George Roussos

Defenders #36 (June, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, we haven’t had a post about Marvel Comics’ Defenders title since we covered issue #34 back in January — which means that our continuing coverage of writer Steve Gerber and artist Sal Buscema’s “Headmen/Nebulon Saga” must resume here not with the issue whose number and cover are shown directly above, but with the one whose cover you see pictured at left.  And that Gil Kane-Mike Esposito number fronting Defenders #35 (May, 1976) is a doozy, isn’t it?  If you’ve never read this comic before, I can’t wait for you to find out who that utterly bizarre unicorn-horned, bird-claw-footed, tentacle-armed monstrosity fighting the Valkyrie really is.  Why, I bet you’ll be just as surprised as Chondu the Mystic was!  (Wait, did I just give the whole thing away?  Damn.)  Read More

Metal Men #45 (Apr.-May, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As of January, 1976, your humble blogger had been reading DC Comics publications for over ten years — but never, in all that time, had I read a single comic-book story featuring the Metal Men, those robotic heroes created in 1962 by writer Robert Kanigher and artist Ross Andru.  Not any of their 4 tryout issues of Showcase, nor any issue of their own series (which consisted of 41 original installments released in 1963-69, followed by 3 reprint editions published in 1972-73)… not even any of their 6 Brave and the Bold team-ups with Batman and other DC heroes.  Oh, I knew who they were, all right, through the normal process of comics-fan osmosis (house ads, letters-page references, etc.); I might even have been able to rattle off their names.  But I’d never read a single one of their adventures.  Read More

Phantom Stranger #41 (Feb.-Mar., 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover to Phantom Stranger #11 (Jan.-Feb., 1971). Art by Neal Adams.

By the time that the 41st issue of Phantom Stranger arrived in spinner racks in November, 1975, I had been buying the title regularly for a full five years — or, to put it another way, for an unbroken run of thirty issues.  That made it unique among the DC Comics offerings I was picking up regularly at the time, as none of the others — Beowulf, Claw the Unconquered, Hercules Unbound, Kong the Untamed, Warlord, and the just-revived All-Star Comics — had even been around just one year before, let alone five.  As for the other DC books that I’d been routinely buying back when I first sampled Phantom Stranger in November, 1970 — these included Green Lantern, House of Mystery, Jimmy Olsen, Justice League of America, Superman, and World’s Finest — while most of them were still going concerns, a couple weren’t; and those that were still being published had become occasional purchases for me, at best.  Phantom Stranger was the only DC comic I’d bought continuously for the last half-decade — the sole survivor of my own personal DC Comics class of ’70.

And after this month, it would be gone, as well… because the 41st issue of Phantom Stranger was also to be the final one.  Read More

Giant-Size Avengers #4 (Jun., 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in August, 1974, after laying the necessary narrative groundwork for many months, Avengers writer Steve Englehart had inaugurated his “Celestial Madonna” story arc with a pair of issues that came out within a couple of weeks of each other: Avengers #129 and Giant-Size Avengers #2.  Half a year later, in February, 1975, the saga would reach its conclusion in a parallel fashion, with the final chapters appearing in that month’s issues of both the regular monthly Avengers title and its giant-sized quarterly companion.  Read More

Justice League of America #110 (Mar.-Apr., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

From a creative standpoint, 1973 had been a very stable year for Justice League of America.  Everyone who’d been working on the book as the year began — writer Len Wein, penciller Dick Dillin, inker Dick Giordano, cover artist Nick Cardy, and (of course) editor Julius Schwartz — remained in place as 1973 neared its end.  From a business perspective, however, it was a rather different story.  After having been published on a nine-times-a-year schedule from 1965 to 1971, DC Comics’ premiere super-team title had dropped back to eight issues per year in 1972; and then, with the first issue of 1973, had its frequency reduced even further, to a bimonthly status.

And then, December, 1973 brought a change that was even bigger (in more ways than one), as JLA joined several other DC titles in transitioning to the “100 Page Super Spectacular” format — a giant-sized package that featured some three pages of reprints to every one of new art and story, at a cost of 50 cents — more than twice that of the “standard” format comic JLA had been prior to the change, which sold for 20 cents.  (With the following month, the price of the “Super Spectacular” format would go up to 60 cents, making these comics a full three times more expensive than DC’s standard size books… but of course we fans of the time didn’t know that yet.)  Read More

Fear #17 (October, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By the time Steve Gerber sat down to write the story that we’ll be looking at today, he was pretty well established at Marvel Comics.  While it’s true that an early stint working on staff as a proofreader didn’t turn out all that great, due to the twenty-five-year-old former advertising copywriter’s propensity for falling asleep at his desk (many years later, Gerber would be diagnosed with sleep apnea), his freelance writing gig was going very well, thank you.  As of late spring, 1973, Gerber was the regular writer for Daredevil, Sub-Mariner, the Zombie (in Tales of the Zombie), and — last but not least — the gig with which he’d started out, almost a year before: the Man-Thing series in Fear.  Not only that, but in just two months, that latter assignment would provide the launchpad for the character for which he’d ultimately be best remembered, Howard the Duck.

