John Buscema

Defenders #36 (June, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, we haven’t had a post about Marvel Comics’ Defenders title since we covered issue #34 back in January — which means that our continuing coverage of writer Steve Gerber and artist Sal Buscema’s “Headmen/Nebulon Saga” must resume here not with the issue whose number and cover are shown directly above, but with the one whose cover you see pictured at left.  And that Gil Kane-Mike Esposito number fronting Defenders #35 (May, 1976) is a doozy, isn’t it?  If you’ve never read this comic before, I can’t wait for you to find out who that utterly bizarre unicorn-horned, bird-claw-footed, tentacle-armed monstrosity fighting the Valkyrie really is.  Why, I bet you’ll be just as surprised as Chondu the Mystic was!  (Wait, did I just give the whole thing away?  Damn.)  Read More

Howard the Duck #3 (May, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we discussed in last December’s post about the second issue of Marvel Comics’ Howard the Duck, the departure from the series of artist Frank Brunner — who, along with having drawn the first two Howard solo strips (published as backups in Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 and #5), and the first two issues of the Duck’s own title, had also contributed to the plotting of HtD #1 — was less than entirely amicable.  Among the complaints later aired by Brunner in an article published in The Comics Journal #51 (Nov., 1979), the “Master of Quack Fu” parody featured the third issue was his idea as well — though he received no credit in the book itself, nor was he remunerated so much as “a thin dime” (his own words) for his contribution.  Read More

Conan the Barbarian #58 (January, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last month we took a look at Conan the Barbarian #57, an issue mostly devoted to setting up the opening chapter of writer/editor Roy Thomas’ adaptation (and very extensive expansion) of Conan creator Robert E. Howard’s 1934 short story “Queen of the Black Coast” (full text available online here).  Turning past the cover by Johns Buscema and Romita, we find issue #58 beginning exactly where #57 left off, with our favorite Cimmerian adventurer riding hard for the docks of an Argossean seaport, a contingent of the city’s soldiers in hot pursuit…  Read More

Conan the Barbarian #57 (December, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The cover of this issue of Conan the Barbarian, as produced by the art team of Gil Kane and Vince Colletta, is unquestionably a solid piece of work; if it has any real flaw, it’s that it’s a little generic.  Yes, Conan is shown holding a length of chain in one hand, which at least vaguely nods to the “A Barbarian Chained!” title blurb at the cover’s bottom (and, for the record, we will indeed see our hero so bound before this issue’s story is over and done).  But other than that, it’s just a generic Conan illustration, which could have appeared anywhere, anytime, over the past several years of the title’s run, and has little true relation to this specific issue’s contents.

But, in a way, that was an appropriate choice, back in September,1975.  Conan the Barbarian was at this time on the verge of making a major shift in direction, setting a new course that the series would henceforth follow all the way through issue #100, published more than three and a half years later.  So the cover of Conan #57 could be taken as a capper for the entire run up to this point — a run that as recently as the past year (the last for which the Academy of Comic Book Arts’ “Shazam” Awards were given) had been deemed “Best Continuing Feature” — a fact the cover itself proudly proclaims.  In that sense, this cover serves not only (or even primarily) to promote the single story contained within the comic’s pages, but to commemorate this whole era of the series… what we might call “Conan the Barbarian B.B.”. Read More

Hercules Unbound #1 (Oct.-Nov., 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Fifty-plus years ago, the spring of 1975 brought news of personnel changes to the major American comic book companies that might not have made it into any major metropolitan newspapers, but were guaranteed to garner headlines in the comics fanzines of the time.  Without doubt, the most dramatic such development was the return of artist/writer/editor Jack Kirby to Marvel Comics following a five-year tenure at rival DC; but another change that happened more or less simultaneously with Kirby’s move — and was essentially the reverse mirror image of it — was also significant enough to get a fair amount of ink in The Comics Reader and its ilk: the return of Gerry Conway to DC Comics as both a writer and an editor after having spent the better part of the past half-decade writing for Marvel, where he’d ultimately been responsible for such high-profile titles as Thor, Fantastic Four, and Amazing-Spider-Man. Read More

