Curious case of the missing metal

Mike Sterling of Progressive Ruin fame is providing an invaluable service to comics with this new site, which reminded me of something I meant to post about.

A little while back I was looking for the last few issues of the Aparo/Barr (BATMAN AND) THE OUTSIDERS run I was missing, and came across this seemingly normal copy of #18 of the Baxter format series, nicely bagged and boarded.

"I'll buy that for a dollar", I said, and proceeded to do so. Taking it home and opening it up, it seemed okay, until I started to leaf through it to admire the Jim Aparo artwork, and it started to fall apart.

Which was odd, to see a book that was so sharp on the outside evidently had been manhandled enough through the years for the interior pages to be coming out.  But closer inspection revealed something much odder.

The comic had no staples at all. For a second I thought that someone had taken them out for some unknowable reason, but it was quickly evident that there had never been staples.

Not just not on the cover, but all the way through, right to the center spread.

Which, got to say, is pretty neat. I've seen an occasional one-staple comic, even a three staple comic, but never a no-staple (among comics meant to be stapled, of course). A few of the pages are stuck together with some light glue, which I guess is a pre-staple part of the binding process. It would be slightly neater if they were all loose, which would have been the case in other binding processes.

So, kind of cool to get a nice surprise like this when opening up a sealed comic you got, as opposed to the usual surprise you sometimes get of finding coupons cut out, whole pages missing, major tears on some pages, random writing or colouring or some other defect. I have occasionally come across books which were signed by one of the creators, but never anyone all that exciting, and even then I'm not really into autographed comics where I didn't meet the creator in person to get the autograph.

Also kind of neat to see a reunion of the CAMELOT 3000 team of Brian Bolland and Mike Barr on the backup (one of two such reunions I know of), and the odd artistic team of José Luis García-López and Jim Aparo on the cover.

Blue Devil #22 [1986] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Blue Devil #22 [1986]

BLUE DEVIL was one of the longer lasting DC comics launches of the mid-1980s based on an original concept, starting with a preview story in FIRESTORM and then a 31 issue series plus an annual.  The character was created by writers Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn, who wrote most of the issues, and artist Paris Cullins, who left the interior art after a half-dozen issues, but returned for the annual a year later, and stuck around on covers for the whole run.

The series revolves around a stuntman and special effects expert, Dan Cassidy, who designs a giant Blue Devil prop suit for a movie, only to find himself trapped in the suit following a chance encounter with a real demon. He eventually settled in as a costumed adventurer with light-hearted escapades in Hollywood and on the fringes of the DC Universe, 

By this time the artists are Alan Kupperberg and Bill Collins joining creators Mishkin and Cohn on the story "Bounty Hunter". Dan and his friend are travelling cross country and stop in Las Vegas, where Dan had been back in #6, so he reunites with his alien friends Jorj and Lehni who settled down there in that previous issue. 

As luck would have it, an alien bounty hunter shows up in Vegas around the same time, and chaos ensues. This is a decent issue overall, a bit of a step down in quality from the first year of the book, but part of a solid middle run before it began to coast in the last year. There are also a few pages advancing some subplots with the rest of the regular cast, and a full three page letter column, including namechecks for some fifty or more writers whose letters they couldn't print. 

Unfortunately most of the series has never been reprinted, other than a few "Year's Best" digest reprints back in the day and a few issues tangentially related to CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS reprints in a few expensive anthologies of such crossovers a while back. The whole series is available digitally.