Alright, so we have 124 distinct books published by DC under the SHOWCASE PRESENTS title. That's pretty straightforward.
But what if we extend it further, and ask what it really means to be a SHOWCASE PRESENTS book. More than the title. What if we say that it's a black and white comic book reprint collection of originally colour comics published and owned by DC.
Well, then there's one that sticks out:
I mean, what are we even doing here? Just by the cover, some weird painted thing. There are a few stylistic outliers in the other covers (mostly those using Jack Adler's halftone technique), but nothing this far out. And then you look in detail and you find out that this is a reprint of a Marvel comic? Licensed from Conde Nast? And was originally published as a black and white magazine? In the words of JOKER (2019) star Marc Maron, WTF?
I mean, clearly there were some crossed wires here. DC had hardly even dug deep into their own history when this came out, with first (only) volumes of THE LOSERS, SEA DEVILS, THE SPECTRE and many more still to come. But for some reason they got the rights to Doc Savage and, in addition to incongruous team-ups with Batman and The Spirit*, gave us some reprints of Marvel's comics from the 1970s. One colour volume for the 8 issue 1972-1973 series and this for the 1975-1977 b&w magazine, also 8 issues.
[* and if that was on the table, at least give us a SHOWCASE PRESENTS WILL EISNER'S THE SPIRIT...]
And I guess because the mentality was that "our black and white reprints are the SHOWCASE PRESENTS line", that's what this got shoved into. So the art is shrunken down and the pages have ridiculous margins. And while the vast majority of proper SHOWCASE PRESENTS books have art sourced from good quality file material, for this they clearly had to resort to copies of the printed comics as source material.
And to be fair, by the standards of reprints from such sub-optimal source material, it's not bad (but varies a lot). A lot of similar reprints look much muddier. I think the newsprint closely matching the original helps. But as good as it is, it really can't match the other books. The reproduction of the covers (often a weak point in the other books) is especially bad, as they were painted, mostly by Ken Barr (with #1 by Roger Kastel based on the film poster. Yes, there was a film...).
All of this isn't a comment on the actual comics. I mean, some John Buscema pencils, a lot of Tony DeZuñiga (full art or inks over others), Val Mayerik and others, all look pretty good. Doug Moench is a usually solid writer, seems well suited to the material from what I've read.
I was about 20 copies away from a full run of the SHOWCASE books when a copy of this became available, priced a bit higher than I liked. I did waver quite a bit on getting it, pretty much had to make the decision there if I was going to be all-in or let a few books slide. Obviously I made a wrong choice.
Still don't like it though. I don't even like shelving it with the other books, except for the photo-op. Definitely the bronze sheep of the family. Like some mutant book, and if I learned anything from X-MEN comics it's "Accursed is the Mutant" (honestly, I only skimmed X-MEN, did I get the gist of it? And I might be confusing it with THE CRYSALIDS (look it up, kids)).
And while my brain knows it doesn't work this way, that the most likely alternative to them doing this probably was just no book, not a different book, my heart can't help but resent it on behalf of the SHOWCASE book we didn't see. We got this instead of SUGAR & SPIKE? This instead of PLOP? This instead of a 1970s Kirby book? This instead of... well a whole other future post on which SHOWCASE books that should have been, but we got Marvel's DOC SAVAGE instead.
So what's the conclusion? I guess you have to decide for yourself. For convenience I'm going to keep saying there are 124 books, but I say for the record I do so under protest. If comics are a religion, this book is in the non-canonical apocrypha. And let me be clear there is one book which is my least favourite, one book which I will let burn if there's a strange fire and I only have time to rescue 123 books, and that book is SHOWCASE PRESENTS BOOSTER GOLD DOC SAVAGE.
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