Bernie Wrightson

Howard the Duck #4 (July, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Prior to the release of today’s featured comic fifty years ago this month, only three artists had lent their pencils to delineating the adventures of Marvel Comics’ newest superstar, at least officially:  Val Mayerik, who’d drawn the character’s debut appearances in Fear #19 and Man-Thing #1; Frank Brunner, who’d illustrated the two solo strips that subsequently appeared in Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 and #5, as well as issues #1 and #2 of Howard’s self-titled series; and John Buscema, who’d done the same for the third and most recent issue.  Read More

Omega the Unknown #1 (March, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re probably already aware that this post is the fourth I’ve published this month.  If, in addition, you’re already familiar with its subject, you may also have noted that it’s the third out of that four to be devoted to a comic book featuring the writing of Steve Gerber.

Of course, if you are a regular reader, you may not consider that latter fact to even be all that notable, as your humble blogger has made it pretty clear that Gerber was (and is) one of my two favorite comics writers of this era (the other being his fellow Steve, Englehart).  And it probably wouldn’t have surprised my eighteen-year-old self, either, back in the waning days of 1975, to learn that Steve Gerber’s work would continue to hold my admiration, half a century on.

What did in fact surprise me way back then, however, was that, per the credits given on the first page of his latest project — a new superhero series called Omega the Unknown — Gerber was sharing the authorial byline… and with a woman, at that, at a time when female comics professionals in general were hardly numerous, and female writers even less so:  Read More

Marvel Preview #4 (January, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in the early months of 1973, Marvel Comics confidently made a big push into the black-and-white comics magazine market then dominated by Warren Publishing with a slate of four horror titles — Dracula Lives, Monsters Unleashed, Tales of the Zombie, and Vampire Tales — obviously designed to go head-to-head with Warren’s trio of Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella.  Within two-and-a-half years, however, all four of those books had shuffled off back to the graveyard, victims of a general downturn in the horror genre’s appeal to American comics fans that had also prompted a significant pruning of Marvel’s color comics of that ilk.  (TTFN, Man-Thing; catch ya later, Morbius; Living Mummy, we hardly knew ye.)

Still, if you’d taken a look at the magazine racks in October, 1975, Marvel’s confidence in its ability to compete in the B&W comics field — or, at least, its determination to do so — would hardly have seemed to have diminished since the heady days of the “Marvel Monster Group”.  That month, you might have scored copies of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #18, Planet of the Apes #15, Savage Sword of Conan #9… maybe even Crazy #15 or Doc Savage #2 (which had both come out in August, but wouldn’t be bumped off the stands by new issues until December).  And also, of course, the book that’s the main topic of today’s post:  the fourth issue of Marvel Preview.  Read More

Captain Marvel #41 (November, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in April we looked at Captain Marvel #39, featuring “The Trial of the Watcher”.  As you may recall, that issue’s trial of “our” Watcher, Uatu, had been held on the home planet of his people, and ended with him getting off the charge of breaking the Watchers’ vow of non-intervention by promising he’d be a good boy and never doing it again.  That might have seemed like an exceedingly small slap on the wrist, given that Uatu had conspired with the group of renegade Kree known as the Lunatic Legion to not only capture but to outright kill our hero, Captain Marvel, before coming to his senses, but whattya gonna do?  The story ended with Mar-Vell literally shrugging off the whole episode, and implicitly inviting us readers to do the same.  Read More

Man-Thing #22 (October, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When we last checked in with the Man-Thing back in March, at the end of his 18th issue, it was for the finale of the three-part “Mad Viking” trilogy — one of the most intense and memorable storylines to have yet appeared in the feature, perhaps matched only by “The Kid’s Night Out!” (which had in fact been published concurrently with it, in the Man-Thing’s quarterly Giant-Size vehicle).  As you may recall, Man-Thing #18 concluded with Manny, his human friend Richard Rory, and a distressed teenager named Carol Selby abandoning the small Florida town of Citrusville in the wake of a book burning incident at the town’s high school in which people as well as pages had perished.  That downbeat ending presaged a significant change in direction for the series — one which writer Steve Gerber and artist Jim Mooney would manage to explore in depth for only three issues before having to abruptly wrap up everything as best they could in the title’s terminal release, Man-Thing #22. Read More

