In Fall 2010, twenty-eight of my friends and I compiled a list for RevSF of 52 comic series that deserved to be collected, the Uncanny Un-Collectibles: Missing Comic Book Trades. With the release of Showcase Presents: The Spectre (see below), I decided to revisit the six part bitchfest and see what else has been collected.
Sugar and Spike Archives Volume 1
Published September 14, 2011
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| Even more than Scribbly, Mayer was known for Sugar and Spike, his long running kids series for DC Comics. Sugar and Spike are next door neighbor babies, who understand each other’s gibberish and get into mischief. Mayer simplified his style for a younger audience, cutting down the ideas per panel in a way that immediately reminds you of Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace. The thing about Sugar and Spike or other long running kid’s comics such as Little Lulu is there are rarely individual stories that tower over the rest and demand reprinting. Instead, you hope to have as much reprinted as possible so you can experience the cartoonist’s art over a wide range of work.
There are a few Sugar and Spikes reprinted in The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, but it really cries out for a Showcase Presents edition. DC over the years has done a good job of digging in its crates. Hopefully, at some point, they’ll make Mayer widely available again. They owe him. |
Showcase Presents: The Spectre
Collects SHOWCASE #60, 61 and 64, THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #72, 75, 116, 180 and 199, THE SPECTRE #1-10, ADVENTURE COMICS #431-440, DC COMICS PRESENTS #29 and GHOSTS #97-99.
Published April 25, 2012
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| The Golden Age Spectre stories have been collected in a wonderful collection. However, in the mid-1960s DC was riding on the success of the Earth-2 stories in The Flash and Justice League of America and they decided to revive the Spectre with Murphy Anderson and Neal Adams as the primary artists. The series lasted just thirteen issues (three in Showcase and ten in The Spectre) but they were wonderfully cosmic and supernatural in nature unlike the original More Fun run. |
Showcase Presents: All-Star Squadron Vol. 1
Published April 18, 2012
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| DC’s Justice Society of America has been on a roll. Nearly all of their series are in trades. The Golden Age ones are in hardback archive editions. The regular series comes out in trades every few months. The All-Star Squadron is better than all of them.
In All-Star Squadron, Roy Thomas mixed World War II history with superhero continuity, and got himself a stew going. The stories made modern-age superheroes out of silly old Golden Age knock-offs. Only the Legion of Superheroes came close to its sheer bulk of membership. In one issue, a double page spread still did not contain every member. I stared at those pages, stirred with geeky wonder, at dozens of heroes drawn by Jerry Ordway into tiny panels. It raised a generation of continuity nerds. That’s why some fans today fret when a story contradicts something that happened last month. Roy Thomas spent most of the stories in All-Star Squadron fixing continuity stuff that bothered him. Besides all that, the stories were white-bread, grade-A superhero goodness. In the early 1980s, All Star Squadron was a welcome vacation from nearly every other comic, where heroes tried to find themselves or had human problems. The All-Stars had problems, too. But then they beat up super-Nazis. The JSA collection needs to be complete. Do it for the super-Nazis. |
The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Curse
Collects LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #297-313 and ANNUAL #2-3.
Published October 19, 2011
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| Now that Paul Levitz has been reunited with the Legion of Super-Heroes, it’s about time some of his greatest work returned to store shelves. The DC Archive Editions include Levitz’s early Legion stories but there’s a noticeable gap in DC’s collections: a long run by Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen beginning with the Great Darkness Saga. While that seminal storyline of the Legion vs. Darkseid has been collected, the rest of their run is only available to folks willing to delve into dusty longboxes.
These are some incredible stories, from the Legion Espionage Squad’s infiltration of the Khund home world to a tale of the Green Lantern Corps in the 30th century that could have important links to recent events in Green Lantern and Legion of Super-Heroes. The end of the Levitz/Giffen run is collected in Legion of Super-Heroes: An Eye for an Eye. But those stories in the middle were so strong that Geoff Johns brought them back into DC continuity with Legion of Three Worlds. Now that Levitz is back in charge of his favorite characters, it’s time to treat fans to the stories that inspire the latest tales. Long live Levitz and Giffen! Long live the Legion! |
Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery
Published April 4, 2012
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| Flex Mentallo, Grant Morrison’s four-issue limited series about a musclebound superhero searching for other champions of justice, might not be for you. It’s too psychedelic for a mainstream audience, yet too much in love with truth, justice, and the American Way for the weirdos and freaks. It’s drug-fueled science fiction fantasy is more than the straight-laces can handle, but has a strangely sweet optimism that cynics won’t get.
But if you simply love comic books, Flex Mentallo is the mondo bizarro comics commentary you’ve been looking for. It’s a love letter to superhero ideals laced with LSD. It’s a beautiful like an explosion, thanks to the stunning art of Frank Quitely. But because of the lead character’s similarity in look and origin to bodybuilder-turned-pitchman Charles Atlas, we may never see a collection of this amazing series. Though DC Comics stood up to the lawsuit-version of getting sand kicked in their face by Charles Atlas Co., they’ve hesitated to reprint the story. Here’s hoping Flex Mentallo uses his reality-changing mastery of Muscle Mystery to flex us up a trade paperback! It could happen, because Flex Mentallo is proof that superheroes are real. |
DC Comics Presents: Chase #1
Collects only CHASE #6-8.
Published November 10, 2010
Chase
Collects CHASE #1-9 and #1,000,000, BATMAN #550, #1-9, DC UNIVERSE SECRET FILES #1, SECRET FILES GUIDE TO THE DC UNIVERSE 2000 #31, SUPERMAN: OUR WORLDS AT WAR SECRET FILES #1, JSA SECRET FILES #2, THE FLASH SECRET FILES #3, THE JOKER: LAST LAUGH SECRET FILES #1, BATGIRL SECRET FILES #1 and HAWKMAN SECRET FILES #1.
Published December 28, 2011
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| What 99 percent of us know about Chase is nothing, unfortunately. It was a blip of a 10-issue series last published in 1999 about Cameron Chase, a female governmental operative with the Department of Extranormal Operations who had a deep-seated hatred of most superbeings, good and bad. No great loss, right? Hardly.
Chase marked the beginning of the artistic partnership of J. H. Williams III and Mick Gray, whose collaboration with Alan Moore on Promethea, a modern-day mashup of Wonder Woman and Fawcett’s Captain Marvel memes, was among a handful of the best and most entertaining and beautiful superhero comics published anywhere by anybody over the past decade. And award-winning too. Since the Eisner-winning debut of Batwoman by Williams III and Greg Rucka in Detective Comics now promoted (to her own series coming this November), the scant few fans of Chase and those who want to be (me) have been asking two questions: 1. When will DC finally collect it? 2. When will Chase return? If the overt hints on Williams III’s web site are any inkling, we may see a Chase reappearance in the pages of Batwoman next year. What that could lead to afterward is anyone’s guess. Fingers and toes are crossed daily. Feel free to join the movement. |
Scheduled for the first half of 2012 but not yet released collections include Showcase Presents volumes featuring Rip Hunter and Sea Devils.
It’s not surprising that these are all DC books. Of the 52 titles mentioned, 26 of them were from DC (Marvel was a distant second with 5).
Revisiting the Uncanny Un-Collectibles was originally published on The Geek Curmudgeon