other blogs so I thought it might be worth a lark to continue it here.

Here is a rundown of the Superman related books and such that I bought for the comic book week of March 26, 2008

New Issues 

All-Star Superman #10

Brave and the Bold #11 (Which came out last week, but my shop was shorted it’s order last week and got more in this week)

Back Issues

Superman (Vol. 1) #s 316, 317, 320, 323 and 328

Action Figures

Bizarro, Zod and Ursa from the Last Son line.

Superman from the Reactivated Series 4: Super Squad line.

Now you might think, “My God, Mike!  Why so many action figures?  You win the lottery or something?”  Or maybe you’re thinking that I’m a lightweight for only getting four.  Somewhere in between you have me, a guy who is finally caught up on the bills and trying to clean out his somewhat but not completely out of control box. 

The figures are actually kind of nice.  I was very excited about the Super Squad Superman figure since I am a big fan of not only the Earth-2 Superman but of the mid-seventies run of All-Star Comics as well.  I have not committed myself to buying the whole line but it is still neat to see them get the action figure treatment.  The only thing I was remotely disappointed in was the fact that the S on Superman’s chest was changed from the initial image released by DC and the final product.  Here’s the promotional image from DC Comics’ website.

Here is the kind of sucky picture I took with my digital camera of the figure I brought home today.

Oh well, change of S notwithstanding it is still a kick ass figure.

The Last Son line I ordered when they first solicted them not knowing that the storyline was going to suffer endless delays.  Yeah, yeah.  I know.  Kubert was sick.  It’s not fair complaining when a man gets sick, but still.  The figures are rather nice, though.  I’m not too keen on the Superman because he looks…well, he looks like he has a hump.  But Bizarro, Zod and Ursa look great. 

The back issues were a total impulse buy.  I have been meaning to get back to my Pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths collection and while these particular issues weren’t in the best of condition I wanted them just the same.

Plus, the cover to Superman (Vol. 1) #317 is a classic.

I need to get a new scanner. 

As for the new issues, well it was a mixed bag.  I haven’t decided if I want to write a review/analyze All-Star Superman #10 but for now let’s just say that while I think the title is well written I don’t think this is the Superman for me.  Brave and the Bold#11 was a lot of fun.  I haven’t been following the title, but throw back to the seventies as personified by Steve Lombard wanting to play a practical joke on Superman aside I thought it was a solidly written issue and you can’t beat Jerry Ordway art.

So all in all a good week.  Now I am off to rip open my Last Son figures and go to bed.

More to follow…

In 1985 Mayfair Games unveiled the DC Heroes Role Playing Game.  Given how comic fandom and gaming fandom tend to cross paths from time to time this seemed like a good idea.  Marvel had put out a system through TSR a year before, which seemed to be fairly well received.  DC Heroes had it’s share of players but from what I understand it wasn’t as good.  I am not a gamer myself and have only played one or two RPGs in my lifetime so I am taking the word of friends of mine who either played or looked at Mayfair’s system and from what they tell me the structure of the game left a lot to be desired, particularly the way the stats and the gadget rules were laid out.  However those that played the system told me that once you got around that a fun time could be had by all.

A few years ago thanks to a good friend and some luck I managed to get my hands on both the original 1985 First Edition of the game (to go with a bunch of sourcebooks another friend gave me) and the 1989 Second Edition.  Now despite having no real desire to start a campaign or the patience to teach myself the system I was excited to get both of them.  They’re neat to look at and neat to own.  I’ll get into the two Superman Sourcebook that Mayfair published in future posts but for today I thought it would be fun to go through both of the Editions that I own and see what Superman type stuff they contain.

