In the 60’s, there was one comic issued by DC that had about 100 pages and it had a story line that involved most, if not all, of the DC heroes.
Back in the late 60’s or 70’s, there was a giant comic book with a story
line about a mirror that allowed you to enter a different world. I’ve been
trying to find this comic, but I don’t quite remember whether it was DC or
Marvel. I seem to remember that the story line had a host that narrated the story.
Whats the story where Conan the cimmerian is cursed by a wizard with a mark on his head that makes him child like and unable to fight but whenever people get close to him and starts being happy, demons appear and kill those hes close with. The mark is like an upside down cross.
The Professor, having made it through the holidays intact (and getting increasingly grumpy about having to go back to, you know, actually teaching next week), first needs to clear out the above three requests. Unfortunately, all three show the Professor’s lameness as an omnipotent comics deity, because he doesn’t know the answer to any of them.
That doesn’t mean the Professor can’t make some guesses, though (he isn’t completely lame). The first one, about the ’60s DC 100-pager, the Professor guesses might actually be from the early ’70s, since ’60s DC books didn’t go past the 80-Page Giants (although, of course, it might have been one of those, if the requester’s count was off). For a comic with a bunch of the heroes, the Professor can make a tentative guess that it might be DC 100-Page Super Spectacular #6 (subtitled “The World’s Greatest Super-Heroes). That’s the one with a great Neal Adams wraparound cover, and a bunch of stories, including a reprint of the first JLA/JSA team-up from JLA #21-22. DC did a reprint of it a couple of years ago (for $8.95, as opposed to the original 50 cents), so it should be reasonably easy to find.
The “giant comic with the mirror” is more problematic. The “host” bit makes the Professor guess that it was one of the DC mystery titles, since they had the hosts (Marvel had a few, too, like Tower of Shadows et al., but the Professor actually read most of those, and it doesn’t ring any bells), and the mirror gimmick sounds like a good way to connect up a bunch of otherwise-unrelated stories. Both House of Mystery and House of Secrets had a few 100-page issues as part of their regular runs; so did The Unexpected, which sometimes had more sf-type stories, and so might be a good bet, too. Another possibility might be DC 100-Page Super Spectacular #4, because that was subtitled “Weird Mystery Tales,” but the Professor doesn’t have a copy of that in his own collection to check.
Finally, the Conan question: again, the Professor doesn’t know. He’s got the Conan Marvel comic up to issue #100, but after that he stopped reading it, except sporadically, and since it could also have appeared in the Savage Sword magazine, or Conan the King, or any of the zillions of later Conan mini-series, it’s hard to tell. If the Professor had to make a hazy guess, he’d say it sounds like something from the period when Jim Owsley was writing it (before he changed his name to Christopher Priest, but that’s another story), ’round about issues in the 170s or so.
The Professor does have one other suggestion, for all three requests: check out the Grand Comic Book Database. It’s available online at www.comics.org , and it offers a searchable database of just about every comic ever printed; if you type in “Conan,” you’ll get a list of Conan titles, and clicking on them will lead you to a cover gallery. If any of the covers look familiar, clicking on them will give you a list of story credits for that particular issue. A warning, though: if you like old, or even recent comics, this site is a complete time sink; you’ll spend hours looking at old comic covers, and never get anything else done for days. You might see a cover that sparks your memory, though, and solves your comics mystery….
