John Buscema | Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books

Hulk #178 (August, 1974)

As regular readers of this blog may recall, I was never a regular buyer of The Incredible Hulk, back in the day. While I always enjoyed the character when he appeared as a guest star, or in a team setting à la the Defenders, for whatever reason his Jekyll & Hyde-cum-Frankenstein premise never had much appeal to me as the basis for a lead character. Or maybe I simply preferred my superheroes to have a little more going on upstairs. In any case, after dipping my toe in the water one time back in 1969, I had since refrained from picking up Hulk except on those occasions when it crossed over with another series I was currently buying, or when it tied up leftover plotlines from a canceled series I had been buying. Read More

Avengers #125 (July, 1974)

Posted on 27 Days Ago 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

Avengers #124 (June, 1974)

Posted on March 23 by Alan Stewart

It’s been a minute since we last checked in what the Avengers were up to half a century ago — since the aftermath of the Avengers/Defenders War, in fact, and we put that multi-issue epic to bed back in September. Given that consideration — as well as the fact that the issue we’re focusing on today is the second half of a two-part story, which itself has been spun off from the conclusion of the three-issue story arc preceding it — you might guess that we have a good amount of recapping to get through before moving on to our main event. Read More

Dracula Lives #6 (May, 1974)

Posted on March 2 by Alan Stewart

In March, 1974, Marvel Comics’ black-and-white magazine Dracula Lives entered its second year of publication with a format relatively little changed from its first issue — meaning that it featured three all-new stories of the titular vampire (one set in the present, two set in the past), supplemented by illustrated text features and a reprint or two, all packaged behind a color painted cover. (In this case, the cover was provided by Luis Dominguez, an Argentinian artist who’d been busy of late drawing covers [and occasional stories] for various DC Comics anthology titles; this was his third published cover for a Marvel horror magazine.) Read More

Tomb of Dracula #18 (March, 1974)

Posted on November 18 by Alan Stewart

I suppose we should probably begin today’s post by acknowledging that the battle between two of Marvel Comics’ biggest horror stars — the vampiric Count Dracula and the lycanthropic Jack Russell — that ran through that duo’s respective titles in November and December of 1973 wasn’t quite the first time that two of Marvel Comics’ monstrous headliners faced off with one another. That distinction belongs instead to Frankenstein #8, which beat ToD #18 to the stands by just one month. Even so, while that comics’ Gary Friedrich-John Buscema tale certainly had its charms, it was set in the 19th century, and didn’t cross over from one monster’s title to the other’s; instead, the dust-up between Drac and the Frankenstein Monster concluded in the following bi-monthly issue of Frankenstein itself, which came out in December. For those two reasons, it didn’t feel quite as special as the almost-concurrent Tomb of Dracula/Werewolf by Night crossover — at least, it didn’t to your humble blogger, either then or now. (Naturally, your own mileage may vary, but for better or worse, the Dracula/Werewolf event is the one I’ve opted to write about.) Read More

Savage Tales #3 (February, 1974)

Posted on October 21 by Alan Stewart

As we covered in our discussion of Savage Tales #2 back in June, the promise made on that magazine’s last page — that the following issue would be on “on sale September 25 A.D. 1973 in this the Marvel age of swords and sorcery” — turned out to be off by almost exactly one month. Savage Tales #3 would in fact not come out until October 23rd — its delay being a result, according to editor Roy Thomas, of business-based concerns over the title’s overall commercial viability. And even now, the book’s future was far from secure — though we’ll wait and let Mr. Thomas deliver that fifty-year-old bad news himself per his ST #3 editorial, coming up later in this post.

For the moment, however, we’ll move right into the main event of the issue — the reason that my younger self would have continued to wait for ST #3 as long as required back in the day, and still considered the result to have been worth it: the conclusion of Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith’s adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s final story of Conan the Barbarian, “Red Nails”. Read More

Fantastic Four #141 (December, 1973)

Posted on September 16 by Alan Stewart

Hard times at the Baxter Building. Bleak House. Heartbreak Hotel. Is life not ironic? If nothing else? As Annihilus remarked back in issue #140. Love and work had come between the Fantastic Four, America’s greatest superheroes. For almost a year — a year in real time, a year in Paul Hood’s whirlpool teens, but a few days, no more, in the motionless, imperceptible time of Marvel comics — Sue Richards, née Storm, the Invisible Girl, had been estranged from her husband, Reed Richards. With Franklin, their mysteriously equipped son, she was in seclusion in the country. She would return only when Reed learned to understand the obligations of family, those paramount bonds that lay beneath the surface of his work. In her stead, the Medusa had joined the Fantastic Four. Medusa: Tibetan-born Inhuman and cousin of Johnny Storm’s paramour, Crystal, the Elemental…

The mood in the Baxter Building was grim. Besides the Richards’s marital problems, Crystal had recently chosen to marry Quicksilver instead of Johnny Storm. Sue was worried about Franklin’s trances; Reed was worried about Sue; Johnny was worried about Crystal; Ben Grimm was worried about himself.