First up is the original box art from the first edition.  You can really tell that this edition was released in the mid-eighties.  The New Teen Titans are heavily featured right down to the “FEATURING THE NEW TEEN TITANS” logo.  The New Teen Titans was DC’s hottest book at the time and had a pretty big fan base, so it makes sense that they would be prominently displayed.  Then there’s John Stewart serving as Green Lantern on this cover.  Around the mid-eighties Hal had given up being GL, so it’s kind of interesting that they would use John on this particular licensed product since other merchandise, like the Super Powers action figure line, had Hal and seemed only mildly interested in what was going on in the comics.  Finally, you had the mid-eighties Brainiac ship in the background.  I have such a nostalgic love for that design and yes I know that has a lot to do with the fact that I was into the Super Powers action figures while growing up. 

It would have been really awesome if they had made a skull ship toy.  Apparently plans were drawn up for one as can be see HERE but, alas, it was not to be.

(In the interest of full disclosure I did not scan this cover image.  I snagged it from another site and now can’t remember exactly where I got it from, but the box was too big for my scanner.)

You have to love the tag line for this edition.  “Be Part of the Legend”.  That’s almost as good as the Super Powers tag line, “Who wins? Who loses? You decide!” but doesn’t quite get there. 

Inside Superman gets some decent attention.  He and the old school, eighties power armor Lex Luthor (another design I will forever dig on because of it’s association the Super Powers line) are featured on the cover of the Gamemaster’s Manual.

He also gets the right hand side of the Game Master’s screen.

Now that is classic, eighties Superman right there. 

To go along with the game (and I guess to make playing certain characters easier) Mayfair also included cards that had a picture of the character and their stats.  The Superman related cards were:

Superman (of course)

Lex Luthor

And Brainiac

They also had smaller, stand ups type cards as well.

The second edition of DC Heroeshad a sleeker look to it.  Gone was the George Perez group shot and in was a simple Superman/Batman shot.  The Superman image looks to be the one from the Gamemaster’s Screen.  Again, this isn’t my scan of the front of the box.

There were far less graphics on the various books inside the box and it seemed as if Mayfair was going for a sleeker feel to the system.  This edition also had the then up-to-date histories of the characters from the DCU.  I kind of feel bad for Mayfair when it came to the original system.  They had to put together all of that background material and right when they release the game DC goes and pulls a Crisis on Infinite Earths on them.   

Or maybe they couldn’t afford the rights to the graphics.  It’s fifty-fifty either way, really.

What this addition did have was trading cards…sort of.  Instead of the boxy kind of cards from the previous editions they went with a simpler character image on one side, stats on the back approach.  It was an interesting set, mainly because it included cards for characters from the Watchmen, which were kind of neat.

The Superman related cards were:

Superman

Lex Luthor

And Mr. Mxyzptlk

I am kind of curious as to why they included Mr. Mxyzptlk.  Maybe it had something to do with the fact that at the time Superman did not have any visually appealing villains.  I mean they had to include Lex Luthor.  That was kind of a given, but the rest of the Man of Steel’s rogues up to that point weren’t the most impressive in the looks department.  Still, you have to give the Mayfair people props for including the imp from the Fifth Dimension.  Sure he got some face time on the Super Friends and Super Powers animated series but other than that he was pretty obscure.

In the next “thrilling” installment: the first Superman Sourcebook.

More to follow…

Saw this and had to laugh.

I mean it totally makes sense, right?  If Batman came on to the show he’d probably get a shot at Lois too,

In the interest of full disclosure I did post something similar to this on another blog I was doing and my Live Journal, but today has been hectic and I wanted to get something out.

More to follow…

I tend to collect a lot of things involving Superman.  These posts are the newest additions to that collection.

This one was a good deal.

As much as I want to fill the bookshelf with a complete collection of Superman trade paperbacks and such the fifty dollar price tag that most of the DC Archive Editions have is something of a bridge too far for me.  I can’t justify spending that kind of bread for a book no matter how nice they look.  Luckily help is available thanks to my old friend eBay.

