Friday, 23 May 2014

THE SUPER HEROES COVER & IMAGE GALLERY - PART ONE...

Images copyright DC COMICS

When The MIGHTY WORLD Of MARVEL came out towards the end of 1972, I considered it the natural successor to the POWER COMICS of the '60s, which included WHAM!, SMASH!, and FANTASTIC, amongst others.  Likewise, when The SUPER HEROES first appeared in 1980, to me, it was the successor to SUPER DC, published in '69/'70.  The editor of The Super Heroes was VANESSA MORGAN, who sadly passed away from cancer just recently.  Although I never met nor spoke with her - or, indeed, can't recall ever seeing her name attached to any other mags - I thought I'd run a cover gallery in tribute to her, seeing as she was responsible for one of the fondly remembered periodicals of my long-vanished and sadly-missed youth.

Some startling cover art awaits you, but as you study it, give a thought to Vanessa - after all, she was the person responsible for commissioning it.  And don't forget to rejoin us for part two.
















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9 comments:

  1. Anonymous23 May 2014 at 22:47

    I've mentioned before how I never saw any DC comics on sale and here's another example - never seen this before at all. However by mid-1980 the only UK mag I was still reading was the Conan monthly as I'd defected to the U.S. Marvel imports by then so even if I had seen this I wouldn't have bought it.

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  2. Kid23 May 2014 at 23:28

    It was a great little mag, CJ. I'm glad I never missed it 'cos it had some great stories in it.

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  3. Dougie24 May 2014 at 10:30

    I wish I had bought more of these at the time but I found them hard to find.

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  4. Kid24 May 2014 at 11:11

    Maybe they were sold out in your neck of the woods, Dougie, because they were so popular? I don't recall ever having any difficulty in finding them in any of my local newsagents. There were only 19 issues, so you can set yourself the quest of tracking down a complete set.

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  5. Unknown24 May 2014 at 12:45

    This was a great and very underrated wee magazine, loved the covers mostly by (I think) Alan Craddock. Although it was well distributed I found the second volume set of 7 issues harder to track down and missed a couple of them. I think they published this to coincide with the Superman 2 movie release and it seemed to do really well at the time. However I always thought it struggled after that as Superman 3 took nearly 3 years to come out after movie -(well that's my detailed economic analysis at any rate).London editions published some really nice DC books (DC Action etc) in the early 1990s but they never really managed to capture the imagination like Marvel did in the UK.

    Although I wasn't that familiar with her work , I was sorry to hear about Vanessa Morgan passing (that disease is sod)

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  6. John Pitt24 May 2014 at 13:10

    I, too, regarded these as the successor to Super DC and I put this mag on a par with MSHM. I think I used to have the complete set, so it's going to be nice to see them all again.
    The only other UK DC comics I ever came across were Supes & Batman pocketbooks and a short- lived weekly or fortnightly comic for both heroes. Although there were annuals as well.

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  7. Unknown24 May 2014 at 13:17

    For anyone trying to get a complete set of this book , I seem to recall that along with the 19 issues of the monthly mag, there was also at least one annual.

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  8. Kid24 May 2014 at 13:22

    I bought #7 in Sperrings in Southsea (just off Boulton Road) when I was living there in 1981, McScotty, and it's a Superman 2 Special Movie issue. I actually saw the film in the main Portsmouth cinema, but I wasn't as impressed with it as I had been with its predecessor. The cover on #7 is a belter, so look out for it.

    Yeah, shame about Vanessa - John Freeman's Down The Tubes site does a nice tribute to her, and I was surprised to see just how involved she was with British comics.

    Actually, there were three Annuals and two softcover Specials, McS. I've got the first two Annuals, and used to have the two Specials - only have the first one now, alas.

    ******

    JP, I also bought those pocketbooks, but I was disappointed with them because pages were sometimes edited out of the stories. I've got some of the later London Editions mags in my collection, so no doubt we'll eventually get around to seeing them at some stage.

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  9. Kid30 June 2023 at 01:39

    Update: Re-added the 2nd Special a while back now. Just thought you'd all like to know.

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