Scott and Dan hit up the comics racks from 42 years ago…
This week for RETRO HOT PICKS, Scott and I are selecting comics that came out the week of May 13, 1984.
Last time for RETRO HOT PICKS, it was the week of May 6, 1977. 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 10 and May 16.)
Walter Mondale, Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart
So, let’s set the scene: 1984 was a presidential election year and while Ronald Reagan was a sure thing to be renominated for the Republican Party, the Democrats, as usual, were eating each other.
Former Vice President Walter Mondale was the front-runner for the Dems but he still couldn’t shake his challengers. U.S. Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado’s primary performance on May 8 — he had surprise victories in Ohio and Indiana — were an elbow to Mondale’s ribs, preventing him from locking up the nomination. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson also refused to give up his long-shot bid.
Kaufman “wrestling” with Debbie Harry (left) and actress Caitlin Clarke, in 1983.
Andy Kaufman, the bizarre comedian and actor who shot to stardom thanks to his breakout turn as Latka Gravas on the brilliant comedy Taxi, died of cancer May 16 at the age of 35. Kaufman’s penchant for hoaxes, oddball behavior and pushing his routines as far as they could go — alter ego Tony Clifton and his time as a professional wrestler who fought women, among them — led conspiracy theorists to believe he faked his death as part of an outrageously elaborate gag. (In 2013, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office felt obliged to re-release his death certificate to confirm that he was dead.)
The official Andy Kaufman website is a treasure trove of information on his antics and performances.
The USSR had just announced May 8 that it would boycott the 1984 Summer Olympics in L.A., in retaliation for the U.S. doing the same with the Moscow Games of 1980. Anti-Soviet fervor at the time was so great that the decision only served to make them greater villains in eyes of the American public: We knew that we would not be facing the same level of competition, which threatened to put a mental asterisk on the Games.
At the same time, we were aware that the U.S. athletes would probably dominate, which was fun.
IN OTHER NEWS
— On May 12, Nelson Mandela, imprisoned in South Africa, was allowed his first contact visit with his wife Winnie Mandela after 22 years of only being permitted to communicate through windows.
— Nobody beyond family and friends cared at the time, but on May 14, Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist, and his wife, Karen Kempner-Zuckerberg, a psychiatrist, welcomed a baby boy in White Plains, N.Y. He was named Mark.
The No. 1 movie in America — released May 11 — was Barry Levinson’s The Natural, starring Robert Redford, Glenn Close, Kim Basinger, Robert Duvall and an all-star team of character actors, including Wilford Brimley, Richard Farnsworth, Barbara Hershey, Robert Prosky, Michael Madsen, and an uncredited Darren McGavin.
With its admittedly hokey Old Hollywood undertiones — which only made it more captivating — and a particularly memorable score by Randy Newman, I fell in love, hard, with this movie, and saw it many times over while working as a 17-year-old at the Madison Triplex in New Jersey.
It’s succeed-against-the-odds theme resonated with a kid who was just turning the corner on a couple of rough high school years, and set me up for one of the happiest summers of my life. I even quoted it the following year for my senior yearbook profile: “I want to walk down the street some day, and have people say, ‘There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was.'”
I cringe now at how way-too-on-the-nose that was, but at the same time, the line drove me as a young man, and, looking back 42 years, I’m glad it did.
(By the way, the 1952 novel by Bernard Malamud is just as superb. While it follows the same general arc of the movie, it’s very, very different.)
Other big movies included Breakin’; Police Academy; Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (which wasn’t); Moscow on the Hudson; and John Hughes’ first cinematic ode to adolescence, Sixteen Candles.
The TV season was drawing to a close, but even four years after “Who Shot J.R.?,” Dallas was still a ratings powerhouse. Other popular shows included Falcon Crest; 60 Minutes; Kate & Allie; Cagney & Lacey; Simon & Simon; The A-Team; Dynasty; Hotel; and, Magnum, P.I.
MTV drove the music scene and Lionel Richie’s video for Hello was inescapable. Deniece Williams’ Let’s Hear It for the Boy, which was on the Footloose soundtrack, was also a hit (as was the movie’s title song by Kenny Loggins).
