Champions | Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books

Avengers #150 (August, 1976)

Welcome to the third of our posts commemorating May, 1976 as “Marvel Milestone Month“. Following our looks at Captain America #200 and Thor #250, this time around we’re taking on the “Spectacular 150th Anniversary Special” issue of Avengers… although we’ll actually be spending more time on the following month’s issue, #151, since the “official” milestone issue turned out to be a disappointing misfire… unless, of course, you really were jonesing back then for an incomplete reprint of Avengers #16 (May, 1965) fronted by a mere six pages of new material from writer Steve Englehart and artist George Pérez. Read More

Ghost Rider #19 (August, 1976)

Posted on May 9 by Alan Stewart

At the end of last Saturday’s Tomb of Dracula #47 post, I promised you that the next installment of this blog would feature “the strange, sad story of Ghost Rider #19.” But, as anyone out there who already knows some version of this tale is well aware, its origins go back well before the May, 1976 publication of the comic whose Gil Kane-Frank Giacoia cover appears at the top of this post. To begin with, this specific issue presents the conclusion of a multi-part storyline that had kicked off in Ghost Rider #17; but beyond that, the ongoing plot lines that find their (more or less) ultimate resolution in this arc extend back at least to Ghost Rider #8 (Oct., 1974)… and, arguably, all the way back to the feature’s debut in Marvel Spotlight #5 (Aug., 1972). And seeing as how we haven’t discussed any issues of this series since July, 2023, when we hit the high points of Ghost Rider #1 and #2 in the context of covering the debut of spinoff character Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan, in Marvel Spotlight #12 (Oct., 1973), we’re going to have to do some catching up to properly set the stage. So let’s get to it, shall we? Read More

Thor #240 (October, 1975)

Posted on July 12, 2025 by Alan Stewart

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before on this blog, Thor was my favorite Marvel superhero back in the 1970s. (Just for the record, he still is.) That didn’t mean that Thor was my favorite Marvel superhero comic book for most of that decade, however — at least, not so far as the new issues coming out then were concerned. The reason for that disparity stems from the fact that, while my enthusiasm for the Son of Odin might have originally been inspired by a general affinity for myth and legend (and for modern heroic fantasy fiction derived from them), it was based at least as much on my admiration for the work that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had done on the feature in the mid-to-late 1960s. Thor/Journey into Mystery was the one major Marvel title I endeavored to acquire a complete run of back in my collecting heyday (I eventually made it back as far as JiM #96, if you’re curious). So I had those Lee-Kirby classics — which I was picking up sporadically, just a few at a time — to compare the current issues to. And despite regularly featuring a high quality of artwork (usually by John Buscema, working with a variety of mostly sympathetic inkers), the new stories (which for most of the first half of the 1970s were written by Gerry Conway) just didn’t measure up in my eyes… neither to those great old Thor/JiM comics, nor to the best of what Marvel was offering elsewhere in the superhero genre in those days. Read More