fujishig

The 80 page giant is this one here:
http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Legends_of_..._Giant_Vol_1_2

really the Art Adams Challengers of the Unknown story sold me on it, but Levitz/Immonen on Legion didn't hurt. Going by the Beast Boy story, this was published right after JLA vs. Titans, so that was quite a while ago, but they are short, standalone stories for the most part.

Adam, you are really tempting me to go back and pick up more from the sale before it expires... and I just spent a bunch of money on a Fraction Uncanny sale last week. Even at 99c, comics are some of the most expensive purchases on my iPad/iPhone...

Adam Tyner

I don't know what my final tally was exactly, but I think I might've bought 18 LSH comics this weekend from that sale.

I picked up the Great Darkness Saga and all but a couple of the vintage Adventures. I first got into the Legion from whatever I could find in quarter/fifty-cent-bins in the late '80s/early '90s, and...well, those issues were never in there.

PhantomStranger

It pains me to read someone would buy the Great Darkness Saga digitally when it is available as an amazing hardcover.

davidh777

Heck, I've bought GDS once in floppies, once in TPB, and once in HC and I'm still thinking about getting it here for the portability.

Adam Tyner

I'm normally print-or-die when it comes to comics. I was eyeing that collection for a while, but...did it get delayed or something? I'm not sure I even knew that it came out. (Edit! Yeah, when the Prologue to Darkness TPB was scuttled, I missed the news of the HC reissue.)

The hardcover has more to it than the 6 issues Comixology put out, so I still might pick up the HC at some point.

PhantomStranger

It came out in an awesome deluxe edition. There is even a follow-up deluxe edition of the subsequent issues after the Great Darkness Saga called The Curse. Both are currently available and some of the best hardcovers DC has released in the past few years.

davidh777

Great Darkness deluxe is indeed awesome. It has so many more issues than the original TPB that set up the whole saga. I got The Curse too and have read part of it--got a little bogged down perhaps because the issues weren't as familiar to me. I haven't read most of these issues since the floppies were new so it's a real trip down Memory Lane.

davidh777

I ended up too late on the comixology deal, but I liked scrolling through the available titles. They even had some of the Khund War issues that I finally picked up on floppy a couple years ago when I gave up hope that they would ever resume that HC Archives series (now that they have, we're still a while away from that). I might end up getting a few of those or the classic adventures eventually at the $1.99 price, even though 0.99 tends to be my selling point for digital/app items.

davidh777

Finally got around to finishing The Curse. Not only were the issues distant memories, but the final ones weren't familiar at all, so that might have been right about the time when I stopped buying comics. I liked the issues in general, but they weren't as good as Great Darkness. There was one four-issue arc that was intended to be a similar type of event, but it just kind of fizzled out. Kind of nice to see some Curt Swan art.

My Archives #13 is supposed to arrive tomorrow!

davidh777

I get some comfort from the fact that Archives #13 is using the same cover style as the previous archives. It'll look good on the shelf with the others.



Yeah, it does look a little creaky, and I'd sort of gotten used to the cover Amazon has been showing me for months.

PhantomStranger

That Amazon mockup cover looked much better.

davidh777

It definitely looks like a cover they'd use for a trade these days, while maintaining the Archive look looks like it goes back a decade or two. Marvel Masterworks look better but those have been redesigned along the way.

Anyway, I just finished the book and enjoyed it, though it certainly is what it is. A lot of these I'd read in floppies, most not since the '80s, and there were a few that were new to me. The first issue was Shooter-Grell, but then it's all Paul Levitz with most pencils by James Sherman and others like Mike Nasser. Based on where we left the last Archives so many years ago, I wasn't really expecting a whole lot here, but the stories were not too bad, and there are some hints leading up to Earthwar, which is the run I'd really like to get in a reprint. Sherman is nothing special, but he's fine, and makes good cheesecakey use of those '70s costumes.

The 59.99 list price is pretty insane for 11 issues, though granted some of them are 60-centers (that's where Nasser often comes in, as the penciller of a backup story). Still, that comes to 250 pages. The Curse deluxe edition was $50 list for 500 pages, and the Great Darkness was $40 for 400. I know I've been hoping for them to resume this series for a long time so I'm glad they did and I got this installment, but I think they need to reevaluate the pricing compared to some of their other trades, especially since those deluxe editions are nearly the same era.

davidh777

Forgot to mention that issue 228 promises the death of one of these characters:

Superboy
Chemical King
Chameleon Boy
Shadow Lass
Light Lass
Colossal Boy
Timber Wolf

(You'll notice that Saturn Girl, prominently featured on the cover below, was not listed on the issue's roll call even though she was in fact on that mission.)

fujishig

I give up, is it Superboy that dies?

davidh777

Damn it, fujishig! Use spoiler tags!

PhantomStranger

The price was so high I passed on it and canceled my pre-order. Apparently DC has to pay out the nose for royalty rates from this era, depending on the creative talent involved. Grossly overpriced but I guess DC doesn't think there are many added sales at lower pricing levels.

davidh777

Yeah, I've read about that, though I forget if there's a certain cutoff. A lot of the '70s-'80s stuff I read is around this cusp so it's a bit frustrating.

I'm such a moron for getting choked up rereading the story of Ferro Lad.

mrhan

It's actually the cover to issue #231. Grell was still doing the cover art after he stopped doing the interiors. The interior art was credited to James Sherman and Jack Abel but a few pages were actually done by Mike Nassar in which he mimics Neal Adams' style. They neglected to put his name in the credits.