Dan Adkins

Hulk #178 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog may recall, I was never a regular buyer of The Incredible Hulk, back in the day.  While I always enjoyed the character when he appeared as a guest star, or in a team setting à la the Defenders, for whatever reason his Jekyll & Hyde-cum-Frankenstein premise never had much appeal to me as the basis for a lead character.  Or maybe I simply preferred my superheroes to have a little more going on upstairs.  In any case, after dipping my toe in the water one time back in 1969, I had since refrained from picking up Hulk except on those occasions when it crossed over with another series I was currently buying, or when it tied up leftover plotlines from a canceled series I had been buying.  Read More

Doctor Strange #1 (June, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

I have to confess, that as fond as I am of the comic that’s the subject of today’s blog post, I’ve always had a little trouble thinking of it as a “real” first issue.  After all, Doctor Strange had already had a first issue of his own solo title all the way back in 1968 — despite Marvel’s having opted at that time to continue the numbering of Doc’s previous home, the double-featured Strange Tales, by sticking a “#169” on it.  That solo series had run for fifteen issues before succumbing to cancellation in 1969, so no way was the comic book that showed up on stands in the middle of March, 1974, the actual first issue of Doctor Strange.  Heck, this wasn’t even the first issue of his current headlining feature, since that had begun a little less than two years previously, in Marvel Premiere #3.  The hero’s MP run had continued through issue #14 and then picked up here after only a three-month break; so, as far as I was concerned, Doctor Strange #1 was little more than the latest issue of the Sorcerer Supreme’s successfully revived solo series.  “Fabulous First Issue!”, my eye (of Agamotto).  Read More

Strange Tales #169 (September, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Voodoo.

 

It’s the current rage, don’t you know. Paperbacks on the subject litter newsstands throughout the world. Voodoo cults are reportedly springing up in major cities throughout the United States. And, figuring on television’s propensity for jumping on a fad with the obliterating properties of an overweight pachyderm, it probably won’t be too long before we see a Voodoo situation comedy laugh-tracking its way across our screens — Loa in the Family.

 

Leave it to the Marvel Comics Group, long renown [sic] for its many innovations in the comics field, to find a new slant on this late-breaking craze. And the result of this new slant promises to outlive the current interest in Voodoo.

— Tony Isabella, “Introducing Brother Voodoo!  The Creation of Marvel’s Most Mysterious Superhero”, in Tales of the Zombie #2 (Oct., 1973).  Read More

Warlock #5 (April, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in November, 2021, we took a look at Marvel Premiere #1, in which Marvel’s new “Warlock” feature made its debut.  As we discussed at the time, that first installment found writer Roy Thomas and artist Gil Kane dusting off a few old Stan Lee-Jack Kirby concepts from 1960s issues of Fantastic Four and Thor and combining them to create the most overt religious allegory that had yet appeared in superhero comics.  In doing so, they were clearly seeking to tap into the cultural zeitgeist exemplified by the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar both topping both the pop album charts and selling out shows on Broadway, and by the youth-driven “Jesus Movement” being featured on the cover of Time magazine, all of which happened in 1971.  Read More

Conan the Barbarian #21 (December, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As noted in last month’s post about Conan the Barbarian #20, at the time that issue went to press, the series had recently received the 1971 Shazam Award for Best Continuing Feature — a fact writer-editor Roy Thomas was understandably happy to publicize in the comic’s letters column.  But for anyone who’d missed the good news, they got a second chance to learn about it one month later, when Marvel trumpeted the accolade on the cover of Conan #21.  (Considering that Marvel’s rival DC Comics had done the same thing a year earlier when their own Green Lantern won the same award, it was hardly a surprise that Marvel would follow suit.)

That the blurb ended up appearing on the cover of this particular issue of Conan, however, would turn out to be somewhat ironic, as a number of the people involved in producing it would in later years view it as something of a train wreck.  As Roy Thomas put it in his 2018 book Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, Volume 1:
 Read More

Conan the Barbarian #20 (November, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we discussed on the blog last month, the 19th issue of Conan the Barbarian saw not only the beginning of the title’s most ambitious multi-issue storyline to date, but also the return of artist Barry Windsor-Smith after a hiatus of several months.  That return was marked by a noticeable improvement in the artist’s already impressive skills in the time he’d been away; but it was also marred somewhat by deadline problems that resulted in only the first nine pages of the story being fully inked (by Dan Adkins), the remaining eleven having to be reproduced from Windsor-Smith’s pencils; an intriguing, but not altogether successful experiment, given the limits of comic-book printing technology of the time.  Read More

Conan the Barbarian #19 (October, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

With this issue of Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian, writer-editor Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith inaugurated the first proper extended storyline to appear in the title since its inception.  A note on the letters page cited the single Conan novel written by the hero’s creator Robert E. Howard, “The Hour of the Dragon” (published in book form as Conan the Conqueror), as a model for the two storytellers; nearly half a century later, in his 2018 book Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, Volume 1, Thomas would also invoke Homer’s epic poem, the Iliad, as an inspiration.  Both works scan as legitimate antecedents for the multi-issue chronicle of what would soon come to be referred to as the Hyrkanian War, or the War of the Tarim; still, I think its fair to say that of the two, the Iliad bears closer resemblance to the story that Thomas and his collaborators would unfold to Conan‘s readership over the next seven months, at least in its setting and overarching premise.  Both epics tell of the siege of a great city by an equally great army; of a bloody war in which neither side may be said to be entirely in the right.  Read More