] type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Super DC Giant #26 - Aug. 1971

sgComics Weekend Super DC Giant starring Aquaman!

Super DC Giant was an ungainly-titled series that ran from 1970 to 1976. and was devoted almost entirely to reprint collections--The House of Mystery, Brave and the Bold, Supergirl, Young Love, Jerry Lewis, and even Binky all got their shot at an issue devoted entirely to them, some of them featuring astonishingly beautiful original covers (check 'em out for yourself).

So its way cool of course that Aquaman got his own special, featuring some classic stories plus one very original addition (which we'll get to in a moment).

Behind the serviceable cover by Dick Giordano is a very spiffy table of contents:

sg
I want to profile all these stories in their original form, so I won't be getting into the details of each story here. But I can't pass up posting the beautiful splash pages, all of them by the awesomely talented Ramona Fradon:
sg
sg
sg
sg
sg
(Please ignore the last splash page's credit box, crediting the art to "Romana Fradon")

So these are all great stories, a lot of fun, and of course feature superb artwork. But DC had two pages to fill, so they gave us this unique little treat:
sg
sg
...an Aquaman prose story, written by Steve Skeates, no less! How cool.

As far as I know, this is the only such prose story Aquaman has ever been featured in (I know that comics in the 40s, 50s, and 60s regularly featured text stories, but I don't think they ever featured the characters from the comic portions of the books themselves, and even if they did, I'd bet Aquaman was never the star of one).

Its a charming little extra DC threw in--as if five Ramona Fradon Aquaman stories for 25 cents wasn't a good enough bargain!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have this book. I love the Human Flying Fish.

Luis said...

This book looks fantastic. That Aquagirl story looks cool!

Richard said...

I can't figure out how I never knew this existed, especially when it falls in the middle of my peak comics reading era! And what a find in that Skeates prose piece.

Is it pervy that I find the first Aquagirl really hot?

rob! said...

Is it pervy that I find the first Aquagirl really hot?

not at all--the Aquagirl rendered by Ms. Fradon in that one story is, to me, one of the most alluring images of women ever in comics.

i plan to get the original comic with that story in it asap.

Anonymous said...

Re: Aquaman prose.

There was an Aquaman Big Book Little Book (with text and illustration on alternating pages) published in the 1960s, at the time of the cartoon series. It was entitled "Scourge of the Seas," and was written by Paul S. Newman (a name one associates with Gold Key rather than DC, but then Gold Key and the Big Little Books were both from Western Publishing.)