John Buscema

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

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

Defenders #23 (May, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The fifty-year-old comic book referred to in the title line of this blog post presents the second chapter of a four-part storyline.  And, seeing how we didn’t feature a post about Defenders #22 here in this space last month, regular readers of the blog know what that means: we’ll be covering that issue before moving on to our ostensible main topic, i.e., Defenders #23.  But wait, there’s more!  Because, although the story chronicled in another half-century-old comic, Giant-Size Defenders #4, isn’t technically part of the same arc, its events do preface those of the main Defenders title’s “Sons of the Serpent” saga in some significant ways.  For that reason, we’ll be spending a little quality time with it before proceeding even as far as Defenders #22.  It’s a three-fer today, folks.  Read More

Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 (May, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If aging memory serves, it wasn’t long after the subject of today’s post first went on sale that it started to rapidly climb in value on the collector’s market — a phenomenon that was surely almost wholly attributable to the comic’s nine-page backup story, which presented the long-awaited first solo adventure of Howard the Duck.  But as epochal as Howard’s ascent to feature-starring status undoubtedly was half a century ago, the story which occupied the issue’s first thirty pages — “The Kid’s Night Out!”, starring the title’s muck-encrusted headliner, the Man-Thing — could hardly be called an inconsequential piece of work.  Rather, it’s one of the most memorable episodes of the lead feature’s entire original run… and it’s where we’ll begin our coverage of this seminal fifty-year-old comic book today.  Read More

Savage Sword of Conan #4 (February, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The fifty-year-old comics magazine we’ll be looking at today leads off with a cover by fantasy painter Boris Vallejo that actually illustrates the issue’s lead story — something which wasn’t exactly unheard of with Marvel’s black-and-white comics of the 1970s, but wasn’t quite what you’d call commonplace, either.  About the only significant discrepancy between cover and story is that the young lady in Vallejo’s painting is depicted as wearing a little less clothing than the equivalent character drawn by John Buscema and Alfredo Alcala in the story’s version of this same scene… but it really is only a little less, as we’ll soon see.  Read More