Al Hartley

Amazing Adventures #11 (March, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In December, 1971, Marvel Comics’ X-Men were in a weird kind of limbo.  The franchise was by no means dead — indeed, there was a new issue of the young mutant heroes’ titular series published every two months.  It’s just that once you got past the freshly-drawn covers (such as the one produced by Gil Kane and Frank Giacoia for the latest issue, #74, as shown at right), the contents of those “new” comics were all reprinted X-stories of some five years vintage (for example, #74 featured an oldie by Roy Thomas, Werner Roth, and Dick Ayers that had originally appeared in #26).

This had been the state of affairs ever since around September, 1970, when Marvel publisher Martin Goodman — having cancelled X-Men nine months earlier, in the aftermath of Thomas, Neal Adams, and Tom Palmer’s brief but acclaimed run on the series — appears to have looked at some late sales reports, liked what he saw, and approved the “revival” of the title — but only as a reprint book.  For more than a year afterwards, this would be the only place you could find the X-Men (save for a three-part Angel adventure that ran from July to December, 1970 in the back pages of two reprint issues of Ka-Zar and one of Marvel Tales, and a single guest appearance by Iceman in Amazing Spider-Man #92, published that October).  Read More

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