This week’s question: What’s your favorite anniversary issue?
Tim Durkee: I’m glad that this question was given an extra week. I knew I could catch up with my reading and two anniversary issues would be a part of that. First off, I’m very far behind, so please don’t chuckle too loud when tell you I just finished Amazing Spider-Man # 690-700 including every point one and gimmick book in between. For all purposes issue 692 is the 50th anniversary issue, but that was overshadowed by the hype surrounding 700. The cat has been out of the bag for several years now, the question would have it been worth the cover price when first released?
I hate when a character dies in a book, not because my favorite hero or villain has perished, but because they never last. Give it a few months, maybe a year and they are back so I was I was in hurry as I knew what to expect. Did ASM 700 deliver to a reader who is very skeptical of deaths, anniversaries, and gimmicks? It sure did!
For a moment I actually thought this was it, the last story. No more Parker. The way the letter columns were filled it was more like a eulogy page rather that a celebration of one of the greatest super-heroes created. And I am reading this, believing this, knowing what happened. That’s what we call darn good writing, true believers! Now I’m on to Superior Spider-Man, which I stayed away from initially. I’ve never been known to have a favorite anniversary issue, until today.
Mike Sterling: Very early on in my comic collecting
endeavors, I always went out of my way to pick up “special” issues. Extra-sized anniversary editions or annuals
or the large treasury editions, even if they were from series or featuring
characters I didn’t normally follow. There was just something especially
enticing about these, even if the higher pricetags bit into my
funnybook-buying budget. And, in the late ‘70s/early '80s, there was no
shortage of fine books to choose from: Flash #300, detailing the origins
of all the Rogues, Detective Comics #500, a monster of a comic
featuring stories starring not just Batman, but several other characters
featuring throughout the series’ long run.
And then there was Justice League of America #200 from 1982.
A great premise: the founding members of the League have gone out of
control, and it’s up to their latter-day teammates to bring them down.
A great story structure: each confrontation is divided into its own short
chapter, including one splash page punctuating the conflict between the
characters.
A great collection of artists: each chapter is illustrated either by the artist
most strongly associated with the characters involved (such as the Flash
versus the Elongated Man by Carmine Infantino, or the Atom versus Green
Lantern by Gil Kane), or by an artist that is most perfectly suited to
said characters (such as Green Arrow and Black Canary versus Batman as
drawn by Brian Bolland). The artwork for the framing and connective
sequences is by George Pérez, who was then nearing the end of his run as
the regular Justice League artist.
The story, by Gerry Conway, very nicely showcases each major character from
the title’s history, as well as tying the plot into the team's origins. It
is, in effect, a sequel to Justice League of America #9 (1962),
where the League’s origin was initially told. Conway
also contributes an extensive text history of the series on the inside
front and back covers.
This is 72 adless pages of superhero perfection, presenting the almost Platonic
ideal of how each character should be treated. Sure, maybe Pérez isn’t quite
as polished here as he would become in short order, but there’s no denying
his work’s power and enthusiasm. He certainly holds his own with the other
featured artists. In addition to Bolland, Kane and Infantino, there’s Jim
Aparo, and Dick Giordano, and Joe Kubert, and Brett Breeding, and more. If
anyone’s taking suggestions for one of those giant tomes that features
high-quality scans of original art, I nominate this book for the treatment.
Justice League of America #200 is the comic I think of when I think
of superhero comics. It’s the one that reminds me of why I became interested
in superhero comics in the first place. Not that it was my first
superhero comic, by any means, but it still remains, at least to the part
of me that still remembers that youthful thrill of seeing the week’s new
arrivals on the newsstand racks, the best.
Scott Cederlund: My Legion of Super-Heroes fandom started out sporadically. I probably read more reprints of older Legion stories in Adventure Comics or even the old Treasury Editions. There’s one Treasury Edition that reprinted a Mordru story that’s still one of my favorite comic stories. Those old Silver-Age stories were hokey but all of those super-powered kids running in those old fashioned costumes held a wonderful charm over me. That’s probably why I had a problem with some of the more modern (at least modern circa 1983) Legion stories. The characters kind of seemed familiar but with all of their updated, Bronze Age costumes, my mind couldn’t connect those old Legion stories to the current Legion stories.
Legion of Super-Heroes #300 is a suspect anniversary issue because the series continued the numbering of the original Superboy series after it became Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes with issue #197. So maybe the 300th issue of Legion of Super-Heroes is a bit of a stretch but it provided the link for me between the Legion I knew from those old reprints and the modern day Legion as it contained a number of imaginary stories about possible timelines for the Legion, all written by Paul Levitz and drawn by a number of different artists.
Levitz’s story touched on all of the eras of the Legion, all the way back to it’s earliest and corniest days in the late 1950s and 1960s, through the Bronze Age cynicism of the 1970s and all the way through the Keith Giffen technological utopia of the 1980s. These stories were “what ifs,” looking at the decisions that the Legion had made through those years and how they could have been different. And Levitz even framed it through the perspective of the brother of the late Ferro Lad. All of these maybes and could-have-been were told from the point of view of one of the Legion’s first and greatest tragedies.
