Fifty years and three months ago, DC Comics’ releases for November, 1974 featured this house ad, hailing the upcoming debut of a new hero…
So new a hero, in fact, that the guy apparently didn’t even have a name yet. Read More
The issue of Adventure Comics we’re going to be looking at today was the eighth in a row to feature the Spectre as its headliner, and as such, might well have been taken by a casual browser of the spinner racks in December, 1974 as simply offering more of the same. Yet this issue departed from its immediate predecessors in at least a couple of respects, beginning with its title logo. In response to recent commercial trends, as of the Spectre’s third outing (issue #433), DC Comics had started slapping the word “Weird” above “Adventure” on the venerable series’ covers. That was an adjustment which made good sense as far as the Astral Avenger was concerned… but wasn’t quite as good a fit with the King of the Seven Seas, Aquaman, who began a run as Spec’s backup in issue #435. Read More
In February of last year, we ran a post on the first issue of Worlds Unknown — a four-color anthology title from Marvel Comics devoted to the science fiction genre, with a special focus on adapting short stories and novels by well-known SF authors. As we discussed at the time, this passion project of Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas, saw just six issues released in this format before it took a hard turn in a decidedly different direction (an adaptation of the fantasy film The Golden Voyage of Sinbad) for its final two issues, the last of which came out in April, 1974.
Given its poor performance in the marketplace, Thomas’ project could hardly be called a success; still, in October of the same year, it became clear that the editor hadn’t given up on the basic idea behind it, as that month saw the debut of a brand new entry in Marvel’s ever-growing, and ever more genre-diverse, line of black-and-white comics magazines: Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction. Read More
As we covered in a post back in February, the 10th issue of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing marked the end of the award-winning collaboration on the title of writer Len Wein, artist Bernie Wrightson, and editor Joe Orlando, as Wrightson chose to leave the book after that installment. But of course, that didn’t mean the end of Swamp Thing itself.
According to an interview with Orlando published in Amazing World of DC Comics #6 (May-Jun., 1975), among the artists who were considered to replace the muck-monster’s co-creator on the series were a young and mostly untried illustrator named Arthur Suydam, as well as the veteran Filipino artist Alex Niño. In the end, however, it was another well-seasoned komiks creator from the Philippines, Nestor Redondo, who got the nod. Read More
In June, 1974, the Hyborian Age was clearly in full flower at Marvel Comics. Along with the latest installment of the publisher’s successful ongoing Conan the Barbarian series (issue #42, for the record), the month also brought the fans of Robert E. Howard’s famous sword-and-sorcery hero the first issue of a brand-new quarterly companion title, Giant-Size Conan. This new series got off to a spectacular start, featuring the first chapter of a multi-part adaptation of Howard’s one and only Conan novel, “The Hour of the Dragon”, as written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Gil Kane and Tom Sutton.
And that wasn’t even the biggest news in Conan comics this month; rather, that distinction went to the main topic of today’s blog post, The Savage Sword of Conan #1 — the first issue of a brand-new black-and-white bi-monthly magazine devoted to the barbarian adventurer and his fellow Howardian heroes. It was, in some ways, Conan’s third coming as far as the b&w comics market went, following as it did both the initial release of Savage Tales in January, 1971, and the subsequent relaunch of that title with its long-delayed second issue in June, 1973. It was also the biggest black-and-white comic Marvel had yet published — a square-bound number that weighed in at 80 pages (as compared to the then standard 64), and cost a whole buck (as compared to Marvel’s other b&w offerings’ going price of 75 cents). Read More
In March, 1974, Marvel Comics’ black-and-white magazine Dracula Lives entered its second year of publication with a format relatively little changed from its first issue — meaning that it featured three all-new stories of the titular vampire (one set in the present, two set in the past), supplemented by illustrated text features and a reprint or two, all packaged behind a color painted cover. (In this case, the cover was provided by Luis Dominguez, an Argentinian artist who’d been busy of late drawing covers [and occasional stories] for various DC Comics anthology titles; this was his third published cover for a Marvel horror magazine.) Read More
In August, 1973, the “Bullpen Bulletins” column that ran in Marvel Comics’ offerings each month opened with a self-congratulatory note about what an eventful summer the company had been having, citing the launches of new ongoing series for the Thing and the Black Panther as well as the debuts of such brand new characters as Brother Voodoo and the Son of Satan, before moving on to this item:
Back in July, we took a look at Daredevil #105, in which a plotline involving a series of mysteriously-empowered new supervillains — one that had meandered through the generally street-level-set series for the past nine issues — suddenly took an unexpected turn for the cosmic, as our Man Without Fear found himself involved with Moondragon — a woman who, though Earth-born, presently called Saturn’s moon of Titan her home. In other words, DD had somehow managed to wander into the outskirts of the “Thanos War” saga being chronicled by artist-writer Jim Starlin over in the pages of Captain Marvel. Read More
The primary subject of today’s post, Defenders #11, is the official conclusion of Marvel’s Avengers/Defenders War crossover event of summer, 1973 — though you’d be hard-pressed to find any evidence of that fact on the book’s otherwise very fine Sal Buscema cover.
Still, as the opening splash page clearly tells us, this is indeed “The 12th and final chapter of the greatest super-epic ever told!” And surely writer Steve Englehart must know whereof he speaks. Mustn’t he? Read More
In summer,1973, my younger self was still pretty isolated as a comic-book reader. Good, lasting face-to-face friendships with fellow enthusiasts were on the horizon, but had not yet arrived, and I wasn’t reading fanzines. Therefore, I generally picked up on hot new titles — or on newly hot streaks on older titles — via the publishers’ own marketing efforts, or by reader buzz in the letters columns… or by sheer happenstance.
So how did I finally catch on to what artist-plotter Jim Starlin was up to in Captain Marvel, some five issues and eight months into his soon-to-be-classic run? As best as I can tell, it was due mostly to the latter of those three options — more specifically, via a very unlikely tie-in with, of all things, Daredevil. Read More
