Tales of Syzpense #25
Double-sized anniversary issue! (Well, no, but check it out anyway for a preview of this week's Tales of Syz #3 comic, some ROM team-up covers, and a decades-old tribute to Keith Giffen
Remember the old anniversary issues of comics? Sure, using an arbitrary “anniversary” as a reason to double the price of a comic was a gimmick but more often than not, it was a welcome one.
But one thing publishers could never seem to agree on was, what constituted an anniversary issue under a nice, round issue 100, 200, 300, etc.? Sometimes, issue 12 became a celebrated thing (“we lasted a year!”) and then also 24 (“we lasted two years!” but never issues 36 or 48, and even issue 50 was only occasionally feted.
And if it wasn’t issue 24, it was issue 25 (“we’re starting our third year!”? Or maybe it was because that issue marked one-fourth of the way to issue 100?).
So, since this is my 25th newsletter, it seems to call for some kind of celebration. Certainly not double-sized — it asks enough of everyone in this age of overload to ask you to skim a normal-length newsletter one a week(ish) — so instead, I’ll offer up a Spinner Rack theme with 25 choices. It was already among the most frequent cover themes throughout comic history and then in 2011, your choices of covers to fit this theme exploded with 52 new offerings.
But first, my real priority: reminding everyone that Tales of Syzpense #3 is in stores this week.
This Week in Syzygy
Our third issue of this newsletter’s namesake comic is released across the land, this time with a special bonus story beyond the two we’ve been offering.
Up first is part 3 of Ashley Wood and T.P. Louise’s Les Mort 13.
Then, Nelson Daniel and I continue Dreamweaver, as the new Dreamweaver gets shares her unwanted abilities in ways that create even more problems.
And finally, Nelson and I offer up a special bonus 8-page sequel to my Groom Lake graphic novel. It’s the first time I’ve revisited these characters in years, and the first official sequel story since the original graphic novel Ben Templesmith and I did a while back.
This little preview will lead into a proper graphic novel in 2024, Groom Lake: Grey Skies Above, but it also stands alone and doesn’t require knowledge of the prior series at all (although I certainly encourage anyone who likes what they see here to check out that first book, too).
Archibald, our fun-loving little grey alien even makes a cameo on one of Nelson’s covers for this issue, the homage cover directly below.
We’ve been doing four covers per issue: 2 by Ash, 2 by Nelson, but this issue only, there’s a fifth cover, this one also by Ashley Wood. Image is doing a line-wide tribute to The Walking Dead’s 20th anniversary, so Ash contributed the wraparound cover you see above. It features Les Mort 13, Lucille, and, uh, to lesser extent, Negan.
Here’s a quick look at a page from each of the three stories, too:
As with any issue Syzygy releases, if you can’t find what you’re after in comic shops, drop me a line directly and I’m happy to help.
Spinner Rack Torn from the Headlines
I think that as soon as a first issue of any comic series was published, artists started playing with the idea of characters busting through a previous cover or interior page. It’s long been used as a way to signify power, or change, or maybe just to show a full-color character in a dynamic pose set against a mostly colorless background.
Whatever the case, it’s an approach that has been used almost as many times as covers with broken logos. And certainly it’s an approach that got new life after 1975’s Giant-Size X-Men 1 cover. That one is maybe the most pure example of the approach, showing as it does an entirely new team of X-Men bursting through, while the previous team watches from above. That particular cover, by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum, has been referenced and homaged so many times that those tributes could likely fill a full spinner rack entirely on their own.
And it’s an approach that DC used in 2011 to launch their New 52 initiative. Again, the torn covers they produced for that launch could fill an entire spinner rack. They could certainly use up all 25 spots I’m giving to this theme this week, but that’d greatly limit all the other great examples from across the decades.
You could argue that after Wolverine 50, which offered actual die-cut tears in its cover, that the approach had reached its peak, and yet they continue on. I used it myself, back when we relaunched the Micronauts comic in 2017. And even more recently, when the first issue of Tales of Syzpense featured an homage cover to Tales of Suspense 59:
I didn’t include that one below, since I’ve shown it before, but I did include the cover of the Marvel comic that reprinted ToS 59, anyway.
Otherwise, I did stick to the plan of offering 25 examples of torn covers to mark this newsletters 25th “issue,” but know that I could easily show double that many examples here. So maybe it’s a theme worth revisiting somewhere down the line…
As social media has gotten more fractured (a kind euphemism) his newsletter’s been a fun way to not only try to spread word about new comics and other things I’ve been working on but also as a way to indulge the lifetime of comics minutiae floating around in my head, so thanks to all of you for indulging it. More to come!
He Came From — INNER SPACE!
Great stuff, Chris.