Mail Call For 2.16.24

As is often the case, the latest Mail Call was inspired by something I saw on Bluesky.

Back in the early ’80s, I was picking up The Flash as regularly as I could for a while, and that was 100% for the Doctor Fate backup stories.

Over the years, I’ve thought about reacquiring those Flash comics for the sake of the backups, but then I learned that they were reprinted in this 1984 collection of Doctor Fate stories.

And why buy those boring-ass, late-period-Carmine-Infantino-illustrated Flash stories when all I wanted was the backups?

I remember seeing the ads for it at the time, and I wanted it, even not knowing what it was about or that it reprinted the backup stories, but I didn’t have access to a comic shop, so there was no way for me to grab them at the time, then I just forgot about it.

Until now. And so, here we are.

Born and raised in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Jon Maki developed an enduring love for comics at an early age.