Reading comics is an interesting hobby, especially if you’ve been paying attention to comics for decades. One of the most interesting things about comics is how much they’ve changed over the years, and it was made clear to me after reading an ’80s DC Comics classic. DC Comics Presents Annual #1 was a pretty standard DC crossover comic, teaming the Supermen of Earth-One and Earth-Two with Lex Luthor of Earth-Three against the Luthors of Earth-One and Earth-Two and Ultraman of Earth-Three. This type of story was repeated across the length and breadth of pre-Crisis DC for decades, nice little single-issue epics.
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Reading this comic showed me everything that was wrong with comics nowadays. This comic was in an oversized issue that spanned multiple chapters, telling a story that took us readers across the multiverse in an action-packed little epic that gave them everything they could want. And it gave them to us in one issue. Not six or seven or eight issues, but one. This is something that modern comics need to learn how to do again.
Comics Used To Be Packed With Story
DC Comics Presents Annual #1 wasn’t exactly a regular comic; it was longer than the usual comics at 42 pages. It was split into six different chapters and ended with an essay about the history of the alternate Earths and how that applied to Earth-Two Superman. It was an action-packed annual issue that cost more than most comics and was what we would consider an event. In today’s market, this story would be a six-issue story arc, each of the chapters decompressed and stretched out. It would still hit all of the same plot points, it would just do them in a much longer way that wouldn’t add anything to the story.
DC Comics Presents Annual #1 is definitely an old-school comic. It’s written for all ages, and it’s not super deep, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s an exciting story that throws surprise after surprise at readers, making the story even better. It keeps upping the ante on readers, and it’s fantastic the way things you never imagined are thrown at you. There’s a lot of reading in this issue, and by the time you hit the end, you feel like you’ve read something, like you just went on an epic journey. It was a feeling that you don’t really get from a comic nowadays.
DC Comics have changed a lot since this 1982 comic came out. Comics have changed a lot. Revolutionary writers like Chris Claremont and Alan Moore changed the way superhero comics worked, and stories have gone from single-issue stories every month to multi-part epics. However, DC Comics Presents Annual #1 showed me that you don’t have to choose one over the other. Single-issue stories are something that comics need to go back to. More people love superheroes than ever, and stuff like DC Comics Presents Annual #1 is a way to show those new fans why comics are great.
I love multi-part epics, but there are ’80s comics that you can read right now that are a single-issue story that also build a multi-part epic. You can enjoy that one story, but you kept reading because the stuff in the background got you interested. DC Comics Presents Annual #1 made me want to read more stories with Earth-Two Superman or the Lex Luthor of Earth-Three. I wanted to know more about these worlds (in my case, that means more pre-Crisis comics). I was hooked because of that single-issue epic. And that’s the key to making comics great again — single-issue stories that hook readers.
New Reader Friendliness Needs to Be the Name of the Game
I love books that tell long stories. One of the best DC stories of the last few years is “Gotham Nocturne”, a story that ran for over 20 issues. Longform stories are awesome but there have to be books like DC Comics Presents Annual #1. This one issue story gave its readers everything they could have wanted in its 42 pages, and did things that only comics could do with its story. A new reader would do much better to pick up DC Comics Presents Annual #1 than just about any modern comic out there.
Modern comics are too obsessed with serving the current readers instead of new readers. Every issue is a chapter in a story that is collected and sold as a book. However, there are new readers who watched Superman or Peacemaker walking into comics looking for one comic to knock their socks off every day. Not every issue needs to be a single-issue blockbuster, but the comic industry needs to put out more comics like DC Comics Presents Annual #1 than anything on the stands right now.
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image courtesy of 20th Century Studios
