Alex Toth

Justice League of America #113 (Sep.-Oct., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Beginning in 1963 and continuing through 1973, the June issue of Justice League of America had featured the first chapter of the latest team-up event between the JLA and their Earth-Two counterparts in the Justice Society of America.  It was an annual summer tradition that no DC Comics fan would have expected to see change in June, 1974.

And indeed, the Nick Cardy-drawn cover for JLA #113 gave nary a clue that anything was different this time around, what with its blurb trumpeting “A New JLA-JSA Shocker!”  But I suspect that for many readers (your humble blogger most definitely being among them), the real “shocker” would come when they got to the end of page 20 of “The Creature in the Velvet Cage!” and discovered that they’d just finished reading a complete story.  There would be no second serving of joint Justice League-Justice Society adventuring this year (let alone a third, as we’d had in 1972); rather, they (and we) were one-and-done, until next summer.  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

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

The Shadow #1 (Oct.-Nov., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover to Shadow Comics #1 (1940). Art by Jerome Rozen.

Cover to The Shadow #8 (Sep., 1965). Art by Paul Reinman.

As memory serves, my younger self had very little knowledge of the Shadow when DC Comics first started promoting their upcoming title about him in the fall of 1972.  If asked, I probably could have told you that he was an old-time crime-fighting hero who had appeared both in pulp magazines and on the radio, though I doubt I could have told you which had come first.  And I’m all but certain that I had no knowledge that he already had a comic-book career behind him, with not only 101 issues of a titular series that ran from 1940 to 1949 (and that featured work by his primary writer in the pulps, Walter Gibson) but also a short-lived (and notoriously unfaithful) revival from Archie Comics in 1964-65 (the eighth and final issue of which coincidentally happened to come out just one month prior to my buying my own first comic book; from most reports, I was lucky to have missed this one, which might have put me off comics forever — who can say?).  Read More

Green Lantern #86 (Oct.-Nov., 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

There’s a lot going on on the cover of Green Lantern #86.  Besides boasting an outstanding illustration by Neal Adams that would probably be even better remembered than it is if it hadn’t followed right on the heels of its instantly iconic predecessor, the cover also boldly heralds the inclusion within the comic’s pages of “an important message” from no less a personage than the 1966-73 mayor of New York City, John Lindsay — and proudly announces that Green Lantern has won the Academy Award for Best Comic.  That’s a lot to take in — but don’t worry, we’ll get to it all, starting with the subject of Adams’ compelling cover image — the concluding installment of the groundbreaking two-part story focused on drug addiction that Adams and writer Denny O’Neil had begun in the previous issue, #85.  Read More

Eerie 1972 Annual

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The 1972 Eerie Annual (and no, I don’t know why publisher James Warren stuck “1972” on a periodical published in July, 1971, though my guess is that he hoped that at least a few inattentive retailers might leave the item on the stands for a full eighteen months) was almost certainly the very first comics magazine from Warren Publishing that your humble blogger, then fourteen years of age, ever bought.

But it wasn’t the first Warren magazine I’d ever bought.  And it may not even have been my first Warren comic book, either — at least, not if you define the latter term as “a book full of comics”.

Lemme ‘splain.  Read More

Witching Hour #5 (Oct.-Nov., 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In 1969, Alex Toth had been a professional comic book artist for over two decades; but prior to the summer of that year, I’d never seen his work.  That’s because I didn’t start buying comics until the summer of 1965, and the work that Toth was producing at that time only appeared in Warren Publishing’s black-and-white horror comics and in DC Comics’ romance titles, both of which were beyond my ken (though for different reasons) as an eight-year-old lad.  And then, approximately one year after my own initiation into comic books, Toth left the industry (though, thankfully, only temporarily) to go work in TV animation. Read More

House of Secrets #81 (Aug.-Sept., 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As I’ve written in several previous posts, I was something of a wuss as a kid, at least when it came to my choices in entertainment.  (Oh, who do I think I’m kidding?  I was an all-around, all-purpose wuss.)  To put it plainly, I was scared of being scared.

So I pretty much eschewed all forms of scary media: horror movies, eerie TV shows, spooky comic books… you get the idea.*  That is, until a friend took me gently by the hand (metaphorically speaking) and showed me that a walk through the cemetery at midnight could actually be kind of fun.  Read More