Eternals | Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books

Eternals #1 (July, 1976)

By April, 1976, the return of artist/writer Jack Kirby to Marvel Comics could no longer be considered news. His first new cover for the publisher (an Avengers illustration fronting Marvel Treasury Edition #7) had appeared the previous July, and his first new full comic book, Captain America #193, three months after that. Still, we hadn’t seen any brand-new series concepts from Kirby yet — and, given that he had been the House of Ideas’ preeminent idea man for roughly the first decade of “the Marvel Age of Comics” (i.e., 1961-70), longtime Marvelites were eager to see what would next emerge from the protean imagination of “King” Kirby — as, of course, were virtually all the creator’s many fans, regardless of their preference for one comics publisher or another. Read More

Captain Marvel #29 (November, 1973)

Posted on August 23, 2023 by Alan Stewart

As I’ve shared in previous posts, your humble blogger was a relative latecomer to Jim Starlin’s run on Captain Marvel. While I’d bought a few issues of the title way back in 1969, I had abandoned it after Roy Thomas and Gil Kane’s Fawcett-inspired makeover in issue #17 and hadn’t paid much attention to Mar-Vell since, save for his guest appearances in Avengers. For my younger self in the summer of 1973, Jim Starlin was the guy who’d drawn a pretty good “Doctor Strange” story in Marvel Premiere earlier in the year, just before Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner took over that feature and made it really good. But then, he showed up in the middle of Daredevil #105, having drawn (and almost certainly also plotted) an origin for that issue’s ostensible villainess, Moondragon, which introduced me for the first time to the epic storyline concerning Saturn’s moon of Titan, and its most dangerous denizen, Thanos, that the young creator had been chronicling in Captain Marvel since coming on board that series with issue #25, back in December, 1972. And then, only a couple of weeks after that, Marvel Feature #12 had arrived in spinner racks, with an even more Thanos-centric yarn, this one drawn (and also at least co-plotted) all the way through by Starlin. If DD #105 hadn’t already 100% convinced me to check out Starlin’s Captain Marvel the first chance I got, MF #12 surely must have clinched the sale. Read More

Avengers #70 (November, 1969)

Posted on September 21, 2019 by Alan Stewart

If you’re a regular reader, you may recall that at the conclusion of last month’s post concerning Avengers #69, your humble blogger unburdened himself of a shameful, half-century-old secret — namely, that upon his first encounter with the brand-new supervillain group the Squadron Sinister way back in August, 1969, he had not the faintest clue that they were intended as parodies of the Justice League of America — who were, of course, the Avengers’ counterparts over at Marvel Comics’ Distinguished Competition, not to mention a team that he’d been reading about regularly for almost four years.

Imagine my gratified surprise when, subsequent to that post going up, I heard from a number of fellow old fans that they, too, had failed to get writer Roy Thomas’ joke back in the day. I’m honestly not sure whether that means that my twelve-year-old self wasn’t all that dumb after all, or simply that a lot of us were that dumb, but either way, I’ll take it as a win. Read More