I'm a little bit surprised that I bought this comic so early. As I've established, I loved monsters, but that goofy beaked monster wouldn't have enticed my interest; it certainly couldn't compare to Kirby's dramatic vampire or Adams' Superboy/Bat creature monsters. I would have found the cavemen the most visually interesting aspect of this cover, but even that's not much of a draw. I was probably going for:1) Economic value: even though this comic was 10 cents more expensive than the other DC comics I was buying, I could do the math and realize that i was getting more story for my money.
2) Familiarity: I was comfortable with the characters.
3) Satisfaction: I could tell that all the stories in this one were complete, unlike the as-yet-unsampled Marvel Comics that I must have at least been glancing at, but which all seemed to end on cliffhangers.
4) Oddballness: Besides monsters, I dug weird situations, and that was something that World's Finest delivered in droves, at least in the era from which these stories were being reprinted. Hero vs. villain slugfests were a harder sell (to me) at this point. Funhouse mirror distortions to Batman's real body? Cool!
This was a good transition to mainstream superhero comics for me. I didn't need to know a bunch of supporting characters or back-story or history. Stories plainly told with a generous helping of unconstrained imagination. The Superman/Batman team would never become one of my favorite combinations, possibly because the contemporary team-ups were less wild than these older stories.
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