This post is not about the issue the ad is promoting. I haven’t read Detective Comics #572 in years, so it’s not fresh in my mind. However, given how much I love the Mike Barr/Alan Davis run of Detective I know that even if I did re-read it and find a few quibbles here and there I feel comfortable in saying this was a fun issue.

What I do want to write about, briefly, is how ads like this lived rent free in my brain back when I first started reading comics. Detective Comics #572 came out six or seven months before I started buying comics, so this was something I saw when I began my back issue journey. During that time period I was absorbing everything I could about the comics I was reading because it was new and exciting and ads like this fascinated me.

“A mystery so strange…it takes the greatest detectives of all time to solve it!”

The names of the creative team meant nothing to me at the time. I recognized Batman and Robin, obviously, and that’s Sherlock Holmes, but who are the other guys? It would be a few years, but I would eventually learn that the stretching dude was Elongated Man and the guy in the trench coat was Slam Bradley. And it would be even longer before I learned that Bradley was a Siegel and Shuster creation and actually read the book, which I finally would in 2003 when I started the epic Post Crisis Batman read through.

But back in 1988 or 1989 when I first saw this? It was a mystery, which is fitting when you think about given that it is promoting Detective Comics.

I kind of miss that feeling. It’s one of the dragons I chase when it comes to reading and collecting comics. I’ll never go back to that fully, but trying to get that high back is a thing.

More to follow…