Yesterday our copy of Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Chosen Collection—all seven seasons—arrived. (It’s supposedly a limited edition, but I don’t see anything to that effect on our box.) Since we’d been listening to the soundtrack of “Once More With Feeling” on the drive home last night, we immediately put on the episode.
I’ve been slowly working my way through the Comic Cavalcade Archives. I’m determined to read the whole thing, but I have to take it in small doses. Partly the target audience is much younger than me, partly the storytelling (and art) I’m used to is much different, and of course partly it’s a very different time. It was the middle of World War II, and half the stories involved fighting Nazi spies or, in some cases, wreaking havoc in Germany itself. (The Ghost Patrol should have been able to take Hitler out on their own, but they seemed more interested in sabotage and practical jokes.) The original setup for Wonder Woman was that she left Paradise Island to help America defeat the Axis!
The Golden-Age Flash hunt continues. I’m now up to three issues of All-Flash with an issue of Flash Comics on its way. So far I’ve discovered that the Turtle didn’t have a costume the first time he appeared. He was just a guy in a green suit who used slowness against a guy who was used to moving fast. Next up: the original Thorn. I’ve bid on a lot of eBay auctions, expecting to win only a fraction of them. Everywhere else I look online, people are selling collector-grade books at much higher prices. I just want to read the original stories, write down who appears, and scan the occasional panel that I’m going to clean up anyway.
Amazon has finally put a discount on the Golden Age Flash Archives vol.2, so I’ve pre-ordered it. While there I looked around on my wish list and noticed that the Mirrormask DVD page (which still shows the wrong date) is recommending, “Buy this DVD with Serenity (Widescreen Edition) DVD ~ Joss Whedon today!” That seems like an appropriate pairing!
Yes, yes … all well and good that Jay Garrick is being collected into a handy series of archives …
But I’m just waiting for DC to collect issues leading up to the “Trial Of The Flash,” the final run of the Flash with Carmine Infantino as Barry Allen’s penciller.
Funny you should mention that. That’s how I ended up collecting Barry’s series. I wanted to read that final storyline, so I started hunting for issues from around 320 onward. There were a few I couldn’t find for a while. This was pre-eBay, so I was still driving around to various stores and scouring the dealers’ booths at Comic Con. At some point I decided to pick up some earlier issues, and eventually decided to see if I could track down the whole series.
Back to Jay Garrick’s run, I hope they speed things up soon. At this rate (each archive holding 15-17 stories at 13 pages each, with 6 years between archives, assuming 3-4 single-length stories or one triple-length story per All-Flash) it’ll be 66 years before they finish!