MORNING CALL DEATH OF SUPERMAN ARTICLE

I believe this article comes from the November 21, 1992 edition of the Morning Call.  For those coming in late the Morning Call is the main newspaper in Allentown, PA and from 1986 until 1995 my family lived just outside of Allentown in a sleepy little community called Wescoville.  November 21st was a Saturday and I remember that weekend very well.  I was a junior at Emmaus High School and that night was going to be the final performance of The Pink Panther Strikes Again, a fun little play I was in based on the 1976 film.  My buddy Larry had crashed at my house the previous night and we were watching television when I found this article.  That’s when it hit me.

Superman #75 had come out that week.

And I didn’t have a copy.

I plan on telling the whole “epic” saga of how I got my hands on the Doomsday storyline on an upcoming episode of From Crisis to Crisis, so I’ll end that particular story there.  What I will go into is the fact that this article brings back a lot of memories for me.  There are two comic shops mentioned in the article; Beachead Comics and Cap’s Comics Cavalcade.  Cap’s was located near what is now called Lehigh Valley International Airport and was something of a mystery to me for years.  I would hear about Cap’s from the other comic collectors I knew in junior high and high school but the one time my Dad and I went looking for it (in those pre-drivers license days) we just couldn’t find the place.  I finally tracked it down when I was a freshmen in college and found it to be a nice comic shop that had the exact same back stock that all of the other comic stores in the area had.  I am not surprised that Cap’s was one of the comic shops the reporter visited to get quotes for her article as it was one of the bigger shops in the Lehigh Valley.

Beachead Comics is a very special store for me.  While it wasn’t where I kept my hold box in November of 1992 it was the first comic shop I ever went to.  It was an old school comic shop that smelled like old paper and had mostly wooden fixtures.  Every time I went there a large white dog slept or rested near the entrance.  That was the shop where I bought Man of Steel and most of the Post-Crisis Superman comics I needed to complete my run when I got serious about collecting the Superman books.  The building was on a corner and the front window, which you can see in what I consider to be the main picture of the article, was always covered in promo posters with Alfred was painted on the front door welcoming you in.  The side of the building had an awesome mural on it.

I took that picture in July of 2001 when my wife (then girlfriend) and I visited Allentown so I could show her where I grew up.  From the looks of it Beachead is still in business, which makes me smile.

As for the article itself, well it reads like the others I have posted.  Once again we get the rumor that when Superman comes back he is going to be, as the reporter puts it, “one tough enchilada.  Not what I would call the most professional journalism I have ever seen but I guess the writer saw this as a puff piece which, in all honesty, it kind of was.

I would love to post the other part of the article but I can’t seem to locate it.  That means one of two things; either I have lost it in the various moves over the years or I never clipped it out.  I am willing to bet I never clipped it out which until today has not been a problem.  So on the off chance that any of you out there reading this lived in the Lehigh Valley in 1992 and clipped out this article (as unlikely as that sounds) I would appreciate a scan.

Odd to think that next year this article will be twenty years old.  That means I have had this little scrap of paper with me for that long and it has lasted through nine moves, one from Pennsylvania to Georgia.  It is almost comforting to know that I still have it.

Next time: I was going to post the contents of the collector’s edition of Superman #75 but I haven’t been able to get all of the bits of business scanned or photographed.  So instead I will leave the subject of tomorrow’s post a surprise but I am fairly sure you will like it.

More to follow…