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Sunday, July 05, 2009

Aquaman Album #1 - Planet Comics

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Comics Weekend From yesterday's stop in France, today we travel down under!

This title, Aquaman Album, hails from Australia, and started in 1978. Dig that funky "Album" in the Aquaman font!

Anyway, as the cover indicates, this book features a whopping 96 pages of content(!), and, unlike a lot of other foreign editions of American comics I've come across, it features material almost entirely centered around one character--the King of the Seven Seas!

It kicks off with a reprint of the first of three Adventure Comics stories drawn by Mike Grell:
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...what's cool is, after the first story, this book features the following two stories, in order, making for a nice little collection!

Next up is a Sea Devils story--okay, sure, its not Aquaman, but its close:
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Then the book jumps forward in time, back to another Aquaman story, this one from his solo strip in DC's Five-Star Super-Hero Spectacular by Gerry Conway and Dick Dillin:
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Then the book travels back a few years, to Aquaman (Vol. 1) #56, reprinting the odd little two-page Aquagirl story (by Steve Skeates and Jim Aparo) that ended the issue, and the title at the time:
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Then we're back to the Sea Devils, for another adventure:
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Finally, the book manages to cram in one more Aquaman story, this one from Adventure Comics #441 (by Paul Levitz and Jim Aparo), Aquaman's first issue in the title as a headliner:
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...whew! That's a lot of reading for a measly 75 cents (even by 1978 standards). If you were an Australian Aquaman fan, this book must have been a treasure trove.

One of the things I enjoy the most about looking at these foreign editions are the ads, which are almost always done by the "local" publishers, so they were never seen back in the U.S.

Here are a couple that ran in this issue, some featuring characters and titles us Americans are familiar with, some not:
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I gotta say, that Doomsday comic looks pretty cool.

2 comments:

Wings1295 said...

VERY cool comic! And yeah, the Doomsday preview looks very neat! :)

Erik the Sleeper said...

Ah Rob, you're too good mate!

This is a tidy piece of Aussie comic nostalgia! I have seen it once before at a Comic Con in Sydney back in the early 90's, but it was display only.

For a while, that was the trend with comics down here- several stories in the one issue... which explains why we often had to wait so damn long!!! I hope they don't do it with Blackest Night, I won't be able to cope!

If I can get my hands on any more 'Aussie-Aqua' gems, I'll be in touch.