Hellcat

Avengers #144 (February, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog may have noticed, I tend not to talk very much about the covers of the half-century-old comics we discuss here; unless they’re really strikingly good, my tendency is simply to note who drew them — to the extent that that’s known, anyway — and then move on.  (And just this week, in writing about Defenders #32, I forgot to do even that much; my thanks to reader Ben Herman for stepping into the breach.)  But I’m going to make an exception this time, simply to express my disappointment with this particular job by Gil Kane and Frank Giacoia.  While there are aspects of the composition that work well, the central figure of Hellcat — a significant new character (OK, technically a new combination of two pre-existing characters) whom readers are seeing here for the very first time — is almost painfully awkward, at least to my eyes.  Kane was a great talent, but among the very many (probably too many) covers he cranked out for Marvel in the 1970s, it stands to reason that there’d be at least a few clunkers; and for me, this is one of them.  (Naturally, your mileage may vary.)  Read More

Avengers #142 (December, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last month we took a look at Avengers #141, which, as regular readers of this blog will remember, ended with three time-travelers — the founding Avenger named Thor, the would-be Avenger known as Moondragon, and their temporary ally, Immortus — touching down in the American West of 1873, just in time to be startled by someone coming up behind them… a someone, or someones, whom our travelers could see, but whose identities remained unknown to us readers…

…at least until the cover of the next issue — the subject of today’s post — where the illustration by Gil Kane and Frank Giacoia (with a likely assist from John Romita) rather gives the game away ahead of the book’s opening splash page…  Read More

Amazing Adventures #11 (March, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In December, 1971, Marvel Comics’ X-Men were in a weird kind of limbo.  The franchise was by no means dead — indeed, there was a new issue of the young mutant heroes’ titular series published every two months.  It’s just that once you got past the freshly-drawn covers (such as the one produced by Gil Kane and Frank Giacoia for the latest issue, #74, as shown at right), the contents of those “new” comics were all reprinted X-stories of some five years vintage (for example, #74 featured an oldie by Roy Thomas, Werner Roth, and Dick Ayers that had originally appeared in #26).

This had been the state of affairs ever since around September, 1970, when Marvel publisher Martin Goodman — having cancelled X-Men nine months earlier, in the aftermath of Thomas, Neal Adams, and Tom Palmer’s brief but acclaimed run on the series — appears to have looked at some late sales reports, liked what he saw, and approved the “revival” of the title — but only as a reprint book.  For more than a year afterwards, this would be the only place you could find the X-Men (save for a three-part Angel adventure that ran from July to December, 1970 in the back pages of two reprint issues of Ka-Zar and one of Marvel Tales, and a single guest appearance by Iceman in Amazing Spider-Man #92, published that October).  Read More