Before we dive into the individual comic book that’s the main topic of today’s post, your humble blogger would like to call your attention to a more general aspect of comics history, one that’s making its debut on this site with the Gene Colan-Tom Palmer cover shown above.  Yes, it’s the Uniform Product Code — which, as best as I can tell, actually first started appearing on DC Comics’ publications in February, 1976, but, as we didn’t cover any DC books last month, had to wait for March to show up here, in conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of its adoption by Marvel.  I don’t really have anything else to say about the UPC, except that we’d all best get used to it (again), because it’s not going away anytime soon.  (Yeah, sure, around the turn of the next decade the big publishers will begin using a different graphic in its place on their direct-sales editions.  But the real estate consumed by that rectangular box won’t be coming back for a long, long time.)  Read More