peter john rios

200 part 2!

Spawn: See? I love anniversary issues so much that I buy Spawn! (2011)

Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes: The wedding of Duo Damsel and Bouncing Boy! And a cameo appearance at the wedding of the Martian Manhunter! A great bit of subtle continuity that gets picked up on decades later. This is the earliest Superboy issue I own that features the LSH. I need about 20+ more earlier than this. And then I need to fill out my Adventure Comics issues, start looking for some Action and eventually see how early I can go with Legion appearances to complete their publishing history in single issue form. (1974)

Superman: The final issue of the short run of writer Steven T. Seagle and artist Scott McDaniel. From what I remember, coming on a few issues after Loeb had left, this run wasn’t particularly well-liked. It wasn’t bad, it just was too much of a departure from what made the Loeb/McGuinness run so fun and bombastic. I appreciated what they did with this issue though - amalgamating and trying to make sense of all the various Superman origins - which is always a worthwhile concept for an anniversary issue. (2004)

Uncanny X-Men: Another milestone 200th issue, especially in regards to X-Men publishing. The Trial of Magneto takes centerstage and by the end, he becomes the leader of the X-Men at Xavier’s request as Charles goes off into space to recover from this issue’s events. The villains of the piece, the Fenris Twins, are some of my favorite X-Men baddies mostly because of their ties to Marvel Universe history (as children of Baron Wolfgang von Strucker), as well as because of their design under artist John Romita Jr. Overall, an important anniversary issue at a time when they were definite must-read issues. (1985)

Wonder Woman: Because they all relaunched, more or less, around the same time (post-Crisis), Superman, Flash and Wonder Woman all hit anniversary issues together (as well as Justice League and Green Arrow back at issue 100, both of which eventually would be re-relaunched). I don’t remember this one though. It came shortly after Greg Rucka hit the title, a run that I didn’t read much of unfortunately. (2004)

X-Men: A fairly decent anniversary issue that would kick off the Endangered Species back up stories, eventually leading to the Messiah Complex event. It’s a bit busy, but I like the David Finch gatefold cover (not totally shown here). (2007)