Shook by a seventh issue

There will always be a part of me that sincerely believes that the absolute best way of consuming comic books is in big chunky reprint issues published on the highest quality baxter paper in the early 1980s. It's the only real way to read superheroes.

That's how I collected all the Green Lantern/Green Arrow reprints of the seminal O'Neill/Adams run in the 90s, with all that social justice and thundering punches really popping on the nicer paper. I got all six of them at second hand bookstores in the 90s - nearly 30 years ago now - and have read and enjoyed these adventures many, many times since. Arrow and his goatee was never groovier, and Lantern's space punches were never more powerful.

And for nearly 30 years I thought I had all the comics in that series until I went to the latest kilo show at the local comic store and in bteween all the other cheap and funky old comics, I found #7 of something I always assumed was a six-issue series. 

I was so convinced I had every issue DC had published back in the last century, and somehow I never, ever stumbled across any evidence of a seventh. And if I missed that, what else have I missed?

I read old Amazing Heroes for fun, and have haunted comic shops all over the world, and somehow still managed to miss this ever existed. So how many other blind spots are out there? Is there a 13th issue of Watchmen? Was there an Ambush Bug special that slipped by?

I don't have a lot of real man skills, but I wish I could put my knowledge of the dopiest fucking comics in the world on my CV, because that shit is world class. I'll argue the merits of those fucking Badger comics by Mike Baron; or how no food will ever taste as goo as the boars in Asterix looked; or the exact moment Cam Kennedy stripped his art style back and stylized up. (It's the Sunday Night Fever story in Judge Dredd, if you're wondering.)

I can say all this nonsense with such complete confidence, but I had just as much confidence that there were only six issues of Green Lantern comic before last week, and I didn't know what the fuck I was talking about.

I'm not saying a lifetime of reading comic books means you need to have a big 'what does it all mean?' meltdown when you find an issue at the fucking kilo sale. But I need to have one, all the same.

(Apart from this, the kilo sale was fucking great, as always. I got a tonne of Superman comics published immediately after I stopped getting them regularly in the mid 90s; way too much GI Joe from the 1980s, including several issues I think I've owned three times now; a couple of issues of Jimmy's Bastards, which I got because I always like Ennis' dumb comedy stuff, don't even get me started on A Train Called Love; some of the excellent Gray/Palmiotti Jonah Hex; a Mr X comic by Seth; Ditko doing Captain Universe and all sorts of other random shit. I might be missing some knowledge, so there's always room for more. More!)