Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Add It To My Want List: Blue Ribbon Digest #14

While browsing some on-line covers, I noticed this absolutely awesome Joe Kubert cover. Now, digests were pretty widely available when I was a kid but I don't think I ever saw half the digests that DC put out in the early 80s. This is certainly one I missed, as there is no way I would have passed up on a book about UFOs. I thought that was purely Gold Key's domain. It also isn't every day (or at least it wasn't back then) that you'd see a cover featuring someone burning to death. It's all reprints from the 50s and 60s, featuring stories by Fox, Binder and Broome and art by Infantino, Kane and Heath. I've seen a few of these stories in Super DC Giant #27, but I simply cannot pass up on the gorgeous little package. The hunt begins.

4 comments:

Argo Plummer said...

I don't remember this particular digest, but it looks awesome. When I was about eight, just after my parents divorced, my Dad would pick me up on Friday evening and we would hit the grocery store by his apartment to stock up on man food for the weekend. The grocery store was next door to a drug store that always had a pretty good selection of digests on hand. Even though my Dad was not fond of my comic collecting
obsession, he would always give me a $5 and let me go buy whatever digests the drug store had so I would have new reading material for the weekend at his place.

Now that I am in my late 30's--older than my Dad was when he was buying me these, I treasure the digests I still own, not only as a treasure trove of DC material, but as a good memory of a really rough time for me.

I purchase digests whenever I come across them, so I wish you well on your hunt for this one, and if by some chance I stumble across it, I will send it your way.

Thanks for giving me a chance to remember something fun from my childhood.

Daniel Graves said...

I used to love the digests. The variety store that was close to my home, where I bought most my comics, didn't carry them. I had to go to the next closest one, which was not really all that far, but I had to go on my bike and cross a busy street. I know I bought this one when it came out. It is unlikely that I still have it, but if I come across it (again, unlikely), it's yours.

A couple of years ago I found my Batmans Villains origins digest that I gave to my son. He still enjoys it. I guess they still publish Archie digests, but boy I'd love to see some new DC digests, with some 70's reprints, preferably.

Fr. Dan
(and before anyone starts scratching their heads about the "Fr." thing and my comment about "my son," I'm an Anglican priest. Unlike our RC brothers, we can get married and have families. Nothing untoward going on here.)

Dan Bailey said...

This was very probably the first DC digest I ever bought. Found it in some used bookstore or other, probably, a couple of decades ago, waaaaay before I got back into comics.

I'm a sucker for UFOs, anyway, & I loved DC's sf reprint titles Strange Adventures & From Beyond the Unknown when I was a kid, so I wasn't about to pass it up.

Izbot said...

This is still one of my favorite digest collections. Just about every story is classic. Remember when DC printed that "Pulp Fiction Library: Mystery in Space" trade paperback? I think some of the stories chozen for this digest were better than the ones chosen for that. And that Kubert cover! PS, the back cover is also by Kubert and features Adam Strange.