Fifty years ago, behind the latest in a series of striking, near-wordless covers by artist Jim Aparo, Adventure Comics #439 gave us the opening installment in the first continued story we’d yet seen appear in the comic’s current lead feature, the Spectre… Read More
Back in August, 1974, after laying the necessary narrative groundwork for many months, Avengers writer Steve Englehart had inaugurated his “Celestial Madonna” story arc with a pair of issues that came out within a couple of weeks of each other: Avengers #129 and Giant-Size Avengers #2. Half a year later, in February, 1975, the saga would reach its conclusion in a parallel fashion, with the final chapters appearing in that month’s issues of both the regular monthly Avengers title and its giant-sized quarterly companion. Read More
Fifty years and three months ago, DC Comics’ releases for November, 1974 featured this house ad, hailing the upcoming debut of a new hero…
So new a hero, in fact, that the guy apparently didn’t even have a name yet. Read More
The fifty-year-old comic book referred to in the title line of this blog post presents the second chapter of a four-part storyline. And, seeing how we didn’t feature a post about Defenders #22 here in this space last month, regular readers of the blog know what that means: we’ll be covering that issue before moving on to our ostensible main topic, i.e., Defenders #23. But wait, there’s more! Because, although the story chronicled in another half-century-old comic, Giant-Size Defenders #4, isn’t technically part of the same arc, its events do preface those of the main Defenders title’s “Sons of the Serpent” saga in some significant ways. For that reason, we’ll be spending a little quality time with it before proceeding even as far as Defenders #22. It’s a three-fer today, folks. Read More
If aging memory serves, it wasn’t long after the subject of today’s post first went on sale that it started to rapidly climb in value on the collector’s market — a phenomenon that was surely almost wholly attributable to the comic’s nine-page backup story, which presented the long-awaited first solo adventure of Howard the Duck. But as epochal as Howard’s ascent to feature-starring status undoubtedly was half a century ago, the story which occupied the issue’s first thirty pages — “The Kid’s Night Out!”, starring the title’s muck-encrusted headliner, the Man-Thing — could hardly be called an inconsequential piece of work. Rather, it’s one of the most memorable episodes of the lead feature’s entire original run… and it’s where we’ll begin our coverage of this seminal fifty-year-old comic book today. Read More