Four Star Spectacular: The Lost Issue

[jkcarrier]

Well, I kinda fell down the rabbit hole with this one...

As a young comics fan in the 1970s, I was a big fan of DC's various reprint titles. Marvel did reprints, too, but they were very straightforward: MARVEL TALES reprinted Spider-Man stories, MARVEL'S GREATEST COMICS reprinted Fantastic Four stories, and so on. DC, on the other hand, had these amazing, eclectic anthology titles, mixing Golden and Silver Age stories, big-name characters and lesser-knowns, mostly curated by editor E. Nelson Bridwell. For the publisher, it was a cheap and easy way to increase their market presence (at the time, comics creators did not get any additional money when their work was reprinted). For little me, it was an instant lesson in comics history.

Not long ago, DC released a trade paperback collection of one of those series, WANTED: THE WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS VILLAINS (a reprint of a reprint...how meta is that?). In addition to collecting the 9 published issues of the original series, they also included a "new" 10th issue, with more reprinted stories that fit the theme. A fun little bonus.

That got me thinking about what other "lost issues" of DC's reprint line might look like. I zeroed in on FOUR STAR SPECTACULAR, a title that ran 6 bi-monthly issues from 1976-1977. As the title implied, each issue featured four super-heroes. The book was anchored by Wonder Woman (who was riding high on the popularity of the Lynda Carter tv show) and Superboy (the teen-aged version of Superman, who'd been mostly squeezed out of his own title by the Legion of Super-Heroes), who appeared every issue, while the remaining two "stars" were different each time out. So I set to simulate what the non-existant 7th issue could have looked like.

Now, I could've just grabbed four random stories and called it a day, but I really wanted to do it "properly", and make sure what I chose fit the format as well as the theme. Not counting covers, each issue was 48 pages long, of which 35 pages were the actual comics stories, with the rest being advertising and editorial material (letters page, etc.). Whatever stories I picked would have to fit within those 35 pages.

(There was a little bit of wiggle room. If I had 1 page too many, I could always sacrifice the letters column. If I was short, I could do what Bridwell sometimes did and run a page or two of "Superboy's Workshop" -- a feature that ran in the Superboy comics of the 1950s, showing kids how to do simple craft projects. In the end, neither was necessary.)

I set some further limits on myself: I didn't want to use any stories that were less than ten years old as of April 1977, nor any that had been reprinted in that time frame. I also didn't want to use any characters (other than Wonder Woman and Superboy, natch) that had been featured in previous issues of FOUR STAR. That meant no Golden Age Flash, Hawkman (and Hawkgirl), Kid Flash, Elongated Man, Supergirl, Green Lantern, Vigilante, Green Arrow, or Blackhawk. And technically Krypto the Superdog, but I decided it was ok to use a Superboy story with him in it, as long as I wasn't counting him as one of the "four stars". Bridwell had sometimes used team-ups (like Kid Flash and Elongated Man in issue #2) or duos (like Hawkman and Hawkgirl in #4) in order to fill the four hero slots more easily, but I was determined to squeeze in four separate stories if I possibly could. Diving head-first into various online comics databases, I started my scavenger hunt.

Aquaman was a strong contender initially. But a LOT of his 50s and 60s stories had been reprinted around that time (like Wonder Woman, he was enjoying a renewed popularity, thanks no doubt to his appearances in the Super Friends cartoon show), and I thought it would be nice to spotlight someone who hadn't gotten as much reprint love. Then I hit upon J'onn J'onnz, the Manhunter from Mars. He checked all the boxes: While not exactly an A-lister, he was at least somewhat well-known from being in the Justice League of America. He had lots of short stories available, almost none of which had ever been reprinted. And right around the time this issue would have appeared, he was in the middle of a brief revival as a back-up series in ADVENTURE COMICS. I selected one of his later stories from HOUSE OF MYSTERY (bumping right up against my ten-year limit), featuring one of his better recurring villains, Professor Hugo.

As I pored through indexes, I stumbled across the fact that many of Plastic Man's early stories were a mere 6 pages long. That gave me some extra elbow room for the other stories, which I ended up needing. I liked the idea of having at least one "Golden Age" (1940s) story in the mix, and Plastic Man was then starring in his own ongoing title (though it would be cancelled by the end of 1977. His Saturday morning cartoon show was still a couple of years in the future). I selected a typically loopy Jack Cole story featuring a giant rampaging eight-ball, which I figured would at least make for a striking cover image.

I had deliberately left Superboy and Wonder Woman for last, figuring that with their long histories, it would be fairly simple to find stories to fit the remaining pages, and I was right. The Superboy series didn't always have a lot of great villains, so an 8-pager featuring the odd but memorable Kryptonite Kid was a natural. And Wonder Woman vs. a bunch of Ross Andru-drawn space dinosaurs was likewise a no-brainer.

