Giant-Size Spider-Man | Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books

Tomb of Dracula #50 (November, 1976)

The main subject of today’s post — the fiftieth issue of the first Marvel title launched as part of the horror comics boom of the early 1970s to reach that fairly impressive number — doesn’t make much of the milestone so far as the book’s cover copy is concerned. Nor, as we’ll see soon enough, is there any mention about the book’s hitting the Big Five-O on the opening splash page. Still, your humble blogger feels fairly sure that the decision of writer/editor Marv Wolfman to feature a very special, if highly unlikely, guest appearance by the Silver Surfer in Tomb of Dracula #50 indicates a sense of occasion on his part, if no one else’s. And, certainly, the book felt special to me when my then nineteen-year-old self first picked it up, back in August, 1976. Read More

Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #1 (September, 1974)

Posted on June 29, 2024 by Alan Stewart

While this blog has briefly touched on the matter of Marvel’s 1974-75 line of “Giant-Size” comics in a few previous discussions, this is the first time we’ve devoted a post to a book in that fairly short-lived format. So, I hope you all won’t mind if we take a little time here at the top of the page, before we flip past Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #1’s Ron Wilson-Mike Esposito cover to take a look at this issue’s specific contents, to get into a little background on the introduction and early days of the “Giant-Size” format in general. It’s an interesting story (at least in my opinion) that seems to indicate a certain degree of disorder in the Marvel offices around this time — disorder which might rise to the level of full-on chaos, but then again might not, depending on your point of view. Read More