I got a comment today on my post from last November about DC Super-Stars #10. That issue contained the wonderfully goofy story "The Great Super-Star Game" in which villains Huntress and Sportsmaster recruit teams of heroes and villains to play a baseball game. It seems that Huntress is ready to switch sides and become a hero because she's convinced that villains can never win. Sportsmaster proposes the baseball game in order to prove her wrong. You can probably guess how well that works out.
Anyway, Matthew H. Camp had a question for me:
This was reprinted in miniature form with a different cover. The cover had the line up of teams facing each other down, with uncle sam in the center, on a yellow background.
Can't seem to find a copy of that online. Any idea what the title of that reprint was?
As it turns out, not too long after I uploaded that post, I acquired a copy of the very book about which Mr. Camp is inquiring. A friend of mine found a copy at a used book store and, knowing how much I liked "The Great Super-Star Game," bought it for me. This demonstrates once again that I have better friends than I probably deserve.
The book in question is DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #13, cover dated September 1981 and featuring, according to the cover blurb, "100 Pulse-Pounding Pages" of Strange Sports Stories. As you can see, aside from the background being white rather than yellow, Matthew described the book pretty accurately:
The issue also includes stories reprinted, for the most part, from the short lived Srange Sports Stories series from the early 70's. Among these are a story in which a man plays tennis against a robot with a grenade for a ball, a 31st century athlete pole vaults through time to 1972, a murderous lumberjack plays hockey against the vengeful ghost of a man killed by his father, the wizard Merlin helps a team of scrubs win a college football game, and four other odd little tales.
I hope you manage to find a copy of this, Matthew. It's worth the effort to track down.
Talk about perfect timing! Thanks for clearing this up - and big props to your friend!
ReplyDeleteThis also explains why I clearly remember reading the stories featured on the covers of the old Strange Sports series, but never had any of those books. They were in this little digest!
Rock on and happy reading