Set Description:
Synopsis: This is a set of 135 books with a minimum grade of 8.0 currently starting with Issue #72 and ending with Issue #227.
Background: World's Finest Comics was published initially by National Periodical Publications and later by DC Comics beginning in the Summer of 1941 until January of 1986 spanning a total of 322 issues. The series was initially entitled World's Best Comics, but changed to World's Finest Comics after issue #1.
Originally, World's Finest Comics was an anthology series that featured DC's most popular characters from other anthology series—mainly Superman and Batman. The comic was 1.5 times larger than standard comics, and cost 15¢ (when standard comics were 10¢). The series was orginally issued on a quarterly schedule for the first twenty issues. It then went to a bi-monthly schedule but still retained more pages then the other DC Comics at the time.
With World's Finest #71, the comic was made regular-size (and price). In order to retain the draw of Superman and Batman without giving them both full-length stories, the series began chronicling the team-up adventures of Batman and Superman. Unlike their Post-Crisis counterparts, the early versions of these characters were the greatest of friends and routinely teamed up to battle the likes of villains such as Lex Luthor, Brainiac and the Joker. Although not considered an official part of the World's Finest team, the Golden Age Robin assisted them in many of their adventures.
For the best part of the Silver and Bronze Ages, the series continued publication with different formats going from regular size comics, featuring experimental ideas such as removing Batman from the lineup and making this series a team up book for Superman while Batman would team up with other heroes in the The Brave and the Bold (Volume 1). The sales of World's Finest Comics began to lag so Batman was brought back to the lineup. Other concepts included the Super-Sons storyline and the 80-pages Dollar Comics, which featured various back-up stories including Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Green Arrow and Hawkman among other notable characters, but always with a main focus on Batman and Superman. The series was eventually cancelled in 1986 after a series of failed attempts to revitalize the concept of the primary characters and the growing tensions between them as their new characterization made it impossible to keep the stories feasible.
Our Collection: While we have registered all our WFs in this set, our goal here has never been to collect all the books dating back to 1941, but rather just the Silver and some Bronze Age issues. We now have 135 books in this title spread out over 20 years (1954-1975), 45 of which are single highest graded. The real highlight of our set are the early books, #90, #91, #92, #94, #96, #99 and #100, all of which are highest graded with five of them holding that distinction alone.
Overall, this is actually a very nice run of books if you look at just Issues #90-#200, which covers a span of a little over 13 years. Of the 111 books in that span, we have high-grade copies of 108 of them, with the vast majority highest graded examples, 39 of which hold that distinction alone. Only one book in that span is worse than second highest graded.
2024 Update: This set remains very much a work in progress, as there are still major holes in our collection. We have decided to start the set with issue #71, although we do not own a copy of said issue. I am not real sure where we will stop it, it may be we will jettison the issues over #200 and aim for a 130 issue set, which would obviously be only a fraction of the books in this WF set. From #90-200 we only need three issues, but all three books are low census. In one case, there is not a reported sale over an 8.0 in 20 years, just to give you a feel for how hard these issues are to find. Again, they are not expensive when they do come up, as the last slot we filled with a top 2 book cost us less than $500, but completing this one is a bear. To use an old analogy, they are like hunting a needle in a haystack.
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