I bought Volumes 1 and 2 about ten years ago at this place called Book Nook that used to be in Riverdale, GA.  They were ten bucks a piece and I just couldn’t pass up the deal.  Since then they have been the only Archives on the book shelf until now.  I found this one on eBay a few weeks ago and it had a starting bid of $14.95 with a five dollar shipping charge.  I plugged in a fifteen dollar highest bid and sat for six days completely convinced that someone was going to come in at the last moment and snipe me. 

Thankfully that didn’t happen and I got Volume 3 for twenty bucks.

Can I get a boo yah?

I thought I could.

More to follow…

I had two reviews due this week for The Superman Homepage.

They were:

Superman/Batman Annual #2

Justice League of America #19

 

Follow the links to the reviews and if you have something to say either comment over at the Superman Homepage or here.  Or both.  It’s really up to you.

More to follow…

Just got through with the first season of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. 

You know what?  I had forgotten how much I enjoyed the first season of this show.  I guess the third and fourth season (or at least what I saw of the fourth season) left such a bad taste in my mouth that it’s hard to remember that when this program was first on the air nearly fifteen years ago I was a huge fan of it.

I mean it was Superman on television.  How could I not be into it?

Well, at least at first.

The thing that bugs me is that I was listening to the commentary to the pilot episode (because I am that kind of guy) and watching the featurette where the show’s developers and directors and actors talk about how the series came to be the people involved, especially Deborah Joy LeVine (the woman who developed the series for television) they all talk as if they were the first ones to come up with this take on Superman.  LeVine makes it seem as if the Kents being alive, Clark being the real guy and Superman being the costume and the romance of Lois and Clark were all her idea.

This irks me because most of what people seemed to like from the show all came from the comics, specifically the revamp that John Byrne did in Man of Steel and what Marv Wolfman, Jerry Ordway, Roger Stern, Louise Simonson, Dan Jurgens and the rest had done in developing the Superman books into a good mix of super-hero action and soap opera. 

I don’t know why this bugs me, but it does.

Of course the argument could be made that LeVine didn’t do a whole lot of research into the comics before developing the series, but the fact that there is a character named Cat Grant in the first season pretty much shoots that theory to hell.

LeVine bugged me in other ways too.  I could go into how much I hate when producers and directors and writers say things like, “You know, I didn’t want to do a Superman (or any other comic book character) series, but I would like to do a series with the same characters but in a different way,” but that’s a post for another time.

More to follow…

I own a good number of Superman related items.  These posts are meant as a kind of showcase for them.

I think it is safe to say that Bloodlines, a crossover that ran through DC’s annuals in the spring and summer of 1993, was pretty awful.  The plot wasn’t terrible (alien shapeshifters come to Earth looking for a meal and end up creating a bunch of new metahumans in the process) and the concept was noble in a comic book sense (create a bunch of new heroes and villains) but the execution was terrible.  Simply terrible.  

Not that I knew that at the time.  I was blissfully unaware of Bloodlinesat the time of publication.  I was seventeen at the time and didn’t have a steady source of income, so comics were kind of a luxury.  I bought Adventures of Superman #500 when it came out (on the evening of my junior prom in fact) but it wasn’t until the latter part of the summer that I got caught up on Reign of the Supermen and a year or so after that before I got around to picking up the annuals. 

Steel, Superboy, the Last Son of Krypton (later revealed to be the Eradicator) and even the evil Cyborg were not so fortunate.  In Superman: The Man of Steel Annual #2 Steel was present at the birth of a character named Edge, who could hurl blades, which is cool, right?  Superman Annual #5 gave us the Cyborg dealing with a character named Myriad, who was the trainer that clipped Lex Luthor the Second in Superman (Vol. 2) #77 and was later killed for that act.  Action Comics Annual #5, written by Jeph Loeb, saw the Eradicator dealing with Loose Cannon and Adventures of Superman Annual #5 was the place where Superboy and Sparx met for the first time.  Later the two would star in the very regrettable Superboy and the Ravers.