Eerie #67 (August, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

At the time I originally purchased the subject of today’s blog post, way back in June, 1975, it had been over two years since I’d bought an issue of any of Warren Publishing’s black-and-white comics magazines (with one exception, which I’ll get to in a moment).  Half a century later, I’m not entirely sure how or why I’d grown so cold so quickly to Warren’s fare, given that I had been reading both Vampirella and Eerie quasi-regularly for some time prior to that (for whatever reason, I never bought more than a single issue of Creepy, at least not in this particular era).  I do recall that I’d lost interest in Vampirella after its ongoing Dracula plotline got spun off into its own series in Eerie, and that I was subsequently disappointed when that series petered out inconclusively after a mere three episodes.  Perhaps that was all it took to turn me off, especially since by mid-1973, I had other options for reading “mature” comic-book stories about Dracula — as well as other horror-oriented subjects — thanks to Marvel Comics’ new black-and-white line.  As for the fourth comics title that Warren would add to its line in early 1974 —The Spirit  — my younger self wasn’t sure what to make of it at all (though I do remember flipping through an early issue or two and being bemused by the discovery that one of my favorite contemporary comics artists, Mike Ploog, seemed to have copped a good bit of his style from this Will Eisner fellow.)
Read More

Astonishing Tales #31 (August, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The last time we checked in with Marvel Comics’ cyborg antihero, Deathlok the Demolisher, it was September, 2024.  (Or, if you prefer, September, 1974).  That’s been a good long while in comics periodical publishing terms, even taking into account the bi-monthly publication schedule of Astonishing Tales back then; so you might figure we have a lot of catching up to do before digging in to the character’s “latest” adventure.  But, as it turns out, the eight-month gap between issues #27 and #31 of the Astonishing Tales brought just two new Deathlok stories rather than three, as issue #29 was a fill-in featuring an unplanned reprint of the first Guardians of the Galaxy story, which (as we discussed in last week’s Defenders #26 post) had originally appeared in Marvel Super-Heroes #18 back in 1968.  Read More

Strange Tales #179 (April, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last November, we took a look at Strange Tales #178, featuring the premiere installment of Marvel Comics’ revived “Warlock” feature, now written and drawn by Jim Starlin.  In the first episode of a new multi-part storyline, the one-time savior of Counter-Earth learned for the first time of the galactic-level threat represented by the Universal Church of Truth — a militant religious organization determined to bring the entire universe under its tyrannical control, led by an entity called the Magus; an entity who, somehow, was the very same being as Adam Warlock himself.

But while I’m sure we’re all eager to proceed with this issue’s continuation of Starlin’s saga, your humble blogger feels he would be remiss not to first encourage you all to take a closer look at the book’s cover — more specifically, at the upper right-hand corner of said cover, where we would normally expect to see the Comics Code Authority’s seal of approval on the contents of this comic book — because in this particular case, approval has evidently been granted by the Cosmic Code Authority.  Read More

Swamp Thing #13 (Nov.-Dec., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we covered in a post back in February, the 10th issue of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing marked the end of the award-winning collaboration on the title of writer Len Wein, artist Bernie Wrightson, and editor Joe Orlando, as Wrightson chose to leave the book after that installment.  But of course, that didn’t mean the end of Swamp Thing itself.

According to an interview with Orlando published in Amazing World of DC Comics #6 (May-Jun., 1975), among the artists who were considered to replace the muck-monster’s co-creator on the series were a young and mostly untried illustrator named Arthur Suydam, as well as the veteran Filipino artist Alex Niño.  In the end, however, it was another well-seasoned komiks creator from the Philippines, Nestor Redondo, who got the nod.  Read More

The Shadow #6 (Aug.-Sep., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last November, we took a look at the third issue of DC Comics’ The Shadow — the first issue by the team of writer/editor Denny O’Neil and artist Michael W. Kaluta to carry a credit for another creative talent.  In this case, it was Kaluta’s friend and fellow artist, Bernie Wrightson, who stepped in to help out his pal when the former artist ran behind on his bi-monthly deadline.

Kaluta ended up having some uncredited help on issue #4, as well — this time from Howard Chaykin and Stephen Hickman as well as Wrightson — although this seems to have been a case of the other artists just wanting to pitch in for the fun of it, rather than a matter of necessity.  Kaluta drew the cover solo, however, just as he had the previous three; like them, it was enhanced by the special washtone process utilized by colorist Jack Adler.  (For the record, this issue also featured an additional writing credit for the first time, as Len Wein co-scripted the story with O’Neil.)

Then, in March, 1974, The Shadow #5 brought the largest creative shakeup yet, as Kaluta was entirely absent from the issue; instead, both the cover and story were illustrated by an artist with a diametrically different style, i.e., Frank Robbins.  Read More