Rob welcomes back fellow network all-Star Chris Franklin to discuss the various DC and Marvel Treasuries That Never Were!
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Contest of Champions did kinda, sorta, make it to Treasury Format. Two or three years back Marvel reprinted it as an oversized hardcover that is extremely close to the Treasury size. It’s a great edition to have.
The reason the pages were used was due to the fact the inker Pablo Marcos was never informed the project was canceled! He continued to work on the pages he was given, then sent them to Mark Gruenwald and inquired as to when he’d get the rest of the pages. Gruenwald was the one who decided to rework the story. The story was rewritten to accommodate what they could, and most or the artwork that was redone was to update costumes and team rosters.
The behind the scenes story was told by Tom DeFalco in the trade reprints. It’s a heck of a story and worth tracking down for his foreword alone.
that makes so much sense.
Contest of Champion “You’ll see every superhero!!”
Five of them Do something!”
Those huge group shots would be better larger!
This Bucky749 since this episode is all about making treasuries that never were . Here’s mine
1.marvel comics : present Doctor who& Daleks Treasury Just would be the City of the dammed and time slip stories some Dalek comics . The cover would be the doctor sitting in a chair reading this very book to children an k-9.
2. Dc side : plastic man and friends essentially this would be a treasury of all the backs up stories from the super friends comics , the cover would be plastic man and the rest popping out of a tv .
3. Last one alagram treasury : this would have all the issues of dark claw my favorite bonus features would include, a schematic of his lair , pin ups of him and his main villain, a sparrow maze and word cross word .
This bucky749 agin and oh my giddy aunt I got the bonus features for two of the Treasureys .
For doctor who there would be a board game , coloring pages for both the doctors and the Daleks and K-9’s maze page .
For plastic man and friends
Let’s have pin up pages for each of the heroes and Jack o lantern word search and a maze help wonder dog get to the club sandwich.
What? No special feature for Seraph?
Couldn’t think of one for him but it if you have one for him be my guest . Also I didn’t know how to spell his name .
Bible-themed crossword puzzle, with clues based on his relics? Maybe too obvious.
Done and done put it in the book .
In case any one. Is wondering to fill out Doctor who and the Daleks. Shag can pick the Dalek comics and and Rob can draw the cover with shags help . Great episode and guest . Sorry I forgot to mention that . I kinda got caught up in creating my own treasuries . Cause I figured why not .
Or and cover for the dark claw on is dark claw in animated series version standing on a building . And the hosts f.w shag and that other guy whose name I can’t spell can each do a dark claw text pulp story .
There was once a Doctor Who Treasury!
https://www.amazon.com/Doctor-Who-Dave-Gibbons-Treasury/dp/B008WA9FHY
Very informative episode! I love Superman and am a Curt Swan fan, but I was most interested in the info on Contest of Champions. I am a huge Olympics nerd so I need to track down the Winter Olympics special you referenced, especially since the 1980 Winter Games were the first I watched and hold a special place in my memory.
I think that I had one or, at most, two issues of Contest of Champions as a kid and picked up the entire series as a TPB. Chris may have put his finger on the reason why I loved it so much when he mentioned the similarity with the Global Guardians from the Super Friends. I am a sucker for teams of international heroes. Does anyone know if Shamrock, Blitzkrieg, Defensor, or especially Talisman appeared anywhere else? Talisman, being an aboriginal hero from Australia and having quite a unique power set, would be fascinating to explore. I was a little disappointed in Shamrock and her luck powers. (Well, I guess we were fortunate that her powers weren’t dancing a jig or the ability to consume large quantities of alcohol and she wasn’t a leprechaun).
If I had a choice of a story to make into a Treasury edition, I would be the JLA/Avengers series. Busiek and Perez were at the top of their game and you get the most characters and most epic scenes possible. Perfect for a widescreen format. And Bucky’s idea about an Amalgam Treasury book could be fun too. Just finished rereading several of those and the concept is timeless.
Don’t know about Shamrock, Talisman, Defensor or Blitzkrieg, but Sabra and Arabian Knight did appear in back-to-back issues of Hulk (#s 256-257) about a year before Contest of Champions – it was when Hulk was on a bit of a global jaunt, so he passed through Israel and Egypt (and also Russia, eventually ending up on Easter Island).
And yes, I agree that Talisman is a character that should have been used more.
Shamrock appeared in Marvel Comics Presents but I would have to check the GCD to pin down which issue(s). [Just did– it was #24 in 1989. Before that she appeared in Rom #65 and afterwards in Alpha Flight #108.]
Marvel Comics Presents is a great place to find obscure characters. if you missed it, it typically had four 8-page features. In most issues three of the features would be chapters of different serials; the fourth was often a stand-alone short story and presumably many of those were inventory stories with seldom used characters so that they could be written in advance and put aside. If a regular monthly series was in danger of missing a deadline, the inventory story could replace the last 8 pages of the scheduled story. By using obscure characters, there was little chance of a story scripted two years earlier contradicting continuity since then, because they hadn’t appeared anywhere else.
maybe it was cuz I WAS 8 but contest of champions had the greatest house ad ever!
