Love is in the air – DC Comics Presents #32

So today I was in downtown DC and worked my way to the monuments where the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, and what cover should pop into my head but this one:

It’s a great and memorable image from Ross Andru, who drew so many covers at DC in this time period (and here he’s ably inked by the recently passed Dick Giordano).  Being a denizen of the Washington area I really like this one because at no point in the story do the characters find themselves among the famous blossoms, yet our artists saw fit to depict them in this setting.  Cool.  And I have to admit, it certainly looks to me that Superman and Wonder Woman were made for each other.  This issue was one in a long series of efforts (perhaps most notably in Kingdom Come) to make a couple out of them, if only for very brief spells.  It seems pretty natural that two righteous super-powered beings would pair up.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Lois, but I never really understood what she and Supes would talk about when they both got home from work.

Lois: “I had a rough day working that school board corruption story for the Planet.”

Superman: “I was teleported to Apokolips where Darkseid thrashed the living hell out of me until I narrowly avoided death by turning his Omega Beams back on him.”

Not a lot of common ground there.

If I have a quibble with the cover it’s that in real life the cherry blossoms don’t actually surround the reflecting pool like that – primarily they’d be more to the right over near the Jefferson Memorial.  But never let geography get in the way of a great juxtaposition.  If Andru put the characters where the cherry blossoms actually are he might not have been able to work in one of the world’s largest phallic symbols, the Washington Monument.  And with a cover where two people have been bitten by the love bug (or pierced by love arrows) that would be a shame, now wouldn’t it?