Captain Marvel

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

Captain Marvel #39 (July, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When last the regular readers of this blog saw Captain Marvel, he’d just been defeated and taken prisoner by the Watcher — a formerly benign, self-declared non-interventionist, whose sudden heel turn after over a decade of Marvel Comics appearances seemed to come out of nowhere — who had then proceeded to hand him over to the mysterious, heretofore unseen enemies who’d been giving our hero trouble ever since the end of auteur Jim Starlin’s run on the series — the Lunatic Legion.

Our first glimpse of those baddies (see right) made them look pretty loony, indeed.  But, considering that storytellers Steve Englehart (co-plotter/scripter), Al Milgrom (co-plotter/penciller) and Klaus Janson (inker) were giving us a Captain Marvel’s-eye view of the LL, here — and also considering that Mar-Vell was, at the time, tripping balls on LSD (euphemistically referred to in the story as “Vitamin C”, so as not to draw the unwelcome attention of the Comics Code Authority) — one might reasonably doubt whether the image we saw here was entirely representative of objective reality.  Read More

1st Issue Special #1 (April, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

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

Captain Marvel #37 (March, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

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

Strange Tales #178 (February, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in June, we took a look at Captain Marvel #34, which was the last issue drawn and plotted by Jim Starlin.  As we discussed in that post, Starlin abruptly quit the series after delivering only one chapter of his first post-“Thanos War” storyline, unhappy with Marvel Comics’ seeming unwillingness, or inability, to give him a single consistent inker on the bi-monthly title.

Per remarks the creator has made in interviews over the years, his leaving Captain Marvel amounted to his leaving Marvel, period, at least for a little while.  As he explained in 1998 for an interview published in Comic Book Artist #2:  Read More

Captain Marvel #34 (September, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

So, how do you follow up a grand, multi-issue crossover superhero epic in which your protagonist and his allies have just barely managed to eke out a win against an insane god in time to save the universe?

If you’re Captain Marvel plotter, penciller, and colorist (maybe we should just go with auteur?) Jim Starlin, you opt for moving straight into a new multi-issue storyline.  Though surely no one will begrudge you taking a few pages at the top of the new narrative’s premiere installment to wrap up a few loose ends, and otherwise provide a nice coda for the tale you’ve been telling for the past nineteen months or so…  Read More

Doctor Strange #2 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Behind a very nice (if somewhat misleading — we’ll get to why a bit later) cover pencilled, inked, and colored by Frank Brunner, the second issue of the newly revived Doctor Strange title picks up where the first one left off.  In other words, Earth’s Sorcerer Supreme is still dead.

Oh, all right.  Nearly dead.  Having been stabbed in the back with a silver dagger wielded by a brand-new villain named, um, Silver Dagger, our mortally wounded hero has postponed his otherwise inevitable demise by entering the Orb of Agamotto.  Unable to return the way he came, he’s presently on a journey to the center of the Orb, in hopes of finding an exit from its mystical confines before his body and soul succumb to its native unreality; of course, even if he succeeds, he’s still got the whole “mortally wounded” thing to deal with.  Yes, it’s quite the sticky wicket.  Read More

Captain Marvel #33 (July, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Behind a cover both pencilled and inked by Jim Starlin (his first such since coming on board the Captain Marvel title with issue #25), this issue featured the conclusion of the epic “Thanos War” storyline that the creator had inaugurated a year and a half earlier with the 55th issue of Iron Man, and which had since woven through the previous eight issues of Captain Marvel itself, while also spilling over briefly into Marvel Feature, Daredevil, and Avengers.  Read More

Avengers #125 (July, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

I suppose that Ron Wilson and John Romita’s cover for this issue of Avengers might be taken as misleading by some readers, since, as we’ll soon see, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes never directly confront Thanos himself anywhere within its pages (indeed, the Mad Titan only puts in a personal appearance on a couple of them).  I’m pretty sure, however, that that fact didn’t bother my sixteen-year-old self very much (if at all) when I first read this comic back in April, 1974; after all, the story is unquestionably a part of the “Thanos War” saga that had been being told by artist-writer Jim Starlin and others for the last year and a half, mostly (though not entirely) in the pages of Captain Marvel.  If you took Avengers #125’s cover as “symbolic” of our heroes’ struggle against that epic’s Big Bad, as I was happy to do, you’d have to admit it was pretty much on the money.  Read More