Jesus, that's a terrible cover. "Run in my tights!"??? I actually went and looked it up just to confirm it was real.

And Batman seems to be getting his ass kicked a lot around that time...here are the cover preceding and after that issue.

Remembering this Earth 1 and Earth 2 crossover. Thanks 😊

I;d never heard of The Question character by Ditko

It was a comic I loved as a kid and reread it so many times because I had zero idea what Earth 1 and Earth 2 were at the time. I was so confused, but I found it fascinating as well.

I grew up on those annual Justice League crossovers.

Even Iron Man somehow looks like he is smiling.

Love Love Love the JLA JSA crossovers. (Which is why my favorite crossover is JLA Avengers and the associated compendium).

It was the former JLA JSA crossovers and the All Star Squadron title that helped me follow the story here.

The one that blew my mind was the one on Earth 3 with the Crime Syndicate, the JLA-equivalent villains with dumber names.

^Do you remember the specific issue? Was just curious. Would like to look it up.


Did anyone have any of these oversized newsprint editions like the one below. I had a well-worn couple of this and some others and read the crap out of them. Even though I really enjoyed this one, it never led me to seek out any more Dick Tracy stuff though.

I had an oversize hardback book of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century that I read a lot. The collection I really devoured was Batman From the '30s to the '70s.

The Crime Syndicate first appeared in Justice League of America #29 (1964).

Did you read the JLA / JSA / Legion Of Superheroes crossover. It has 2 earths and time travel.

I have that one (in very nice condition, too!) and most of the oversized books. The ones I'm missing are mostly the Rudolph/Christmas books.

As for Dick Tracy, I picked up a few comics during my younger days of collecting, but never got into needing to find more.

I too am missing the Rudolph treasury editions. I'd love to have them. As far as the Dick Tracy volume goes, I love it. It's been a long while since I read it but, if memory serves, it features the Flattop story where he hides in a chimney, gets covered in soot and honey (there was a bee's nest in the chimney) then goes to a street vendor selling a miracle cleaning liquid. Only the guy's a snake oil salesman and it's just gasoline. He tells the guy to clean his coat, the guy tries to tell him it's just gas, but Flattop forces him to do it anyway. Obviously it doesn't work so Flattop pours it on the guy and burns him alive. Gruesome in in the Dick Tracy tradition but it was new to me at the time and I was hooked.

This mini-series was at the height of my comic book collecting. I was around 16 when it hit, and I tried to collect it and all the tie-ins because I liked Legends and Crisis a lot. Thus...it also led to my downfall with comic collecting. Just wasn't an interesting story with too many tie-ins that seemed to be trying to jumpstart floundering series or get you to buy new ones. This reason along with the following: Too many new series. Too many variant covers. Too many issue #1s! Too many uninteresting or non-essential tie-ins.

If you no longer regularly collect, what was your series or downfall issue?

The creation of Image comics, compounded by the constant gimmicks you mentioned, which every company was indulging in to a dismaying degree, and apparently still are! As someone who solely followed a tiny handful of more-or-less veteran artists from whom I’d learned to draw (primarily Byrne and Perez), and because those artists were getting a bit long in the tooth after their 70’s/80’s heydays, I just went cold turkey until the current omnibus era allowed me to collect books themed specifically on those artists. And now I’m basically finished with those, too. Some of those very first Image editions had some impressive artwork at first glance, but it quickly became apparent they were mostly about endless static splash pages and weak storytelling. For me, seeing those clowns become millionaires for essentially doing so little was the final straw. (and yes, I fully expect longer-term Image fans here to roast me but by the time that company broadened its scope and respectability over the years, I was too long gone to care). 1992 was when I’d had enough, so relative early in the overall industry decline, thankfully.

This was basically Secret Invasion before Secret Invasion. And the repercussions were basically the New Guardians who were summarily forgotten by all (though I did like that there were multiple Asians on the team (and an Inuk), even if Ram was a little bit too on the nose for an electronic dude)

There are a lot of great artists/runs you missed out on though (most of which have nothing to do with Image creators, though I will defend the Lee/Silvestri X-men to my deathbed).

I don’t doubt that!

As I mentioned, though, a lot of that was simply too late, or happened later, and I wasn’t willing to follow ‘hot’ new artists/characters for very long in such an overcrowded and increasingly unpredictable marketplace. I was out. I did grab the first few issues of Jim Lee’s X-Men run because that was in 1991, apparently – and his artwork by then had shown remarkable improvement over his shitty early gigs – but then I caught myself thinking about all the connecting covers of the first issue I raced to buy like everyone else, and the seed was planted.

I’ve popped into comic shops and new and used bookstores constantly over the years and have flipped through countless single issues, trades, omni, whatever looks interesting, and while there appears to have been no end of phenomenal works created in the decades since I got out, nothing has ever pulled me back in. It’s beautiful stuff to look at, and maybe even impeccably well written over the long haul, but i think comics simply inspired me creatively, and into a creative career, until they were simply no longer required. I’ll confess to being something of a fair weather fan, and all the early 90’s gimmicks (Crossovers! Multiple covers! Foil! Trading cards in bags! Printed Bags!) made it easy to graduate to being a casual bookstore skimmer ever since.

And all through my time with comics, I was also a movie fan and burgeoning collector, so ultimately the latter won out.

This lasted only three issues and I had all three as a kid. I really need to go back and watch the series. I wonder if it is just cringe, it if holds up or if it is still fun to watch?

I remember that The A-Team 1 issue well, it was always found in those comic assortment packs you found at Pic N Save (Big Lots). I also seem to remember that for a period of time Web Of Spider-Man 1 was also considered very much a common comic book that you would find it those plastic multi-comic packs that also contained The A-Team 1. I probably picked up quite a few of those packs while my parents were in the store and I was looking for something that caught my eye. The comic packs and interestingly enough, Star Wars toys/sets Big Lots had on their shelves for a time also drew my eye. In fact, I seem to remember that even though some of the Star Wars stuff ended up at what is now Big Lots, that my parents were able to get me a treat, or gift certain Star Wars box sets, but the At-At Walker that was so large was still out of my parents price range for a bit of time there (I think it was priced at $50, so it was a very expensive toy to buy anywhere else).

Folks, if you are all...dude, there was no At-At or similar Star Wars toys on the shelves of Pic N Save, you might be right and I could be misremembering that I saw the toy at Toys R Us or KB toys (I still miss the store that was in the Northridge, CA mall for so many years) and it was unattainable to me at the time I was a kid. I still feel that a lot of my Star Wars stuff came from the shelves of Pic N Save/Big Lots.

Sorry for the thread drift, but I can't be the only one who was kicking himself that at one point I probably owned several Web Of Spider-Man 1 issues due to its inclusion in comic multi-packs and could only wish I had enough of a clue to keep them and not just sell them for quick cash on a site like eBay back in the day. Even ungraded, a high condition issue is probably worth over a hundred easy, and to think that it was considered so common and easily available to buy that it was thrown in a comic multi-pack.

The 1996 Onslaught event. I was 38 and had been reading/collecting since 1965 when I was 7. I stuck around for a few more Spider-Man issues to see what happened with Mary Jane being pregnant. Last new issue I bought/read had the old lady mid wife stealing the baby and giving it to Norman Osborne/Green Goblin then telling Peter and Mary Jane the baby was dead. Whatever happened with that?
Nowadays I collect Omni and TPB collections of silver and bronze age stuff.