Gerry Conway

Fantastic Four #141 (December, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Hard times at the Baxter Building.  Bleak House.  Heartbreak Hotel.  Is life not ironic?  If nothing else?  As Annihilus remarked back in issue #140.  Love and work had come between the Fantastic Four, America’s greatest superheroes.  For almost a year — a year in real time, a year in Paul Hood’s whirlpool teens, but a few days, no more, in the motionless, imperceptible time of Marvel comics — Sue Richards, née Storm, the Invisible Girl, had been estranged from her husband, Reed Richards.  With Franklin, their mysteriously equipped son, she was in seclusion in the country.  She would return only when Reed learned to understand the obligations of family, those paramount bonds that lay beneath the surface of his work.  In her stead, the Medusa had joined the Fantastic Four.  Medusa: Tibetan-born Inhuman and cousin of Johnny Storm’s paramour, Crystal, the Elemental…

The mood in the Baxter Building was grim.  Besides the Richards’s marital problems, Crystal had recently chosen to marry Quicksilver instead of Johnny Storm.  Sue was worried about Franklin’s trances; Reed was worried about Sue; Johnny was worried about Crystal; Ben Grimm was worried about himself.

It was a good period for readers of the F.F….

— from Rick Moody’s 1994 novel The Ice Storm.

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Daredevil #105 (November, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

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

Savage Tales #2 (October, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As I’ve noted in previous posts, Marvel Comics’ Savage Tales #1 — the company’s second attempt to break into the black-and-white comics magazine market, following Spectacular Spider-Man (or, if you prefer, its third, following Pussycat; or even the fourth, if you want to go all the way back to 1955’s Mad knock-off, Snafu) passed my then-thirteen-year-old self by upon its January, 1971 release.  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I passed it by.  I was doubtless aware of it, since it had been plugged in Marvel’s Bullpen Bulletins columns; but, at the time, I hadn’t dared to take so much as a peek at the “mature” black-and-white offerings then available on the magazine racks (my first Warren Publishing purchase wouldn’t happen until that summer) — unless you counted Mad, which I didn’t.  Plus, I hadn’t even sampled the adventures of Savage Tales‘ headliner, Conan the Barbarian, in his titular Comics Code-approved color series yet (my first issue of that book would be #4 — which, as it happens, came out just one week after Savage Tales #1).  But even if I had been inclined to give the new magazine a try, I would likely have been too intimidated by the “mature” cover painting by John Buscema (not to mention the big “M” label positioned adjacent to that painting’s bloodily severed head) to risk sneaking it into my very Southern Baptist household.  Read More

Dracula Lives #3 (October, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Arriving on stands in June, 1973, the third issue of Marvel Comics’ new “Marvel Monster Group” of black-and-white titles got off to a strong start with a spectacular cover by Neal Adams.  Over a year prior, the star artist had begun backing away from a long stint as the most prolific cover artist for Marvel’s primary rival, DC Comics — a tour of duty extending back past the turn of the decade, and one which at its productive peak had seen him turning out ten or more covers a month.  Of course, Adams had kept his hand in the cover game (at Marvel as well as its chief competitor) even after curtailing his commitment to DC; but the painting that graced Dracula Lives #3 represented a new phase for the artist, one which would see him produce a number of covers in that medium for Marvel (though not in any sort of quantity approaching that of his earlier output at DC), primarily for black-and-white titles that weren’t even out yet as of this issue’s release (e.g., The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu) — titles which, when they did eventually make it to the magazine racks, would end the present horror-centric hegemony of the Marvel Monster Group.  Read More

Amazing Spider-Man #122 (July, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Like its immediate predecessor, the 122nd issue of Amazing Spider-Man leads off with a cover by John Romita, which, if not quite as iconic as that of #121, is still an exceptionally arresting image.  Not to mention one which, back in April, 1973, would likely have shocked the hell out of any semi-regular reader of the web-slinger’s series who had somehow managed to miss not only that most monumental of issues, but also any fannish discussion of same over the several weeks since its release on March 13th.

