The Ottawa Comic Book Guy

If there is one thing that being a parent is teaching me, it's that kids are so consistently inconsistent. But there is one lesson we always try to teach them, and that's "Don't judge a book by its cover." My son doesn't follow that advice, he always seems to pick from the covers. In the case of today's book, he said: "Look at all the colours of the heroes, Papa," and chose this book. He then asked why there were so many Supermans? (When I answered I was informed there as a Shopkin named...this is for another column, perhaps?) Anyway, so today's choice is DC Comics Presents 80 (April 1985), which features a team-up between Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes (the above-mentioned "colours" since Shrinking Violet, Chameleon Boy, Ultra Boy, Phantom Girl and Element Lad and lots of Supermen.). One note before we start, the cover date for this book is the same month that Crisis on Infinite Earths begins, so this story will...

Good day. We are back after a short hiatus for this thing that Prince called life. Today I am going to do a review of the latest book that my son picked out, saying he loved the big yellow man. So without further ado, here is a review of December 1980's issue of DC Comics Presents #28, featuring Superman and Supergirl. (Doesn't Mongul have a face that even a mother can't love?) There are two stories in this issue, the main one and a feature called "Whatever Happened to" that was a regular feature of this book during this time. This months feature is Johnny Thunder, Lawman (not the doofus with the magic T-Bolt, the other one.) Story 1 - "Warworld" Writer: Len Wein, Artists: Jim Starlin and Romeo Tanghal, Letterer: Ben Oda, Colourist: Jerry Serpe, Edied by Julie Schwartz. The story begins with Superman and Supergirl flying through space where Supergirl is recounting to her cousin his story of how he met Mongul before, and that Mongul got away...

I picked up the following book last week as an impulse purchase (I don't know what attracted me to the cover.) What surprised me is that it is listed as Cover D. For a 15th issue in a series that, when reading the issue, didn't seem to have any large necessary impact on a killer story line (I found it better than average, but...) That's when I realized, although I am aware of just about a few issues really having a variant cover over the last couple of years (maybe five...ten), but the amount of variants  is almost becoming unwieldy. Back in the beginning days of comics, variants only happened by accident, either by a manufacturers defect (for example, double-stapled covers, missing inner pages, etc..), or a printer's error (number changes on issue, price changes.) There are very few examples of variants until just after the Second World War. At that point, Canada created true variants by limiting US cultural product importation (due to wartime import restrictions...