DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest: Strange Sports

Tags

baseball game, DC Comics, dc heroes and villians, DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest, digest, pocket sized, sports, sports comics, Strange Sports, the great super-star game

Today, we flip through the pages of DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #13. Looking for information on the exact title of this tiny tome introduced us to the world of comic book blogs back in 2010. We didn’t know people did that, and it looked like it might be fun. It reminded us, too, of the book’s sports stories without superheroes.

We first read this pocket-sized production as little martians in the early 1980s. Though the baseball game of DC heroes and villains makes for classic bronze age shenanigans, the gems of this book are the reprints of the short-lived Strange Sports Stories #1-6 in 1973. The faceless basketball team. The boxing glove necklace heirloom which saves the day. The man who pole vaults over the world to travel in time. WOW. We have since read the original issues of that series, and commend the editors of this digest for picking the truly outstanding ones.

We have an archive of scans from DC’s original Strange Sports series. It appeared in The Brave and the Bold and predated both the baseball game’s original appearance (DC Super-Stars #10, 1976) and the second series excerpted in this digest. (Astute readers will notice Warrior of the Weightless World in this digest comes from those Brave and the Bold stories.)

Harlem Heroes

Tags

2000AD, aeroball, black and white, brains, Dave Gibbons, Harlem Heroes, Indie Comics, Pat Mills, sports, sports comics, Tom Tully, UK comics

Audiences in the States may know 2000AD as the UK magazine that spawned Judge Dredd. Our readers know we love 2000AD for the dinosaur series Flesh, the violent time-traveling fantasy of writer Pat Mills. Artist Dave Gibbons may not be a household word, but the American film industry made more people aware of the most famous book he drew: Watchmen. Our gallery today features another of Pat Mills’ brilliant ideas: the Harlem Heroes.

Dave Gibbons drew the Harlem Heroes, of which we share with you the first fifty pages or so. Tom Tully’s script delivers action and heroism at a breakneck pace. The Harlem Heroes play a futuristic game called Aeroball, and the series blends an outrageous dose of science-fiction themes with sports in a barrage of non-stop conflict. When one of your team members is a brain in a vat, what else can you expect?

These second-hand scans we found years ago while looking for images from Flesh leave something to be desired, but they give a good impression of the awesomeness of this little-known series. If you want a high-quality reproduction of the complete series, you can buy the collected Harlem Heroes on Amazon. Also know that the UK’s version of Amazon has three informative reviews of Harlem Heroes that do not appear on the States’ version of Amazon.

Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s play aeroball!