The celebrated Mr. K — author of the novel JSA: Ragnarok — picks his fave comics stories without pictures… By PAUL KUPPERBERG I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and Black Friday… which is not, contrary to what it sounds like, DC’s next company-wide crossover event that promises to change everything forever. Again. Until the next time. No, this is the crass, commercial Black Friday, the “Ladies and gentlemen, start your wallets!” time of the holiday gift-buying season. Unlike many others, I do not revile or mock Black Friday. Indeed, as a producer of consumer goods myself, I’ve embraced the crassness and commercialism and did not so much as bat an eye before agreeing when “Santa” Dan Greenfield suggested I use the season’s columns to shamelessly pimp — I mean, subtly promote — my own product, i.e., my books. Which brings me to one of my favorite corners of comic book storytelling: the comic book novel. Publishers like Whitman had been mining the comic strips since the 1930s for a long-running series of hardcover children’s novels featuring such strip stars as Blondie, Little Orphan Annie, Red Ryder, and others. Superman made his debut prose appearance (outside of a few filler text stories in the comic books) in the 1942 novel, The Adventures of Superman by George Lowther. The first prose treatment of a superhero I ever read was 1966’s Batman vs. the Fearsome Foursome — a novelization of the 1966 Batman theatrical film rushed out to take advantage of the ABC-TV show’s explosive popularity — and I was hooked! The lack of pictures was more than made up for by the depth the prose brought to the storytelling. In a comic book, we might be treated to captions that dove into the character’s thoughts but were usually just an excuse to reiterate what the picture was showing anyway. My line about Silver Age storytelling is that a panel would show Superman flying over Metropolis, with a caption like, “One day, as Superman flies over Metropolis,” as Superman’s thought balloon reads, “I better hurry if I want to get to the other side of Metropolis in time!” Prose not only eliminated this sort of redundant storytelling but offered writers the opportunity to actually delve into characters’ thoughts, and motivations. Even a plot as ridiculous as Batman’s rogues vying to...