Superman and Batman Magazine

The wife mentioned in the last post that it’s impossible to find stuff online about SUPERMAN AND BATMAN MAGAZINE.  And, surprisingly, it IS.  This magazine, which came out at the end of the nineties, was, for its entire run THE BEST SELLING COMIC BOOK IN NORTH AMERICA, and no one remembers it.  It sold more than HALF A MILLION copies per month, ALL by subscription, and all to younger readers, so naturally, the biz ignores it, and it was canceled after less than ten issues.  (Actually, the company that published it, WELSH PUBLICATIONS, was purchased by Marvel, and the magazine was pulled as an obvious conflict of interest.)

The above issue (5) was where the HAWKMAN poster (seen below) is originally from.

If anyone could explain to me why DC was willing to cancel its BEST SELLING comic magazine, rather than move it “in-house”, I’ve always been willing to listen.  I did TONS of art for the series, including a pin-up poster inside each issue…a couple of covers, and a fully illustrated 20 page story starring the Justice League Adventures characters LONG before they had a show.   I’ll look around the studio for copies of the mag, the posters, and any original art I still have left from the book.

Ty the O.G.

JLA pages

Ty’s wandering around the kitchen eating a sandwich (he regards it as a tribute to his Jewish roots* to regularly eat corned beef on rye.  So, it’s apparently some kind of religious ritual that can’t be interrupted, but he can talk), so I’m sitting here typing as he tells me interesting things about these pages.

Okay, I’m still waiting…I’ve got to hear lots of things about the never-shown (?) Richard Pryor tv-special/roast, but there’s no way I can repeat any of those jokes.

Okay…c’mon Ty.

So, sez Ty,

“I think these pages are from my best-selling project to date. Inked by Joe Rubinstein. Please don’t ask about pages with Batman and Dr. Fate on them; those were sold long ago.  Pages with civilians on ’em are the only ones I have left and that’s why they’re so cheap.

“Imagine my joy for this issue when I got the script from Keith Giffen and discovered that the first four pages were given up to Maxwell Lord in a bathrobe staring out a window.  Strangely, these pages have never sold.  Now, they can be yours at whatever low price Keiren has typed in, and you can use them for placemats or paper airplane practice.  Or the training of dogs.”

Keiren

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(* Ty frequently jokes about his Jewish heritage and people generally assume it is just that–a joke.  But, yes, his beautiful blue-eyed blonde mother is in fact the daughter of a Jew. I specify “daughter of” as she self-identifies as an atheist–that would be in tribute to the years spent being educated in a Catholic school and having the nuns tell her that she had to compensate for her “heathen mother”.  Her father was Catholic.)