• Flash #100: The Quick and the Dead (April 1995)
• Wonder Woman #100: Fall of an Amazon (August 1995)
• Justice League America #100: Return of a Hero (June 1995)
• Superman #100: The Death of Clark Kent (May 1995)
• Green Arrow #100: Where Angels Fear to Tread (September 1995)

Does anyone know of any others?

I went through the galleries at the Grand Comic Database for the 1959 and 1987 series, and managed to find no less than 23 covers on which the Flash, or a member of his supporting cast was depicted as dead, but managed to survive the story. Sometimes the events took place, but the character survived, or it turned out the body was someone else’s. Sometimes they were what I call “CPR deaths,” in which the character is technically dead, but not beyond the help of modern (or in comics, slightly ahead of modern) medicine. Generally they’re resuscitated in the following issue. And some are just plain misleading.

Hover for a description. Click to open the issue’s page at GCD.

Update: It’s Monday, and spoilers for the actual issue are starting to hit the message boards. Please DO NOT post any here. I’m waiting until Wednesday when I can read the book. Thank you!

Update 2: Added one cover from Impulse.

Update (June 25): I just discovered that Comic Coverage did a similar feature on The Many Deaths of Barry Allen last year.

Update (August 19): I can’t believe I missed Impulse #77.

An explanation: I recently stumbled across a mention of Smash Comics, a series from Quality Comics that ran more or less concurrently with the more familiar Flash Comics. Just for kicks, I searched the Grand Comics Database (which is where I got the cover images) for Crash Comics, and found Crash Comics Adventures, which ran for 5 issues in 1940 before spinning off a series on the original Cat-Man. So the three books would have been on sale at the same time!

I couldn’t find any other books with the same pattern in the title. The GCD does substring matches, and “ash comics” only brought up variations on these three series. Though it did remind me that DC resurrected the Smash Comics title for one chapter of the 1999 The Justice Society Returns! event.

If they weren’t publishing alternate covers, there’s no way they would have used a fully-painted picture of the puppet Angel. Update: Scan added.

The guy at the comic store said, “of all the people who had it on their pull list, I figured you’d appreciate this one the most.” Good call!

Angel: The Curse

In this first issue of a new Angel tale, Angel has survived the conclusion of his TV show and finds himself in a mysterious Romanian forest. There, his search for the Gypsy tribe that cursed him years ago takes a turn for the worse.

I suspect we’ll get a “once out of the pit…” explanation (i.e. no explanation at all) and the cliffhanger’s resolution will remain open for Joss to deal with in a movie-of-the-week or something.

But what galls me is that the book is supposed to have four covers. OK, one variant every once in a while is nice, and I can even go for Dark Horse’s early efforts to have one drawn cover and one photo cover to get the newsstand audience (is there such a thing anymore?)… but the only reason to do four covers for one book is to get collectors to buy four copies. It was an insulting gimmick in the early 1990s, and it annoys me that the practice never quite went away. Worse, TV Guide took it mainstream. I guess we’ll know we’re in trouble when Time or National Geographic starts doing multiple collectors’ covers.

*grumble*