These were awesome.

Best value in comics, ever.

Still have dozens of these, albeit many of them with the covers torn off, because I didn't know it was illegal for the local drug-store owner to sell them that way.

These started coming out when I was nine years old, replacing the older Treasury format in an attempt to capitalize on the digest market paved by Archie. I didn't have many (any?) of the DC Treasuries when they first came out, but I had a bunch of the Marvel ones. I wish Marvel had switched the digest form, too.

No. 1: Superman (coverdate Oct. 1979)



Reprints:

"Attack by the Army of Tomorrow" - Superman 265 (Elliot S. Maggin, Curt Swan & Murphy Anderson, 1973)
"The Midnight Murder Show" - Action Comics 442 (Cary Bates, Curt Swan & Kurt Schaffenberger, 1974)
"Superman Under the Red Sun" - Action Comics 300 (Edmond Hamilton & Al Plastino, 1963)
"The Adventures of Mental-Man" - Action Comics 196 (Bill Finger, Wayne Boring & Stan Kaye, 1954)
"The Death of Superman" - Superman 149 (Jerry Siegel, Curt Swan & George Klein, 1961)

I learned so much about the DC universe from these titles. Like the Marvel reprint line (Marvel Tales, Marvel Super-Heroes, Marvel's Greatest Comics, etc.) I actually preferred these to the new monthly material being published.

I did, too. My favorite is still one of the earliest ones, a Batman digest with the same cover you were using as an avatar a few months back.

But they were all great. For about a year DC ran Adventure Comics as a digest, reprinting 2 Legion of Super-Heroes stories each month (among other content) and that was my favorite comic at the time. Plus at least for a while DC ran Flash and World's Finest Comics digests, with smaller pagecounts.

They were all magical to me.

My favorite was the Doom Patrol one. Between that, the awesome cover to Showcase 94, and the hunt for the Doom Patrol's killers in New Teen Titans, the Doom Patrol became my favorite DC characters.

I spoke incorrectly. Looking through eBay, apparently there weren't series of Flash and WF digests, but a separate series of digests which at times featured Flash and WF, among others. My apologies.

I have a few of these.

I think I have some more somewhere too; the boy may have them in his room.

How much do you suppose a digest like that would cost if they were still making them? $6-7?

You have the one I posted! (Second from the left!)

I remember buying that Superman blue ribbon digest at the Sunflower grocery in 1979 along with the Super Friends digest and reading them in the car while waiting for my mother to finish buying groceries. I even remember GQ playing on the radio while I read. Good times.

The Archie Double Digest for this month is 160 pgs, 30 lb newsprint, Full-Color, for $3.99 US.
If Marvel and DC stuck to just using repeats, I think they could do reasonably well at $4.99.

But, when Marvel has been doing repeats lately of their Marvel Adventures line, they've
been doing four issues (96 pages) for $6.99. I think Marvel's digests are about 2" taller
though, and about 1/2" wider, and on better paper. I'm all for a smaller format closer to
what Archie does, and cheaper paper, but I don't think most of what Marvel publishes
these days would reduce well to that small size.

The comics in the DC Digests are reduced to a point to being a a bit hard to read, at least to my old eyes. I don't remember this being a problem when I was a kid and got them the first time around.

You and me, too, Trev.
I think that's why marvel makes their digests the size that they do. They aren't marketing
it for kids.

The last DC digest was coverdated April, 1986. Looking at the covers that month, it looks like they may have stopped marketing to kids almost entirely by that point. http://dcindexes.com/timemachine/coverd ... 86&month=4

Outside the Superman covers and the two Roy Thomas Earth 2 books, anyway. Those still look superheroie

Even the last digest doesn't look like it had kids in mind.



Ooo, how EXCITING!

No, but it's one of the few times I can recall being amused by Ambush Bug.
Actually, truth be told, I liked him quite a bit when he first appeared.

I liked him too, back in the '80s

This is awesome. These were my main exposure to DC comics back in the day, because I loved the digest format so much.

I've been considering going on a "hunt" for these and collecting most of them.

I figure I'll do this chronologically. This was DC's second Blue Ribbon Digest.

Jonah Hex and Other Western Tales #1 (coverdate Oct. 1979)

A while back, I went on a Western kick, and comics were a big part of that. I ordered comics ranging from the 1940s through modern times. My favorites overall were the '70s DC material, which seemed influenced by the Spagehtti Westerns, while the rest was more the Gene Autry/John Wayne era. Jonah Hex, both the '70s version and the modern one, were my absolute favorite - what a great character. I highly recommend both the Showcase volume and the first four or five trades of the new series. I'd also discovered the amazing Frank Thorne run on Tomahawk which I think is almost as good as his run on Red Sonja. Sadly, I don't think Tomahawk has been reprinted. Another favorite was Bat Lash. Fortunately there's a Showcase collection of that material.



Reprints:

Jonah Hex in "The Hundred Dollar Deal" - All Star Western 11 (John Albano & Tony DeZuniga, 1972)
El Diablo in "Night of the Living Dead" - Weird Western 13 (Cary Bates & Neal Adams, 1972)
Jonah Hex in "The Point Pyrrhus Massacre" - Weird Western 23 (Michael L. Fleisher & Tony DeZuniga, 1974)
Outlaw in "Bullet for a Gambler" - All Star Western 7 (John Albano & Tony DeZuniga, 1971)
Scalphunter in "The Origin" - Weird Western 39 - Weird War 24 (Michael L. Fleisher, Dick Ayers & George Evans, 1977)
Jonah Hex in "The Point Pyrrhus Aftermath" (Michael L. Fleisher & Noly Panaligan, 1974)

In many of the issues I have, the word balloons have been enlarged to compensate for the smaller size.