I think this one is super cool

Are we sure that is John on the Girls' Romances cover?

Red Skull with the Roman salute!

Classic Jim Aparo cover, I recently picked up a high-grade copy. Not a cheap book. In some ways I prefer Aparo on Batman even over Neal Adams.

Glancing at it, I think you could almost mistake that cover for Neal Adams. Aparo's Batman looks very similar there.

I could never decide if I liked Aparo or Adams better. They are both my faves from back in the day.

I liked them both and both of them are what I would consider "clean" comic artists (as in the way they draw the characters) but Neal's Batman and backgrounds had a slightly more sinister and darker look to them than Aparo's to my untrained eye. Not as murky and scary as Gene Colan but definitely a little more ominous than Aparo.

I was a Marvel Zombie in the mid-80s, and I'd occasionally flip through a DC book like Batman or Superman. I didn't care for Aparo's art at all. It seemed overly stuffy and conservative, like something from the 1960s or 1970s, which reinforced my notion that DC Comics were for older, nerdier people than me. His Batman and Robin always made me think of something that would be on a lunchbox or pajamas.

So it was really weird to see Aparo drawing Robin getting his head bashed in by the Joker in "A Death in the Family." That's the point where I also started seeing DC a bit differently, since that scene was so hardcore. And a year later I was reading Batman and Detective (and Legends of the Dark Knight, gotta get in on that new #1!) along with everyone else when the Batman movie came out. And from there I started reading Giffen's Justice League America and a few other DC titles. And a year later I started hitting the pre-Vertigo DC books like Sandman, Hellblazer, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and Shade the Changing Man.

I did quickly come to appreciate Aparo's clean lines; his art (and Breyfogle's) did appear sort of conservative and old-fashioned, but it also had its own identity distinct from the Marvel stuff I had been reading. DC was classic rock to Marvel's punk and hair metal.

Great story worthy of FF's own title. If you didn't know better you'd think you were reading the FF.

Thank you for that trip down memory lane. I remember loving those as a kid.

I've read that Marvel was trying to trademark the term "Super-Villain" (after their fight with DC and Mego back in the 70s regarding who owned the trademark to "Super Heroes") and publishing Super-Villain Team-Up was one way they tried to establish and keep the trademark. Same with them publishing the below book in the early 80s (no idea if they still own the trademark these days). I remember buying this comic off the newsstand.

Crisis on Infinite Earths was definitely the shakeup DC needed at the time, especially the coup of grabbing Byrne for Superman, but it and Perez cordoning off Wonder Woman meant a new direction for the Justice League/JLI which just fit. And you had all the Charleton characters (and Shazam) fully coming into continuity. But I'm surprised you never read stuff like pre Crisis New Teen Titans, Legion of Superheroes, Omega Men, etc. Those were really dark books at times.

I was barely reading comics pre-Crisis. I think the only one I was reading around that time was Transformers.

I started reading Titans when the "Titans Hunt" arc started. And I never even heard of Omega Men until I found out Lobo had his first appearance in the book.

In the late 1980s, I was really limited to what was available on the spinner rack at the local Kroger, which leaned heavily Marvel. It also wasn't easy to find recommendations for other books. Around 1990, I started getting my books via mail order, which led me into getting into things like Sandman, Grendel, etc.

The Incredible Hulk always had the best covers of any comic or at least I thought that as a kid. Just the green-skinned goliath destroying shit.