Stalker #1 (Jun.-Jul., 1975)

Following our coverage of Beowulf #1 in January, and Claw the Unconquered #1 in February, we come now to the third of the brand-new sword and sorcery series launched by DC Comics in the first quarter of 1975 — the shortest-lived of the group, as things turned out, but your humble blogger’s personal favorite, nevertheless.

In a career-spanning interview with Paul Levitz conducted in 2019 by Alex Grand and Jim Thompson, the primary progenitor of Stalker (also, albeit a few decades later, DC’s president and publisher) recalled how the project came to be.  At the time, the 18-year-old Levitz was working as an assistant to DC editor Joe Orlando…  Read More

Beowulf #1 (April, 1975)

Readers of this blog who have been following it for a while will probably have noticed the relative dearth of DC Comics-centered posts in recent months.  In all of 2024, your humble blogger wrote a mere eight posts devoted to DC’s offerings of half a century ago, compared to fifty-four about those of DC’s primary competitor, Marvel Comics.  That’s a far cry from 2022, when the breakdown was thirty posts about DC books to thirty-four about Marvel’s.  And if you have noticed the change, you may have wondered: how come?

To fully explain why the blog’s coverage of DC has changed over the past couple of years, we’ll need to look at how DC itself changed during the historical period covered by the blog these last 36 months: i.e., the years 1972 through 1974.  Read More

The Brave and the Bold #76 (Feb.-March, 1968)

When I picked up this issue of Brave and the Bold fifty years ago (give or take a couple of weeks), Batman’s co-star in the book, Plastic Man, had been around for over twenty-six years — almost as long as the Caped Crusader himself.  But he’d only been a DC Comics hero for a little over one year — which is about as long as my ten-year-old self had been aware of him.  Read More