It was a good period for readers of the F.F….

— from Rick Moody’s 1994 novel The Ice Storm.

Avengers #118 (December, 1973)

Posted on September 9 by Alan Stewart

It’s September, and we’ve finally arrived at the climax of Marvel Comics’ pioneering crossover event of the summer of 1973, the Avengers/Defenders War. Having realized at last that they share a common enemy, the superheroes of the two feuding teams have united to save the world.

So it’s fitting that, for the first time since the storyline began, the cover of this chapter gives us a group shot of multiple members from both teams — although artists Ron Wilson and John Romita have probably chosen wisely in not trying to cram all fourteen heroes, plus supervillains Dormammu and Loki, into a single shot. Rather, they’ve opted to go with just nine, and it’s interesting to take note of who’s been included. Unsurprisingly, every character starring in their own series — that’s Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, and Black Panther (in Jungle Action) from the Avengers, plus Sub-Mariner, Hulk, and Doctor Strange (in Marvel Premiere) from the Defenders — makes the cut. But that still leaves two slots, and they’ve both gone to female characters — the Avengers’ Scarlet Witch and the Defenders’ Valkyrie — which serves to make the cover at least slightly less of a sausage fest. Better luck next time, Silver Surfer, Vision, Hawkeye, Swordsman, and Mantis (the only shero who didn’t make the cover).

Still, if you’re hankering for a big group shot featuring all the heroes from both teams, no exceptions, then have no worries; Marvel’s got you covered on the book’s opening splash page: Read More

Marvel Spotlight #12 (October, 1973)

Posted on July 26 by Alan Stewart

In several previous blog posts (most extensively in this one), I’ve described the early 1970s horror boom in American comics as part of a larger wave of interest in monsters (especially among young people) that can be traced back to the arrival of the classic old Universal monster movies on television in the late 1950s, and that flourished in the following decade and beyond, ultimately giving us such enduring cultural artifacts as Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s hit 1962 single “Monster Mash”, the Gothic TV soap opera Dark Shadows (which premiered in 1966, but didn’t really didn’t take off until the arrival of the vampire Barnabas Collins in ’67), and, lest we forget, Count Chocula and Franken Berry breakfast cereals, which first crept onto grocery shelves in 1971. It was a legitimate popular phenomenon, but one that had largely passed American color comics by — at least until the early 1971 revisions to the Comics Code, which allowed for vampires, werewolves, and ghouls to be used “when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high calibre literary works” for the first time since the Code’s adoption in 1954. Before too many months had passed, spinner racks were filling up with titles like Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, Frankenstein, and Swamp Thing — and fifty years ago, in the summer of 1973, new ones were continuing to arrive. Read More

Savage Tales #2 (October, 1973)

Posted on June 28 by Alan Stewart

As I’ve noted in previous posts, Marvel Comics’ Savage Tales #1 — the company’s second attempt to break into the black-and-white comics magazine market, following Spectacular Spider-Man (or, if you prefer, its third, following Pussycat; or even the fourth, if you want to go all the way back to 1955’s Mad knock-off, Snafu) passed my then-thirteen-year-old self by upon its January, 1971 release. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I passed it by. I was doubtless aware of it, since it had been plugged in Marvel’s Bullpen Bulletins columns; but, at the time, I hadn’t dared to take so much as a peek at the “mature” black-and-white offerings then available on the magazine racks (my first Warren Publishing purchase wouldn’t happen until that summer) — unless you counted Mad, which I didn’t. Plus, I hadn’t even sampled the adventures of Savage Tales‘ headliner, Conan the Barbarian, in his titular Comics Code-approved color series yet (my first issue of that book would be #4 — which, as it happens, came out just one week after Savage Tales #1). But even if I had been inclined to give the new magazine a try, I would likely have been too intimidated by the “mature” cover painting by John Buscema (not to mention the big “M” label positioned adjacent to that painting’s bloodily severed head) to risk sneaking it into my very Southern Baptist household. Read More