DC Comics

Swamp Thing #10 (May-Jun., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

With the publication of the subject of today’s blog post fifty years ago, the collaboration between writer Len Wein, artist Bernie Wrightson, and editor Joe Orlando on Swamp Thing that had begun with a one-off short story in House of Secrets #92 (Jun.-Jul., 1971) came to a close.  According to an interview Wein gave The Comics Journal in 1979, the trio’s issue-to-issue production of the ongoing Swamp Thing series — which, unusually for DC Comics at the time, regularly began with a joint plotting session between writer, artist, and editor held every couple of months in the latter’s office, followed by Wrightson pencilling the entire story before Wein wrote a word of the script (a version of the “Marvel method”, if you will) — started out as a great working experience… but then, somewhere along the way, it stopped being so:  Read More

The Brave and the Bold #112 (Apr.-May, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By my reckoning, DC Comics’ The Brave and the Bold was one of the first comic book titles I ever spent my own money on (for the record, it was preceded only by Superman, Detective Comics, Green Lantern, Justice League of America, Flash, and Lois Lane).  I bought my first issue, #64, in December, 1965 — drawn in, no doubt, by its irresistible Gil Kane cover — and BatB soon became one of my most consistent regular purchases as a nascent comics fan.  No, I didn’t buy every single issue, but that was true of virtually every other title as well (the sole exception in those early days being Justice League of America, to which I quickly subscribed).  The ongoing appeal of the book, of course, was that you were always guaranteed at least two superheroes for the price of one (sometimes, as with issue #65’s team-up between the Flash and the Doom Patrol, you got even more).  That wasn’t quite as good a deal as JLA, which might give you as many as ten costumed crusaders cavorting in the same story… but it was still pretty sweet.  Read More

Justice League of America #110 (Mar.-Apr., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

From a creative standpoint, 1973 had been a very stable year for Justice League of America.  Everyone who’d been working on the book as the year began — writer Len Wein, penciller Dick Dillin, inker Dick Giordano, cover artist Nick Cardy, and (of course) editor Julius Schwartz — remained in place as 1973 neared its end.  From a business perspective, however, it was a rather different story.  After having been published on a nine-times-a-year schedule from 1965 to 1971, DC Comics’ premiere super-team title had dropped back to eight issues per year in 1972; and then, with the first issue of 1973, had its frequency reduced even further, to a bimonthly status.

And then, December, 1973 brought a change that was even bigger (in more ways than one), as JLA joined several other DC titles in transitioning to the “100 Page Super Spectacular” format — a giant-sized package that featured some three pages of reprints to every one of new art and story, at a cost of 50 cents — more than twice that of the “standard” format comic JLA had been prior to the change, which sold for 20 cents.  (With the following month, the price of the “Super Spectacular” format would go up to 60 cents, making these comics a full three times more expensive than DC’s standard size books… but of course we fans of the time didn’t know that yet.)  Read More

Detective Comics #439 (Feb.-Mar., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As of November, 1973, it had been twenty-seven months since the last time I bought an issue of Detective Comics.  (For the record, that issue was #416, featuring the fourth appearance of Man-Bat.)  There hadn’t been any conscious “drop” decision involved in this long dry spell between purchases; like a lot of other titles, Detective was simply one of those books I made an individual buy-or-not-buy choice about every time I saw a new issue on the stands.  I’d check out the cover, glance at the credits for the Batman story, note who Bats was fighting this go-around — maybe even see who was starring in the backup feature (there was always a backup feature back then) — and if one or more of those aspects grabbed me (or, if the spinner-rack pickings were really slim that week, even just mildly interested me), I bought the comic book.  Read More

The Shadow #3 (Feb.-Mar., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In November, 1973, the third bimonthly issue of DC Comics’ The Shadow arrived on newsstands as scheduled, sporting yet another instantly-classic cover by regular series artist Michael W. Kaluta and colorist/washtone-process master Jack Adler.  Turning to the opening splash page, a prospective buyer might have noted that the creative lineup for the book’s interior contents remained basically consistent with the title’s previous installments as well, its story having once again been scripted by writer/editor Denny O’Neil, and drawn by Kaluta and… Bernie Wrightson?  Read More

Mister Miracle #18 (Feb.-Mar., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Has it really been only fifteen months since I last wrote about Jack Kirby’s Fourth World?  Somehow it feels like a lot longer.  Which is a little odd, since I’m pretty sure the time between the release of New Gods #11 in August, 1972, and that of Mister Miracle #18 in November, 1973, practically flew by for my younger self, back in the day.  And as we all know, time progressed at a much slower pace fifty years ago than it does today.  So what gives?