YEAH Thanos was dead in 1982. See Avengers Anual 7 Which is also a great example of something that would work as a tresury All of Starlin aliens, the page where they explained how thanos got the all the soul gems.
Does anybody know if Jim Starlin is a Basil Wolverton/spacehawk fan? I’ve always wondered.
Rob and Chris, this was very interesting (and also a lot of fun). You got me thinking about “if DC had done war comics treasuries….” A lot of the war stories were repetitive, but the treasuries (like the digests) were always opportunities to pick “best of” material, so they probably would have been outstanding. And with all those breathtaking Joe Kubert covers, there would *have* to be a cover gallery, preferably with the covers in full-color and at full treasury page size. In fact, DC should publish a hardcover coffee table book at treasury size of just those covers, with inside info on the back page of each one. Adam! Andy! Maybe you should get with Uncle Paul Levitz and figure this out.
Oh, this is so very much my cup of tea… Rob, you could probably adapt this chat with Chris as an entry for Back Issue’s Greatest Stories Never Told feature. I knew about Action #500 and the JLA two-parter, but it was great to hear chat about the behind-the-scenes stuff
Rob, did you try asking Gerry Conway about why the JLA treasury was reformatted when you were asking about King Arthur? Goodness, what with these projects and the Firestorm: Corona graphic novel. Gerry had some bad luck.
Okay, the Fire and Water Network demanded the Who’s Who Omnibusi, you sparked the Aquaman movie… how about using your benevolent power to get the JLA issues treasury collected and re-edited, as it should have been seen, into a treasury edition? Hardcover if necessary, but traditional would be best.
Martin, I find the hardcovers to be quite spiffy. What do you prefer about the traditional?
The hardbacks are fine for reprints of treasury editions, but let’s have a proper comic book first!
This is a really great topic for a show about treasury books, and I really enjoyed the conversation. I think most of these have been mentioned briefly in previous shows, but it was still nice to hear some more about these books that never were. And my ears perked up a bit when you mentioned the possibility of at least releasing the King Arthur book as a digest. The young digest-loving me of the late ’70s/early ’80s would have been all over that one!
As for Contest of Champions – which seems quite popular in this comments thread as well – I ate it up when it came out; even then, I knew it was a bit silly, but I loved it nonetheless. And unlike Chris, I thought the art was pretty spiffy, too. That story would have indeed been amazing in treasury format…
Let the record note that I had not read down to see Edo’s use of spiffy when I used it above. Unless of course, I saw it in passing as I scrolled and was subliminally influenced.
This was an enjoyable episode to listen to at work. If a Sgt. Rock treasury existed, I guarantee it would be in my collection now. As for why DC didn’t move forward with the Ross/Dini Villains treasury, I am confident the cold truth is that the projected sales figure was too low. I’m having trouble finding a sales summary, but the team started at the high point with Superman, then every treasury afterward sold significantly fewer copies than the previous one.
I often sit there and imagine movies or TV shows/episodes that never were, so this was intrinsically interesting to me. Good work, guys!
Rob, I just bought Marvel’s 2001: A Space Odyssey treasury at my local comic shop’s Black Friday sale. Any chance you could cover it soon?
Update: The 2001 Treasury was great! Of course, it helps that I already loved the film, Arthur C. Clarke’s series of novels (2001, 2010, 2061, and 3001), and Jack Kirby’s art. He clearly took advantage of the large format.
Fun discussion, Uncle Rob and Uncle Chris. In the spirit of cross-promotion, I should mention that another “treasury comic that wasn’t” was the Super Jrs. Holiday Special, which ended up being printed in the smallest format in Best of DC Digest #58 in 1985 (and unfortunately, the “standard sized” reprint in the DC Through the 80’s: The Experiments hardcover used the digest printing plates instead of the larger original art, which DC likely never made stats of). For everyone who doesn’t know, Uncle Rob and Uncle Chris talked about this comic in episode 9 of Digest Cast:
http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/digest09/
Great show, Rob and Chris. I have the 3-issue Contest of Champions series. The only thing I really remember of it is Shamrock. I don’t know what that says about me. She steals the one MacGuffins from a bunch of A-Listers by hanging upside down from a tree. As I’m sure you know, the Irish are well known for their tree climbing.
I have a story about X-ACTO knives, since you guys mentioned them in the intro. When I first started at a design firm right out of college, we were still doing some paste up work for ads. I was cutting some of the red film to mark shading. As I was slicing down the paper, the X-ACTO knife skipped off the ruler I was holding and sliced length-wise straight through my left finger. I immediately yelped and went over to the sink to rinse the blood. That’s when I could see my finger bone. I somehow didn’t pass out and told my boss. She almost fainted and then drove me to the hospital. Long story short, I got it stitched up and have full use of my finger. I was apparently the first designer there to ever use workman’s comp, and left a big blood stain on the drafting table.
Anyway, that King Arthur treasury would’ve been cool.