I mean, I had watched television before, so of course I knew of the likes of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Flash (Although I don't think I had yet realized this Flash was a different one in the costume than the other guy). And having read a handful of the Armageddon 2001 annuals (including the bookend specials) the previous year and having been in a comics shop on a semi-regular basis by then, I had a decent lay of the land of the DC Universe, and thus who knew Waverider, Lobo and Martian Manhunter were. And I wasn't shocked to see that Green Lantern was some guy with a bad haircut and comically large boots instead of the guy from The Super Powers Team cartoon. Hell, I could even identify Power Girl, Troia and the modern Hawkpeople, even if I couldn't tell you what their whole deals were, like, who exactly they were and where they came from (Fun fact: I still can't! Have any of their origins been settled in the last 34 years?).
As a teenager who used to check out copies of the Overstreet Price Guide from the public library just to look at the titles and names of characters and creators (There weren't a whole lot of comics in the libraries back then), I also knew the various Golden Agers who made up the Justice Society of America (well, maybe not Sandy the Golden Boy) and most of the other players in the book; not sure if I recognized Sgt. Rock's name from the guide, or from the closing credits of the original Predator movie, where Shane Black's Hawkins is shown reading an issue of his comic.
Still, this particular miniseries introduced me to several characters, like Jo Nah/Ultra Boy from the Legion of Super-Heroes, World War I's Enemy Ace Hans von Hammer and World War II heroes Gunner, Sarge and Pooch and Johnny Cloud, The Navajo Ace.
Most of those guys were minor enough that even now, after decades of reading DC Comics, I still haven't read many stories featuring them, and those that I have tend to be ones in which they just make cameos or are name-dropped. (Enemy Ace is an exception though, as I've read hundreds of pages of his adventures at this point, thanks to a Showcase Presents collection (as well as a few other appearances, including miniseries War Idyll and War in Heaven). (Oh, and I'm sure there have been plenty of Ultra Boy appearances since 1992, but for the most part I try to avoid Legion comics; for whatever reason, they just seem intimidating to me.)
This recent re-read of Armageddon: Inferno hit completely different than the series did when I had originally read it. Back then, I was still just dipping my toes into the DC Universe, whereas now I have spent years and years swimming in it and plumbing its depths. This time around, not only did I know all these guys' identities, but in most cases, I now know all about them, what their stories were before John Ostrander wrote them into this time-travel series and where they would go afterwards. Likewise, the names and careers of creators like "John Ostrander" and "Tom Mandrake" and "Art Adams" and "Walt Simonson" are pretty well known to me.
So, this time I was really able to appreciate the comic as something of a Who's Who in the DC Universe by way of a fight comic, and the all-star nature of the creative team.
I even recognized the cameos by The Unknown Soldier and Mademoiselle Marie, who I guess Luke McDonnell drew in that second panel above, although the rendering is awful rough. (The tank also resembles The Haunted Tank, although without a ghostly Civil War general floating around it, I can't be 100% sure that's what McDonnell meant to draw there, or if it's some random American tank with a star on it).
2.) I know the prices of goods and services rise over time, but still...! I was shocked to learn that each of these issues only cost $1.00. I could have sworn comic books were $2 or $2.50 when I had started reading them. I just checked dc.com, and it looks like the average comic book of theirs today is still $3.99 for 20 pages, which is what they cost when I stopped buying single issues and switched to trades a few years back (I had to double-check, because with the price of everything else seemingly going up in the last five years or so, I couldn't be sure comics weren't even more than $4 a pop now).
While it is not at all surprising that comic books cost a lot more today than they did in 1992, I still thought it worth noting that dang, you could really get a whole four-issue, 88-page mini-series back then for the cost of a single, 20-page chapter of a story arc today (plus an extra penny).
I can't imagine being a 15-year-old in 2026 and going into a comic shop and thinking to myself, "Yes, I would like to spend $3.99 on this issue of Batman, which, if I understand how comics work correctly, will get me one-fourth or one-sixth of a single story." I mean, not when I can get...well, let's see the page-count and price of the last manga volume I bought...about 200 pages for $14.99 on a different shelf of the shop (Or a big box bookstore or online, I guess).
It was therefore something of a novelty to read this series in back issues pulled from a long box (It's never been collected in trade, which is how I generally revisit old comics now) and to see any ads at all, let alone the specific ads of 1991.
They offer a rather interesting window into who DC and the companies who purchased the ads thought must be buying comic books at the time, too. As far as I can tell, it seemed to be kids...and some adults who were comic book fans and/or collectors.
Just out of curiosity, I took note of all the ads in here. The one above was the most surprising, I thought, as that sort of page filled with a checkboard of a bunch of small ads, complete with an ad for a Charles Atlas body and live sea horses, is something I would have guessed would have been in Silver and Bronze Age comics, rather than something from the early '90s.
Anyway, Armageddon: Inferno contained ads for movies (Cool World, Encino Man and Honey, I Blew Up The Kid, plus one for the video release of Frankenweenie), candy (Three Musketeers, Skittles and Starbursts), collectible cards (Score and Upper Deck's Major League Baseball cards, Fleer's basketball cards, "The Official Trading Car of Super Bowl XXVI" and some kind of parody baseball cards called "Flopps"), videogames (Super Smash TV, Super WrestleMania, Kid Chameleon, Krusty's Fun House, Top Gear and the Game Genie), upcoming comics conventions (John Byrne, Moebius, Tom Lyle, Steve Bissette and more in Boston! Rob Liefeld in New York!) and back issues (East Coast Comics, Mile High Comics, Twin City Books, Kingpin, American Comics & Entertainment), plus Palladium role-playing games, Topps' Batman Returns souvenir magazines, Wyler's drink mix, Estes brand precision rockets and Kiss' Revenge album.
Oh, and one for the Constitution of the United States from the Ad Council which, if you mailed-in for it, would get you a free informational kit including your very own copy of the constitution.
I suppose the presence of such ads is what helped DC be able to sell these things for only a buck back then.
As for house ads, they were fairly few and far between relative to the DC comics of the past few decades. There was one for Justice League Spectacular #1, another for "The Blaze/Satanus War" in the Superman books, one for the four-book Superman line with a blurb from Comic Buyer's Guide, and another for DC Comics Cosmic Cards ("From Clark Kent to Hell-Bent" the ad read, showing a picture of a Superman card and Lobo card), one offering subscriptions to 31 different DC books (ranging in price from $12 to $21), and a half-page black-and-white ad for imprint Impact Comics' The Web #10 and The Crusaders #1 (I wouldn't mind DC collecting their Impact books, if they could straighten out the rights, nor would I mind stumbling upon some of those series in a discount back issue bin).
None of the ads for particular books mentioned the names of the creators involved with producing them.
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By the way, when Googling something for my post about Armageddon: Inferno, I stumbled upon this five-year-old post at Steve Mollmann's Sciences' Less Accurate Grandmother blog, if you'd like another take on the miniseries. I seem to have liked it far more than he did. I was heartened by the fact that he chose to illustrate the post with one of the best sequences, that in which Simonson draws Enemy Ace gunning down a pterosaur. I didn't include that in my post, but only because I had already posted it on Bluesky.
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