So I will be the first person to admit that my experience with Superman comics has been spotty at best. When I was a kid, I owned a few because I loved the movies and shows like Super Friends, but I think that amounted to an issue here and there during the pre-Crisis era and a few right around the time of the Byrne reboot (mostly Aventures of Superman). When I got into comic book collecting in 1990, I jumped into the Batman camp, but did buy Superman comics when I had the chance, especially if the stories looked good. That meant that I was an “on again-off again” reader throughout much of the Triangle Era and since Infinite Crisis have been the same.

But if the comic was published before 1980, I probably haven’t read it.. And if it wasn’t in the main Superman title, I definitely haven’t read it (unless, that is, it was reprinted in a “Greatest Stories” trade). Superman Family, therefore, was something that I was completely unfamiliar with (well, except for its format because I’ve read most of the Batman Family book), and I wasn’t necessarily looking to start collecting it, but I spotted a few issues on a good discount ($3 a piece, I think) at the Baltimore Comic-Con and decided to give them a try.

The result, I found, was mixed. Two of the issues are filled with at least a couple of reprint stories, and while I definitely can appreciate them for what they were, they didn’t really hold my attention. The two in the pile that were of the higher number (#186 and 200) fared better in my reading in that they held my attention. Issue #186 has the first part of a Superman/Earth-2 Superman team-up as well as a solid Nightwing and Flamebird story and a middle chapter of what was actually a pretty intriguing Supergirl story. Issue #200 is a similar anthology with different characters taking the lead, but they’re all told in the future–the early 2000s, to be precise–where Superman and Lois are married and have a teenage daughter. Each story centers around the characters’ wedding anniversary and they are interesting and goofy at different times, but I like it when you get “peek into the future” stories from the pre-Crisis era. Maybe that’s because all of the “peek into the future” stories I have seen in recent decades have all been bleak and dystopian.

Nothing against bleak and dystopian, but there are times when I like stories that give us something positive or “the wonder of what’s possible.”

I think if I were a kid in the 1970s and pulled comics off the newsstand racks, I might have picked these up once in a while (especially #200), and they definitely deliver their value (from 50 cents to a dollar), even when they are priced for the back issue market.

Keep, Sell, Donate, or Trash?

Keep.