We live in an age of nearly total access. Our own Greg Hatcher wrote a great article on the topic here, about how so many of the comics of his youth are available in trade paperback collections. Even with this large amount of available comic books, there are still a number of great comic books that have never been collected into trade paperback (I'd say roughly 60% of them are DC Comics from the 1980s through the mid-1990s). So every day this month I will spotlight a different cool comic book that is only available as a back issue. Here is an archive of the comic books featured so far.

I want you folks to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com with your suggestions for comics that I should feature this month. I'd like to see what you all would like to see get more attention. But for day one, I'll be featuring one of my favorite single comic book issues (well, at least among those that have never been reprinted), Justice League America #45 (which I write about here a lot, since I like it so much), which details a date between Guy Gardner and Tora Olafsdotter (Green Lantern and Ice of the JLI, respectively) that does not go the way Guy expected.

The issue was written by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis, penciled by Adam Hughes and Russ Braun and inked by John Beatty, Jose Marzan, Jr. and Malcolm Jones III.

The concept of the issue is that Oberon is considering leaving the Justice League to go be with Mister Miracle and Big Barda. Meanwhile, Ice is trying to get Guy Gardner to take her on a REAL date, as their first date was to a porno theater and their second date was to a cock fight. So she manages to convince him to take her to the Ice Capists.

Unluckily for Guy, Blue Beetle and Killowog find out about their date from Ice's best friend, Fire, and they have certain plans in place for Guy...











Hilarious stuff, and great art from Russ Braun, who has been doing some strong work recently on The Boy filling in for Darick Robertson (who is a pretty tough act to follow).

Guy and Ice return to the embassy and Guy, naturally, is fuming. He tries to calm down, for Ice's sake, but then he enters his room...



What follows is stand-out work from J.M. DeMatteis, as he handles most of the rest of the humor in the issue off-panel (by the by, Lightray and Orion had recently joined the Justice League to replace Mister Miracle)...







That is the first comic featured this month, now e-mail me at bcronini@comicbookresources.com to see what other comics will be featured this month!