Thor #240 (October, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before on this blog, Thor was my favorite Marvel superhero back in the 1970s.  (Just for the record, he still is.)  That didn’t mean that Thor was my favorite Marvel superhero comic book for most of that decade, however — at least, not so far as the new issues coming out then were concerned.  The reason for that disparity stems from the fact that, while my enthusiasm for the Son of Odin might have originally been inspired by a general affinity for myth and legend (and for modern heroic fantasy fiction derived from them), it was based at least as much on my admiration for the work that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had done on the feature in the mid-to-late 1960s.  Thor/Journey into Mystery was the one major Marvel title I endeavored to acquire a complete run of back in my collecting heyday (I eventually made it back as far as JiM #96, if you’re curious).  So I had those Lee-Kirby classics — which I was picking up sporadically, just a few at a time — to compare the current issues to.  And despite regularly featuring a high quality of artwork (usually by John Buscema, working with a variety of mostly sympathetic inkers), the new stories (which for most of the first half of the 1970s were written by Gerry Conway) just didn’t measure up in my eyes… neither to those great old Thor/JiM comics, nor to the best of what Marvel was offering elsewhere in the superhero genre in those days.  Read More

Defenders #26 (August, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The subject of today’s post is the first of four regular issues of Defenders that guest-starred the original Guardians of the Galaxy.  But the storyline actually kicked off in the fifth (and last) issue of the non-team’s other vehicle, Giant-Size Defenders, so you can probably guess what that means — yep, we’ll be taking a look at that one first.

Although, considering that we’ve never really discussed the OG Guardians on the blog prior to this post, and given that GSD #5 represented only their third non-reprint appearance overall at the time it was released, maybe we should look at least briefly at the prior history of the team?  Sure, let’s do that. Read More

Savage Sword of Conan #6 (June, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

We’ve discussed the so-called “Filipino Invasion” of the American comic book industry during the 1970s in several previous posts.  As regular readers may recall, this development began with the arrival of artist Tony DeZuñiga at DC Comics around the middle of 1970, but really picked up steam in 1972 following a business trip to the Philippines taken by DeZuñiga, his editor Joe Orlando, and DC publisher Carmine Infantino.  That visit resulted in a deal by which DeZuñiga and his wife would act as a sort of broker between DC and his fellow Filipino illustrators, most of whom continued to live and work in the islands.  Within a number of months, DC’s mystery anthologies (along with related titles such as Weird War Tales and Weird Western Tales) were all but dominated by the art of such talents as DeZuñiga, Alfredo Alcala, Nestor Redondo, and a number of others. Read More

Giant-Size X-Men #1 (May, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover layout by Gil Kane, featuring only the new X-Men team lineup.

The completed original art for the cover, with the new team pencilled by Kane and the old team pencilled by Dave Cockrum; all inks by Cockrum.

Half a century after its original release, there’s little doubt that the subject of today’s post was the most historically significant mainstream American comic book released in 1975; indeed, it’s arguably in the very top tier for the entire decade of the Seventies.  But in April, 1975, it arrived with very little fanfare — at least in the relatively isolated comics-reading world of your humble blogger, who at age seventeen still wasn’t tuned in to what little fan press there was at the time.  I don’t recall seeing any house ads for Giant-Size X-Men #1 ahead of its release, and the only promotion of the book I’ve been able to locate in any Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page published around then is a brief mention in the column that ran in the company’s March-shipping issues, reporting how artist Dave Cockrum’s being chosen to illustrate the project represented the realization of the “fan dream of a lifetime”.  That may well have been the only heads-up I had that this book was coming out at all, prior to seeing its soon-to-be-iconic cover by Cockrum and Gil Kane staring out at me from the spinner rack. Read More

Man-Thing #18 (June, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last month, we took a look at Giant-Size Man-Thing #4, whose lead story centered around the high school in Citrusville, Florida — the fictional small town built on the edge of the swamp that the muck-encrusted star of the title called his home.  In this post, we’ll be covering a trilogy of issues of the monthly Man-Thing series that not only came out concurrently with “The Kid’s Night Out!”, but also shared its setting, at least in part — and whose storyline in some ways incorporated both the events and the themes of that other story.  Read More