"Welcome to March"

Had this been a Leap Year, today would have been February the 29th., rather than March the 1st., and according to the answer to some inquiring fan back in the 1960's page of either an issue of Superman (or, maybe it was Action Comics), it'd be The Man of Steel's birthday. Since 2008 will be a Leap Year, and Supes was introduced in 1938, that'll still make him only 17-1/2 years old. Guess he'll have to wait around till 2012 just to be legal.

The above photo is of, of course, Nick Fury #12 (Circa 1969). It was the only issue drawn by Barry (Winsor-) Smith in the 18 issue run. Interesting in a way because Smith was trying his best to copy the styles of BOTH Jack Kirby AND Jim Steranko for that issue.

Sort of a funny story involving Smith's early work. When I first saw it in The X-Men 53, I thought it was horrible! The Agent of SHIELD 12 I thought interesting, but the prototype of Conan in Chamber of Darkness looked bad; too darkly inked. In fact, I didn't start becoming a Smith fan until Conan #3. But around the time when the title first started, Don Newton did a cover for the RBCC(aka: "The Rocket's Blast & Comicollector" fanzine) of the character and I wrote them a letter-of-comment (which they printed) where I stated that I thought Newton's version looked better than Smith's. Well, I must have hurt poor Roy Thomas's feelings back then 'cause he tore the letter out of his own personal copy of that 'zine, wrote on it: "Are you kidding?!" and mailed it to me! (Ahh...old "fanboy" memories are such a hoot!)