Millennium Interlocking Covers (DC, 1988)

In 1987, I first walked into a comic book store and was instantly hooked. However, I went straight to DC for some reason, and picked up the #1 issues of Green Arrow, Spectre, and Suicide Squad along with the start of Batman's New Adventures on issue 408. A couple months later, the Millennium cross-over event happened, and I was blown away. Not the greatest cross-over of all time for sure, but my first big comic event. I saw the interlocking covers between Captain Atom, Detective, Spectre and Suicide Squad, and thought they were the coolest thing. In retrospect, it makes sense that I loved them as they were done by Jerry Bingham, the Batman: Son of the Demon artist on whose work I absolutely drooled over page after page. I don't know of an earlier set of interlocking covers, so this might have been the first of its kind... The last couple years as an OA collector, these were the covers I was holding out as my personal grail. I contacted Jerry, who said he had sold them as a set in 1989. And that was where the trail went cold. Posting on CGC's Where are they now? just fanned other people's interest and yielded no results. On a random scan of the CAF listing of ebay items, I almost fell off my chair on seeing all four covers for sale. But the link was dead; the seller pulled them once he realized they were likely going to be broken up. I contacted him separately, and several agonizing months later and multiple assurances of never breaking up the group, we got to a happy place. In a quirk of fate, they arrived on my birthday. I notified Jerry who was excited to see them again after all these years. Jerry and I almost grew up in the same neighborhood in the South Side of Chicago, and we've maintained contact during my (until now, fruitless) search. Having that extra connection makes owning these that much cooler.