In 1992, Horror of Horrors!

Yep, Ol' Supes was slated to croak.  And it was serious business, baby!

Thanks, DC -- "No comment"!

Well, we all know how this horror of horrors turned out.  Who would've believed that for all those 50+ plus years, the Anti-Humanite had REALLY traded his/her brain with Superman's!  And that Green Lantern's Power Ring's vulnerability to yellow things could somehow interact with Gold Kryptonite and switch Superman's brain out of the A-H's un-super human body, and into a cloned replica from the 1960s.  That backup clone of himself that Superman made back in 1961, before entering the Phantom Zone for the first time, really came in handy!

And I, for one, didn't expect that the mind transfer would somehow erase all of the crap from John Byrne's reboot!  It's a good thing that Alan Moore was willing to rescue the Action Ace!  And the combo of Curt Swan and Wayne Boring alternating issues was a jolt, but a great salute to history!

What do you think about the way they brought Superman back?

  

More Ado About Holmes

As a combination clipping bureau and packrat, I accumulated these advertisements and articles about that ol’ Consulting Detective of Baker Street.

            A previous post about some other Holmesiana is here.

             When the public learned about the infamous 18-minute gap in Nixon’s secretly recorded White House tapes, speculation abounded as to the topic.  Aliens?  Pot-roast recipes?  Jimmy Hoffa?

            Well, a smart aleck named Stefan Kanfer decided to corral history’s most famous detective and sic him on the case.  Kanfer does a cute job of looping in England’s 1970s socialism, the Energy Crisis, and ... read for yourself!

            Of course, just because Holmes solved the case, that doesn’t mean he will tell us...

            Later that year of 1974, Nick Meyer’s masterful pastiche The Seven-Per-Cent Solution rated this review from Time.

            A couple of years later, the film adaptation was surveyed by Newsweek.

            And similarly in a review published in the Tulsa World, the day after Christmas, 1976.

         

 Holmes and Watson were sufficiently well-known to plug cars on TV and in print ads.  Even the tracking dog Toby (from The Sign of the Four but resurrected by Meyer in Seven-Per-Cent) makes an appearance!

           When Meyer’s sequel, The West End Horror, arrived, the paperback rights were snapped up by Ballantine, who took out the above ad in Publishers Weekly to lay out their publicity campaign.

             Well, that’s it for this collection of stuff exhumed from books.  See you next time!