Frank Bolle

Defenders #11 (December, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

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

Defenders #10 (November, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Today we continue our coverage of Marvel Comics’ groundbreaking crossover event of summer, 1973, the Avengers/Defenders War.  As you’ll recall from our post about Avengers #117 two weeks ago, the latest battle in the ongoing conflict between the super-teams ended without a clear winner or loser, as Captain America and the Sub-Mariner called a time-out to investigate their suspicions that the heroes were being played against each other by a malevolent third party (which was indeed absolutely the case).

But, as had been promised in no uncertain terms by Avengers #117’s end-of-issue “coming next” blurb — and which was proclaimed even more forcefully by Defenders #10’s John Romita cover — whatever “Breakthrough!” might be imminent wouldn’t arrive in time the stop the Mighty Thor and the Incredible Hulk from throwing down.  And that was a good thing, since if that match-up hadn’t come to fruition, sixteen-year-old me would have asked for my money back.  (Well, not really, since I was well aware the guy working the counter at the Tote-Sum would simply have looked at me like I was crazy if I pulled something like that.  But you know what I mean.)  As it was, however, I could just kick back and wait for writer Steve Englenart and artists Sal Buscema and Frank Bolle to bring on the brawlers…  Read More

Warlock #8 (October, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When last we left Adam Warlock at the end of our Warlock #5 post back in January, the superheroic would-be savior of Counter-Earth had just saved thousands of Northern Californians from dying, either as a result of bomb test-caused earthquakes and flooding, or from the fire of armed missiles — the “Deathbirds” — which the same test had inadvertently triggered… only to have the very man responsible for ordering the bomb test in the first place, President Rex Carpenter, subsequently declare him a menace on national television.

The next issue of the series, sporting a cover by John Romita, picks up very soon after those events, as Adam finds himself under assault by the United States military.  Warlock #6 also sees the partial return of Mike Friedrich as the book’s writer, providing the finished script over a plot by Ron Goulart (who’d written issue #5), who in his turn worked from an “idea” contributed by Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas.

Additionally, issue #6 also features a major changing of the guard on the series’ artistic side, as Bob Brown replaces Gil Kane as penciller.  Kane, who’d co-created the feature with Thomas back in Marvel Premiere #1 (Apr., 1972) and had drawn every installment but one since then, would go on to provide one more cover for the book before its cancellation, but was otherwise done with Warlock as of #5.  Read More

Avengers #116 (October, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

According to writer Steve Englehart, the multi-issue Marvel Comics crossover event most of us refer to as the Avengers/Defenders War (Englehart himself prefers to call it the Avengers/Defenders Clash, God bless ‘im) had its origins in his personal affection for the classic Marvel Annuals he’d enjoyed as a fan in the 1960s — epic, overstuffed extravaganzas like the very crashed wedding of Reed Richards and the Invisible Girl in Fantastic Four Annual #3 (1965), or the save-the-timeline battle between the “new” and the “old” Avengers in Avengers Annual #2 (Sep., 1968).  As the writer confided in his 2010 introduction to Marvel Masterworks — The Defenders, Vol. 2, “I have great memories of finding these gems and sitting down in the shade of a tree on a sunny summer’s day to read them.”  But in recent years, such summertime Annuals as Marvel had continued to produce were mere collections of reprints — nice enough if you didn’t already have those stories, many of which were already classics, but not something you could really get excited about in the same way you could the extra-length, brand-new, “event” stories featured by the Annuals in their heyday.  Read More

Avengers #114 (August, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Panel from Avengers #112 (Jun., 1973). Text by Steve Englehart; art by Don Heck and Frank Bolle.

As we covered in last month’s blog post about Avengers #113, writer Steve Englehart had introduced a mystery in the previous issue, #112, by briefly bringing onstage a brand-new character, Mantis, and her unnamed, only-seen-in-shadow companion.  About all we were told about the latter character, in either his first or his second blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance (in #113) was that he had a prior association with the series’ titular super-team, and that he had strong, less-than-positive opinions about a recently departed Avenger, Hawkeye.  Not a whole lot to go on, at least in the opinion of my fifteen-year-old self… though, to be honest, I probably didn’t give the matter a whole lot of thought at the time.  After all, there were plenty of other comic books to be read back in the spring of 1973, and a caption in #113 had promised us that the next issue would bring a solution to the puzzle of this mystery man’s identity.  So, I was content to wait to see what May would bring us.

As it turned out, when Avengers #114 was released, I wouldn’t even have to pull the issue all the way up out of the spinner rack to discover the answer to the two-month-old mystery, as the cover (probably by John Romita) prominently featured both Mantis and her shadowy beau — so much so, in fact, that the tops of the couple’s heads obscured some of the lower real estate of the book’s logo.  And if I had had a moment’s confusion in trying to place the purple-costumed, mustachioed gent dominating the cover’s left half (which I’m pretty sure I didn’t), the story title blurb at the bottom would have clued me in by the time I got the comic all the way out of the aforementioned spinner rack, by letting me know that Mantis’ mysterious amour was none other than… the Swordsman!  Read More

Fear #15 (August, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in September of last year we took a look at Fear #11 (Dec., 1972), featuring writer Steve Gerber’s debut outing on the “Man-Thing” feature (as well as the fifth appearance overall of that feature’s titular star).  As you may remember, that story introduced two siblings, Jennifer and Andy Kale, who lived with their grandfather in a small Florida town; the pair’s ill-advised experimentation with a book of magic spells “borrowed” from Grandpa inadvertently summoned a demon, the Nether-Spawn, who was only prevented from ravaging the town by the intervention of the Man-Thing, within whose swampy habitat the young people had conducted their spell-casting.  At the tale’s end, the Nether-Spawn had been banished back to his hellish dimension by the expedient of burning the spell-book, and the Kale kids had declared their gratitude and everlasting friendship for their shambling, semi-sentient savior.  There was no indication whether Gerber would return to these characters — or to the intriguing question of what Grandpa Kale was doing with such a powerful grimoire in the first place — but the conclusion certainly left the door open for a sequel.  Read More

Daredevil #100 (June, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

It’s been a while — sixteen months, to be precise — since this blog checked in with Marvel Comics’ Man Without Fear.  Granted, our last Daredevil-themed post was something of a marathon, seeing as how it attempted to cover writer Gerry Conway’s entire “Mister Kline” saga — a complicated (and ultimately unsuccessful) continuity that encompassed not only a whopping eight issues of DD’s own series, but also five installments of Iron Man, and even one random Sub-Mariner — in a single go.  It was a long post, in other words; one in which no one could seriously claim we hadn’t given Matt Murdock and his alter ego a lot of quality time.  Still — it has been a while.  So, before we get on with the business of marking the milestone of ol’ Hornhead’s first hundred issues, we have some catching up to do in regards to what our Scarlet Swashbuckler been up to for the last 1 1/3 years.  Read More