Mickey Mantle

What a curveball from the Silver Age — the real-life baseball legend Mickey Mantle himself stepped into the DC Universe when he appeared in World's Finest Comics #87 in 1957, brought to the page by the legendary creative team of Bill Finger and Dick Sprang. With only a handful of catalogued appearances, this is a genuine curiosity for collectors, a moment when the worlds of sports celebrity and superhero comics collided in that wonderfully earnest late-'50s fashion. He turns up in the company of Superman and Clark Kent, no less, as well as the teen-scene cast of A Date with Judy, making his comics footprint small but utterly distinctive. For fans of Silver Age oddities and the era when DC wasn't shy about mixing real-world icons into its colorful pages, tracking down these appearances is a treat worth the hunt.