Today, the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos will square off in Super Bowl XLVIII, a game with two weeks of built-up hype and one that may define the way Peyton Manning–one of the great regular-season quarterbacks of all time–is thought of in terms of his postseason performance.Five years ago, we took a stroll down a kind of surreal memory lane that reminded us just how few really good football-themed comics there have been over the years, in spite of having a fair number of comic book characters who played the sport.There have been a few extras that we can add to the list since then, including some that are actually pretty good. So it seemed as good a time as any to update the thing.Most of the football comic books we encountered didn’t last for more than one issue. Of course, some were designed as one shot promotional issues. One of the earliest examples of a professional football comic book was Charlton Sport Library – Professional Football #1, which was published by Charlton Comics in 1969. Oddball Comics has a great write-up about the issue, which it describes as being more of a collection of schedules, player biographies, rosters, and game recaps than an actual comic book.In that way, a lot of the reality-based and celebrity tie-in type comics haven’t changed much in forty-five years: Bluewater Press still makes bio-comics and history comics that are little more than illustrated pamphlets giving a short history of the topic at hand.
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