The first random year up to take a look at is 1988! Let's find out what the kids were reading back then, while they waited in anticipation for what Santa would bring them.
Why it was Alpha Flight #55!Since all the other bloggers are doing it, I tried to find a Christmas cover for the books released this month, but came up empty. But hey, this one's got snow on it so I'll count that as a win!
And with the big armored guy's color scheme, if you squint your eyes hard enough you can almost pretend that it's Santa in his Santa Armor variant costume battling the dreaded Lump-o-coal-a-saurus.
My apologies if I offended any Alpha Flight fans for not knowing who the big robot is, but at least I didn't just assume it was Iron Man, eh? Even consulting comicbookdb.com wasn't much help, but I did notice that Jim Lee did the pencils on this issue, with inks by Tony DeZuniga. That's a combination I wouldn't mind seeing, so perhaps a special trip to the LCS is in order.
So that was 22 years ago, what about 39 years ago? A quick trip to 1971 and once again, there was nary a holiday cover to be found. This Christmas theme blogging is hard, so it looks like I'll have to cheat again.
Don't look too closely, but I'm pretty sure that's the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future on the cover of The Avengers #85, celebrating the birth of baby Jesus under the glistening Star of Bethlehem!Enough with the holiday shenanigans, let's get to picking the next random book to review. Take it away, Randomizer...
...and that book is Batman #603 from July 2002, published by DC Comics!Check out the pedigree of the creators on the cover. That's Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips!
The very same Brubaker and Phillips of Criminal and Incognito fame. I knew that they had worked together previously on the two Sleeper series, but this issue predates even those. Little did we know at the time that we were witnessing the birth of a classic creative team.
It should be interesting to see their take on the Batman, especially after the body of work that they have accrued in the meantime. It almost makes up for the fact that we have to review part eleven of an eighteen part storyline!
See you in a day or two for the review.
The big robot is Box (Madison Jeffries) when he was a serious butt-kicker.
ReplyDeleteRoger
Box! That's right. I vaguely remember him now. Thanks for the info.
ReplyDeleteI did find this issue of Alpha Flight at my LCS this week for a buck, so I picked it up. I may take a deeper look at it for the blog, but I'm not sure how much posting I'm going to do over Christmas, so maybe...maybe not.