I was just curious if anyone on here knows what it is really worth (hopefully more)?

WITHOUT the dust jacket? Not a lot. Off the top of my head, and after a quick check of some dealer sites, I think you probably are looking at somewhere between $25 and $30. I think $200 eBay guy is dreaming.

BEFORE 1995, your odds would have been better. But a lot of collectors were perfectly happy, as I was, to settle for the facsimile edition that was published that year. Those are a lot easier to find and they are usually in good shape, including the dust jacket.

I rather like these boy’s adventure books from the 1940′s, especially ones based on big-name franchises like Dick Tracy or the Lone Ranger, and I assure you that $40 is the high end for most of them. If they’ve been reprinted, it tends to go lower. Not that many people care about original vs. reprint unless they’re hard-core collectors, and for them things like dust jackets and spine creases count for a lot.

Now I know. Thanks, Greg.

You left one out. There was an over-sized paperback put out by Whitman (I think) in 1966 or 67. It had a Kurt Schaffenberger cover and artwork throughout. It was called something like “The Case of the Movie Mogul”. Superman thwarts an insidious movie producer or something along those lines.

Superman Smashes The Secret of the Mad Director.

That was, like, a coloring book, almost. And I technically also left out Superman: from Krypton to Metropolis, another children’s book Bridwell did in 1982 that came with a little tape cassette.

Honestly, I thought they were a little outside the scope of this piece, those are more just collectibles. I don’t know that anyone here would really be into them for the prose.

I suppose the same could be said of the Big Little Book, but the weird absence of a Superman entry in that series for so long had piqued my curiosity. Especially, since, as you point out, Mad Director was a Whitman publication as well.

And you are absolutely right about the Maggin novels. Miracle Monday is absolutely brilliant. As soon as I found Elliot Maggin on the Internet I sent him my first fan mail since I was a 7 year-old to tell him how much I loved that book. (I’m surprised you didn’t mention the spin-off character from it in comics, Superwoman). I re-read Last Son of Krypton recently and it’s still brilliant too. I love the conceit in that one that Jor-El actually sent Albert Einstein a message to collect Kal-El from the landing coordinates but was prevented from doing so and Jonathan and Martha found him instead. And that’s leaving out the brilliant Krypton chapter and the fascinating insights into the Luthor/Superman dynamic.

I still think those two novels are two of the greatest Superman stories ever written. Certainly (with the first movie) they’re the best Superman stories produced in the late seventies and early 1980s, period.

I had no patience for the Life and Death. I wanted an original novel like Last Son of Krypton or Miracle Monday and instead I got an unbelievably literal novelisation of *every* issue of a year or so of stories. I gave up when they novelised the bloody Metropolis Mailbag but with other heroes filling in for Superman issue– which probably would have been the first thing anyone else would have cut! It was especially disappointing as I have tremendous respect for Roger Stern.

The menace of the mysterious haunted ship that’s plaguing the docks is maybe a little too Scooby-Doo for modern audiences, but in fairness this book was originally published in 1942, a couple of decades before Scooby Doo made it a cliche. (Lowther might have done that particular mystery-solution riff first too, for all I know.)

It probably comes from the great radio serial, “I Love a Mystery”, which premiered in 1939.

Great article by the way.

I agree that Stern did a remarkably good job of not only condensing the entire storyline, but also providing short background pieces for all the characters that weren’t in their iconic forms (Matrix Supergirl, Lex Luthor II, no-name JLA, etc.) that the average reader wouldn’t be familiar with.

“That’s a good word for it. Another good word for it is shitty.”

I wish novels would get back to the days when they were just for kids…

Here’s the exchange for those who haven’t read it…

“Oh, don’t play the lost little lamb with me, Superman, okay? Be a hero or a Romeo or a heel or some kind of sick, hormone-infested macho freak or anything you feel like being, but don’t make believe you don’t know what’s going on in my head.”

“You’re upset that I never told you that Clark and I were the same person.”

“Upset? No, amazed. You’re a stranger. Do you realize that? In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve been a stranger. How do you think that makes me feel?”

“Alone?”

“That’s a good word for it. Another good word for it is shitty.”

If that doesn’t persuade those who haven’t read it yet to give it a shot, well… I give up.

That would also explain why DC never did comic book adaptations for the first two movies like they did for the second two.

If you don’t count the novel based on Kingdom Come, Elliott Maggin’s only other Superman prose entry to date was a short story called “Luthor’s Gift,” which was — I think — done originally as an entry for this anthology…

It’s not in the book, which is annoying because the story is no longer posted anywehere online, either.

You must not have looked in the right place. You can read “Luthor’s Gift” here.

It used to be available at http://www.superman.ws, but that site, sadly, seems to have evaporated. The site also used to maintain, with Maggin’s blessing IIRC, the full text of “Miracle Monday.” That’s how I read the book, but now it’s gone.

Except, as you know, it’s hard to make anything on the internet truly disappear. So thanks to archive.org:

“Miracle Monday” by Elliot S! Maggin

(And in case that link doesn’t work for some reason, just go to http://www.archive.org and plug in the URL http://superman.ws/thebook/mm_contents.php )

But darn! Now I’m going to have to hit the used bookstores and look for some of the others.

Where’s Judging books by their covers?

I’m just a minion around here. You’d have to ask our Dread Overlord Brian about that.

He’s one post up, talking about Spider-Man’s half-face.

Great article!