Cover Art by Tom Grummett and Doug Hazlewood

 

So, there’s been a lot of talk about the plummeting sales of the Big Two, allegedly due to reader fatigue of hollow gimmicks among other things. It could very well be the fact that I work in a bookstore (that shall go unnamed) where I see all manner of marketing mayhem at play, but I don’t feel as though we’re quite at the point of ridiculousness that would cause so many to jump ship. We get a lot of old comics coming through the store. Some are worthless, some are intellectually intriguing, others are rare, but I can say with certainty that there is simply no era of comics more outlandish and uninspired than the 90’s. But it’s not the shoulder pads, the pouch laden outfits or even Rob Liefeld that make readers shudder when they think of this time period. It’s the plastic. See, the dread of the 90’s came with the advent of the collectible comic shop. You see, we’re talking about an era of excess that included Vanilla Ice, excessive color palettes, Hype Williams and just about everything we hated about (then named) Puff Daddy. Comics went through something of an economic hemorrhage from trying to justify itself, selling somewhere around 3 million comics to an audience of maybe 500,000 readers. This included variants, reprints, special embossed covers, etc. In other words, on any given month, you had publishers selling a handful of comics in several different ways. The worst part? All the plastic.

For some reason, the more plastic you wrapped around a comic, the more people assumed that it was worth a million bucks or that it would be one day. That’s why, for me, this week’s pick for Weekend Coverage sums up everything you need to know about the 90’s worthlessness. It’s this one comic that came in all the time for my first few years at the store. Usually, it had been opened, read and placed back in the polybag in the hopes that a collector won’t notice and they can still get a million dollars for it. In most cases, they walk out sorely disappointed.

It’s not important for me to tell you how The Adventures of Superman #500 was a pretty good way to follow the Man of Steel’s death and had something to do with him reuniting with his late father in the afterlife or that, when you take the time to read it, it’s actually pretty good. The highlight of this pick is that it’s double layered in 90’s worthlessness. First, it’s wrapped in a white polybag (the Platinum Edition had a black bag) with the “S” on the front. Then, in case the thing didn’t feel waxy enough, the cover itself is Superman reaching out for the afterlife (or possibly reaching out from it, I dunno) and when you peel back the “removable translucent cover”, it ends up being an optical illusion of Pa Kent’s arm reaching back. This means there’s one version in which Superman is reaching out for nothing for reasons unknown. This was what people paid three bucks (astronomical price for a comic at the time) for. When comics reach the point again when they’re hocking that much nothing for that much money, I’ll believe readers pulling out on account of gimmicks.

---

Until then, bring on the Skottie Young alternates, I say!