So I had my line-up (and an even greater respect for editor Bridwell, who had to work this jigsaw puzzle on a monthly basis, across multiple titles, without the benefit of Google):

Superboy
"The Kryptonite Kid!" - 8 pages
Superboy #99, September 1962

Plastic Man
"Eight Ball" - 6 pages
Police Comics #8, March 1942

Wonder Woman
"Eagle of Space!" - 12 pages
Wonder Woman #105, April 1959

Manhunter from Mars
"The Deadly Martian" - 9 pages
House of Mystery #165, March 1967

And just to be extra anal-retentive about it, I looked at a couple of other 48-page comics that came out the same month this one would have (BATMAN FAMILY #10 and DC SUPER-STARS #13) to check the placement of the ad pages. I wanted to make sure I hadn't done anything obnoxious like having the first page of a story followed by an ad. If you're curious, here's how it broke down:

1 Superboy pg 1
2 SB 2
3 SB 3
4 SB 4
5 Ad
6 Ad
7 SB 5
8 SB 6
9 SB 7
10 SB 8
11 Ad
12 Ad
13 Plastic Man pg 1
14 PM 2
15 PM 3
16 Ad
17 PM 4
18 PM 5
19 PM 6
20 Wonder Woman pg 1
21 WW 2
22 WW 3
23 Ad*
24 WW 4
25 WW 5
26 WW 6
27 WW 7
28 WW 8
29 WW 9*
30 WW 10
31 WW 11
32 WW 12
33 Ad
34 Manhunter from Mars pg 1
35 MM 2
36 MM 3
37 Ad
38 Ad
39 MM 4
40 MM 5
41 MM 6
42 MM 7
43 Ad
44 Ad
45 MM 8
46 MM 9
47 Letter column
48 Ad

The (*) indicates a difference in the ad placement in the two books I used for reference. In one issue, there was an ad on page 23, and page 29 was a story page; in the other book, it was the opposite. Otherwise, the placement was the same in both. Either way, it didn't make much difference, so I didn't bother looking for a "tiebreaker".

(Incidentally, the ad on page 33 in both books was a house advertisement announcing the arrival of new DC publisher Jeanette Kahn. Big changes would soon be coming!)

With the insides of the issue sorted out, I turned my attention to the cover. The original issues all had covers by ubiquitous 70's cover artist Ernie Chan (aka Ernie Chua). I briefly toyed with the idea of trying to draw an illo in Chan's style, but haha that wasn't happening. So I settled for using panels from the individual stories and modifying them to fit. That turned out to be a lot more work than I anticipated.

There was no set format for the covers of FOUR STAR SPECTACULAR, each one was a little different. Since I had four stories, I decided to follow the layout of issue #1, which had four equal-sized panels, one spotlighting each story. Easy-peasy. One hitch I ran into was because of another big change that came along in the '70s: As of the books cover-dated May 1976, all DC comics began featuring that ginormous UPC barcode in the bottom left corner. I was able to work around it, more or less, but Wonder Woman ended up getting the shaft in terms of cover space. Sorry, Wondy!

For each story, I picked a suitably dramatic panel and imported it into PhotoShop. Using various filters and selection tools, I removed the color and then touched up the linework to get a clean (ish) black and white image. Then there was a lot of cutting and pasting and re-arranging to make the scene fit into my pre-determined boxes.

Superboy: The Superboy figure was moved closer to the Kryptonite Kid, so I could make them both as large as possible.

Plastic Man: I flipped the building and 8-ball so that Plas was confronting it, rather than chasing it. I moved the "8" symbol higher up on the ball, so Plas' arm wouldn't cover it up.

Wonder Woman: Flipped the entire scene horizontally (to get around that damned barcode), and extended the art a little bit on the top and right so that the entire figures of WW and Steve Trevor could be seen.

Manhunter from Mars: The splash page showed Professor Milo walking away from J'onn after shooting him, so I copied Milo from another panel so we could see the actual shooting happening. Removed the other background characters. Also extended the art on the bottom, so J'onn's foot wasn't so abruptly cut off (though I still cheated and had him standing in tall grass so I didn't have to actually DRAW the foot!).

I found some nice scans of the original art for a couple of the FOUR STAR covers on the Heritage Auctions site (ha.com), which allowed me to copy over the logo and trade dress. But again, there was a small hiccup: The scans I had were from earlier issues, and as of issue #5, DC had changed the trade dress for their 48-page "Giant" comics, and the FOUR STAR SPECTACULAR logo was modified to fit. But no big deal, I just did the same thing that DC's production department had done back in the day: reduced the size of the "FOUR STAR" part of the logo, and extended the "perspective lines" to fill in the gap. Frankly, I think it makes the logo look unbalanced and therefore less attractive, but I was going for authenticity, so I was stuck with it.

For the "floating heads" around the logo, Wonder Woman and Superboy were already in place from earlier issues. I got Plastic Man's head from the cover of PLASTIC MAN #11, and J'onn J'onnz came from an interior panel of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #71.

Two other bits of trivia about the cover. That "33486" number in the top righthand circle is the distributor number. Each series was assigned its own number, to help distributors keep track of it. For some reason, FOUR STAR SPECTACULAR's distributor number changed half-way through the series. Early issues had a 31530 number, while later ones were 33486 (so that's the one I used).

The other number, the "N-1660" scribbled in the corner of the Wonder Woman panel, is the job number, used by DC internally to track the various parts of a comic as they were assigned and completed. Each story, as well as the cover, and even the letters page, would have its own number. The letter indicated which editor the job was done for; E. Nelson Bridwell's job numbers all started with "N" ("N" for "Nelson", I guess -- "B" numbers were used by another editor, Murray Boltinoff). The job number for the cover of FOUR STAR #6 was N-1655, so I arbitrarily assigned my fictitious #7 cover a job number slightly higher, N-1660 (Yes, I realize I was being completely ridiculous by this point).

With all the elements in place, I added the colors on a separate layer, using the traditional 64-color palette of the era, following the original colors as best I could. I knocked back the opacity of the colors a bit and added a faint cream-colored overlay for a more "vintage" look.

And that's pretty much it! There is probably something wrong with me, but I enjoyed every tedious, nit-picky, aggravating second of this project. There will probably be more of this kind of thing in the future. I mean, I pretty much HAVE to do SUPER-HEROES BATTLE SUPER-GORILLAS at some point, don't I?