Scott and Dan pick the comics they’re most looking forward to…
—
Dan Greenfield, editor, 13th Dimension
Absolute Batman #6, DC. OK folks, you tell me. Should I be reading Absolute Batman — and if so, why? I would love the input. Thanks!
—
The Art of George Wilson, Hermes Press. Anthony Taylor deserves huge credit for giving us all a long-overdue, much-needed coffee table bio of the late, great George Wilson — the Gold Key cover artist who deserves much more credit than he’s ever gotten. (Check out Anthony’s 13 ESSENTIAL COMIC BOOK COVERS BY GEORGE WILSON.) UPDATED: This has been delayed until May.
—
Batman & Robin: Year One #6, DC. The halfway point of the 12-issue saga.
—
Fantastic Four #3 Facsimile Edition, Marvel. The team gets uniforms — and a flying bathtub! So much fun.
—
Batman #613 Facsimile Edition, DC. The latest Hush reprint. The sequel starts next week, kids.
—
The Incredible Hulk #340 Pan Dimensional 3D Edition, Marvel. The classic Wolverine/Hulk blowout illustrated by Todd McFarlane — in 3D! Complete with glasses and sealed in a polybag. (FYI: I’m seeing two release dates for this one — March 19 and March 26. So check with your shop.)
—
Catwoman #74, DC. Frank Cho’s variant covers have been great.
—
Archie Is Mister Justice #3, Archie. Betty’s not gonna end up dead on a bridge somewhere, is she? Love the Matt Talbot variant…
—
Scott Tipton, contributor-at-large, 13th Dimension
DC Finest: Team-Ups — Chase to the End of Time, DC. DC Comics Presents was a Superman team-up book in the style of The Brave and the Bold, and I’m happy to see any of it collected.
Dan adds: Interesting, this one. Includes the first 14 issues of DCCP and #141-155 of Brave and the Bold, though the latter isn’t signaled on the cover. Huh.
—
Crisis on Infinite Earths #12 Facsimile Edition, DC. A minor detail that I love about this cover is that it’s Ralph Dibny who’s stretching around the Anti-Monitor and not Plastic Man.
Dan adds: I’ve really enjoyed re-reading Crisis as a monthly. My big question going in was whether it held up as a story, not just as a historic event. And it does. What Marv Wolfman, George Perez and co. pulled off was nothing short of remarkable, whether or not you agree that it should have happened at all. And it’s fitting that this ish not only has foil and sketch covers — it’s got a Super Powers variant featuring… Earth-Two Superman. That’s downright poetic.
—
Batman/Superman: World’s Finest #37, DC. Always good to see Aquaman on the giant seahorse.
March 17, 2025
“Dan adds: Interesting, this one. Includes the first 14 issues of DCCP and #141-155 of Brave and the Bold, though the latter isn’t signaled on the cover. Huh.”
Bob Haney’s name is on the cover. There are probably issue covers and info on the back for B&B. Other than doing a split cover there isn’t much more they could do than that.
March 17, 2025
I absolutely oved DC Comics Presents! Fond memory of my College days and a little after!
March 18, 2025
It also seems odd to me that they didn’t indicate on the cover of the DC Finest cover that it contains Batman teamups. Unfortunately, I have read most of these issues but I would like to see a collection of reprints from other years.
March 18, 2025
REALLY bummed that the Art of George Wilson book has been delayed, yet again. I placed my preorder for it back in 2023. :’(
March 20, 2025
I reread Crisis about six months ago (in the collected Deluxe Edition). I’ve reread bits and pieces of it periodically over the years, but I think this may have been the first end-to-end reading of it since it first came out in the 1980s.
Caveats:
I LOVED Crisis when I was 12-years-old. I had just gotten into comics about six months before the first issue of Crisis hit the stands. But I was really into it (and even more into its companion book, Who’s Who). Even as a new reader I was already turned off by the multiverse (still am), so I was really excited to see what was going to come out on the other side Crisis when it was over.
To that end, I love what Crisis did: wiping the slate clean and allowing for the post-Crisis reboots to happen. The 1986 to 1990-ish era of DC is my favorite era of comics. I have a lot of those comics in Absolute, Omnibus, and Deluxe editions and most of the post-Crisis reboots still hold up. But none of that would have happened without Crisis clearing the path for it.
I love George Perez’s artwork. I was pleasantly surprised by just how well it holds up. Crisis is a clear demarcation point in Perez’s artistic development. Before Crisis he was good, but from Crisis and beyond he was great (particularly on Wonder Woman and History of the DC Universe). Sometimes I wonder if having Dick Giordano and Jerry Ordway ink him on Crisis (and seeing how they simplified and streamlined his drawing) led to the subtle simplification of his work that was to follow (pre-Crisis Perez artwork tends to be, to my eyes, unnecessarily busy in its compositions and renderings). Just a hypothesis.
And there are individual sequences that work in isolation (the death of Supergirl being the best example).
But…
As a story, Crisis just does not work for me. It’s flabby, meandering, and repetitive (oh so repetitive). But the biggest failing of Crisis is that it doesn’t have a protagonist. There’s no central character through whose eyes we’re seeing the story unfold. That’s Storytelling 101, and its *the* fatal flaw in the series. It also doesn’t help that there are multiple story threads that are teased and then go absolutely nowhere. Maybe they were resolved in the crossover titles, but if so, that’s a failure of the crossover event storytelling style. It may drive sales in the short-term, but it makes the stories themselves unreadable later on.
So, again, I’m grateful for what Crisis did for DC and the great stories that followed that likely would never have happened had Crisis not occurred. But as a story, it just doesn’t work at all.