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DC Comics vs. the Real World Part 8: Earth Day
As the Gregorian calendar turned the page from the 1980s to the 1990s, DC’s public service comics continued in the same vein of well-meaning liberalism that Heroes Against Hunger had established. But world hunger was slipping out of fashion. The late 1980s and early 1990s were the undisputed heyday of a certain misguided form of…
Not All Your Power Can Save Them: DC Comics vs. the Real World Part 7
The full-length (or even extra-length) PSA comic really enjoyed its heyday in the 1980s. As we saw in a previous installment, the Teen Titans even did what was effectively a three-issue miniseries about the evils of drugs. And today, those issues are perhaps the most strongly remembered DC Comics PSAs. But while we might often…
Comics You Were Never Supposed To See
In general, the unpublished comics I write about it here comics which were intended to be published and purchased and consumed by readers. But there is a smaller subcategory of comics which remained unpublished because they were never supposed to be published in the first place. We’re going to take a look at a couple…
Belt ‘Em For Safety! DC Comics vs. the Real World Part 6
The 1980s were a busy time for DC’s public service comics. More than that, the decade was really the beginning of the widespread use of full-fledged comic books as PSAs unto themselves, rather than just a one-pager here or there. As we covered last time, perhaps the best-remembered example of this is the three-issue run…
Gordon’s Interspecies Romance: Robin y El Murcielago #6 translated
My ongoing project of translating Robin y el Murcielago, the bootleg Spanish Batman comic from the 1940s, has always been troubled by the weird and pervasive anti-Asian racism running through the books. But folks, I really thought maybe with the fifth issue, Ribera and Fernández had turned a corner, that maybe the racism was being…
The Lurid Insanity of the Batman: The Animated Series Toy Line
This post isn’t actually about unpublished comics, or foreign bootleg comics, or anything else this blog is supposedly meant to cover. But it is, in a sense, about comics that never were, in that it is about toys depicting things that never happened in a comic book, or in any other form of media. Something…
Fighting the War on Drugs: DC Comics vs. the Real World Part 5
Superman wasn’t the only DC superhero dispensing public-service-style justice in the 1980s. In fact, he wasn’t even the most popular one. The 1980s were kind of a weird time in comics. A pretty incredible time, but also weird. The X-Men took the comic book world by storm thanks to writer Chris Claremont’s revolutionary approach of…
The Plot Thickens: Robin y El Murcielago #5 translated
As Robin y El Murcielago, the Spanish bootleg Batman comic, continued to progress, it didn’t move away from its blatant racism so much as soften it. It’s still clearly centered around “yellow peril” fear of the entire Northeastern Hemisphere, but writer Julio Fernández López is no longer giving Asian characters an offensive accent and the…
And now, an unpublished work of Rob Liefeld
Alright guys, time for some real pervert shit. Time to increase the amount of Rob Liefeld art you’ve seen in your life. Look, at this point we’ve all seen that old Progressive Boink post about Liefeld, and if you haven’t, I’m linking to it yet again. The man is bad at comics. But unlike, say,…
Never Say Yes to a Cigarette! DC Comics vs. the Real World Part 4
After a terrifying glimpse at a world in which Superman is committed to putting children in jail and doesn’t care if parents beat up their children, DC’s PSAs regained their footing in the 1980s. First up was a UK-only anti-smoking campaign. This wasn’t the first time a DC character had done a Britain-only PSA. Batman…
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Alex Ross Al Milgrom Al Plastino Al Williamson Ann Nocenti Batman: The Animated Series Bernie Wrightson Chester Kozlak Creig Flessel Curt Swan Dave Gibbons Denny O'Neil Dick Giordano E.E. Hibbard Frank Robbins Frank Springer George Perez Gerry Conway H.G. Peter Howard Mackie Jerry Ordway Jerry Siegel Joe Gallagher Joe Shuster Joey Cavalieri John Rosenberger Julio Fernández López Julio Ribera June Brigman Klaus Janson Marv Wolfman Michael Higgins Mike Kaluta Normal Nodell Paul Reinman Ralph Reese Rick Leonardi Rob Liefeld Ross Andru Shelly Moldoff Stan Kaye Tony Isabella Toys Web of Horror Win Mortimer
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