Daredevil

Daredevil #51 (April, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When I first saw the cover of Daredevil #51 on the spinner rack fifty years ago, I believe I must have known something was up.

After all, I’d been buying and reading this series for a whole year now, and even if I wasn’t the most sophisticated spotter and identifier of individual artists’ styles at age eleven, I believe that I could tell a Gene Colan Daredevil cover from, well, anyone else’s.

Not that there hadn’t been any non-Colan DD covers in the twelve months I’d been following the book — there’d been issue #43‘s, which was a Jack Kirby job.  But that particular issue had guest-starred Captain America, and since Kirby was Cap’s regular artist at that time (and also his co-creator, of course, though I probably didn’t know that yet), that had made sense.

But who was this, who’d drawn the cover for #51?  I mean, Daredevil’s head looked… different (and not just because it was giant and translucent).  There was something sort of Kirbyesque about it, actually, but it wasn’t Kirby.  So who?  Read More

Doctor Strange #180 (May, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As I’ve related in previous posts, I was a little slow in warming up to Doctor Strange.  Marvel Comics finally got me in late 1968, however, through the double-barrelled approach of first giving him a visual makeover, and then guest-starring him in The Avengers.  Those moves caught my interest — which, according to what Roy Thomas (a Marvel associate editor at the time, not to mention the writer of both Doctor Strange and Avengers) would state decades later in his introduction to Marvel Masterworks – Doctor Strange, Vol. 3, was precisely what the publisher had hoped they’d do.

But the next issue of Doctor Strange to hit the stands after Avengers #61 was a reprint, featuring the good Doctor’s “old look” — though, since it was a reprint of a classic tale by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee that co-starred Spider-Man, and which was 100 % new to me, I didn’t really have much to complain about.  Still, I was happy to see Doctor Strange #180, the “real” follow-up to Avengers #61, when it finally arrived in early February, 1969.  Read More

Avengers #60 (January, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

They just don’t make superhero wedding comics* the way they used to.

These days, it’s as likely as not that a heavily promoted “wedding issue” will come out and have not a single scene where anything remotely resembling a wedding ceremony occurs.  Or, a couple does get married, but it’s a different couple than the one whose marital union the book was supposed to be about.  Something of a bait-and-switch going on in both of those cases, if you ask me.

Ah, but in the Good Ol’ Days (AKA the Silver Age of Comics), the major funnybook publishers really knew how to celebrate them some nuptials.  For an example, take Aquaman #18 (Nov.-Dec., 1964), where the whole blamed Justice League of America turns out for the Sea King’s undersea wedding to Mera (bubble helmets thoughtfully provided by the Royal Atlantean Event Planning Committee, I’m sure),   Or Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965), in which not only do all of Reed Richards’ and Sue Storm’s super friends show up, but so do a whole passel of super foes, as well, thanks to the machinations of the diabolical Doctor Doom.  Now that’s what I call a wedding to remember.  Not a dry (or un-blackened) eye in the house, y’know what i mean?

And then, there’s Avengers #60, featuring “‘Til Death Do Us Part!”, by Roy Thomas (writer), John Buscema (penciler), and Mike Esposito (inker, as “Micky Demeo”) — which not only gives us an Avengers Mansion-ful of super-powered guests and gatecrashers, but also brings the wacky on a level rarely seen before or since.  Read More

Daredevil #47 (December, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When we last checked in on Matt Murdock for this blog, he was engaging in an unnecessary (but still entertaining) slugfest with Captain America, while also moping over having been (sort of) dumped by his (kinda) girlfriend, Karen Page.  All that, of course, went down in Daredevil #43, published in June, 1968.  The three issues that followed that one told a single story, in which Daredevil was framed for murder by his newest arch-foe, the Jester, who’d been introduced in #42.  I bought those issues when they came out, and the story was a pretty good one, as I recall.  Nevertheless, I’ve opted not to blog about them here — mainly because the Jester’s not all that interesting to me as a villain, and I’ve already made most of the general comments I could make about scripter Stan Lee and penciler Gene Colan’s late-Sixties DD work in earlier posts.

Daredevil #47 is something different, however.   “Brother, Take My Hand!” (for which Lee and Colan are joined by inker George Klein) is a standalone story without any flashy costumed super-villains, which deals meaningfully with some fairly unusual topics for a 1968 comic book — the Vietnam War, physical disabilities, and racial equality — without actually being “about” any of them.  Read More

Spectacular Spider-Man #2 (November, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By August, 1968, I’d been buying Amazing Spider-Man regularly for eight months; and if it hadn’t yet become my very favorite comic book, it was awfully close.  I wasn’t quite ready to start investigating his earlier, reprinted adventures in Marvel Tales just yet (perhaps because I wasn’t yet sold on the other Marvel heroes he shared space with in that twenty-five center — Thor and a solo Human Torch — or perhaps because at that time I still thought Steve Ditko’s artwork looked a little strange), but otherwise, I was buying everything your friendly neighborhood arachnid appeared in.