Others big-sellers included Against All Odds, by Phil Collins; Hold Me Now by Thompson Twins; Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper; Oh Sherrie, by Steve Perry; You Might Think, by the Cars; and Head Over Heels by the Go-Go’s. On May 16, Prince released the instant smash, When Doves Cry.
Footloose, Michael Jackson’s Thriller; Sports, by Huey Lewis and the News; Van Halen’s 1984; and Run-DMC’s self-titled debut, were among the top albums.
This is what it sounds like, when doves cry…
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Scott Tipton, contributor-at-large, 13th Dimension
The New Teen Titans #1, DC. The first issue of the higher-print-quality, direct-market-only second Titans series, begun at the height of the team’s popularity. I must confess, I always felt that it was kind of over-colored and not as clean-looking as the newsprint title.
Dan adds: I don’t want pile on or anything, but in my mind this marked the long, slow decline of the Titans. The previous month brought us the debut of Nightwing and the conclusion of The Judas Contract, the first series’ highest of high points. This first arc, featuring Trigon’s return, felt a bit like a rehash of his first saga four years earlier. For whatever reason, the magic was ebbing.
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Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #93, Marvel. When I was a kid, I really thought the Answer was gonna have legs as a big-time Spidey villain. Him and the Spot.
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The Defenders #134, Marvel. From Peter B. Gillis and Don Perlin, a decidedly creepy tale of an assassin infiltrating Warren Worthington’s Aerie and murdering the Defenders one by one. Worth seeking out.
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Fantastic Four #269, Marvel. Loving this Byrne cover.
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Dan Greenfield, editor, 13th Dimension
The Best of DC #51, DC. Any Batman-focused digest was a pick-up for me, especially since this was labelled “Batman Family.” Tremendous line-up of reprinted stories, including Batman #232’s Daughter of the Demon and #237’s Night of the Reaper! — both by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams; a Ragman appearance; and Batman Family’s Outsider saga starring Robin, Batgirl and Man-Bat, with art by Marshall Rogers and Don Newton, among others. With a new front cover by Ed Hannigan and Dick Giordano, and Sheldon Moldoff’s famous 1961 Batman Family portrait on the back.
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DC Comics Presents #72, DC. Superman/Phantom Stranger/Joker mayhem, courtesy of our pal Paul Kupperberg and artists Alex Saviuk and Dennis Jensen.
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The Fury of Firestorm #26, DC. I’ve mentioned this before but this was one of the few titles I read that had nothing to do with Batman or his crew.
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Starslayer #20, First. Requisite reminder that the mid-’80s were much more than the Big Two. By John Ostrander, Timothy Truman and Hilary Barta.
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Blue Ribbon Comics #10, Archie. I say this all the time but I really should track down some of these issues. Long been intrigued. Love the Fly.
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Atari Force #8, DC. I’ve never read Atari Force, and wasn’t much of a video-game kid at all — I preferred to spend my money on comics — but this is such a cult-fave series by writer Gerry Conway and penciller Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez (with an assist this ish by editor Andy Helfer, who scripted) that I feel compelled to mention it.
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MORE
— RETRO HOT PICKS! On Sale The Week of May 6 — in 1977! Click here.
— RETRO HOT PICKS! On Sale The Week of April 29 — in 1986! Click here.
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Comics sources: Mike’s Amazing World of Comics and the Grand Comics Database.
May 13, 2026
Hmmm I never thought of the baxter series as the start of the decline (until now). That first issue with Kory and Dick in bed and then the Pics of Raven’s gradual changes in appearance were so shocking to lil’ me but the confusion when George left and lil’ me kept waiting for him to come back.
May 13, 2026
“I don’t want pile on or anything, but in my mind this marked the long, slow decline of the Titans. The previous month brought us the debut of Nightwing and the conclusion of The Judas Contract, the first series’ highest of high points. This first arc, featuring Trigon’s return, felt a bit like a rehash of his first saga four years earlier. For whatever reason, the magic was ebbing.”
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The problem with Titans circa 1984 was that, unlike virtually every other mainstream super-hero title (with the notable exception of Goodwin and Simonson’s Manhunter), the Titans had reached its natural narrative end point. But unlike Manhunter, which was allowed to end as a series, Titans kept being published beyond the point at which there were compelling new stories to tell.
