I was going through some old comics this evening and found the ad below in Jimmy Olsen #90, the January 1966 issue. The Superman 80-Page Giant being advertised was cover-dated the same month.

If you click through the image several times to blow it up as large as you can, you’ll see a couple of things that intrigued me.

First, note Superman is telling the audience of 1966 that the reprinted stories were “published before you were born,” that “less than 100 copies of this issue are still in existence” (tsk, tsk, Superman, don’t you know the proper usage should be “fewer”?) and that “collectors will pay $30.00 and up for a perfect copy!”

$30.00? Wow!

The comic he’s referring to from which the reprints were plucked is Superman #19, the November/December 1942 issue. As far as I can tell from researching the Heritage Auction site, a copy sold for $1,195.00 in May of ’09.

The other interesting thing about the cover is that it asks the reader to “show this story to your Ma and Dad! Do they remember the first story of Mr. Mxyzptlk, the super-pest … a tale printed when they were kids?!”

Put those two concepts together and they paint a fractured picture of how the comic reader was perceived in 1966. On the one hand, it was made up primarily of kids. Why else would the reader be told to show the comic to his or her “Ma and Dad”? But on the other hand, the cover also acknowledged the beginnings of the adult collector market. For who else would have paid that (gasp!) $30.00 amount meant to astonish the 1966 audience?

Comics were in the midst of changing then, and the world in which Superman could say those things to a reader and have them come off as anything but ironic and postmodern is now gone forever.