John Romita

Captain America #176 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In his 2016 introduction to Marvel Masterworks — Captain America, Vol. 9, Steve Englehart refers to the cover John Romita produced for the subject of today’s post as “iconic”.  That’s become a rather overused word in today’s culture, I grant you; all the same, I find it hard to disagree with him.  For this grizzled old fan, it’s virtually impossible to think about this particular era of Captain America comics without the image shown above leaping immediately to mind — and that’s close enough to iconic for the word to fit, at least in my book.  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

Avengers #125 (July, 1974)

Posted on 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

Defenders #14 (July, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When we last left the Defenders, back in September, the Defenders themselves were, well, leaving.  Most of them, anyway.  As was the writer who’d been chronicling their adventures since they’d graduated from Marvel Feature into their own title some sixteen months earlier: Steve Englehart.

Just in case you missed it, Englehart had concluded his double-title, multi-issue crossover epic, the Avengers/Defenders War (or, if you prefer, the Quest for the Black Knight’s Soul) in Defenders #11 with a scene that saw four of the six heroes who’d carried the banner of the junior team in that classic match-up — the Hulk, the Sub-Mariner, the Silver Surfer, and even raw recruit Hawkeye — departing to pursue other interests.  That left only de facto team leader Doctor Strange, as well as the Valkyrie (who had nowhere else to go, really) on hand to say farewell from the window of the Sorcerer Supreme’s Sanctum Sanctorum — and also left incoming new regular writer Len Wein with the challenge either of contriving a way to bring some or all of the wayward members back, or of quickly  introducing new members to the mix.  (Or of having Doc and Val face down the menace of Xemnu the Titan all on their own, which I don’t think anyone expected — or especially wanted, for that matter — to see happen.)  As we’ll soon discover, he ended up employing a combination of those first two strategies… although it would take several issues for that process to be complete.  Read More

Avengers #124 (June, 1974)

Posted on 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

Marvel Two-in-One #2 (March, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we covered here back in August, the twelfth — and final — issue of Marvel Feature ended with Benjamin J. Grimm (aka the Thing), stranded in a desert in the American Southwest.  But we Marvel Comics readers of 1973 had no need to worry over the fate of our rocky orange hero, since just two months later, the narrative of Ben’s travails picked right up in Marvel Two-in-One #1 — the first issue of a brand-new title devoted to the “Thing Team-Up” series premise that had made its debut in Marvel Feature #11.

With the new title came a (mostly) new creative team; for, while longtime Fantastic Four inker Joe Sinnott soldiered on, making sure that Aunt Petunia’a favorite nephew remained reliably on-model, the series was now being written by Steve Gerber and pencilled by Gil Kane.  Gerber and Kane faithfully picked up the threads left behind by previous storytellers Mike Friedrich and Jim Starlin, having Ben Grimm finally reach civilization and buy a bus ticket home to New York — only to exchange it for one for Florida, after catching sight of a news story regarding a certain muck-encrusted mockery of a man who’d been sighted shambling about the Sunshine State’s swampy Everglades.  “Like it ain’t bad enuff just bein’ the Thing –!” Ben complained aloud to an uncaring universe.  “This bug-eyed mudball’s gotta come along and rip off my name!”  Read More

Amazing Spider-Man #129 (February, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

I don’t suppose I need to explain to anyone reading this just why the topic of today’s post is so significant.  After all, even if you didn’t know anything about the 129th issue of Amazing Spider-Man before you arrived here, just a look at the comic’s iconic cover by Gil Kane and John Romita would quickly clue you in to its contents.  And what other comic-book character’s fiftieth anniversary in this month of October, 2023 could possibly compare in importance to the first appearance of… the Jackal?

Nah, just kidding.  I’m talking about the other guy.  (Although I freely acknowledge that the debut of the Jackal is significant in its own way, especially for ’90s-era Spider-Man fans who still have nightmares about the Clone Saga.)  Read More

Savage Tales #3 (February, 1974)

Posted on 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