If there were any such readers fifty years ago, and if they hoped for some sort of recap to bring them up to speed on the details of how so something so unthinkable as the murder of Spider-Man’s beloved Gwen Stacy had come to pass, they were pretty much out of luck — because the creative team behind both the previous episode and this one — i.e., scripter Gerry Conway, penciller Gil Kane, foreground inker John Romita (who may have also contributed to the plot) and background inker Tony Mortellaro — weren’t about to break their storyline’s headlong momentum with any more exposition than was minimally required, let alone any flashbacks:  Read More

Amazing Spider-Man #121 (June, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The subject of today’s blog post is generally considered to be one of the most important issues in the sixty-plus-year history of Marvel Comics’ best-known hero, Spider-Man.  Many fans would call it one of the most significant single comic books ever published by Marvel, period.  Some (though not, I must confess, your humble blogger) would even go so far as to call this issue the precise dividing point between the Silver Age of Comics and the Bronze.

But you almost didn’t get a chance to read about Amazing Spider-Man #121 on its fiftieth anniversary — not in this venue, anyway.  Why?  Because your humble blogger’s then fifteen-year-old self almost didn’t purchase the book when it first arrived on stands, back in March of 1973.  And why was that?  Because I’d stopped buying Amazing Spider-Man two months earlier.  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

Amazing Adventures #18 (May, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

According to the account given by Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas on the letters page of Amazing Adventures #18, the new feature that made its debut in that issue had been gestating for some time.  (“Two long and not always enjoyable years,” to quote the man himself.)  It had all started in 1971, when Marvel was looking to expand its market share in a big way, and Stan Lee (himself still editor-in-chief at that time) asked Thomas to submit a list of ideas for new comics for consideration by Lee and Marvel’s publisher, Martin Goodman.  Among those ideas was a series concept based on H.G. Wells’ classic late-Victorian science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds.

More specifically, Thomas imagined “a vast, hopefully unending sequel to the Wells classic.  A storyline which would pit earthmen in a kind of guerrilla warfare against the Martians, who had returned approximately 100 years after their initial invasion attempt… and who this time had come, seen, and conquered.”  Read More

Dracula Lives #1 (May, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In February, 1973, Marvel Comics published 42 individual comic books — a 75% percent increase in production from the previous year, when the second month of 1972 had seen the company release a mere 24 new issues.  And notwithstanding such a prodigious expansion in production, the company (which had recently surpassed arch-rival DC Comics in sales numbers for the first time ever) wasn’t nearly done.  But Marvel’s next major phase of growth — which in fact began in that very month of February, 1973 — was to be in a different area than the full-color comics line in which it had made its mark.  Read More

Worlds Unknown #1 (May, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in January of last year, in a post about Monsters on the Prowl #16, we discussed Marvel Comics’ late-’60s -to-early-’70s attempts to break into the “mystery” (i.e., Comics Code-approved horror) anthology market that seemed to be doing so well at the time for their primary rival, DC Comics.  As we covered in that piece, in 1969 Marvel launched two titles, Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness, that were virtual clones of such DC fare as House of Mystery and The Witching Hour.  These titles started off quite well, with original stories by Marvel’s top talent (Neal Adams, John Buscema, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Jim Steranko, etc.), as well as by several EC Comics pre-Code horror veterans (Johnny Craig and Wally Wood) not to mention at least one young artist poached (albeit only briefly) from DC (Bernie Wrightson).  Soon, however, the new material began to be supplemented by reprints from the publisher’s late-’50s-to-early-’60s “Atlas” era; and before either title had seen as many as ten issues, Tower of Shadows had morphed into Creatures on the Loose, while Chamber of Darkness became Monsters on the Prowl.  By mid-1972, one could easily be forgiven for not seeing much if any difference between those titles and the all-reprint “monster” comics that Marvel had initiated around the same time as their “mystery” books, e.g. Where Monsters Dwell.  Read More