Howard Chaykin

Marvel Spotlight #31 (December, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Assuming your humble blogger hasn’t missed something in his research, the comic we’re going to be looking at today was, fifty years ago, the first to feature Nick Fury, agent of SHIELD — as opposed to Sgt. Nick Fury, leader of World War II’s Howling Commandos — in a headlining role since the cancellation of, um, Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, back in 1969.  Not that the eye-patched director of the Marvel Universe’s foremost spy agency had been at all out of sight through the first half of the 1970s; indeed, for a while he seemed to be popping up in one book or another almost every single month.  Read More

Marvel Premiere #33 (December, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in September, 1976, the artist of the comic book story we’ll be discussing today — Howard Chaykin, that is — wouldn’t have ranked among the most prolific of the generation of talented young illustrators who’d entered the American comic book industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Unlike other such “Young Turks” of the era as Barry Windsor-Smith, Bernie Wrightson, Frank Brunner, and Jim Starlin, Chaykin still hadn’t had a run on a series lasting more than four issues — and that personal record had been set back in 1973.  Nor had his one- (or two-) off jobs over the past few years been all that plentiful, or frequent.  Read More

Savage Sword of Conan #14 (September, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

You’d likely never guess it from the wholly acceptable, but not especially memorable Earl Norem cover to the comic book that’s our topic for today — but, half a century ago, Savage Sword of Conan #14 represented something of the end of an era… even if no one knew it at the time.  That’s because its pages contained the very last collaboration between writer Roy Thomas and artist Neal Adams — two creators whose previous joint efforts, though relatively few in number, comprised some of the high water marks of the late Silver and early Bronze Ages of comics.  Read More

Marvel Super Action #1 (January, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As was discussed in detail in our post about Marvel Preview #4 several weeks ago, by 1975 all four of the black-and-white comics magazines with which Marvel Comics had made a big push into that market just two years before were winding down.  But Marvel was far from throwing in the towel on the B&W format itself.  Accepting that the early-’70s horror boom that had inspired the launches of Dracula Lives and its ilk was pretty much over, Marvel now looked to other genres for new titles that could replace those that had made up the “Marvel Monster Group”.  Read More

Demon-Hunter #1 (September, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last November, in our post about Grim Ghost #1, we discussed the origins and early days of Atlas/Seaboard — the comic-book company launched in 1974 by the founder and previous owner of Marvel Comics, Martin Goodman, and his son Charles (aka “Chip”).  In this post, we’ll be covering the upstart publisher’s decline and fall, as well as taking a close look at one of Atlas/Seaboard’s very last releases — a comic which, ironically, was not only one of the company’s better efforts, but also one of the very few to have any sort of afterlife following its abrupt demise. Read More

Wulf the Barbarian #1 (February, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

A week ago, writing about the advent of the short-lived comics publisher Atlas/Seaboard, I touched briefly on one of the company’s first color comic-book releases — the barbarian-themed Ironjaw #1 — which, as you may recall, I didn’t rate very highly.  At the time, I promised you we’d be taking a look at the other sword-and-sorcery comic Atlas put out in November, 1974 — a book which was perhaps somewhat more generic than its immediate predecessor, at least on the surface level, but one which ultimately proved a more satisfying entertainment experience overall, simply by virtue of being so very well drawn… well, that, and not being poisonously misogynistic, as the Michael Fleisher-written Ironjaw unquestionably was.  And now, here we are.  Read More

Savage Sword of Conan #2 (October, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In 1974, star comics artist Neal Adams had largely turned away from pencilling comic book stories.  But he did keep his hand in in the field in various ways, such as by turning out painted covers for Marvel Comics’ black-and-white magazine line on a fairly regular basis.  The second issue of Marvel’s new Savage Sword of Conan title is graced by one such; like most of the covers produced for the b&w line, by whichever artist, it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the magazine’s specific contents.  But I’m sure I didn’t complain when I first picked this book up half a century ago, and I doubt many other readers did, either.

Turning past that cover to the issue’s double-page frontispiece/table of contents, we’re greeted by the first published professional work of a young artist who was as unknown in August, 1974 as Adams was famous:

  Read More

Marvel Spotlight #17 (September, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If you were to take a deep dive into the credits page for writer Steve Gerber at the Mike’s Amazing World of Comics web site, you’d be forgiven if you ultimately concluded that, in the summer of 1974, he must have been scripting half of Marvel Comics’ entire line.  He wasn’t — not quite — but given that he was at that time responsible for six ongoing features, while also continuing to contribute the odd one-off short piece for anthology titles like Vampire Tales and Crazy, he was turning out at least as much verbiage for the House of Ideas as any other one writer, and arguably more. Read More

Weird Worlds #8 (Nov.-Dec., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Fifty-one years after the fact, it seems at least possible that the DC Comics title Weird Worlds might never have come into existence at all, had that publisher kept up its “Bigger and Better” experiment — i.e., a standard comic-book format of 48 pages, which sold for 25 cents — for a while longer than it did.  After all, the earliest DC issues of Tarzan and Korak had seemed to have ample space not only for the adventures of author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ famous jungle hero and his somewhat less well-known son, but also for backup features based on what were arguably even less familiar ERB properties, such as “John Carter of Mars”, “Carson of Venus”, and “Pellucidar”.

But with the shift back to 32-page comics as DC’ standard size (“Now Only 20¢”), Tarzan and Korak could no longer accommodate all of those backups — let alone add any of the other properties that DC had access to via their Burroughs license.  And so, while “Carson of Venus” continued to appear in Korak (and a new feature, “Beyond the Farthest Star”, took up residence in the back pages of Tarzan), John Carter and David Innes (the protagonist of “Pellucidar”) each found a new home in a brand new title: Weird Worlds, the first issue of which arrived on stands in June, 1972.  Read More

Sword of Sorcery #4 (Sep.-Oct., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last December, we looked at the first issue of Sword of Sorcery — DC Comics’ new (as of December, 1972, that is) bi-monthly series featuring author Fritz Leiber’s fantasy fiction duo, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.  The debut of the two roguish heroes in their own title came five months after their introduction to DC readers in Wonder Woman #202, courtesy of writer Samuel R. Delany, artist Dick Giordano, and editor Denny O’Neil — the latter of whom, not so coincidentally, would be not only editing DC’s new sword-and-sorcery title (the company’s first ongoing effort in that genre), but scripting it, as well.  SoS #1’s art, meantime, was contributed by a young penciller named Howard Chaykin, with inks by the mysterious “Crusty Bunkers” (whom, as we’d soon learn, consisted of various talents working out of the Continuity Associates studio run by Neal Adams and Giordano.)  Read More