WALLS MAY HAVE EARS, BUT THEY ALSO HAVE POSTERS... (In MY house anyway.)

Copyright DC COMICS

On one of my walls is a Superman poster which originally comprised two pages of a UK Annual, acquired in the very late '70s or very early '80s.  I no longer recall where I got the Annual from, but I don't think it was new, so I either obtained it from a jumble sale, was given it by someone, or bought it mail-order from a comics dealer because it piqued my curiosity.  This was before eBay and the like, so I know for a fact that it wasn't purchased in that manner.

It couldn't have impressed me too much, hence my decision to remove the poster pages, tape them together to hang on my wall, and then give the Annual to a pal who didn't mind the absence of the couple of story pages on the reverse side of the poster.  Thing is, I never got to adorn my wall with it until I moved to a new house in '83, and it wasn't until I moved back to my former house in '87 that the poster finally graced the wall it was intended for in the first place.

Do you care?  Of course not, but bear with me.  Two or three years back (or thereabouts) I scanned the poster and printed it out on a single sheet of card, then replaced the original with its brand-spanking new doppelganger, which still resides in the same spot today.  But guess what?  I'd always assumed that the illo had been culled and isolated from an internal comics panel for its transformation into a poster, but last week I found out that my assumption was mistaken.

Superman had actually been lifted from the cover of Action Comics #398, which I saw on eBay and bought straight away.  I was familiar with the main story (but not the back up) as it had been reprinted in Superman From The '30s To The '70s, but this was the first time I'd seen the illustration in its first published form.  It arrived yesterday, and it's good to finally have the original incarnation of a drawing which has adorned a wall in my current home for 35 years.

How's that for a game of soldiers?  Anyway, not much of a tale perhaps, but I felt compelled to tell it anyway.  You can't complain - you got in here for free.

Posted in: Cartoons