30 days of comics I love #21: I love adventure!

Detective Comics #38 (Millennium edition) 

By some golden age legends and a few literal unknowns

I've only read a tiny fraction of comics from the golden age, they are just something I've never seen around, and I have no idea how many even made it to this part of the world, all the way back in the day. The only things I've seen from that era have been reprints, and they are usually tiny slices of some extremely well-known comics and characters.

And then I get something like this, a facsimile reprint from the year 2000 (with some very 2000 advertisements) featuring the first appearance of Robin, and it reprints the whole lot, filler and all.

And there is a lot of filler in these comics, with strips and storylines that literally nobody cares about anymore. It's not hard to see why, the Batman story is clearly the most energetic and fun. even the colourful costumes alone makes it stand out from the pack. 

The Steve Malone, Cliff Crosby and Red Logan comics are all thuddingly dull to modern eyes, and even characters who still have some name recognition today, like the Crimson Avenger and Slam Bradley, have the same leaden art and tedious plots.

These are comics from a different time, and it's more than a little ridiculous to judge them with a modern eye. I don't begrudge anybody who gets real enjoyment from these crude comics from almost a century ago, and I even envy their ability to look past the simplicity of them.

But seeing them in a chunky package like this comic does leave me with the assurance that I don't really need to hunt out much more of this type of thing. I've read almost all of the early Batman and Superman comics in various reprints through the years, but his back-up crew from the golden age can happily fade away with history. 

They were only meant to last as long as the attention span of a 10-year-old boy in the 1930s anyway, and the fact that they have been reprinted at all gives them some kind of longevity, but it's only their proximity to the first Robin that put them in front of my eyes.