In March of 1962, a child could walk into a drugstore, hand over twelve cents, and carry home a comic book on which the President of the United States, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mantle, and Jerry Lewis appear as Halloween masks worn by imperfect duplicates of Superman.
That is the actual premise. The Bizarros — chalk-skinned, backwards-speaking, running on a logic that inverts every sentence they utter — decide to frighten Krypto the Super-Dog by dressing as the four most recognizable faces in American life. Curt Swan and John Forte drew it perfectly straight. Nobody winks.
It is a strange and wonderful artifact, and it has become stranger with time. Monroe died that August. Kennedy died the following November. Neither event was imaginable to the person who approved this cover, and the comic carries no knowledge of what was coming. It is a document of a particular five months in the American imagination, preserved by accident inside a Superboy title.
Jerry Siegel — who created Superman a quarter century earlier and was by 1962 a working writer on the character he’d invented — supplied the script. Al Plastino and John Forte handled interiors. A Superboy adventure rounds out the issue.
This copy is graded CGC 9.2, Near Mint-, with off-white pages. High grade on early-sixties Adventure Comics is genuinely hard to find; the yellow logo field on this cover shows handling immediately, and most surviving copies show it. This one doesn’t.
Ships in a Gemini graded comic mailer inside a rigid outer box, fully insured, signature confirmation on delivery.
CGC Certification #0187108008 — DC Comics, March 1962 — Off-White Pages
In March of 1962, a child could walk into a drugstore, hand over twelve cents, and carry home a comic book on which the President of the United States, Marilyn Monroe, Mickey Mantle, and Jerry Lewis appear as Halloween masks worn by imperfect duplicates of Superman.
That is the actual premise. The Bizarros — chalk-skinned, backwards-speaking, running on a logic that inverts every sentence they utter — decide to frighten Krypto the Super-Dog by dressing as the four most recognizable faces in American life. Curt Swan and John Forte drew it perfectly straight. Nobody winks.
It is a strange and wonderful artifact, and it has become stranger with time. Monroe died that August. Kennedy died the following November. Neither event was imaginable to the person who approved this cover, and the comic carries no knowledge of what was coming. It is a document of a particular five months in the American imagination, preserved by accident inside a Superboy title.
Jerry Siegel — who created Superman a quarter century earlier and was by 1962 a working writer on the character he’d invented — supplied the script. Al Plastino and John Forte handled interiors. A Superboy adventure rounds out the issue.
This copy is graded CGC 9.2, Near Mint-, with off-white pages. High grade on early-sixties Adventure Comics is genuinely hard to find; the yellow logo field on this cover shows handling immediately, and most surviving copies show it. This one doesn’t.
Ships in a Gemini graded comic mailer inside a rigid outer box, fully insured, signature confirmation on delivery.
CGC Certification #0187108008 — DC Comics, March 1962 — Off-White Pages
