Jim Starlin

Giant-Size Avengers #4 (Jun., 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in August, 1974, after laying the necessary narrative groundwork for many months, Avengers writer Steve Englehart had inaugurated his “Celestial Madonna” story arc with a pair of issues that came out within a couple of weeks of each other: Avengers #129 and Giant-Size Avengers #2.  Half a year later, in February, 1975, the saga would reach its conclusion in a parallel fashion, with the final chapters appearing in that month’s issues of both the regular monthly Avengers title and its giant-sized quarterly companion.  Read More

Strange Tales #179 (April, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last November, we took a look at Strange Tales #178, featuring the premiere installment of Marvel Comics’ revived “Warlock” feature, now written and drawn by Jim Starlin.  In the first episode of a new multi-part storyline, the one-time savior of Counter-Earth learned for the first time of the galactic-level threat represented by the Universal Church of Truth — a militant religious organization determined to bring the entire universe under its tyrannical control, led by an entity called the Magus; an entity who, somehow, was the very same being as Adam Warlock himself.

But while I’m sure we’re all eager to proceed with this issue’s continuation of Starlin’s saga, your humble blogger feels he would be remiss not to first encourage you all to take a closer look at the book’s cover — more specifically, at the upper right-hand corner of said cover, where we would normally expect to see the Comics Code Authority’s seal of approval on the contents of this comic book — because in this particular case, approval has evidently been granted by the Cosmic Code Authority.  Read More

Captain Marvel #37 (March, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover art by Jim Starlin.

Cover art by Ron Wilson and Frank Giacoia.

Back in June, we took a look at Captain Marvel #34 — the last issue produced by auteur Jim Starlin, who would soon be moving on to “Warlock” in Strange Tales.  As you may recall, Starlin’s swan song ended on a cliffhanger, with Mar-Vell lying unconscious after having been exposed to a deadly nerve toxin.

On one level, this cliffhanger wouldn’t be fully resolved until 1982, when Starlin’s graphic novel, The Death of Captain Marvel, revealed that the hero had contracted cancer as a result of the nerve gas — a cancer which did indeed ultimately prove fatal.  But in 1974, Mar-Vell wasn’t going anywhere, and so it would be up to the creators who picked up the ongoing storyline in Captain Marvel #35 to get him out of the fix Starlin had left him in — even if it ultimately turned out to be only a temporary reprieve, seen in retrospect.  Read More

Strange Tales #178 (February, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in June, we took a look at Captain Marvel #34, which was the last issue drawn and plotted by Jim Starlin.  As we discussed in that post, Starlin abruptly quit the series after delivering only one chapter of his first post-“Thanos War” storyline, unhappy with Marvel Comics’ seeming unwillingness, or inability, to give him a single consistent inker on the bi-monthly title.

Per remarks the creator has made in interviews over the years, his leaving Captain Marvel amounted to his leaving Marvel, period, at least for a little while.  As he explained in 1998 for an interview published in Comic Book Artist #2:  Read More

Marvel Two-in-One #7 (January, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As of October, 1974, Steve Gerber had been the writer on Marvel Two-in-One for a year — ever since the series teaming the Fantastic Four’s Thing with a rotating cast of co-stars had jumped from its previous home in Marvel Feature to its own brand-new title, in fact.  Intriguingly (though perhaps also understandably), with the whole Marvel Universe to play with, Gerber had initially opted to choose Benjamin J. Grimm’s partners in adventuring from environs he already knew well — that is, from other series he was already writing.  So it was that in MTiO #1, the Thing had come face-to-face with his half-namesake, the Man-Thing; next, in issue #2 he’d first fought and then joined forces with the Sub-Mariner; and then, in #3, he’d teamed up with Daredevil — a trio of co-stars who were all also headliners in other Gerber titles.  Read More

Giant-Size Defenders #3 (January, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we’ve discussed in this space previously, Marvel Comics seems to have been in an almighty rush to get as many “Giant-Size” comics to market as possible in the first half of 1974.  Along with a multitude of title, frequency, price, and format changes, most seemingly made on the fly, one likely result of this haste was the release of Giant-Size Defenders #1 in April, 1974 as a mostly-reprint package, its only new content (not counting the Gil Kane-John Romita-Frank Giacoia cover) being a 9-page framing sequence.  Written by Tony Isabella and illustrated by Jim Starlin and Al Milgrom, that strip unquestionably looked great, and it read just fine; there simply wasn’t enough of it. Read More

Captain Marvel #34 (September, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

So, how do you follow up a grand, multi-issue crossover superhero epic in which your protagonist and his allies have just barely managed to eke out a win against an insane god in time to save the universe?

If you’re Captain Marvel plotter, penciller, and colorist (maybe we should just go with auteur?) Jim Starlin, you opt for moving straight into a new multi-issue storyline.  Though surely no one will begrudge you taking a few pages at the top of the new narrative’s premiere installment to wrap up a few loose ends, and otherwise provide a nice coda for the tale you’ve been telling for the past nineteen months or so…  Read More

Captain Marvel #33 (July, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Behind a cover both pencilled and inked by Jim Starlin (his first such since coming on board the Captain Marvel title with issue #25), this issue featured the conclusion of the epic “Thanos War” storyline that the creator had inaugurated a year and a half earlier with the 55th issue of Iron Man, and which had since woven through the previous eight issues of Captain Marvel itself, while also spilling over briefly into Marvel Feature, Daredevil, and Avengers.  Read More

Avengers #125 (July, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

I suppose that Ron Wilson and John Romita’s cover for this issue of Avengers might be taken as misleading by some readers, since, as we’ll soon see, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes never directly confront Thanos himself anywhere within its pages (indeed, the Mad Titan only puts in a personal appearance on a couple of them).  I’m pretty sure, however, that that fact didn’t bother my sixteen-year-old self very much (if at all) when I first read this comic back in April, 1974; after all, the story is unquestionably a part of the “Thanos War” saga that had been being told by artist-writer Jim Starlin and others for the last year and a half, mostly (though not entirely) in the pages of Captain Marvel.  If you took Avengers #125’s cover as “symbolic” of our heroes’ struggle against that epic’s Big Bad, as I was happy to do, you’d have to admit it was pretty much on the money.  Read More