The road to acquiring this comic was a convoluted one for sure.
I can't say I ever saw an episode of Ultraman, nor did I ever really know what Ultraman was really all about, save that it a giant space man fighting giant monsters..which l guess is all you need to know. The offspring of Gojira and Gamera and the like, the forebearer of Power Rangers and the like, it is something I'd like in irony and appreciate in context of the subgenre, but I've just never approached it. If there were any reason why I was even aware of Ultraman at any point it's because of seeing the solicits for comics such as this while flipping through Previews when the diameter experienced a brief nostalgia revival in the middle of the '90's.
I purchased the great (if occasionally glitchy) Masters of the Universe 30th Anniversary Commemorative Collection,my childhood favourite which my four-year-old has become a fanatic of, but as we rapidly blew though the 16 discs (130 episodes) we discovered that one of the discs was corrupt. Contacting the manufacturer by email they were surprisingly responsive and easy to deal with. It was about a week before the replacement disc showed up, but with a bonus copy of Ultraman with 10 episodes from the first series.
I haven't watched it but I put it on for my daughter one Saturday morning as I was jetting off to work a booth at the Fan Expo. My brother-in-law was babysitting informed me later in the evening that she loved it. The next day at the Fan Expo I was digging through a 50 cent bin and found a bunch of UItraman comics (from three different publishers no less) so believing that my daughter was a newfound fan I picked them up (after first making sure they're acceptable for a 4-year-old).
Weeks later l discovered that the first Ultraman mini was written by Dwayne McDuffie, one of my personal favourite writers. Woo! Bonus McDuffie l wasn't even aware I was missing. This was published by "Ultracomics", which was a division of Harvey Entertainment --you know, Richie Rich, Wendy an Hot Stuff-- who also had a division called "Nemesis Comics" which published a great Frankenstein spin called ''Frank" (advertised in this issue), drawn by McDuffie's Milestone partner Denys Cowan.
True story.
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