Despite Stan Lee’s oft repeated bromide that super-hero comics should maintain the *illusion* of change while, in reality, perpetuating the unchanging status quo in perpetuity, the Titans actually *did* change over the course of five years. The characters were fundamentally different in 1984 than they were in 1980s.
— Donna had discovered her roots and gotten married
— Dick emerged from the shadow of a domineering father figure and emerged as someone new and different
— Wally realized that he wasn’t cut out for the super-hero game and retired
— Raven slowly evolved into a pseudo-villain before being redeemed in the first five issues of the Baxter series
— Gar grew from an insecure, immature, attention-seeking kid into someone who was forever scarred by the tragic loss of the woman he loved
— Vic came to understand that his transformation wasn’t a curse but actually a gift
— Kory had assimilated into Earth culture
(Brief aside: I began reading comics in July 1984, so two months after the first issue of the Baxter series. So I mostly discovered Titans through back issues over the next three or four years. The issue that actually got me interested in Titans was Tales of the Teen Titans 52, the issue with Cheshire on the cover standing in front of posters of each of the Titans. Somehow I knew that the Teen Titans were the teen sidekicks of the JLA, so seeing this cover on the newsstands confused and excited me. Other than Wonder Girl, I didn’t recognize *any* of these characters. Who were they? So I began a back issue mission to find out who they where and how they got to that point, and what a great journey it was.)
At that point, there was no story left to tell. At the end of the Baxter Trigon story, the Titans had finally graduated from being the second string Junior JLA into a team of grown-up heroes who saved the world all by themselves. How do you follow that up with an encore (a lesson which the MCU is learning the hard way following Endgame)? Metaphorically, it was the equivalent of them graduating from high school after spending four or five years together. But instead of going their separate ways by going off to metaphorical college, DC continued publishing the title and the characters became the equivalent of the kids who can’t quite let go of their glory days in high school and keep hanging around the campus years after they graduated.
In a perfect world, DC would have directly followed up Donna Troy’s wedding in issue 50 with the first five issues of the Baxter series (the Trigon story redux)…and then ended the series. Let the property rest for a while. At that point they could have done one of two things:
Option 1 would have been to essentially do what Mike Baron did with the Flash in 1987: show the characters in new settings after several years of personal growth. And then let these new dynamics play out as each of them realize that they’re not the same people they were three years ago.
Or, Option 2, since the Trigon story more or less coincided with Crisis on Infinite Earths, they should have just done a hard reboot of the Titans following Crisis and retold their story as teen sidekicks from the very beginning but from a different story perspective and with a more modern narrative approach.
If my memory of an almost 40-year-old interview from Comics Interview or Amazing Heroes serves me well, Option 2 was Marv Wolfman’s preferred option at the time but DC management wouldn’t allow him to do that.
Had Titans ended after the second Trigon story, I think the title would be held in the same esteem today that the Goodwin/Simonson Manhunter series is. Instead, I think a lot of people today see Titans as akin to The Simpsons: a series that limped along for decades past its glory years to the point where the glory years have become just a blip in the series’ history and are seen now as being more of an anomaly than the transformative event that it actually was at the time.
May 14, 2026
Brilliant analysis.
May 14, 2026
Thanks for explaining why I lost interest in the TT franchise at that point. I only cared about the “sidekicks” having their own team and by 1984 the new team was nothing like that team. (This is my beef with the end of the 60s title and the 70s title too–way too much development effort on the non-core members.) The new characters in 1980 were good characters, but I didn’t buy the series for them.
Stan Lee was right. Best to not evolve them too much from the premise… Looking at my collection, all my gaps are because editorial changed the characters too much and I only come back when they are close to their original selves (Green Lantern is a good example).
May 13, 2026
You should do an article about the New Defenders covers. There is a number of absolute stunners in there from a variety of A artists.
Hot take: The Titans aren’t very good outside of 50 really good comics from the 80s…and Uncanny X-Men was still usually better.
May 13, 2026
I agree with the first point about the Titans (although with annuals, mini-series, and Baxter series, I’d probably put the number st shout 75 issues). I don’t agree with the second part about the X-Men. I have a DC bias, so take that into account, but every time I’ve tried reading X-Men in the past I’ve always been put off by Claremont’s prose style. Unnecessarily dense and just not my cup of tea. Many others obviously disagreed.
