This is a feature called "Win What's Never Been Won." This is about looking back at the history of comic book contests and showing who the winners were of the various contests (if we can tell who the winners are - I don't think anyone will ever know who won that Clark Bar Superhero Sweepstakes from the late 1970s).

I featured this as a Comic Book Questions Answered once, but obviously it fits here better, so here ya go!

In DC Comics with cover dates of August and September 1977, there was a notice on the cover about how "YOU could be in the SUPERMAN movie - details inside."

Those are the Superman covers, but lots of DC comics had that same notice.

Inside the comic with those notices was the following comic book contest...

The letters needed to be cut out to then send in as part of the contest (you had to spell out Superman and then either Clark Kent or Kal-El) were then printed in the letters pages of various DC comics for those months. Here are the ones from the aforementioned Superman #314 and #315...

DC books typically had a tag made at the bottom of a letter column to help promote other comics, so they just removed them to put the letters in their place. Luckily, they had an ad for a new reprint of Batman vs. Ra's Al Ghul's first battle that was cut out to be replaced by the contest rules (the contest was come up with at the last possible minute, so the books for the month had already been laid out).

Naturally, tens of thousands of people entered the contest. Interestingly, as far as I can tell, there wasn't any age limits either way (you know, kids younger than X cannot enter or kids older than X cannot enter), but the winners were both roughly the same age.

Tim Hussey (from California) and Ed Finneran (from Massachusetts) were the winners...

They are worked into a scene early in the film where Clark Kent is serving as the Smallville football team's equipment manager. The football team all drop their helmets off at Clark's feet and you'll notice that two of the players (dressed in gray without numbers on their uniforms) are noticeably smaller than the others...

Those are presumably Hussey and Finneran.

That contest did so well, though, that DC did a SECOND contest and it was a bit more complicated!

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='See the second Great Superman the Movie Contest']

DC editor Jack Harris arranged so that the winners would be chosen by Superman himself, Christopher Reeve (who was in New York City for a TV appearance)...

Bob Rozakis detailed a funny side effect of the contest:

Readers had to search through two months of DC titles for all 25, list the answers on a postcard, and send them in.

First prize in the contest was a cape worn by Christopher Reeve in Superman: the Movie. Ten second prize winners each got a page of Curt Swan artwork. The remaining entrants who got all 25 correct answers would receive a two-year subscription to the DC title of their choice.

Sound tough to win? Well, some folks at DC thought so. That’s why an extra tier of prizes was added. Every entrant who answered 15 to 24 of the questions correctly would receive a one-year subscription to his or her favorite book.

So the contest begins and before long, post cards start arriving at the DC offices. First a few a day. Then a few dozen a day. Then we were swamped. And the problems began.

No one had given much thought about how the winning cards would be isolated from all the entries. What we had, in effect, were thousands of multiple-choice tests that had to be graded. And we couldn’t just toss out every one that had an incorrect answer. Because of the extra tier of prizes, we had to check every answer on every card.

Guess who did it? That’s right, the vast majority of those cards were “graded” by yours truly. It didn’t take me long to memorize the correct answers and I could rattle them off for myself or for a group of my fellow staffers sitting around a table.

When all the entries were checked, we had only 21 people who’d gotten 100%. That made it fairly easy to do a drawing to determine who would get to tug on Superman’s cape and who would get Curt Swan artwork. What was going to be an expensive proposition was the one-year subscriptions. There were about 1400 winners! DC President Sol Harrison never anticipated that he’d be giving away quite so many comics and he wasn’t too pleased about it.

Along came the Answer Man with a suggestion: We were going to have to contact every one of the winners and ask which comic they wanted their subscription to. (Another job -- and expense -- no one had figured on.) The DC library at the time was overflowing with extra copies of books, I pointed out to Sol. Suppose, as an alternative to a subscription, we offered the winners a “DC Prize Pack” of twenty books that would include “classics from DC’s library,” some foreign editions (of which we had plenty) and at least one autographed comic.

Sol smiled as if to say, “I knew there was a reason I hired you!” He told me to work up a letter to be mailed to the winners, which I did. As it turned out, over ninety percent of the winners opted for the “Prize Pack.”

Bob has more cool stories about the contest at his blog here. Check it out!

Oops, I thought that that above image had the name of the winner. It did not. Here is the name of the winner, Darwin Metzger, who won Superman's cape!

Okay, folks, I am sure that you have suggestions for notable comic book contests! Heck, maybe you WON a notable comic book contest! That'd be awesome. I'd sure love to know who won that darn Clark Bar contest that no one can figure out (it might be the toughest mystery in comic book history)! Whatever the case may be, whether you just want to suggest a contest or if you won one, feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com and I'll see if I can't use your idea!