Month: July 2023

Daredevil #105 (November, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In summer,1973, my younger self was still pretty isolated as a comic-book reader.  Good, lasting face-to-face friendships with fellow enthusiasts were on the horizon, but had not yet arrived, and I wasn’t reading fanzines.  Therefore, I generally picked up on hot new titles — or on newly hot streaks on older titles — via the publishers’ own marketing efforts, or by reader buzz in the letters columns… or by sheer happenstance.

So how did t I finally catch on to what artist-plotter Jim Starlin was up to in Captain Marvel, some five issues and eight months into his soon-to-be-classic run?  As best as I can tell, it was due mostly to the latter of those three options — more specifically, via a very unlikely tie-in with, of all things, Daredevil.  Read More

Marvel Spotlight #12 (October, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In several previous blog posts (most extensively in this one), I’ve described the early 1970s horror boom in American comics as part of a larger wave of interest in monsters (especially among young people) that can be traced back to the arrival of the classic old Universal monster movies on television in the late 1950s, and that flourished in the following decade and beyond, ultimately giving us such enduring cultural artifacts as Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s hit 1962 single “Monster Mash”, the Gothic TV soap opera Dark Shadows (which premiered in 1966, but didn’t really didn’t take off until the arrival of the vampire Barnabas Collins in ’67), and, lest we forget, Count Chocula and Franken Berry breakfast cereals, which first crept onto grocery shelves in 1971.  It was a legitimate popular phenomenon, but one that had largely passed American color comics by — at least until the early 1971 revisions to the Comics Code, which allowed for vampires, werewolves, and ghouls to be used “when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high calibre literary works” for the first time since the Code’s adoption in 1954.  Before too many months had passed, spinner racks were filling up with titles like Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, Frankenstein, and Swamp Thing — and fifty years ago, in the summer of 1973, new ones were continuing to arrive.  Read More

Defenders #9 (October, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

We’ve arrived at the second full-length installment in the epic Marvel Comics crossover known as “The Avengers/Defenders War”, and if you missed our post about the previous episode in Avengers #116, you might want to check that one out first, since we’re going to jump right back into the continuing narrative without worrying about a recap… pausing only long enough to make note of the fact that while the first installment’s cover by John Romita and Mike Esposito managed to convey the scope of the conflict while only depicting three heroes, this issue’s follow-up by Sal Buscema ups that number to five.  On the other hand, Hawkeye the Avenging Archer has been Hawkeye the Defending Archer for all of a minute, so it’s not hard to understand how Marvel might have thought that fans coming in even a little bit late would be confused to see an issue of Defenders that only cover-featured Hawkeye and Iron Man.

And now, with that observation made, it’s on with the show:  Read More

Warlock #8 (October, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When last we left Adam Warlock at the end of our Warlock #5 post back in January, the superheroic would-be savior of Counter-Earth had just saved thousands of Northern Californians from dying, either as a result of bomb test-caused earthquakes and flooding, or from the fire of armed missiles — the “Deathbirds” — which the same test had inadvertently triggered… only to have the very man responsible for ordering the bomb test in the first place, President Rex Carpenter, subsequently declare him a menace on national television.

The next issue of the series, sporting a cover by John Romita, picks up very soon after those events, as Adam finds himself under assault by the United States military.  Warlock #6 also sees the partial return of Mike Friedrich as the book’s writer, providing the finished script over a plot by Ron Goulart (who’d written issue #5), who in his turn worked from an “idea” contributed by Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas.

Additionally, issue #6 also features a major changing of the guard on the series’ artistic side, as Bob Brown replaces Gil Kane as penciller.  Kane, who’d co-created the feature with Thomas back in Marvel Premiere #1 (Apr., 1972) and had drawn every installment but one since then, would go on to provide one more cover for the book before its cancellation, but was otherwise done with Warlock as of #5.  Read More

Fear #17 (October, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By the time Steve Gerber sat down to write the story that we’ll be looking at today, he was pretty well established at Marvel Comics.  While it’s true that an early stint working on staff as a proofreader didn’t turn out all that great, due to the twenty-five-year-old former advertising copywriter’s propensity for falling asleep at his desk (many years later, Gerber would be diagnosed with sleep apnea), his freelance writing gig was going very well, thank you.  As of late spring, 1973, Gerber was the regular writer for Daredevil, Sub-Mariner, the Zombie (in Tales of the Zombie), and — last but not least — the gig with which he’d started out, almost a year before: the Man-Thing series in Fear.  Not only that, but in just two months, that latter assignment would provide the launchpad for the character for which he’d ultimately be best remembered, Howard the Duck.

But it all almost came crashing down in the middle of ’73, thanks to Gerber’s introduction of another, less well-remembered character in the pages of that same series — a character whose unmistakable similarity to the flagship superhero of Marvel’s number one competitor, though intended as parody, wasn’t at all well received by that competitor — resulting in the young writer coming very, very close to being fired.  Read More

Avengers #116 (October, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

According to writer Steve Englehart, the multi-issue Marvel Comics crossover event most of us refer to as the Avengers/Defenders War (Englehart himself prefers to call it the Avengers/Defenders Clash, God bless ‘im) had its origins in his personal affection for the classic Marvel Annuals he’d enjoyed as a fan in the 1960s — epic, overstuffed extravaganzas like the very crashed wedding of Reed Richards and the Invisible Girl in Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965), or the save-the-timeline battle between the “new” and the “old” Avengers in Avengers Annual #2 (Sep., 1968).  As the writer confided in his 2010 introduction to Marvel Masterworks — The Defenders, Vol. 2, “I have great memories of finding these gems and sitting down in the shade of a tree on a sunny summer’s day to read them.”  But in recent years, such summertime Annuals as Marvel had continued to produce were mere collections of reprints — nice enough if you didn’t already have those stories, many of which were already classics, but not something you could really get excited about in the same way you could the extra-length, brand-new, “event” stories featured by the Annuals in their heyday.  Read More

The Shadow #1 (Oct.-Nov., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover to Shadow Comics #1 (1940). Art by Jerome Rozen.

Cover to The Shadow #8 (Sep., 1965). Art by Paul Reinman.

As memory serves, my younger self had very little knowledge of the Shadow when DC Comics first started promoting their upcoming title about him in the fall of 1972.  If asked, I probably could have told you that he was an old-time crime-fighting hero who had appeared both in pulp magazines and on the radio, though I doubt I could have told you which had come first.  And I’m all but certain that I had no knowledge that he already had a comic-book career behind him, with not only 101 issues of a titular series that ran from 1940 to 1949 (and that featured work by his primary writer in the pulps, Walter Gibson) but also a short-lived (and notoriously unfaithful) revival from Archie Comics in 1964-65 (the eighth and final issue of which coincidentally happened to come out just one month prior to my buying my own first comic book; from most reports, I was lucky to have missed this one, which might have put me off comics forever — who can say?).  Read More