As I’ve mentioned many times, whenever my family takes a trip I like to do a little nerd shopping. Not only do I hit up comic shops whenever possible, but if I can find used bookstores, antique malls, or anything else of the sort, my wife knows that I’m going to want to immerse myself in some back-issue diving. There’s some relationship advice, folks, marry somebody who is willing to be patient with you when you’re elbow-deep in old copies of Donald Duck.
The interesting thing about doing this is that you never quite know what it is you’re going to find. I like the bargains, the dollar bins, the unsorted pot of gold at the end of the comic book rainbow. Sometimes you get complete sets. Sometimes long runs. But more often, I find, you get utterly random issues that don’t necessarily have anything else to do with anything else in the box. I always like to grab the weird comics when that happens, things that I’ve never heard of before, stuff that I’ve heard of but maybe have never read…and, of course, when I come across a Superman comic that I haven’t enjoyed, I rescue it from the bin.
Of course, this approach to collecting comes with a major complication – not knowing what I’m looking for and not even always knowing what I’m getting, Because I like to approach it this way, I often get incomplete stories. While it’s true that comics of the past were rarely serialized to the extent that they are today, even in the 70s and 80s it wasn’t unusual for a storyline to run for two or three issues, and at the time it was virtually unheard of for them to be labeled as such on the cover.
When that happens, when I read a comic that’s only a chunk of a story, I don’t necessarily feel like it’s fair to give it a full review. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be fun to talk about it, though. For example, a few weeks ago on a trip to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, we hit an enormous antique mall where I scored several cheap Superman books, virtually all of which turned out to be only a part of a story.
Action Comics #507, for example. The lead story in this issue is “The Miraculous Return of Jonathan Kent” by Cary Bates and Curt Swan. Younger folks might not remember this, but until the John Byrne Superman reboot in 1986, most versions of Clark Kent’s adoptive parents had passed away by the time he began his career as Superman. So I’m sure you can imagine Clark’s shock in this 1980 comic when Jonathan shows up to visit him in Metropolis as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Clark is dumbfounded, of course, but is even more shocked when he discovers that Lana Lang, too, thinks it’s perfectly natural for the late Jonathan Kent to be there. Whooshing off to Smallville, Clark can’t find his father’s grave or any other evidence that he died – in fact, there is a preponderance of evidence that Jonathan has been alive and well in Smallville all this time. Superman even finds letters (people used to do that before email) written to Jonathan FROM Clark, in his own handwriting. How is such a thing possible?
What a great question! I assume the answer can be found in Action Comics #508. I didn’t get that issue, though, so I can’t be entirely certain.
Adventure Comics #455 from 1977 has the opposite problem – it’s the end of a story that began in the previous issue. In “I Can’t Go Home Again” by Bob Rozakis with art by Juan Ortiz and Vince Colletta, Superboy begins the issue in outer space looking down on a Smallville that seems to have been somehow inundated with Kryptonite. Although (in this Pre-Crisis era) Kryptonite is harmless to humans, Superboy is trapped outside of town, and a recap of last issue tells us that although he’d captured the Kryptonite Kid, thinking him responsible, the real culprit is Lex Luthor. Superboy switches back to Clark and tries to confront Lex, even though the Kryptonite has left him as weak as a kitten. It goes as well as you might expect, and let’s all be grateful that Pete Ross knew Clark’s secret, even if he didn’t want Clark to know that.
The story isn’t bad, but it makes me want to go back and read the first part which – needless to say – I don’t have. It probably also goes without saying that neither of the books I’m hoping to read are available on the DC Universe Infinite app. I’ve written before about how irritating it is that the “infinite” app has such huge swaths of comics missing from its catalogue. By what measure can we call it “infinite” if there are hundreds of comics featuring Superman that aren’t included in the database? (To say nothing of the missing comics featuring Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and all the rest?) I get that digitizing old comics takes time and money, but it’s been an embarrassingly long time since there were any more older comics added to the app.
I doubt that they’ll leap onto these two comics that I’ve mentioned here just because I happened to mention it – after all, I’ve been playing this particular song for a couple of years now and DC hasn’t made any real strides to start adding older comics again. But it’s something I find frustrating every time I open the app and look for a comic that turns out to be missing.
Not that this will stop me from picking up the random oldies whenever I come across them, of course. That, if nothing else, is part of the fun.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!
Blake M. Petit 