Gil Kane

Hulk #178 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog may recall, I was never a regular buyer of The Incredible Hulk, back in the day.  While I always enjoyed the character when he appeared as a guest star, or in a team setting à la the Defenders, for whatever reason his Jekyll & Hyde-cum-Frankenstein premise never had much appeal to me as the basis for a lead character.  Or maybe I simply preferred my superheroes to have a little more going on upstairs.  In any case, after dipping my toe in the water one time back in 1969, I had since refrained from picking up Hulk except on those occasions when it crossed over with another series I was currently buying, or when it tied up leftover plotlines from a canceled series I had been buying.  Read More

Defenders #14 (July, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When we last left the Defenders, back in September, the Defenders themselves were, well, leaving.  Most of them, anyway.  As was the writer who’d been chronicling their adventures since they’d graduated from Marvel Feature into their own title some sixteen months earlier: Steve Englehart.

Just in case you missed it, Englehart had concluded his double-title, multi-issue crossover epic, the Avengers/Defenders War (or, if you prefer, the Quest for the Black Knight’s Soul) in Defenders #11 with a scene that saw four of the six heroes who’d carried the banner of the junior team in that classic match-up — the Hulk, the Sub-Mariner, the Silver Surfer, and even raw recruit Hawkeye — departing to pursue other interests.  That left only de facto team leader Doctor Strange, as well as the Valkyrie (who had nowhere else to go, really) on hand to say farewell from the window of the Sorcerer Supreme’s Sanctum Sanctorum — and also left incoming new regular writer Len Wein with the challenge either of contriving a way to bring some or all of the wayward members back, or of quickly  introducing new members to the mix.  (Or of having Doc and Val face down the menace of Xemnu the Titan all on their own, which I don’t think anyone expected — or especially wanted, for that matter — to see happen.)  As we’ll soon discover, he ended up employing a combination of those first two strategies… although it would take several issues for that process to be complete.  Read More

Savage Tales #4 (May, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we previously discussed in our post about Savage Tales #3 last October, back in the fall of 1973 it seemed that Marvel’s one-and-only sword-and-sorcery-centric black-and-white comics magazine was about to be cancelled — for the second time.  The first incarnation of Savage Tales had seen but one issue published in January, 1971 before Marvel’s then-publisher Martin Goodman pulled the plug; then, the second iteration, launched in June, 1972 following Goodman’s departure from the company he’d founded, had come under the scrutiny of an auditor for the conglomerate (Cadence Industries) that now owned Marvel.  According to a rather downbeat editorial by Roy Thomas that ran in ST #3, a go-ahead for producing further issues wouldn’t be given until sales numbers had been received for the relaunch; and if you read between the lines, the signs didn’t seem very encouraging. Read More

Captain America #174 (June, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When we last saw Captain America and the Falcon, near the end of last month’s post about CA #173, our heroes had seemingly been successful in their subterfuge against the sinister Secret Empire — the clandestine organization behind both Cap’s recent woes (which include first having his reputation smeared by an ad campaign, then being framed for murder) and the mysterious disappearance of multiple mutants, including several members of Cap and Falc’s newfound allies, the X-Men.  We rejoin them here on page one of issue #174, as they make their descent into the proverbial belly of the beast…  Read More

Marvel Premiere #15 (May, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In early 1974, when a slot for a new continuing feature opened up in Marvel Premiere (due to the previous tenant Dr. Strange having vacated the premises to return to headlining his own title), it must have seemed a virtual no-brainer to offer it to a character who could help Marvel Comics cash in even further on the burgeoning martial arts craze than they were already doing with the Master of Kung Fu series (which had debuted in September, 1973) and its brand-new black-and-white magazine spinoff The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu (which launched in early February, just a couple of weeks prior to the release of today’s featured fifty-year-old comic).  But for Marvel to do that, someone was first going to have to invent such a character; and in this instance, that process of invention began with the company’s then-editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas.  Read More

Captain America #173 (May, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In February, 1974, the X-Men hadn’t appeared in a new story in their own title in over four years — but while gone, they were hardly forgotten.  (Actually, they weren’t even gone, since their book had been resurrected as a reprint title by Marvel’s then-publisher, Martin Goodman, eight months after he’d cancelled the series with issue #66.  But you know what I mean.)  That’s because a number of people working for Marvel just plain liked the characters, regardless of their allegedly limited commercial viability; and, as writer Steve Englehart puts it in his 2009 preface to Marvel Masterworks — The X-Men, Vol. 8, “the Marvel Universe was a coherent entity, so the X-Men continued to exist in it even if they had no comic to call their own.”  Read More

The Brave and the Bold #112 (Apr.-May, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By my reckoning, DC Comics’ The Brave and the Bold was one of the first comic book titles I ever spent my own money on (for the record, it was preceded only by Superman, Detective Comics, Green Lantern, Justice League of America, Flash, and Lois Lane).  I bought my first issue, #64, in December, 1965 — drawn in, no doubt, by its irresistible Gil Kane cover — and BatB soon became one of my most consistent regular purchases as a nascent comics fan.  No, I didn’t buy every single issue, but that was true of virtually every other title as well (the sole exception in those early days being Justice League of America, to which I quickly subscribed).  The ongoing appeal of the book, of course, was that you were always guaranteed at least two superheroes for the price of one (sometimes, as with issue #65’s team-up between the Flash and the Doom Patrol, you got even more).  That wasn’t quite as good a deal as JLA, which might give you as many as ten costumed crusaders cavorting in the same story… but it was still pretty sweet.  Read More

Marvel Two-in-One #2 (March, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we covered here back in August, the twelfth — and final — issue of Marvel Feature ended with Benjamin J. Grimm (aka the Thing), stranded in a desert in the American Southwest.  But we Marvel Comics readers of 1973 had no need to worry over the fate of our rocky orange hero, since just two months later, the narrative of Ben’s travails picked right up in Marvel Two-in-One #1 — the first issue of a brand-new title devoted to the “Thing Team-Up” series premise that had made its debut in Marvel Feature #11.

With the new title came a (mostly) new creative team; for, while longtime Fantastic Four inker Joe Sinnott soldiered on, making sure that Aunt Petunia’a favorite nephew remained reliably on-model, the series was now being written by Steve Gerber and pencilled by Gil Kane.  Gerber and Kane faithfully picked up the threads left behind by previous storytellers Mike Friedrich and Jim Starlin, having Ben Grimm finally reach civilization and buy a bus ticket home to New York — only to exchange it for one for Florida, after catching sight of a news story regarding a certain muck-encrusted mockery of a man who’d been sighted shambling about the Sunshine State’s swampy Everglades.  “Like it ain’t bad enuff just bein’ the Thing –!” Ben complained aloud to an uncaring universe.  “This bug-eyed mudball’s gotta come along and rip off my name!”  Read More

Detective Comics #439 (Feb.-Mar., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As of November, 1973, it had been twenty-seven months since the last time I bought an issue of Detective Comics.  (For the record, that issue was #416, featuring the fourth appearance of Man-Bat.)  There hadn’t been any conscious “drop” decision involved in this long dry spell between purchases; like a lot of other titles, Detective was simply one of those books I made an individual buy-or-not-buy choice about every time I saw a new issue on the stands.  I’d check out the cover, glance at the credits for the Batman story, note who Bats was fighting this go-around — maybe even see who was starring in the backup feature (there was always a backup feature back then) — and if one or more of those aspects grabbed me (or, if the spinner-rack pickings were really slim that week, even just mildly interested me), I bought the comic book.  Read More