I’m not sure, but it may have to do with the fact that in August, 2022, after having blogged about Kirby’s Fourth World comics at least a couple of times per month ever since my first such post two years earlier, I wrote my final blog posts about Forever People and New Gods, conducted my postmortem on the whole Fourth World project… and called it a day.  I then moved on to thinking, and writing, about other fifty-year-old comic book-related matters, allowing Jack Kirby’s unfinished opus to quickly recede in my mental rear-view mirror. Read More

Adventure Comics #431 (January, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

It may be hard to believe, but despite having been a DC Comics reader since August, 1965, I’d never bought a single issue of Adventure Comics — the second comic-book series ever to have been released by the publisher, way back in 1935, and one of its longest running — prior to October, 1973.  What can I say?  I evidently had a huge blind spot in regards to the super-team who’d held the lead feature spot when I first got into comics in the mid-1960s — i.e., the Legion of Super-Heroes (a quirk I wouldn’t really get over until the team’s Paul Levitz-Keith Giffen era kicked off in 1982), and I also wasn’t much of a fan of Supergirl (who took over from the LSH in 1969).  Nor did I give Adventure a nibble when, following Supergirl’s graduation to her own title, editor Joe Orlando briefly switched the venerable series formerly known as New Comics to an anthology format with #425, then introduced a mysterious new superheroine, the Black Orchid, who held the cover spot for three issues (#428 to #430).

But the Spectre?  The Ghostly Guardian had been one of my favorite DC superheroes ever since I picked up his third tryout issue of Showcase, back in 1966, and I’d been missing him ever since his apparent “death” (how do you kill a ghost, anyway?) in Justice League of America #83 (Sep., 1970).  So once I learned that DC was bringing the Astral Avenger back in Adventure Comics, I became a buyer of Adventure Comics… at least for the duration.  Read More

Demon #16 (January, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

DC Comics appears to have had high hopes for The Demon when the title was first launched, back in June, 1972.  After just one issue — well before any reliable sales figures could have become available — the publisher increased the book’s frequency from bi-monthly to monthly with Demon #2, which was released in August.  That month happened to be the very same one that DC dropped the ax on artist/writer/editor Jack Kirby’s core “Fourth World” titles, Forever People and New Gods, each with their eleventh issues– two series in which the veteran creator had almost certainly invested more of his passion, imagination, and energy than he ever would The Demon, or, for that matter, any other comic he’d work on for DC in the 1970s.  Yet neither title had ever received the show of faith on DC publisher Carmine Infantino’s part that monthly status would have indicated, nor had (or would) the lone surviving Fourth World title, Mister Miracle — which continued coming out every two months (albeit gutted of virtually everything that had made it a Fourth World book in the first place), while both The Demon and its fellow “new” Kirby creation, Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, sprinted along at their monthly pace. Read More

Justice League of America #109 (Jan.-Feb., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Nick Cardy’s cover for Justice League of America #109 is interesting in that it completely ignores the conflict that drives roughly 80% of the plot of this issue’s story.  Rather, it seeks to hook the prospective buyer by way of a tantalizing mystery — who is leaving the team?  It’s not a bad strategy, really, since even casual fans of the JLA would likely be curious to learn the answer.

The only real problem with hanging the cover’s whole pitch on this mystery is that the answer is given immediately, on the story’s very first page.  So if our hypothetical prospective buyer was only interested in that bit of information, and they so much as flipped past the cover while still standing at the spinner rack, they might well have opted to put the comic back rather than spend two dimes on it.  But, hey, see for yourself:  Read More

Swamp Thing #7 (Nov.-Dec., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

A few months ago, I wrote about the “house dress” that, by mid-1973, had become common on the DC comics edited by Joe Orlando.  It was a look that included a solid color banner that ran behind the title logo  and other necessities (e.g., the price tag, Comics Code seal, etc.) and took up roughly the top third of the cover area.  Not every Orlando cover followed this format (see, for instance, Plop), and other DC editors used it on occasion as well.  Still, in the period of comics history we’re presently discussing, it was a prevalent enough feature to count as an editorial signature for Orlando, if not precisely a trademark.

At the time of my previous comments, I wrote that giving over a third of the cover’s real estate to a single solid color effectively reduced the canvas available to Orlando’s cover artists.  But while that statement was true enough on its face, it really should have been accompanied by an acknowledgement of how Orlando routinely mitigated the negative effect of that design choice by keeping the amount of verbiage used on his covers to an absolute minimum.  Nowhere was that truer than with Swamp Thing, the covers of whose first thirteen issues included no blurbs or other typography (other than the necessary elements mentioned earlier) — depending entirely on the strength of Bernie Wrightson’s artwork to sell the comic. Read More