John Buscema

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

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

Tales of the Zombie #8 (November, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover art by Boris Vallejo.

Back in April, 2023, towards the end of my post on Tales of the Zombie #1, I wrote that while I fully expected to cover another issue of the series — more specifically, an issue within writer Steve Gerber and artist Pablo Marcos’ run on the titular lead feature — it was “likely to be a minute or two” before that would happen.

Well, in the end it took 745,000 minutes (give or take a couple of thousand), but we’re here at last.  And just in time, too, as TotZ #8 features the last story of Simon Garth, Zombie, produced by the Gerber-Marcos team.

Over the seventeen-month stretch between the first and eighth issues of this black-and-white magazine (which, as you may remember, was one of four such horror-oriented titles launched by Marvel Comics over an equal number of months in the first half of ’73), the format had been tweaked somewhat — old stories reprinted from 1950s Atlas horror comics had been pretty much phased out, for one thing — but the mix between comics stories and illustrated text features remained about the same, with the continuing, 20-plus-pages-long exploits (for lack of a better word) of the Zombie consistently dominating the proceedings.  Read More

Savage Sword of Conan #2 (October, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In 1974, star comics artist Neal Adams had largely turned away from pencilling comic book stories.  But he did keep his hand in in the field in various ways, such as by turning out painted covers for Marvel Comics’ black-and-white magazine line on a fairly regular basis.  The second issue of Marvel’s new Savage Sword of Conan title is graced by one such; like most of the covers produced for the b&w line, by whichever artist, it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the magazine’s specific contents.  But I’m sure I didn’t complain when I first picked this book up half a century ago, and I doubt many other readers did, either.

Turning past that cover to the issue’s double-page frontispiece/table of contents, we’re greeted by the first published professional work of a young artist who was as unknown in August, 1974 as Adams was famous:

  Read More

Thor #228 (October, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The primary subject of today’s blog post is the advent of artist Rich Buckler as the regular artist on Marvel Comics’ Thor (and despite the post’s title, we’ll be spending at least as much time on issue #227 — Buckler’s actual debut on the series — as we will on #228).  But as it’s been a while since we last checked in on the God of Thunder (at least in his own book), it’s probably advisable that we take a few moments here at the top to orient ourselves to the current lay of the land in Thor, in terms both of its ongoing storyline and of its creative team.  Read More

Fantastic Four #150 (September, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

A week ago, we took a look at Avengers #127 (Sep., 1974), the first half of a two-part crossover story set to conclude in the comic book that’s the main subject of the present post.  But while Fantastic Four #150 does in fact pick up immediately from the cliffhanger ending that closed out its predecessor, we’re going to be taking a somewhat circuitous route today to get to the splash page of “Ultron-7:He’ll Rule the World!”.  Why?  Well, as regular readers of this blog will surely recall, our Avengers #127 post promised that this follow-up would provide an explanation for that issue’s depiction of a happily reunited Reed and Sue Richards, who’d been very much on the outs the last time we’d encountered them in this space.  So that’s where we’ll begin.  Read More

Savage Sword of Conan #1 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In June, 1974, the Hyborian Age was clearly in full flower at Marvel Comics.  Along with the latest installment of the publisher’s successful ongoing Conan the Barbarian series (issue #42, for the record), the month also brought the fans of Robert E. Howard’s famous sword-and-sorcery hero the first issue of a brand-new quarterly companion title, Giant-Size Conan.  This new series got off to a spectacular start, featuring the first chapter of a multi-part adaptation of Howard’s one and only Conan novel, “The Hour of the Dragon”, as written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Gil Kane and Tom Sutton.

And that wasn’t even the biggest news in Conan comics this month; rather, that distinction went to the main topic of today’s blog post, The Savage Sword of Conan #1 — the first issue of a brand-new black-and-white bi-monthly magazine devoted to the barbarian adventurer and his fellow Howardian heroes.  It was, in some ways, Conan’s third coming as far as the b&w comics market went, following as it did both the initial release of Savage Tales in January, 1971, and the subsequent relaunch of that title with its long-delayed second issue in June, 1973.  It was also the biggest black-and-white comic Marvel had yet published — a square-bound number that weighed in at 80 pages (as compared to the then standard 64), and cost a whole buck (as compared to Marvel’s other b&w offerings’ going price of 75 cents).  Read More

Hulk #178 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

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