Since it was the nineties and Bloodlines was a big time comic book event type thing you would be correct if you assumed that it had a trading card set associated with it.  In fact, there was a preview card for the set forced uponus enclosed in the polybagged edition of Adventures of Superman #500.  I always found this kind of amusing.  To me Adventures of Superman #500 always felt like the red-headed stepchild of Superman #75.  Where Superman #75 had the neat, black cover with the bleeding “S”, a poster, an armband, a “newspaper” clipping and a preview card to the Death of Superman trading card set Adventures of Superman #500 had the comic and a preview card for the Bloodlines set.  It’s like the difference between eating a steak at Longhorn or Outback and getting a steak at the Waffle House.  Sure they’re both steak but one is certainly fancier and tastes a whole heck of a lot better than the other.

Like the annuals that were to some an affront to man and God I didn’t get around to buying the trading card set until about 2002 or so.  The only upside to the comic book market crashing in the nineties is that the dealers who were stuck with a bunch of inventory from that time are unloading it on eBay for a song.  I think I paid ten bucks plus shipping for an entire, unopened box, which is good because if you are going to own something awful it is always best to not pay a lot of money for it.

(Comic book trading cards are one of my vices.  I just can’t help myself.)

As I was going through the set I noticed that all four of the supposed Supermen had there own cards.

Steel

Cyborg

Eradicator

Superboy

Cyborg even got his own chase card.

As I was going through my packs of cards (at work, actually, because I had the closing shift at this convenience store and my boss was pretty cool with what I did between customers as long as I got the side work done) I came across this.

 

I was intrigued and flipped the card over.

I was a bit bummed out.  I wanted a “One True Superman” card but it was well past the January 15, 1994 expiration date.  Actually it was nearly ten years passed the expiration date.  If I had found this card back in the summer of 1993 it would have soon looked a lot like this.

Yes, I remember my address from way back then.  I lived there for nine years.  The house you grew up in and it’s address tends to stick with you.

So I filed the cards away and thought, “Well, that’s that then.  Never going to get that card.  Another grail that slipped through my fingers.”  It never occurred to me to, you know, go back to eBay and search the card down.  Last year the thought finally hit me to do so and soon it was mine.

 Neat, huh?  Sorry about the scans of both this and the chase card.  They had a foil look to them and those tend not to scan well.

At some point I’ll track down the other chase cards, but having the “One True Superman” card is good enough for the moment.

More to follow…

I’m going through my Post-Crisis on Infinite Earths run of Superman again.  I haven’t read those books in a while and I like to reacquaint myself with them every few years.  Not only is this my favorite era for the character but re-reading those books bring back a lot of good memories.

Plus, I just wanted to, which is the best reason to in my opinion.

The next issue that’s on deck to be read is Superman (vol. 2) #28.

This issue kicked off the Exile story arc, which is flat out my all-time favorite Superman story ever.  Love that story.  I’ll get into the whys and wherefores later but something on the cover caught my eye.  Something I had literally never noticed before, which is kind of odd really because I bought this issue off the rack when it was first published.

Here’s what I noticed.

The “After Steranko” thing just got me curious.  Curious in a way that makes it rather annoying that I had to go to work.  When I got home I did a little research (read: I typed “Steranko covers” into the Google search bar and clicked “Go”) and found the Steranko cover that Kerry Gammil and Dennis Janke were paying homage too.

Now that’s a neat cover.  I have never been a huge fan of Steranko but I like his work and I respect what he brought to the table.

I scanned the cover to Superman #28.  I copied the Nick Fury cover from the Grand Comic Database because, well, I don’t own it.

Mystery solved.  I can sleep peacefully tonight knowing the origin of one of my favorite Superman covers.

And now you know too and knowing, of course, is…something.

More to follow…

This is pretty wrong.

The great thing about the Silver Age is that there are endless covers and panels that can be taken totally out of context for comedic effect.

This was one of the better ones.

More to follow…