Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Wayne Boring — Superman Powers Up

Superman Daily Strip, September 29, 1965

Classic Superman artist Wayne Boring provides us with an excellent and rare daily strip at the end of Superman’s 27-year newspaper run.

The excellence is obvious; Superman uses three different super powers in each of the three panels. 

Rare because, well, pretty much the same reason: Many, many strips from this period only feature Clark, Lois or other characters in “civilian” garb, with soap opera style plots and stories. In other words, there are many strips where Superman is nowhere to be found.

In fact, in the 80s, Boring would often Remarque those “plain” originals with a Superman figure to make them more desirable in the collectors market.

But of course, no need to add an “extra” Superman here. He’s doing just fine in this good-looking example.

We managed to collect most of the Superman strips at IDW and LOAC, but couldn’t find any collectors with complete runs from the earliest silver age period. (Late 50s.) That era of strips includes the introduction of a Brainiac prototype (“Romado”) drawn by the great Curt Swan.

Al Plastino — Batman’s Watery Doom!

Batman Daily Strip — July 8, 1969

Bat sheets. Bat soap. Bat pajamas. Bat-a-rangs…

As nearly any pop culture fan knows, (especially — ahem — older ones like myself) the hugely successful camp 1966 Batman TV show launched a plethora of bat merchandise.

So it’s no surprise that DC launched a revival of the Batman comic strip, which had a successful, but brief run in the Golden Age.

The daily strips initially mimicked the campiness of the TV show, but ultimately moved closer to more traditional DC superhero stories, as did the comics after the show was cancelled in early 1968.

Al Plastino handled the art chores for many of the strips, following Sheldon Moldoff and Joe Giella.

The strip managed to soldier on until early 1973. Finally managing to collect all of them — the dailies and Sundays — into a three-volume LOAC series was an archival highlight of mine at IDW. 

(It only took five years or so to convince DC to let us do it. Perseverance won the day.)