A Use for Old Cigar Boxes

Yes, my DC Digests, plus a couple Marvels on the right there, fit perfectly into this old Marsh Wheeling cigar box. I've only smoked a couple cigars in my life, but I do feel I'm getting to the age now where I could smoke a cigar and not look too silly, I mean any sillier than anyone smoking in this day and age. I could also wear a trenchcoat now and not look like a putz, so yes, I could be Columbo if I wanted. But I digress. I love those DC Digests from the late seventies and early eighties. There was a time where it was the easiest way to read classic stories from the Silver and even Golden Age. I've got a bunch of "theme" Superman ones (vs. aliens, Kryptonite, Lex Luthor, etc.) Plus Metal Men, Supergirl, and a few others. They made a bunch. I pick 'em up when I see 'em. Some day I may need a bigger cigar box. The one on the far left is an Archie's Mad House, I love the crazy stories they had in those. On the far right are Fantastic Four, with a reprint of the first six issues of their title, and the Hulk, with six issues of his original series, which I really like and from where Peter David derived the "Grey Hulk" for his run, the smarter, nastier version of the Hulk, though in that digest he's coloured green in all issues. I used to have a Captain America digest, but I think some nefarious villain scooped it. I'm sorry about that because I like early Jack Kirby Cap stories from the Silver Age, they had that tragic quality of his being a man out of his time. They also had some of his two fisted Golden Age tales as well, if I recall.

In my other comic news, today I finally completed my run of DC Challenge!, with issue 12 arriving in the mail. I also received a worn copy of Phantom Stranger #1 and Superboy #87 featuring the first appearance of Thought Beasts, those wonderfully impractical Kryptonian monsters. I'm not buying back issues for a while until I finish a stack I'm still working through. I'll probably be sharing some highlights, coming up.