Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery
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Action Comics # 855, October 2007
Geoff Johns, Richard Donner and Eric Powell creating a multi-part Bizarro story?
Sign me up.
Spoiler alert: It’s absolutely terrific — fun and affectionate — start to finish. Powell knocks the art out of the park. Many mainstream superhero readers tracked down Powell’s Goon series after they saw this.
You can bet the farm — Kent’s or otherwise — on that.
One final time — Happy Halloween, 2024!
Action Comics #422, March 1973 (Human Target back-up feature)
Here’s a terrific Dick Giordano action page from the origin story of the Human Target, published shortly after the character’s introduction in a back-up feature in Action Comics 50 years ago.
And although uncredited, I’m pretty sure I see some light ghosting from Dick’s pal, Neal Adams, in a few places along the way.
Regardless, it is yet another example of a DC Bronze-age series that remained uncollected for decades. After three (!) TV iterations of the character, you would think our friend Christopher Chance deserved a TPB. But, finally in 2019, the complete early stories appeared in a best of Len Wein collection. (Len wrote all the original stories.)
Welcome to Day Six of the 12 DC Days of DeCember.
Action Comics #407, December 1971
I rarely get into bidding wars over a specific piece of art. As a well-know art dealer intones: “There’s always more art.”
This time, though, I got carried away.
Superman in space. Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson. Superman in every panel. A title page. An original Superman logo. And my peak era of buying comics from newsstands (late Silver Age, early Bronze age) without the benefit of comics conventions.
That is a lot of checkboxes. So, like I said, I got carried away.
Overpaid — but worth it.
Plus — and I love this — it has a Looney Tunes type joke in the monolugue. He made a wrong left turn a million miles ago? Seriously?
Action #592, September 1987
John Byrne provides a terrific page from about the halfway point in his re-boot run of Superman.
(And no mainstream character was more in need of a reboot in the mid-80s than Superman.)
John of course provided nearly everything here: Story, script, pencils and inks. Keith Williams adds the background inks on buildings and such.
Byrne? Superman in every panel? That’s a keeper.
Action Comics #406, November 1971
Our third annual Halloween tribute continues now through October 31.
Remember that time hat Superman lost his head?
You don’t?
I do, and I was pleased to see this page come up at auction earlier this year.
I was mostly done with the Superman Family by the time this issue appeared in 1971, but occasionally something off the wall (pun NOT intended — this time, anyway) would grab my attention, and this was one of those issues.
It’s rare (although not impossible) to find a title page that has such a literal cover interpretation, and of course the fact that it was drawn by the great Superman art team of Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson is a giant selling point for me.
Also rare: The cover is taken from the back-up story instead of the main feature. Obviously, someone at DC knew how to grab attention — at least mine, anyway.
Fun fact: On both Superman stories in this issue, the “Swanderson” art team gets top billing in the credits. They deserved it, as the art was light years ahead of the story material.)