Or I was trying to, anyway.  I know for sure that when the full-age ad shown below had turned up in Marvel’s comics that spring, I’d been pretty darned jazzed, and had had every intention of buying the book:  Read More

Daredevil #43 (August, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog will know, I somehow managed to get through the first five months or so of being a regular buyer and reader of Marvel Comics without picking up a single book featuring the work of perhaps the single most important architect of that publisher’s fictional universe — that would be Jack “King” Kirby, of course  — but, come June, 1968, I went on a Kirby tear, buying not one, not two, but three different comic books that showcased the King’s art.

Of course, Daredevil #43 could only boast a cover by Kirby, as the interior art was by the book’s regular penciler, Gene Colan (with embellishment by inker Vince Coletta).  And since I was by this time a regular purchaser of the Man Without Fear’s title, the fact is that I would have bought this issue even if the cover had been by Colan, rather than Kirby — which, as the penciled art shown to the lower right should indicate, it indeed almost was.  Read More

Daredevil #41 (June, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

My blog post about Daredevil #40 last month ended — as did its subject — by promising that the following month would bring  “The Death of Mike Murdock!”  And if you read that post — or have read, and can recall, the fifty-year-old DD #40 itself — you’ll know that that’s going to be a hard trick for writer Stan Lee, penciler Gene Colan, and inker John Tartaglione to pull off in issue #41 — because, even in the context of the fictional Marvel Universe, “Mike Murdock” is himself a fiction — a false persona invented by blind lawyer Matt Murdock to keep his friends and co-workers, Foggy Nelson and Karen Page, from learning that he, Matt, is actually the superhero Daredevil.  Improbable as it may seem, Matt has managed to convince Karen and Foggy that he has a twin brother named Mike, and that Mike is Daredevil — and, as things have progressed, has also found himself actually enjoying playing the role of the more flamboyant and freewheeling Mike — though he’s beginning to have second thoughts, as we’ll see in a minute.   Read More

Daredevil #40 (May, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last month I blogged about Daredevil #39 — the first issue of Ol’ Hornhead’s series that I ever bought, as well as the first chapter of a three-part tale featuring a return engagement between Daredevil and the “Unholy Three” — a trio of animal-themed villains our hero first battled back in issues #10 and #11, when there were actually four of them, and they went by the collective moniker of the “Ani-Men”.  (O Frog Man, Where Art Thou?)  If you weren’t around for that post. or would just like to refresh your memory on the details, feel free to click on over there to get caught up.  Or — you could just pretend that you’re a brand new Daredevil reader, circa March, 1968, and hope that scripter Stan Lee has provided enough exposition via captions and dialogue on the first couple of pages to bring you up to speed on what’s going on.

You know what?  That latter option will probably work just fine.  Read More

Daredevil #39 (April, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The primary subject of today’s post is the thirty-ninth issue of Daredevil, the first issue of the Marvel comic book series starring “The Man Without Fear” that I ever bought — but probably not the first book featuring Daredevil that I happened to purchase.

That’s because I’m pretty sure that, some time prior to plunking down my twelve cents for DD #39 at either the Tote-Sum or Short-Stop in February, 1968, I had shelled out a whole fifty cents at Miller’s Department Store for this little item:  Read More

Amazing Spider-Man #59 (April, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog may recall, I purchased my very first Marvel comic book, Avengers #45, in August, 1967.  That book was the one with which I finally expanded my comics consumption beyond what had been, for the full first two years that I’d been buying and reading the things, a diet consisting almost exclusively of DC comics.  Still, as I wrote in my post about that issue, five months ago, that first, single excursion into Marvel territory wouldn’t be followed by another one until the fateful day in January, 1968, that I picked up the subject of today’s post, Amazing Spider-Man #59.

I’m not exactly sure why it took me that long to buy my second Marvel book — I do remember liking that Avengers issue, so it wasn’t as though I’d tested the waters and found them wanting.  Probably, it was just a reluctance to change my ingrained buying habits.  But even if I’m not certain why I dragged my feet for another five months, I have little doubt that it would have taken me even longer, if not for this:  Read More