Joe Giella

Superman is notoriously difficult to kill. It's kind of his thing, and even though people have been trying to pull it off for 77 years now, they've never really managed to. Even the most famous example of someone coming close had to involve an unstoppable giant bone monster in bike shorts and a spurious understanding of evolution, and even that didn't really work --- the main result was less shuffling off this mortal coil and more hanging around for a couple of years in dire need of a haircut. But there is one person who might have a pretty good shot. Someone who knows all of Superman's weaknesses, and who has the resources to provide a squad of hitmen with everything they'd need to put a Kryptonite nail into the Man of Steel's coffin. That man is Clark Kent, and in Len Wein, Dick Dillin and Joe Giella's "A Matter of Light and Death," which opens with Clark hiring a trio of crooks to off his own alter-ego, and just keeps getting weirder from there.

This week marks the premiere of Gotham, the new Fox television show focusing on Jim Gordon's first year as a cop in Batman's hometown, and the origins of young Bruce Wayne and the people who will one day become the greatest enemies of his war on crime. That the show exists at all is a testament to how strong Jim Gordon and the rest of the Gotham city Police Department are as heroes in their own rights. So if Gotham has you in the mood to read about Gordon, Harvey Bullock and the rest of the GCPD -- or if you just want to dive into some solid Batman comics where the spotlight isn't entirely on the Dark Knight -- then I've got some suggestions for great comics about Gotham's top cops!

Saying that the Joker has done a lot of weird stuff in his time is putting it pretty mildly. From trying to patent poisoned fish to serving as Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, the dude has been up to some pretty strange stuff. But never, in a 70-year history of thematic villainy, has he done anything stranger than he did in July of 1969, because that was when he turned his dastardly crim

A while back, ComicsAlliance brought you a look back at the 1976 Mighty Marvel Strength & Fitness Book, in which the kids of the '70s were invited to slim down with exercises like the "Torchie Twist." It's hardly the only strange piece of strange Marvel ephemera from the era, though, and apparently it did its job so well that by the next year, it was time to fatten up those kids all