Half a century ago this week, the new year of 1976 brought comics fans something that would have seemed an utter impossibility just a few years before — a all-new tabloid-sized comic book co-produced by the American comics industry’s two greatest rivals, DC and Marvel, featuring their flagship characters in a single 92-page adventure. Read More
Four months ago, we took a look at Doctor Strange #10, which presented the first chapter in writer Steve Englehart and artist Gene Colan’s latest (as of July, 1975) four-part saga of the Sorcerer Supreme — this one involving our hero’s attempt to prevent the awesome cosmic entity Eternity from destroying the Earth. Naturally, that story had continued in the next bi-monthly issue of the series; but since we didn’t manage to fit a full post about Doctor Strange #11 into our September blogging schedule, we’ll need to cover its main events before moving on to the specific comic whose name and cover you see at the top of this post. If you’re a regular reader, you already know how this goes… and if you’re not, I’m sure you’ll figure it out as we roll along. Read More
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
A couple of weeks ago, I noted that when I picked up Detective Comics #450 in the late spring of 1975, it had been well over a year since I’d bought an issue of that title. As it happens, I could have said the same thing about most of DC Comics’ other Bat-books of the time. The last issue of Batman itself that I’d purchased had been #255, which had come out at the end of 1973, and I hadn’t been paying any attention at all to World’s Finest (which of course was technically Superman’s book at least as much as it was Batman’s) since well before that. Granted, I was a somewhat more frequent consumer of Brave and the Bold, where every new issue arrived possessing the baseline advantage of Jim Aparo’s reliably fine artwork, then might pick up additional interest based on who the Masked Manhunter’s co-star happened to be this time around. Still, you get the basic idea; while I continued to like the character of Batman just fine, DC’s “Batman family” of comic-book titles was mostly leaving my younger self cold. Read More
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
This 450th issue of Detective Comics — a numerical milestone, though not commemorated as such by DC Comics at the time of its release (probably because the major comics publishers hadn’t yet determined that such commemorations often provided a sales bump) was the first issue of the series my younger self had purchased since #439, back in November, 1973. As I related in a post last fall, as much as I liked the “new” comics material in that issue, I was a hard sell on DC’s reprint-heavy 100 Page Super-Spectacular format. That meant I ended up missing out on most of editor-writer Archie Goodwin’s tenure on Detective, which largely overlapped with the run of issues published in that format — and which included among its highlights the “Manhunter” backup serial by Goodwin and a new young artist named Walt Simonson. That serial, which ran through all of the Goodwin-edited Detective issues, culminated in #443’s Batman/Manhunter crossover — a “book-length” story which not only marked the end of the “Manhunter” feature itself (and the concurrent end of Archie Goodwin’s stint as Detective‘s editor), but was also the very first time that Walt Simonson drew the Batman. Read More
Readers of this blog who have been following it for a while will probably have noticed the relative dearth of DC Comics-centered posts in recent months. In all of 2024, your humble blogger wrote a mere eight posts devoted to DC’s offerings of half a century ago, compared to fifty-four about those of DC’s primary competitor, Marvel Comics. That’s a far cry from 2022, when the breakdown was thirty posts about DC books to thirty-four about Marvel’s. And if you have noticed the change, you may have wondered: how come?
To fully explain why the blog’s coverage of DC has changed over the past couple of years, we’ll need to look at how DC itself changed during the historical period covered by the blog these last 36 months: i.e., the years 1972 through 1974. Read More
In November, 1974, your humble blogger was pretty much a “just Marvel and DC, please” kind of guy where color comic books were concerned. But, naturally, that didn’t mean I was unaware of the wares of other companies. How could I have been? All of the spinner racks I can recall from the first decade or so of my comics buying didn’t sort the new books by publisher (or by any other system, for that matter). So if you wanted to make sure you got a look at every new DC or Marvel book out in any given week, you generally got at least a cursory glance at every new Archie, Charlton, Fawcett, Gold Key, and Harvey, as well.
And if a brand-new publisher showed up? You noticed — especially if one of their books sported a cover by Neal Adams, like Atlas/Seaboard’s Ironjaw #1 did. Read More
As we previously noted in our post about Doctor Strange #2 back in May, in June, 1974, Marvel Comics provided fans of the Master of the Mystic Arts’ normally bimonthly series with the release of an extra issue. But Doctor Strange #3 didn’t feature the third chapter of the continuing story begun by scripter/co-plotter Steve Englehart and penciller/co-plotter Frank Brunner back in the premiere issue of their hero’s newly revived solo title; rather, behind a new cover by Brunner (and also wrapped within a new 1 1/2-page framing sequence by Englehart, Brunner, and inker Alan Weiss), the comic offered an edited presentation of an old story that had originally run in Strange Tales #126 (Nov., 1964) and #127 (Dec., 1964). That tale by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko was indisputably a stone classic, and as a latecomer who’d only arrived at the Doc Strange party in 1969, my younger self was happy to have it; still, even I was impatient to see the continuation of the Sorcerer Supreme’s current quest to escape the Orb of Agamotto, and rescue his beloved Clea from the sinister but self-righteous Silver Dagger, by the time Doctor Strange #4 finally showed up in the spinner rack. Read More
Beginning in 1963 and continuing through 1973, the June issue of Justice League of America had featured the first chapter of the latest team-up event between the JLA and their Earth-Two counterparts in the Justice Society of America. It was an annual summer tradition that no DC Comics fan would have expected to see change in June, 1974.
And indeed, the Nick Cardy-drawn cover for JLA #113 gave nary a clue that anything was different this time around, what with its blurb trumpeting “A New JLA-JSA Shocker!” But I suspect that for many readers (your humble blogger most definitely being among them), the real “shocker” would come when they got to the end of page 20 of “The Creature in the Velvet Cage!” and discovered that they’d just finished reading a complete story. There would be no second serving of joint Justice League-Justice Society adventuring this year (let alone a third, as we’d had in 1972); rather, they (and we) were one-and-done, until next summer. Read More