Showcase Presents Retrospective - The Phantom 125th

So, as I alluded to here, while there are, for all intents and purposes, 124 SHOWCASE PRESENTS book published by DC from 2005 to 2016, as seen in the graphic on right and on my bookshelf, there's an argument to be made for a 125th book needed for a truly complete collection. Not a great argument, really, but it's an interesting bit of trivia.

Let's go back to February 2008, pretty much the peak of the line, they had been releasing two books a month for over a year, and would continue at that pace for more than another year.  Sometimes something that slips through the cracks and in this case it was SHOWCASE PRESENTS SUPERMAN FAMILY Vol 2, released on February 27, 2008, the very week of Superman's birthday (and on a year he gets to celebrate on the proper day).

Well, that seems fine.

Several weeks later, this statement was issued by DC to retailers:

In SHOWCASE PRESENTS: SUPERMAN FAMILY VOL. 2 TP (NOV070244), several pages from SUPERMAN’S GIRL FRIEND LOIS LANE #2 were accidentally swapped. DC Comics will provide retailers with new, corrected copies of this title in quantities equal to their orders to date on the current printing. Retailers will not be billed for these new copies. DC asks retailers to please dispose of any copies of SHOWCASE PRESENTS: SUPERMAN FAMILY VOL 2 TP they currently have on their shelves, and to accept returned copies from their customers in exchange for corrected copies. The SHOWCASE PRESENTS: SUPERMAN FAMILY VOL 2 TP new printing is scheduled to arrive in stores on April 2. To differentiate it from the original printing, the logo on this cover will be red and white instead of red and yellow, and will arrive in stores under the item code JAN088359. 

More detail about the error can be found on the GCD entry for the book:

In the first print run, the splash page of "Superman's Secret Sweetheart" is followed by pages 2-8 of "Superman's Forbidden Room," and vice versa. The logo on the corrected edition is red and white instead of red and yellow.

Well, that was a silly thing to do.

And so, if you're looking for the book, make sure you get one that looks like this, which flew into stores a few weeks after the previous one (April 9 apparently, as they forgot to account for the April Fools' Day holiday):

Which should be almost all available copies, because of course all retailers followed DC's request to dispose of the erroneous versions.

But if for some reason you really want to be complete (and really, even I'm not that crazy.  Yet) you obviously need one of each.  And then you'd have 125 books, such a nice solid number.  Five cubed.  Five shelves of 25 books apiece (yeah, okay, three of them are slimmer). I think I'm talking myself into wanting that book...

Not really.  But since I still instinctively check any Showcase books I see, I do keep my eye open for the yellow label SUPERMAN FAMILY Vol 2, and if it's not too expensive, I'll probably pick it up.

By the way, a few of the early books also had second printings, with a different cover price and without the "Over 500 Pages..." blurb on the cover, but counting those would be extreme even for me.

But of course, there's another book one the list that doesn't belong at all, the Apocryphal Showcase.  But, as they say on Hammy Hamster, that's another story...