It’s the first Monday of the month, and that means it’s time to hop into the Delorian, floor it ’til we hit 88mph, and revisit July of yesteryear. Stops on this trip include July 1950 for an early cover gimmick, July 1979 for the first comic book miniseries, and July 1994 for a failed experiment in comic format. Buckle up!
July 1950
Everybody knows the early 1990s were the heyday for cover enhancements, both in quantity and in variety. What fewer people know is that trend setters like “Ghost Rider” #15’s glow in the dark ink and “Silver Surfer” #50’s foil stamp in the summer of 1991 weren’t the first. Neither was the metallic ink on variant of “Spider-Man” #1 in 1990. No, fancy covers are much older than that.
The earliest one my research has uncovered was “Silver Streak” #1 from December 1939 with a silver ink logo. Yeah, it was first, but that was about the only remarkable thing about it. If it impacted sales, it wasn’t enough to justify the effort because it vanished after the fifth issue. Publishers still wanted to be eye-catching, but they couldn’t even imagine the technology for holograms, acetates, or lenticulars. Aside from shocking content, what could they do?
Optical illusions, that’s what. This 132 page, square-bound installment of the Dell Giant series from July 1950 promised kids a moving cover if they followed the viewing instructions found inside the back cover (tilt it side to side). This gimmick didn’t cost Dell anything, but it may have helped convince kids to take a chance on a thick, expensive $0.25 comic. As far as I can tell, this didn’t hit off any kind of trend, but that could be because of the limited bag of tricks offered by this kind of illusion. It’s also possible the cover artist did it for fun, not because his editor demanded a sales boost.
Most importantly, any kids who paid for the cover got their money’s worth, because “Walt Disney’s Vacation Parade” #1 came with 55 pages of Carl Barks work.
July 1979
In 1978, DC made a deliberate effort to increase its output with new spin-offs, new titles, and new genres. In ads, they touted this initiative as the “DC Explosion”. Unfortunately, corporate management was not impressed and killed it in its infancy. The sudden turn around led to a lot of canceled comics and earned the nickname “DC Implosion”. A lot of fans were disappointed and a lot of creators lost work, but a positive development did come from the mess.
One of the canceled titles was the anthology “Showcase”. Prior to the implosion, it was scheduled to run a three-part Superman story that had been completed but delayed for marketing reasons (DC wanted it to coincide with the release of the first Superman film). After the implosion, the company found itself with a good story that was complete, paid for, and didn’t fit anywhere in the remaining line. In a time of layoffs and uncertainty, no one wanted to let the story go to waste, so they had to find an innovative way to publish it: a miniseries.
The format wasn’t quite perfect, though. Due to economic quirks of Canadian import/export law, a four-part series would be significantly more profitable per issue than a three-parter. After one more three-part story (“Untold Legends of the Batman”) in July 1980, DC’s new minimum for a miniseries was four issues. When Marvel entered the miniseries game in September 1982 with “Hercules” and “Wolverine”, both of them were four parts.
July 1994
In the early 1990s, Bart Sears was a hot artist. He made a name for himself on “Justice League Europe” before doing the 1992 crossover in DC’s annuals, “Eclipso: The Darkness Within”. “Wizard” promoted him pretty heavily, and Sears provided them with covers and a couple year’s worth of a “how to draw” column. When he decided to start up his own company with comics starring the characters from his column, “Wizard” gave him a seven-page feature in the middle of the magazine and put his name on the cover as a top story.
Sears’ plans were unique and bombastic – “What I’m doing isn’t really comics; it’s heroic sagas.” The first release from Ominous Press was “Brute & Babe: …it begins…”, which was made available in a format very unlike a traditional comic. It was eight sheets of cardstock, without staples, each in its own plastic sleeve. One side was a comic page, the other side was profile information on a character. These “tablets” were sold in a slipcase for $3.95. That’s right – eight story pages for $4 at a time when the average comic was still $1.50 to $2. Sears thought the comic industry, which had just suffered a brutal recession, was waiting for something like this. “A new mythology, cast in stone.”
The main feature in “Wizard” was very positive, but in their suggested picks section, they were openly mocking the characters’ designs and names. This seemingly more honest section was probably more accurate to the market reaction. I don’t see that “Brute & Babe” ever appeared in the “Wizard” price guide, which means retailers never reported interest in the title. Two more offerings were solicited for August, the 36-page traditional-style “Mael’s Rage” and the 16-tablet “Death of Pheros”. As far as I can tell, only #2 was released. “Wizard” never did any kind of follow-up coverage, and Ominous Press has been forgotten.
