Who Remembers the Millennium Editions?
One of the absolute highpoints of my career at DC Comics came relatively early. It was February 2000, a little over five years after I joined DC, and I was a manager in the Creative Services department. In this role I had to serve as an all-around, ready for anything project manager. I wrote sales kits for the ad sales group. I wrote DC’s promotional material. I oversaw the design and outputting of slides for the sales and marketing team – a team that I would join a few years later.
DC had launched a series called the Millennium Editions that reprinted one classic comic per week (with two per week in the first month, which was December 1999). I had been involved from the start, because each issue featured an introduction by Bob Greenberger, and it was my job to edit and fact-check Bob’s intros.
In February, though, my department head told me that I was going to take over editing the line. At the time all collected editions were edited by one person with an assistant, and adding the Millennium Editions to his workload was too much, apparently.
I always liked a challenge – but this one made me nervous. I went to Paul Levitz and told him that I was concerned because I’d never been a part of the editorial process at DC, and I didn’t know the systems.
“You’re not really going to be an editor,” he said. That wasn’t much reassurance, but he made up for it by giving me an assistant who really knew his way around DC’s production department: Nick J. Napolitano, who is now DC’s VP – Publishing & Business Operations.
After 26 completed issues, the first title to bear my name as editor was DC Millennium Edition: The New Gods #1. As a big fan of Jack Kirby’s work, I appreciated the coincidence.
Still, getting out a comic every week on top of my regular responsibilities was a challenge, and there were a few bumps in the road ahead. Every title was a different puzzle: many had never been reprinted before and had to be entirely reconstructed from scanned copies of the originals. Occasionally, though, we’d have a more recent title on our schedule, with digital files that were relatively easy to work with.
Along the way, Paul put me in touch with a few folks who helped me identify the talent on some early comics. (We were sticklers for accurate credits!) One was superfan Rich Morrissey, whom I’d known slightly through some fandom activity years before. Rich (and his partner, whose name I’m embarrassed to say I do not recall) had a system for identifying writers based on word usage and syntax – something that clearly required some serious scholarship.
The other was Michael “Batman” Uslan, who had been a member of DC’s Junior Woodchucks in the 1970s – and even though he had officially “gone Hollywood,” he always answered emails about art credits, and he had a great way of drawing comparisons between art on different stories to point out that they clearly hadn’t been drawn by the same person.
Another weird highlight: There were a few times when we had absolutely nothing for a particular issue. Not the film. Not a beat-up copy in the library. Nothing. Then I would have to contact Mike Wilbur from Diamond to see if Steve Geppi could loan us a copy from his personal collection. The two times that happened under my watch were for Detective Comics #1 and New Fun Comics #1, the latter of which we decided not to reprint at that time because it was too far from standard comics format.
I told Mike to send reading copies, but what came in looked like they had just gone on sale at the local newsstand. Like new, they were. I’m telling you, my hands were shaking when I unpacked them!
I also gained an appreciation for early DC artists like Fred Guardineer, Jack Burnley, and Fred Ray, as well as the stories behind the stories revealed in the introductions.
Here, then, are the Millennium Editions I edited:
· NEW GODS #1
· OUR ARMY AT WAR #81
· ACTION COMICS #252
· HELLBLAZER #1
· JUSTICE LEAGUE #1
· PLOP! #1
· THE SPIRIT #1
· KINGDOM COME #1
· SUPERMAN #75
· WONDER WOMAN (2nd series) #1
· WORLD'S FINEST COMICS #71
· FLASH COMICS #1
· HOUSE OF MYSTERY #1
· MYSTERIOUS SUSPENSE #1
· POLICE COMICS #1
· BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS #1
· MILITARY COMICS #1
· PREACHER #1
· SENSATION COMICS #1
· ADVENTURE COMICS #247
· BRAVE AND THE BOLD #85
· MORE FUN COMICS #101
· SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING #21
· ADVENTURE COMICS #61
· NEW TEEN TITANS #1
· SHOWCASE #22
· SUPERMAN #1
· DETECTIVE COMICS #1
· DETECTIVE COMICS #225
· MORE FUN COMICS #73
· SHOWCASE #9
· SUPERMAN #233
· ALL STAR COMICS #8
· BATMAN #1
· THE SHADOW #1
· SUPERBOY #1
That’s 35 out of the full run of 62 issues. It gave me some pride that we got through all of them with only one significant error. One issue, very early in my run, went to press missing a crucial “created by” credit. Fortunately, those credits ran on the inside back covers rather than the interior comic pages, and, also fortunately, the comics hadn’t been bound yet, so we only had to scrap and reprint the covers, not the full comic.
I still have a full set of the series, plus some odds and ends like a word doc of the complete solicitation copy for each issue.
So, what was your favorite Millennium Edition?