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
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the relative dearth of DC Comics-related posts on this blog over the last twelve months or so, compared to how many I’d been turning out just a couple of years earlier. Today, we’ll be talking about something that’s been even more scarce in these parts in recent times: posts about comics written and drawn by Jack Kirby. Sure, I might have only managed to bang out eight posts concerning DC books in 2024 (out of sixty-four overall), but that’s still better than my record for Kirby posts over that same year, which is: zero. Considering that I wrote about ten Kirby-kreated books as recently as 2022 (and twenty in the year before that), that’s a pretty dramatic change. Read More
In August, 1973, the second half of the 11th annual team-up event between the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America led off with a cover (by Nick Cardy) that clearly called back to a particular predecessor — namely, the cover that had graced the second half of the 5th such summertime event, way back in July, 1967. And why not? That Carmine Infantino-Murphy Anderson number is an all-time classic, which, aside from its own individual excellence, arguably established the motif of “two line-ups of superheroes charging each other” that has been a staple of super-team comic book covers ever since.
That said, it rankled me just a bit at the time — and, what the hell, I guess it still does — that to make the idea work in the context of JLA #108’s story by writer Len Wein and artists Dick Dillin and Dick Giordano, editor Julius Schwartz had to fudge the cover copy a bit. After all, there aren’t just “two different Earths” represented among the eight costumed stalwarts heading towards blows whom we see on the cover above — there are three. The JLA’s Earth-One, the JSA’s Earth-Two, and — as had been introduced to DC Comics’ readers just one issue before — Earth-X. A world inhabited by yet another team of heroes, newly dubbed “the Freedom Fighters”, who had been published during the Golden Age of Comic Books by DC’s now-defunct rival, Quality Comics… and also a world where the Nazis had won World War II. Read More
Like its immediate predecessor, the 122nd issue of Amazing Spider-Man leads off with a cover by John Romita, which, if not quite as iconic as that of #121, is still an exceptionally arresting image. Not to mention one which, back in April, 1973, would likely have shocked the hell out of any semi-regular reader of the web-slinger’s series who had somehow managed to miss not only that most monumental of issues, but also any fannish discussion of same over the several weeks since its release on March 13th.
If there were any such readers fifty years ago, and if they hoped for some sort of recap to bring them up to speed on the details of how so something so unthinkable as the murder of Spider-Man’s beloved Gwen Stacy had come to pass, they were pretty much out of luck — because the creative team behind both the previous episode and this one — i.e., scripter Gerry Conway, penciller Gil Kane, foreground inker John Romita (who may have also contributed to the plot) and background inker Tony Mortellaro — weren’t about to break their storyline’s headlong momentum with any more exposition than was minimally required, let alone any flashbacks: Read More
By August, 1968, I’d been buying Amazing Spider-Man regularly for eight months; and if it hadn’t yet become my very favorite comic book, it was awfully close. I wasn’t quite ready to start investigating his earlier, reprinted adventures in Marvel Tales just yet (perhaps because I wasn’t yet sold on the other Marvel heroes he shared space with in that twenty-five center — Thor and a solo Human Torch — or perhaps because at that time I still thought Steve Ditko’s artwork looked a little strange), but otherwise, I was buying everything your friendly neighborhood arachnid appeared in.
Or I was trying to, anyway. I know for sure that when the full-age ad shown below had turned up in Marvel’s comics that spring, I’d been pretty darned jazzed, and had had every intention of buying the book: Read More