Float Like a Butterfly, Faster Than a Speeding Bullet...

Here's another one of my very favourite comics from when I was a kid:



Superman vs. Muhammad Ali.

Yes, I'll agree, it *does* sound a little weird at first. But trust me, it was a cool comic. (And they both did their part to defeat the invading armada of space aliens... again, you'll just have to trust me that it was cool.)

Here are a few bits of trivia:

1) If you look at the larger version of the cover above (which you can see is actually the front and back covers together), you might be able to recognize numerous faces from the 1970's, like Cher, Donny and Marie, Jimmy Carter, and many others.

2) By the time this comic was released, Ali wasn't even the world heavyweight champion, having lost his title to Leon Spinks (which he won back in a rematch, as you old folks might remember).

3) (Here's a little bit of trivia even *I* didn't know until I started searching the internet for cover scans to use in this post)

The artist, Neal Adams, was actually a replacement for another well-known comic artist named Joe Kubert. Apparently Kubert's art didn't meet with approval from Ali's people. Here is Kubert's original cover, the layout of which Adams kept when he redrew it:



I eventually stopped being a boxing fan (in large part due to seeing the toll which it extracted from Ali himself), but I never stopped loving this comic!


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(I think I'm going to have to go out and find that old song about Muhammad Ali... remember? It went: "Muhammad... Muhammad Ali / He floats like a butterfly, and stings like a bee / Muhammad... the black Superman / He calls to the other guy, I'm Ali... catch me if you can")