David Anthony Kraft

Demon-Hunter #1 (September, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last November, in our post about Grim Ghost #1, we discussed the origins and early days of Atlas/Seaboard — the comic-book company launched in 1974 by the founder and previous owner of Marvel Comics, Martin Goodman, and his son Charles (aka “Chip”).  In this post, we’ll be covering the upstart publisher’s decline and fall, as well as taking a close look at one of Atlas/Seaboard’s very last releases — a comic which, ironically, was not only one of the company’s better efforts, but also one of the very few to have any sort of afterlife following its abrupt demise. Read More

Tales of the Zombie #8 (November, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover art by Boris Vallejo.

Back in April, 2023, towards the end of my post on Tales of the Zombie #1, I wrote that while I fully expected to cover another issue of the series — more specifically, an issue within writer Steve Gerber and artist Pablo Marcos’ run on the titular lead feature — it was “likely to be a minute or two” before that would happen.

Well, in the end it took 745,000 minutes (give or take a couple of thousand), but we’re here at last.  And just in time, too, as TotZ #8 features the last story of Simon Garth, Zombie, produced by the Gerber-Marcos team.

Over the seventeen-month stretch between the first and eighth issues of this black-and-white magazine (which, as you may remember, was one of four such horror-oriented titles launched by Marvel Comics over an equal number of months in the first half of ’73), the format had been tweaked somewhat — old stories reprinted from 1950s Atlas horror comics had been pretty much phased out, for one thing — but the mix between comics stories and illustrated text features remained about the same, with the continuing, 20-plus-pages-long exploits (for lack of a better word) of the Zombie consistently dominating the proceedings.  Read More

Man-Thing #8 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Mike Ploog’s splendidly over-the-top cover for Man-Thing #8 probably calls back harder to the lurid, gory glories of early-1950s pre-Code horror comics than anything else ever published by Marvel in the 1970s (including their Code-free black-and-white magazine line).  Of course, back in May, 1974, my sixteen-year-old self probably didn’t fully comprehend that that was what the artist was up to here; still, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t appreciate the cover on its own merits.  A muck-covered monstrosity breaking free from his lab-table restraints, while nearby a hideous ghoul threatened a beautiful, buxom young woman?  What wasn’t to love?  Read More

Fear #19 (December, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Fifty years after the fact, I’m not sure exactly what my sixteen-year-old self expected to find behind Gil Kane and Ernie Chan’s excellent cover for Fear #19, back in September, 1973.  A straight-up sword-and-sorcery yarn?  That was certainly possible.  After all, if there was one thing that writer Steve Gerber had demonstrated in his run on the “Man-Thing” feature, it was a willingness to confound genre-based expectations.  His previous efforts had ranged from the traditional, demon-haunted horror of Fear #11 to the Superman parody of #17, and from the relatively realistic one-off melodramas of #12, #16, and #18 to the surreal, almost absurdist fantasy of #13-15’s “Thog” trilogy.  If I’d had to choose which of all those antecedents issue #19’s story would most closely resemble, I’d probably have gone with the last one listed — and I’d have been right.

Still, even if I had guessed correctly about that, I’m quite certain that I would never have expected to finish the comic having made the acquaintance of an anthropomorphic talking waterfowl named (though not in this issue) Howard… though, of course, that’s exactly what happened, thank the dogs (err, I mean the gods.  Or do I?).  Read More