May 13, 2026
I stopped reading X-Men regularly when Jean Grey died the first time. I would check in from time to time, but there was magic in the Claremont/Byrne/Austin issues.
Likewise, the magic of New Teen Titans ended for me with issue #12 of the Baxter series. Such an arbitrary point, I know, but Crisis had begun and change was in the air. My favorite issue of NTT is still #38, “Who Is Donna Troy?” It’s a great reminder of why the series worked.
May 14, 2026
X-Men declined badly without Byrne. I thought the Levitz/Giffen LSH wasthe best superteam book until Giffen left. Titans and LSH were way ahead of post Byrne X-Men for me, because of that Claremont prose,
May 14, 2026
Can’t wait for the new Byrne X-Men from that era when it comes out shortly. I’m hoping it captures much of the old magic.
May 14, 2026
I think time has moved on. It is 45 years ago
May 14, 2026
I stopped reading X-Men about 45 years ago. So it won’t be too shocking to my system. And from what I understand the new stories have been done over the last 5 years or so. In the previews I’ve seen, it looks good. I know Byrne can be a hard nut to crack but I think his pencils are still there. I don’t have to sit down and share a coffee with him. The real difference here from the work he did 45 years ago is he’s now writing the stories and not just co-plotting. We will see.
May 14, 2026
Agreed! I am priming myself for a great, great read!
I’m reading X-Men from 1-up right now. Here’s the reading order:
1. X-Men 1-66. That’s Lee, Kirby, Thomas, Drake, Smith, Steranko, and Neal Adams and Tom Palmer!
2. Then it continues in Byrne’s X-Men the Hidden Years 1-22 with Palmer. What a beautiful run.
3. Then the ‘gap years.’ Blue Beast, etc.
4. The All-New X-Men of Wein, Cockrum, Claremont, and Byrne 94-143. No better run in the history of comics, imo.
5. And now we get to jump into Byrne’s alternate future with Elsewhen! Volume 1 will ship in a few months.
What a treasure!
I wish we could have gotten a “Hidden Years” type JLA run by Perez with alternate issues 233-on of the E1 title. If I ran DC I’d be doing a lot of that these days. Grab Ordway for some more All-Star Squadron. Create an imprint for it.
May 14, 2026
Dan P wrote: “ I wish we could have gotten a “Hidden Years” type JLA run by Perez with alternate issues 233-on of the E1 title. If I ran DC I’d be doing a lot of that these days. Grab Ordway for some more All-Star Squadron. Create an imprint for it.”
I am very much a man out of time when it comes to most entertainment, including comics. DC has teased the original multiverse being among the greater omniverse yet continues to treat Power Girl as if she’s an orphan from Earth-2. What was the purpose of undoing the original Crisis if you’re not going to do something with it? And if the original Crisis was undone, wouldn’t that mean PG was never NOT on Earth-2?
That’s what happens when you mention the possibility of Jerry Ordway doing more All-Star Squadron. I start thinking about stuff like that. Lol
I still enjoy some characters and titles, but I’m not invested in titles for the long haul anymore. No more extended runs of 50 or 100 issues of New Teen Titans or JLA or All-Star Squadron or Legion of Super-Heroes or any other title. No more tracking down back issues when you’d skip a few issues and then decide to go back and get the ones you missed. Unfortunately, for me, today’s comics aren’t as memorable as those from 50 years or so ago.
May 14, 2026
I started losing interest after issue 150 but hung around because I liked the art of Cockrum and Smith. The characters and stories were becoming strange to me. You didn’t miss much story-wise.
May 13, 2026
I always enjoyed the DC Digests and getting to catch up on DC History. The Batman Family digest was the first time a digest featured a story (actually 2) that I had read in a treasury. As enjoyable as the digest was, Neal Adams’s are was more impressive at treasury size.
May 13, 2026
I followed the Titans, but the idea of the Baxter issues jumping ahead, and being reprinted a year later in the rebranded Tales of The New Teen Titans…
Wasn’t Mr. Wolfman reaching a point of “burn-out”? I thought I read that somewhere…