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
Cover art by Jim Starlin.
Cover art by Ron Wilson and Frank Giacoia.
Back in June, we took a look at Captain Marvel #34 — the last issue produced by auteur Jim Starlin, who would soon be moving on to “Warlock” in Strange Tales. As you may recall, Starlin’s swan song ended on a cliffhanger, with Mar-Vell lying unconscious after having been exposed to a deadly nerve toxin.
On one level, this cliffhanger wouldn’t be fully resolved until 1982, when Starlin’s graphic novel, The Death of Captain Marvel, revealed that the hero had contracted cancer as a result of the nerve gas — a cancer which did indeed ultimately prove fatal. But in 1974, Mar-Vell wasn’t going anywhere, and so it would be up to the creators who picked up the ongoing storyline in Captain Marvel #35 to get him out of the fix Starlin had left him in — even if it ultimately turned out to be only a temporary reprieve, seen in retrospect. Read More
When we last saw the Avengers, it was at the end of Fantastic Four #150 — the second half of a crossover with Avengers #127 in which both of Marvel’s premiere super-teams came together in the Great Refuge of the Inhumans to celebrate the wedding of the one-time FFer Crystal to the inactive Avenger Quicksilver.
The next issue of Avengers, #128, picked up directly from that two-parter’s events, as behind a cover by Gil Kane and John Romita, writer Steve Englehart and artists Sal Buscema and Joe Staton opened with a scene of the Avengers and Fantastic Four arriving together back in New York, via Avengers quintet. (Just why the two groups were now traveling together, when Avengers #127 had clearly established that they’d made the journey to Attilan separately, was never explained. Maybe the FF lent their own ship to the newlyweds for their honeymoon?) Read More
Back in January, we took a look at Master of Kung Fu #17, a comic which presented the third installment of Marvel Comics’ first ongoing martial arts feature (albeit only the first one under that title, as the two previous episodes had seen print as Special Marvel Edition #15 and #16). That third installment was also the last to involve artist Jim Starlin, who had been instrumental in conceiving and developing the feature with writer Steve Englehart (although the idea of making the strip’s hero, Shang-Chi, the son of the famous fictional villain Fu Manchu came from Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas). Read More
Marvel Comics’ first official mention of the feature that would eventually become known as “Deathlok the Demolisher” seems to have been a brief blurb in the fourth issue of the company’s self-produced fanzine FOOM (cover-dated “Winter, 1973”, but bearing a date of “Winter, 1974” in its indicia; Mike’s Amazing World of Comics offers an “approximate on-sale date” of January 1, 1974). After hyping a 2-part adaptation of the movie The Golden Voyage of Sinbad that would be coming up soon in Worlds Unknown, FOOM‘s anonymous news columnist went on to add: Read More
As we previously discussed in our post about Savage Tales #3 last October, back in the fall of 1973 it seemed that Marvel’s one-and-only sword-and-sorcery-centric black-and-white comics magazine was about to be cancelled — for the second time. The first incarnation of Savage Tales had seen but one issue published in January, 1971 before Marvel’s then-publisher Martin Goodman pulled the plug; then, the second iteration, launched in June, 1972 following Goodman’s departure from the company he’d founded, had come under the scrutiny of an auditor for the conglomerate (Cadence Industries) that now owned Marvel. According to a rather downbeat editorial by Roy Thomas that ran in ST #3, a go-ahead for producing further issues wouldn’t be given until sales numbers had been received for the relaunch; and if you read between the lines, the signs didn’t seem very encouraging. Read More
In August, 1973, the “Bullpen Bulletins” column that ran in Marvel Comics’ offerings each month opened with a self-congratulatory note about what an eventful summer the company had been having, citing the launches of new ongoing series for the Thing and the Black Panther as well as the debuts of such brand new characters as Brother Voodoo and the Son of Satan, before moving on to this item:
We’re going to start this post off a little differently than any other among the 405 (!) that have preceded it, as before we can proceed to our discussion of Captain Marvel #31, your humble blogger has an apology — and a correction — to make regarding our Captain Marvel #30 post from October.
You see, I left the whole last page of that issue’s story out of the post. Arrgh. Read More
By the time Captain Marvel #30 came out in October, 1973, Marvel Comics readers had already had a couple of opportunities to see the newly-enhanced (as of issue #29) “Most Cosmic Superhero of All” in action — namely, in Marvel Team-Up #16 and Daredevil #107. But the subject of our discussion today was the first time that writer-artist Jim Starlin, the creator who was actually responsible for the big changes to Mar-Vell’s status quo, had himself had a chance to show just what those changes meant for the hero, and for his fans, going forward; and the creator obligingly responded with a story that, if it didn’t quite deliver on its cover blurb’s promise of “pure action — from cover to cover!”, still managed to come pretty damn close to living up to that claim. Read More
Back in July, we took a look at Daredevil #105, in which a plotline involving a series of mysteriously-empowered new supervillains — one that had meandered through the generally street-level-set series for the past nine issues — suddenly took an unexpected turn for the cosmic, as our Man Without Fear found himself involved with Moondragon — a woman who, though Earth-born, presently called Saturn’s moon of Titan her home. In other words, DD had somehow managed to wander into the outskirts of the “Thanos War” saga being chronicled by artist-writer Jim Starlin over in the pages of Captain Marvel. Read More
