Month: October 2019

Archie Giant Series Magazine #169 (January, 1970)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As I’ve written here on earlier occasions (and even if I hadn’t, a quick scan of the blog’s archives would clue you in), I didn’t pick up many humor comic titles in my formative years as a comic book fan, a half-century and more ago.  The most notable exception to that rule was Mad, which, as I explained some weeks back, I probably didn’t consider to be a “comic book” in quite the same way that I did, say, Flash, or Daredevil.  Oh, there was that one issue of Not Brand Echh, of course, as well as several issues of The Fox and the Crow (aka Stanley and His Monster) — and even a Dennis the Menace comic or two, fairly early on, which I opted not to write about here.  But that was it, as far as “funny” funnybooks went.  Needless to say, I completely eschewed the teen humor genre — indeed, the only time I can remember even being vaguely interested in checking out the Archie Comics line circa 1965-1967 was when the company briefly jumped on the superhero fad bandwagon, with their flagship character transformed into Pureheart the Powerful and so forth.  Even then, I didn’t bite.

So, why in the world would my twelve-year-old self, after more than four years of enjoying DC comics (almost all of which were in the superhero genre) and close to two years of the same with Marvel (ditto) — pretty much to the exclusion of anything else (save, naturally, for Mad) — suddenly succumb to the impulse to buy an Archie title?  Read More

Avengers #71 (December, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

At the conclusion of Avengers #70, published fifty years and one month ago, readers were promised that the next issue would feature “the most shocking surprise guests of all!!”  A month later, those fans who picked #71 up off the spinner rack wouldn’t have to look any further than the dynamic Sal Buscema-Sam Grainger cover to learn the identity of those guest stars — though it’s likely that a lot of them had already gotten the news courtesy of the Mighty Marvel Checklist entry for the book that ran in that month’s Marvel comics’ Bullpen Bulletins text page: “The battle that time forgot!  The Avengers take on Cap, the Torch, and Namor in wartime Paris!  Don’t miss “Endgame!”

In October, 1969, my twelve-year-old self had yet to read a single Golden Age Marvel (or Timely, if you prefer) comic book story.  And while I’d gleaned enough information in my few years of reading current Marvel comics to know that Captain America, the original Human Torch, and the Sub-Mariner had all been around in the 1940s, I’m not sure if I knew whether or not they’d ever appeared in the same story together before.  I certainly didn’t know about the Invaders — and neither did anyone else, including their creator Roy Thomas (also the scribe of our current tale), since they wouldn’t actually exist for another six years.  So to see these three characters in World War II-era action was a whole new thing for me (and probably for a lot of other readers as well). Read More

Fantastic Four #94 (January, 1970)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

With the 94th issue of Fantastic Four, Marvel Comics’ new single-issue story policy, first announced by editor-in-chief Stan Lee in a “Stan’s Soapbox” editorial three months earlier, finally caught up with the publisher’s flagship title — its implementation there having been delayed for a couple of issues while Lee and his collaborator Jack Kirby wrapped up their “Skrull gangster planet” multi-parter.  Prior to that storyline, the book had featured another serialized tale, involving the Mole Man, that filled up two issues and spilled over into a third; that story had in turn followed a Dr. Doom epic that ran four issues; and so on.  In fact, the last real “done-in-one” story to appear in Fantastic Four had been “Where Treads the Living Totem!” in #80 (Nov., 1968) — an issue which happened to be not only the second-ever FF comic I’d ever bought, but also my least favorite issue to date.  Outside of reprints, prior to October, 1969 that was likely the only single-issue, non-continued Fantastic Four story my twelve-year-old self had ever read. Read More