RETRO HOT PICKS! | 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture

May06

RETRO HOT PICKS! On Sale This Week — in 1977!

Posted by Dan Greenfield on May 6, 2026

RETRO HOT PICKS! On Sale This Week — in 1977!

Scott and Dan hit up the comics racks from 49 years ago… This week for RETRO HOT PICKS, Scott and I are selecting comics that came out the week of May 6, 1977. Last time for RETRO HOT PICKS, it was the week of April 29, 1986. Click here to check it out. (Keep in mind that comics came out on multiple days, so these are the issues that went on sale between May 3 and May 9.) So, let’s set the scene: Watergate dominated the nation’s political landscape for so much of the 1970s and on May 4, TV viewers heard Richard Nixon’s side of the story. The first of four installments of Nixon’s infamous sit-down with David Frost aired on syndicated television, drawing an audience of 45,000,000 — a record for a political interview. CBS fought hard to get Nixon but as a credible news organization, refused to pay for the privilege. Instead, the pathologically venal Tricky Dick pocketed $600,000 from Frost’s production company. The four-part, weekly series was such a smash that the producers would come back in the fall with a fifth episode featuring material excised from the initial run. New Yorkers were terrified to go out at night, thanks to a mysterious gunman who was targeting men and women around the city. Known as the .44 Caliber Killer, the serial fiend had last struck in mid-April, killing 20-year-old Alexander Esau and 18-year-old Valentina Suriani, who were shot in a car parked on a Hutchinson River Parkway service road in the Bronx. A handwritten letter was left by the bodies, and police initially kept a lid on it. But some of the contents leaked to the press, and now the public had a new, even more frightening name for the murderer: He called himself the Son of Sam. The killer’s spree fit a city that was suffering through calamitous rot, poverty and filth. But there was no shortage of big personalities that wanted to run it anyway, including Democrats Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo and Bella Abzug, who each wanted to unseat Mayor Abe Beame. (Comparably few cared about the Republican side of things.) But that’s not to say the city wasn’t without its glamor — New York never is. In April, a new nightclub had opened in Midtown Manhattan that drew the glitterati from all over: Studio 54,...

Apr29

RETRO HOT PICKS! On Sale This Week — in 1986!

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Apr 29, 2026

RETRO HOT PICKS! On Sale This Week — in 1986!

Scott and Dan hit up the comics racks from 40 years ago… This week for RETRO HOT PICKS, Scott and I are selecting comics that came out the week of April 29, 1986. Last time for RETRO HOT PICKS, it was the week of April 22, 1989. Click here to check it out. (Keep in mind that comics came out on multiple days, so these are the issues that went on sale between April 26 and May 2.) So, let’s set the scene: On April 26, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union exploded and it’s impossible to understate it — it was one of the worst man-made disasters in human history. The accident occurred thanks to a bungled safety test, reckless oversight, substandard technology, and abject incompetence. To this day, experts debate the death toll because of long-term health effects that are difficult to quantify, but it’s been placed anywhere between the initial roughly 30 killed and up to 16,000. It also cost an estimated $700 billion across decades. Making matters worse, it was a classic case of Soviet propaganda gone awry: Authorities immediately tried to downplay the explosion and didn’t order the evacuation of the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, where Chernobyl was located, until a day and a half after, as poisonous radiation spewed through the air. Just as bad, on April 28, radiation levels set off alarms in Sweden, more than 1,000 kilometers from the plant. The Swedish government contacted the USSR to ask whether there’d been an accident and the Soviets actually denied it. But the Swedes forced their hand when they said they were going to file an official report with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Soviets still tried to tamp down Chernobyl’s true, devastating impact and it even took until May 1 for the Russian news agency Tass to report it. Eventually, the truth couldn’t be contained, and virtually every country in the Northern Hemisphere was affected in one way or another. Chernobyl forced the secretive nation to become more transparent and the financial toll helped bring it to its knees. In many ways, it was the flashpoint that led to the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. But that was still years way. (Millions of words have been written about the disaster, but if you want...

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