But it all almost came crashing down in the middle of ’73, thanks to Gerber’s introduction of another, less well-remembered character in the pages of that same series — a character whose unmistakable similarity to the flagship superhero of Marvel’s number one competitor, though intended as parody, wasn’t at all well received by that competitor — resulting in the young writer coming very, very close to being fired.  Read More

Conan the Barbarian #21 (December, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As noted in last month’s post about Conan the Barbarian #20, at the time that issue went to press, the series had recently received the 1971 Shazam Award for Best Continuing Feature — a fact writer-editor Roy Thomas was understandably happy to publicize in the comic’s letters column.  But for anyone who’d missed the good news, they got a second chance to learn about it one month later, when Marvel trumpeted the accolade on the cover of Conan #21.  (Considering that Marvel’s rival DC Comics had done the same thing a year earlier when their own Green Lantern won the same award, it was hardly a surprise that Marvel would follow suit.)

That the blurb ended up appearing on the cover of this particular issue of Conan, however, would turn out to be somewhat ironic, as a number of the people involved in producing it would in later years view it as something of a train wreck.  As Roy Thomas put it in his 2018 book Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, Volume 1:
 Read More

Batman #242 (June, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In addition to being a fine piece of artwork by Michael W. Kaluta, the cover of Batman #242 represents a minor milestone of sorts; outside of those for a small handful of giant-sized all-reprint issues, it was the first cover since October, 1969 for either Batman or its companion title, Detective Comics, not to have been drawn by Neal Adams.  (That particular month, not so coincidentally, was the same one in which those titles’ editor at DC Comics, Julius Schwartz, introduced the Caped Crusader’s “Big Change” — a return to a moodier, more grounded approach to the hero that was largely inspired by what Adams had been doing over in Brave and the Bold for the last year or so.) Read More

Forever People #9 (Jun.-Jul., 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In October, 1971, Don and Maggie Thompson’s fanzine Newfangles reported:

There are indications that DC is in serious trouble. Dealers are not too keen on the 25¢ comic book[s], sales are skyrocketing for Marvel, Charlton and Gold Key (GK has 15¢ books, Marvel and Charlton 20¢)… DC’s titles are also reported to be dying in droves on the stands, if they get that far—wholesalers prefer to handle the 20¢ books, apparently.

A couple of months later, with disappointing sales reports now in for about a quarter-year’s worth of the “bigger & better” format DC had inaugurated in June, publisher Carmine Infantino prepared to make some course adjustments.  The most significant upcoming change would be to the format itself (more on that later), but there were other indicators of Infantino’s efforts to staunch the bleeding as 1972 got underway; for example, Green Lantern, one of the signature series of DC’s Silver Age, was cancelled with its 89th issue, shipping in February.  As for the titles written, drawn, and edited by Jack Kirby, with which DC had clearly hoped to clean up with sales-wise following Kirby’s 1970 defection from DC’s chief rival, Marvel Comics: Jimmy Olsen was removed from Kirby’s purview with the 148th issue (which, like GL #89, came out in February); and while Infantino wasn’t quite ready to pull the plug on Kirby’s three remaining titles — the core books of the star creator’s interconnected “Fourth World” epic — he appears to have been determined to take a more active role in guiding their respective directions than he had before.  If the King could ever have been said to have had free rein in managing “his” comics at DC (and that’s by no means an indisputable statement), that day was over.  Read More

Avengers #100 (June, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The final panel of Avengers #99 had promised that “this hour” would see an imminent invasion of “the hallowed halls of Olympus!!“, as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes prepared to mount a rescue of their amnesiac comrade, Hercules, who’d just been snatched away by servants of Ares, the Greco-Roman God of War.  So you’d naturally expect the next issue to begin with such a scene — or if not, then maybe a scene of something happening simultaneously to the invasion, just to draw out the suspense a little bit longer.

As we’ll see momentarily, that’s not quite what happens in the opening pages of the Avengers’ hundredth issue.  But our heroes’ delay in launching their assault on the home of the gods turns out to have some justification behind it.  After all, it takes a little time to gather all of the characters on view in artist Barry Windsor-Smith’s instant-classic cover image — a first-time-ever assemblage of every Marvel character who’d ever been an Avenger as of March, 1972. Read More