This feature is called "Almost Hidden." Even with this large amount of comic books that have been collected in trade paperbacks, there are still a number of great comic books that have never been reprinted in print (I'd say roughly 60% of them are DC Comics from the 1980s through the mid-1990s). So in this feature I spotlight different cool comic books that are only available as back issues.

Honestly, with the amount of books that have been collected in recent years plus the rise of DC and Marvel putting nearly every one of their back issues online as digital comics, I had put off this feature for, like, four years. However, I think there is still something to be said for comic books being collected in actual trade paperbacks, so I'll go back to doing this feature again with some regularity (well, you know, more often than on a four year basis).

Anyhow, in this instance, it started when I wrote a piece about how good J.M. DeMatteis was on Captain America. Someone asked what trades his run was collected in and I was aghast by how few they were collected in! The end of DeMatteis' run, which featured the death of Red Skull, WAS collected in a trade and so, too, was the very beginning of the run (#261-266 were added as a tack-on on to the Epic Collection collecting Roger Stern and John Byrne's Captain America run).

In that piece about DeMatteis' run, I wrote about one story that I particularly liked (J.M. wrote to me to say that Jim Shooter and Roger Stern came up with this particular bit - see, the guy is ever so humble, as well!)....

In a brilliant bit, in Captain America #278 (by DeMatteis, Zeck and Beatty), Captain America and a friend of his are captured by Baron Zemo and attacked by these mutated horribly monstrous creatures. Cap's friend, though, realizes that they are just PEOPLE who were cruelly mutated by Zemo, so he implores Cap to appeal to their hearts and not just punch them. Cap gives them a speech and it WORKS!!

DeMatteis' Captain America was a truly compassionate, caring guy who believed in the good of others and would be willing to die to see it out.

The shocking thing is that, while I think DeMatteis did an excellent job on the series, the ARTWORK is also by one of the Marvel's top artists of the 1980s, the art team of Mike Zeck and John Beatty! They went right from their run on Captain America to drawing Marvel's blockbuster crossover event, Secret Wars.

Zeck is also famous for his iconic covers for G.I. Joe (one of the best-selling ongoing series of the 1980s) as well as a return to Captain America to do a series of awesome covers for the book (like Captain America firing a machine gun on the cover).

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Check out this Zeck and Beatty sequence from the end of the arc that introduced Jack Monroe as the new Nomad. Cap has been tortured, but he has to stop Viper from decimating the country...

The classic Deathlok stories at least are collected, but in a Marvel Masterworks: Deathlok, so not in an easily accessible trade paperback (it seems unlikely that you'd buy a big Deathlok hardcover just for the three Cap issues it reprints, right?).

How in the world has this not been given an Epic Collection?

Okay, folks, If you have a suggestion for a comic that hasn't been collected into a trade that you'd like to see me spotlight in this feature, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!