There’s only a handful of comics from 1983 (or even before that) that I can actually remember buying and reading for the first time. I got the issue from a shop called All American Comics in Evergreen Park, Il, on a summer night. And I read the comic in the lobby of the Christ Medical Center on 95th Street. My father had taken me to the comic shop as a mild bribe before going to visit my grandmother in the hospital. I can remember the lighting still being dim in the waiting area while my father went up to my grandma’s room. I probably went up to her room for a little bit but I was probably quickly allowed to go down to the lobby to read my comics while my dad spent time with his mother.
The comic means as much to me about the contents of it as it does about the summer of 1983 when my grandmother died of cancer. When the question was posed about anniversary issues for this column, I immediately thought of this issue but it took a while to sink in about what the comic means to me and why I still have it in my collection. The comic is full of possibilities and things that never happened in the Legion continuity, but they all could have happened if the writer and artists had made different choices along the ways. For this anniversary issue, Paul Levitz tapped into some of that potential that exists in all comics within the boundaries of continuity.
Joe Gualtieri: This week’s question is borderline impossible. It would have been tough enough if we could pick five, but one anniversary issue? Especially as someone who was a young teen during the prime years of anniversary mania (Marvel made a way bigger deal about the thirtieth anniversaries of their various superheroes than they did the fiftieth), this felt like a nigh-impossible task. Outside of material reprinted in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told (“To Kill a Legend” from Detective Comics #500 is a contender here), my first anniversary issue was likely Detectve #627, celebrating Batman’s 600th appearance in the title (yes, it’s actually his 601st, an error pointed by many letter writers in subsequent issues). It reprinted the very first Batman story, “The Case of the Criminal Syndicate” by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, and a retelling of the story, “The Cry of the Night is- ‘Kill’”, from #387 by Mike Friederich, Bob Brown, and Joe Giella. It also contained two new reinterpretations of that first story by essentially the then-contemporary teams on both Detective and Batman: Marv Wolfman, Jim Aparo, Mike DeCarlo, and Adrienne Roy, and Alan Grant, Norm Breyfogle, Steve Mitchell, and Roy. The Grant/Breyfogle tale was a little gruesome for my tastes at the time, but getting four variations, retold over time, has always left an impression on me as a great way to do an anniversary issue.
My favorite though? In the end, it comes down to two issues,
both from the same storyline, Spectacular Spider-Man #189 (the first of
four issues celebrating Spider-Man’s thirtieth anniversary in 1992, each with a
hologram on the cover, because 1992) and #200. My first Spider-Man comics were Amazing
#347 (Venom!) and Spectacular #175 (Doc Ock!), both purchased from
Robinson’s Convenience Store on the same day because they had villains I liked from Marvel
trading cards. Funnily enough, I came in as a classic creator left, as Spectacular
#175 wrapped up Gerry Conway’s final Spider-Man story-arc (though it was written
by David Michelinie). The next two issues were fill-ins by some guy named Kurt
Busiek, and then in #178, J.M. DeMatteis’s run started with a sequel to his
already legendary Kraven’s Last Hunt, with Sal Buscema on art. Despite
not having read that story, his run worked really for me, in part because the
story was something of a thematic sequel, focusing on Harry Osborn and his
struggles with his father’s legacy as the Green Goblin. By the end of that
initial arc, Harry had fallen to his worse impulses, becoming a villain
again.
After a detour involving the
Vulture, DeMatteis brought Harry back in #189 for “The Osborn Legacy.” Deranged
after using his father’s super-strength formula, Harry kidnaps his own family
and starts psychologically torturing Spider-Man. At the end of the issue,
Spidey actually turns Harry over to the authorities, despite the threat of
Harry revealing his secret identity as Peter Parker. Over the next year, Harry
would occasionally show that he could still reach out from prison, but he was
released in #199. The next issue, “Best of Enemies!” sees Harry up his war
against Spider-Man, his family struggling to deal with his instability and
Harry fighting himself, caught between wanting to do what his evil father would
want and his long friendship with Parker. The issue is tense, and features one
of probably only two scenes returning to the scene of Gwen Stacy’s death that
is actually any good, as Harry takes Mary Jane Parker there to assure her he
will not hurt her. In the end, Peter and Harry come to blows, Harry poisons
Peter and leaves him to die in a death trap before Mary Jane talks him into
going back. Then the super strength formula he used a year earlier turns to
poison and kills him (a simple metaphor, but beautifully done, and perfect for
the genre). Harry Osborn’s death is absolutely stunning, a scene so well done
by Buscema that DeMatteis deviated from his original plans and left the final
pages silent.
Spectacular Spider-Man #200 is everything an anniversary issue should be: it wraps up the current creative team’s story-lines, but beyond that it truly builds on the history of the characters involved. “Best of Enemies” gets its impact not just from the artistry of DeMatteis and Buscema, but from everyone who came before on the Spider-Man comics. It’s a story that demands a mature Spider-Man, and is inconceivable without him being married to Mary Jane. Marvel has, inexplicably, just reprinted parts of it, and the only way that makes sense to me as vindictiveness over how it shows how wrong nearly everything the company has tried to with the character since has been, as Marvel’s flailed about, trying to de-age him, believing kids couldn’t relate to an older, married Spider-Man. *Ahem* Anyway, it also has a foil cover, and being 11 in 1992, I confess to having a weakness for those when they’re well done.
