In 1982 when the team of Frank Miller and Klaus Janson were pumping new life into Marvel’s blind superhero, a company called Fantaco Enterprises produced a oneshot magazine called The Daredevil Chronicles, about the Marvel hero, but Lev Gleason’s Daredevil was featured on both the first and the last interior pages of artwork. The second appearance, containing a comparison and contrast between Bart Hill and Marvel’s Daredevil, Matt Murdock, revealed that Gleason’s Daredevil Comics achieved a peak circulation of six million copies per month. By way of comparison according to G.B. Hecht’s 2003 “Marvel Circulation Analysis”, the House of Ideas’ namesake crusader’s peak circulation in the 1960s was under 300,000 and although the Miller/ Janson run brought sales up above 250,000 again, by the dawn of the new millennium, sales of Daredevil‘s comics were peaking at 100,000 but often dropped to well below half that.

Does that sound counter-intuitive? Isn’t the comicbook industry bigger now than it has ever been? Yes and no. The industry itself is bigger, yes. Hollywood surely wouldn’t have bet the 1940s equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars on comic properties at the time. Even the successful Batman & Robin, Captain Marvel and Captain America movie serials were of a comparatively small budget. While comics cost a good bit more to produce now, they cost exponentially more to buy than they did in the ‘40s.

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It’s the coincident magic of shuffle. As I begin to write, Guns N Roses’ “Breakdown” off of their Use Your Illusion (Blue) begins to play. And I’m reminded of what it takes to make it big, to make something that lasts, to say, “This is my team. This is who I’m with and where I’m from.” And I’m reminded, just days after Cinco de Mayo, that the story of the rise of the Legion of Super-Heroes is also the story of the improbable victory of New World values.

Happy Comic Book Day, True Believers. You all know about Daredevil right? He’s the superhero with a disability who uses his special skills and handheld weapon to fly above the city and punish criminals. He’s the one who started out in a largely yellow costume in his first appearance, but soon shifted the mostly red look that he’s most recognized for.

Yeah, you know Daredevil. And if you’re a true comicbook fan you know that his secret identity is… Bart Hill.

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“How do your pistol and your bible, and your sleeping pills go?” Tom Waits croons out heartrendingly on “Who Are You”, the fifth track on 1992’s Bone Machine, “Are you still jumping out of windows in expensive clothes?” There’s a strange link between the Waits song and China Miéville’s unique reboot of Dial H. But it’s a link you can’t really see until you read Dial H #12.

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After just a few years on the Hellblazer title, Jamie Delano’s body of work already began to seem somehow insurmountable as a creative statement. Could other writers achieve the same character affects Delano had? Could they map out the same neo-Victorian London-driven storytelling (which married so elegantly those hardboiled noir elements of Chandler with the utter mind-screaming horror of Lovecraft) in the same way that Delano had? Could they protract that quintessential magic? When Garth Ennis took the reins as series regular writer for Hellblazer, he reminded us not only of the power of the John Constantine character (the titular Hellblazer), but also that as significant as it was, Delano’s creative vision wasn’t a limitation, but an invitation.