I pulled out The Apokalips Sourcebook (1989) primarily for that super sweet Mike Mignola cover. The contents are pretty straight to the point: there’s a summary of the whole New Gods thing, a brief look at the planet Apokalips, a lengthy collection of character briefings, some tech and some advice on exploring and surviving the planet. I’m not suuuuper into the whole New Gods thing; like I said, I’m here for that cover primarily.

I want to be like, “This is pretty thin for a comic RPG sourcebook.” But is it really? List price is $7.00 in 1989 money, which the inflation calculator tells me is the equivalent of $17.76 in 2024 money. I suspect the inflation calculator is a little bit full of shit, though. Let’s do this another way. The book is A4, which is bigger than a comic, and 40 pages, which is also bigger than a comic. It isn’t full color, but the paper and cover stock are better than comics of the era, and it is illustrated. As it is primarily text, it’ll take you far longer to read than a single comic (even considering how much wordier 1989 comics were). And, if you’re running a game where this is useful material, it is hard to tell just how much additional use-time it would have, but probably a lot. 1989 comics were 20-something pages, plus ads, for a buck, so this is priced as the equivalent of seven comics. That…feels fair to me. Even if the book itself isn’t super exciting.

And now that I am thinking about it, I kind of like how little BS is in here. It’s a book about Apokalips. It gives you everything you need to know about Apokalips. Cool.