Joe Orlando

Phantom Stranger #41 (Feb.-Mar., 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover to Phantom Stranger #11 (Jan.-Feb., 1971). Art by Neal Adams.

By the time that the 41st issue of Phantom Stranger arrived in spinner racks in November, 1975, I had been buying the title regularly for a full five years — or, to put it another way, for an unbroken run of thirty issues.  That made it unique among the DC Comics offerings I was picking up regularly at the time, as none of the others — Beowulf, Claw the Unconquered, Hercules Unbound, Kong the Untamed, Warlord, and the just-revived All-Star Comics — had even been around just one year before, let alone five.  As for the other DC books that I’d been routinely buying back when I first sampled Phantom Stranger in November, 1970 — these included Green Lantern, House of Mystery, Jimmy Olsen, Justice League of America, Superman, and World’s Finest — while most of them were still going concerns, a couple weren’t; and those that were still being published had become occasional purchases for me, at best.  Phantom Stranger was the only DC comic I’d bought continuously for the last half-decade — the sole survivor of my own personal DC Comics class of ’70.

And after this month, it would be gone, as well… because the 41st issue of Phantom Stranger was also to be the final one.  Read More

All-Star Comics #58 (Jan.-Feb., 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In October, 1975 — just a little less than a quarter-century since their last headlining appearance in All-Star Comics #57 (Feb.-Mar., 1951), and about half that time since their revival in Flash #137 (Jun., 1963) — the Justice Society of America finally returned to newsstands in their own book.  The premiere superhero team, not just of DC Comics but of all comics, was at last back in full force, ready to reclaim its former glory.

And it had Marvel Comics to thank for the opportunity.  Read More

Adventure Comics #440 (Jul.-Aug., 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Arriving in spinner racks in late April, 1975, the 440th issue of DC’s Adventure Comics featured an updated look, as the title’s current lead feature — the Spectre — finally got a cover logo of his own.  A number of artist Jim Aparo’s earlier covers, excellent as they were, hadn’t even featured the character’s name anywhere in their copy… which was perhaps not the best call ever made by editor Joe Orlando.  But now, finally, we had the return of the classic logo that the great Ira Schnapp had designed for the Spectre’s Silver Age revival in Showcase back in 1965, which had then gone on to grace most of the issues of his subsequent titular series.  It was a good move — though one that came a little late, given that Adventure #440 would be the last to feature the Spectre as the book’s headliner.  Read More

Stalker #1 (Jun.-Jul., 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Following our coverage of Beowulf #1 in January, and Claw the Unconquered #1 in February, we come now to the third of the brand-new sword and sorcery series launched by DC Comics in the first quarter of 1975 — the shortest-lived of the group, as things turned out, but your humble blogger’s personal favorite, nevertheless.

In a career-spanning interview with Paul Levitz conducted in 2019 by Alex Grand and Jim Thompson, the primary progenitor of Stalker (also, albeit a few decades later, DC’s president and publisher) recalled how the project came to be.  At the time, the 18-year-old Levitz was working as an assistant to DC editor Joe Orlando…  Read More

Adventure Comics #438 (Mar.-Apr., 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The issue of Adventure Comics we’re going to be looking at today was the eighth in a row to feature the Spectre as its headliner, and as such, might well have been taken by a casual browser of the spinner racks in December, 1974 as simply offering more of the same.  Yet this issue departed from its immediate predecessors in at least a couple of respects, beginning with its title logo.  In response to recent commercial trends, as of the Spectre’s third outing (issue #433), DC Comics had started slapping the word “Weird” above “Adventure” on the venerable series’ covers.  That was an adjustment which made good sense as far as the Astral Avenger was concerned… but wasn’t quite as good a fit with the King of the Seven Seas, Aquaman, who began a run as Spec’s backup in issue #435.  Read More

Swamp Thing #13 (Nov.-Dec., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we covered in a post back in February, the 10th issue of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing marked the end of the award-winning collaboration on the title of writer Len Wein, artist Bernie Wrightson, and editor Joe Orlando, as Wrightson chose to leave the book after that installment.  But of course, that didn’t mean the end of Swamp Thing itself.

According to an interview with Orlando published in Amazing World of DC Comics #6 (May-Jun., 1975), among the artists who were considered to replace the muck-monster’s co-creator on the series were a young and mostly untried illustrator named Arthur Suydam, as well as the veteran Filipino artist Alex Niño.  In the end, however, it was another well-seasoned komiks creator from the Philippines, Nestor Redondo, who got the nod.  Read More

Phantom Stranger #33 (Oct.-Nov., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover art by Michael W. Kaluta.

Cover art by Nick Cardy.

It’s been quite a while since we covered an issue of Phantom Stranger on the blog — more specifically, since May, 2023, when we took a look at PS #26.  As I wrote at the time, that issue’s crossover between the comic’s lead and backup features (the latter then being “The Spawn of Frankenstein”) represented the end of an era for the Joe Orlando-edited title, as the very next issue, #27, would bring a complete overhaul of the creative teams for both strips.

Gone from the front of the book were writer Len Wein (who’d written every Phantom Stranger story since issue #14) and artist Jim Aparo (whose association with the character went all the way back to #7); replacing the duo were Arnold Drake and Gerry Talaoc, respectively.  Meanwhile, writer Marv Wolfman and artist Michael W. Kaluta had departed the back pages, leaving the chronicling of the modern adventures of Mary Shelley’s classic creation to Steve Skeates and Bernard Bailey.  Read More

Adventure Comics #435 (Sep.-Oct., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

About a year ago, in a post about Plop #1, we spent some time musing about the flourishing of the word “Weird” in the titles of various DC Comics series of the early-to-mid-1970s.  As Joe Orlando — who was the editor of the majority of these titles — would later put it in a 1998 interview for Comic Book Artist #1:  “I started using the word and [publisher] Carmine [Infantino] decided that ‘Weird’ sold anything. Weird War, Weird Western, Weird Worlds, Weird Mystery.”  Read More

Swamp Thing #10 (May-Jun., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

With the publication of the subject of today’s blog post fifty years ago, the collaboration between writer Len Wein, artist Bernie Wrightson, and editor Joe Orlando on Swamp Thing that had begun with a one-off short story in House of Secrets #92 (Jun.-Jul., 1971) came to a close.  According to an interview Wein gave The Comics Journal in 1979, the trio’s issue-to-issue production of the ongoing Swamp Thing series — which, unusually for DC Comics at the time, regularly began with a joint plotting session between writer, artist, and editor held every couple of months in the latter’s office, followed by Wrightson pencilling the entire story before Wein wrote a word of the script (a version of the “Marvel method”, if you will) — started out as a great working experience… but then, somewhere along the way, it stopped being so:  Read More