The official podcast of THE AQUAMAN SHRINE and FIRESTORM FAN
Episode 82 - DC Digests
Let's get small! This week, I am joined by Guest Co-Host Michael Bailey talk about one of our favorite comic book formats from childhood: the DC Digest!
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Opening theme, "That Time is Now," by Michael Kohler. Closing music by Daniel Adams and Ashton Burge of The Bad Mamma Jammas! http://www.facebook.com/BadMammaJammas
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2 comments:
Great show guys! The digests are the backbone of my love for DC. Some of my fondest comic memories come from those DC digests, and I was crushed twice, first when they seemingly went all Superman and Humor, and secondly when they ended all together. My DC Digests still line the front of my bookcase to this day, and I regularly pull them off the shelf and re-read them.
The Marvel Digests were far inferior, just from the production side alone. The DC digests adjusted the text and word balloon size to make them more legible at the small size. Marvel did not, and you can get a migraine trying to read those things. Plus, the printing is 10 times worse than any Charlton comic. Maybe it was the dreaded Flexographic process rearing it's ugly head again.
Chris
I liked black and white reprint magazines okay as a kid, but I never gravitated to digests. With magazines, it was nice to see the images at larger size as pure linework, plus they usually collected several consecutive issues like a baby trade paperback in the days before publishers' programs were in full swing. I also liked paperback novel style reprints, because they kept the panel sizes reasonable and they looked like "real" books in the days when reading comics in public was shameful. Digests betrayed their nature to the judgmental through odd dimensions, slim length, and bright colors, plus they reproduced whole pages at an uncomfortably small ratio.
A few DC Digests have passed through my hands over the years, but the only one I bought on purpose new was The Best of DC #49, a "Funny Stuff" issue. I have no idea what possessed me beyond liking the cover art, but the interiors brought me no great thrill. I was ahead of the curve whenever "Stanley & His Monster" came up from then on, at least.
At least two of the big Houston comic shops have a nice shelf of these types of digests in polybags for $10-25 dollars a piece. They're garnish-- possessed of no legitimate value and a pain to replace, but a draw/conversation piece for visitors. When I bother to visit a brick & mortar, it's to see stuff like that, and not buy any of it. They don't really want to sell them, anyway.
I had a few Treasury Editions, but I hate that format. They're so cumbersome and flimsy! Hardly any of the ones I still have are intact.
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