Posted By Dan Greenfield on Jun 14, 2025 | 13 comments

The celebrated Mr. K hits a 13th Dimension landmark — on his 70th birthday!

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Hey, Paul! Happy 70th birthday — and Happy 200th 13th Dimension column! Hope you dig this all-new, groovy banner by our pal Walt Grogan that we’ll be using to adorn your pieces from now on! Dig it, man! Lunch soon! — Dan

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By PAUL KUPPERBERG

That Dan Greenfield guy is pretty, pretty sneaky.

He starts by luring you into his 13th Dimension web with a request for a few Retro Hot Picks, then the occasional retrospective of a favorite creator or fondly remembered toys or titles, and before you know it — boom! — you find you’ve penned 199 columns for the guy since 2020!

This one, by my count, makes it 200!

Two hundred opportunities to trip down memory lane and pay homage to the comic books I’ve read and loved and the comic-book people who created them, not to mention increasingly all-too-frequent memorials to the friends and colleagues we’ve lost. Every month, Dan sends around an email with all the upcoming birthdays in the comics field, and we contributors—which now number about a dozen regulars, including creators and historians like Bill Morrison, Kerry Callen, Walt Grogan, Fred Van Lente, Peter Stone, Franco, Rob Kelly, and others—are free to follow our respective blisses and rhapsodize about whomever and whatever floats our boat in the form or medium of our own choosing.

My personal bliss are the comics and creators of my Silver Age childhood. I was born in the first Eisenhower administration and came of age during those weirdly innocent years of the early 1960s where all our entertainment resolved in happy endings, and we had real-life heroes like America’s astronauts to admire. But as much as I loved (and still love!) those silly, gimmick-driven, Mort Weisinger-edited Superman stories of the day, very few of them hold up to any kind of critical scrutiny. They were, plain and simple, childish entertainment for children, and very few comics pretended to be anything else.

But what did hold up and stay with me all these decades later is the sense of wonder and awe those stories evoked.

Even before I could read the words, I followed the pictures, and those pictures were downright magical. Television in 1960 was in black and white and I hadn’t yet been to enough movies for them to make a real impression, so comic books were technicolor splashes of excitement filled with impossible people doing breathtakingly impossible things.

And none of what they did had to make sense, didn’t need to adhere to the rules of storytelling or even the laws of physics. The Flash runs faster than the speed of light? Wow! Green Lantern’s power ring is a genie’s lamp that conjures up whatever he can imagine? Wish I had one of those! Superman needs to physically shove the Earth out of the path of danger? Of course!

It hasn’t been just old comics either! It’s also old TV and old movies and old books. I’ve written about old DC and Marvel house ads, actors from related media projects, and I’ve plugged my own projects (you know, like my memoir, Panel by Panel: My Comic Book Life, or my books of interviews like Direct Conversations: Talks With Fellow DC Comics Bronze Age Creators and Direct Creativity: The Creators Who Inspired the Creators, as well as delving into my own output of comics and other stuff, usually in service of celebrating the many, many, many legendary talents it’s been my privilege to work with or alongside over the past 50-plus years in comics as a fan and professional.

I’ve also contributed a bunch of My Comic Moments, relating funny encounters I’ve had with comic book (and some showbiz) people.

As behooves a site with the number “13” in its name, most of the previous 199 columns have taken the form of lists of my “13 Favorite,” but that’s just a gimmick. When someone asks me about my Top 10 favorite anything I tell them that it includes at least a hundred or more, their rankings depending on my mood. Seriously, how is anyone supposed to single out a mere 13 examples from the hundreds or thousands of stories and pages of any creator’s decades-long career?

Fortunately, many titles have hit the landmark 200 number, but I always like the comics that owned their anniversary and made a thing of it, if only on the cover. So, here then, MY 13 FAVORITE 200th ANNIVERSARY ISSUES FOR MY 200th COLUMN:

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Batman #200 (March 1968), DC. Cover by Neal Adams.

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Our Army at War #200 (December 1968), DC. Cover by Joe Kubert.

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Blondie #200 (October 1972), Charlton. Cover by Paul Fung.

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The Incredible Hulk #200 (June 1976), Marvel. Cover by Rich Buckler and John Romita.

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G.I. Combat #200 (March 1977), DC. Cover by Kubert.

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Superman Family #200 (April 1980), DC. Cover by Ross Andru and Dick Giordano.

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Unexpected #200 (July 1980), DC. Cover by Andru and Giordano.

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Justice League of America #200 (March 1982), DC. Cover by George Perez.

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The Brave and the Bold #200 (July 1983), DC. Cover by Jim Aparo.

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Green Lantern #200 (May 1986), DC. Cover by Walter Simonson.

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Marvel Tales #200 (June 1987), Marvel. Cover by Frank Miller.

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The Savage Sword of Conan #200 (August 1992), Marvel. Cover by Joe Jusko.

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The Spectacular Spider-Man #200 (May 1993), Marvel. Cover by Sal Buscema.

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MORE

— 13 Birthday Thoughts About PAUL KUPPERBERG, by PAUL LEVITZ. Click here.

— 13 REASONS PAUL KUPPERBERG Is a Comic Book Treasure. Click here.

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PAUL KUPPERBERG was a Silver Age fan who grew up to become a Bronze Age comic book creator, writer of Superman, the Doom Patrol, and Green Lantern, creator of Arion Lord of Atlantis, Checkmate, and Takion, and slayer of Aquababy, Archie, and Vigilante. He is the Harvey and Eisner Award nominated writer of Archie Comics’ Life with Archie, and his YA novel Kevin was nominated for a GLAAD media award and won a Scribe Award from the IAMTW. He also wrote an essay for DC’s Aquaman: 80 Years of the King of the Seven Seas. Check out his new memoir, Panel by Panel: My Comic Book Life. 

Website: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/

Shop: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/shop-1