Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Wednesday Comics: DC Through the 80s

 

Somehow, I missed the original solicitation of this one, though I did see what is presumably the follow-up: DC Through the 80s: The Experiments. It was tempting, but ultimately I thought it was too scattershot to warrant a purchase.

DC Through the 80s: The End of Eras, despite it's to my ear awkward title, seems more like one for the shelf. Many of the good comics reprinted here I already own, but there are others I have never read and there's some interesting supplemental material, including (supposedly) Moore's proposal for Twilight of the Super-Heroes.

What's in here that I would recommend? Well, there's Moore's and Swan's "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" Of course, you've probably already read that one. There's also story I recall fondly from my childhood: A crossover of the Earth-Two and Earth-One Batmen by Mike Barr and David Gibbons from Brave and the Bold #200--the final issue of that title. There's a less good, but still fun crossover between Lex Luthors of those same Earths from DC Comics Presents Annual #1 by Wolfman and Buckler.

Pulling from some non-supers titles of the era, we have Blackhawk #258 by Evanier and Spiegle where the Nazis destroy Blackhawk Island with an atom bomb. This whole run is probably under-appreciated. 

There are a number of DC horror titles and the sci-fi anthology Timewarp represented. And there's war comics, including Weird War Tales #93--the first appearance of the Creature Commandos. 

And there's a random issue of Warlord

1 comment:

Dick McGee said...

I recognize most of those stories from my youth. Nice to see some of the old war comics and Blackhawk making an appearance. Used to be an enormous Warlord fan, which was my favorite DC swords & sorcery book outside of the vastly underrated Claw the Unconquered - which, to be fair, might have outstayed its welcome if it had lasted longer, whereas Warlord stayed pretty consistently entertaining for a long, long time.