John Severin

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

Kull the Destroyer #11 (November, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By August, 1973, Marvel Comics had been publishing comics about Robert E. Howard’s sword-and-sorcery hero King Kull for over two and a half years — or, to be more precise, for thirty-two months — but only had ten issues of Kull the Conqueror to show for it.  That record was in marked contrast to that of Howard’s better known barbarian protagonist, Conan, who’d made his American comic-book debut just five months before Kull’s, but who’d so far racked up thirty-one regular issues of his own title, plus a “King-Size” reprint special and two appearances in the black-and-white magazine Savage Tales, to boot.  But while from our contemporary perspective it may seem obvious that Kull of Atlantis — despite his having actually preceded Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria in terms of the chronology of their respective creations by Howard — was destined to always come in a distant second to his younger compatriot in terms of audience appeal, fifty years ago, the powers-that-were at Marvel — especially editor-in-chief (and Howard fan) Roy Thomas — had yet to receive that memo.  Read More

Conan the Barbarian #25 (April, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In January, 1973, the cover of Conan the Barbarian #25 — a collaboration between Gil Kane and Ralph Reese — hardly gave any hint of the enormous artistic shift this issue represented for Marvel Comics’ award-winning series.  After all, Kane had pencilled four Conan covers prior to this one, and while two of those had graced issues that also featured Kane art on the inside (the first of those, #17, also happened to have been inked by Reese), the other two — including the most recent one, for issue #23 — had fronted stories drawn by the title’s original and primary regular artist, Barry Windsor-Smith.

So, if you were a regular Conan reader who’d somehow managed to miss issue #24 (and if you were, you have my sympathies), you may well have been startled to open #25 to its first page to see that the story had been drawn by a penciller previously unseen in these pages (though his name and work were hardly unfamiliar to Marvel fans)… namely, John Buscema:  Read More

Kull the Conqueror #7 (March, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in April, we took a look at the third issue of Marvel Comics’ Kull the Conqueror, featuring the titular hero’s first all-out battle against the undead sorcerer Thulsa Doom (a character who’d actually been introduced in another comic published a few months previously, Monsters on the Prowl #16).  Today, we’ll be examining Kull #7, in which the barbarian king of Valusia meets his evil arch-foe again… for the first time.

That seemingly paradoxical statement refers to the fact that this comic book features an adaptation of the short story “Delcardes’ Cat” — the first and only story by Kull’s creator, the pulp writer Robert E. Howard, in which the skull-headed villain ever makes an appearance.  Oddly enough, Howard only seems to have come up with the idea for Thulsa Doom well into the story, requiring him to go back and write another version in which the baddie gets referred to as a known threat a few times early on, just so that he doesn’t seem to come out of nowhere in the tale’s final scenes (which, as we’ll see soon enough, he kind of does anyway).  Even so, Howard wasn’t able to sell the story during his all-too-brief lifetime; like most (though not all) of his Kull stories, the tale remained unpublished as of the author’s death in 1936, not seeing print until Lancer Books released its paperback collection, King Kull, in 1969.

Got all that?  Great!  Now, on with our comic…  Read More

Marvel Spotlight #5 (August, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Like many another character to arise out of the production methods of the two major American comic book companies, Marvel Comics’ supernatural superhero Ghost Rider — the one with the flaming skull — had a number of creative minds involved in his beginnings.

Or, alternatively, he was in every significant sense the creation of one sole individual.  It all depends on whom you ask. (Or perhaps that should be “asked”, as more than one of the principals involved is no longer with us.)

That’s true in regards to a number of other comics characters as well, of course — though in most cases, the difference in opinion doesn’t make it all the way to federal court.  But more on that a bit later.  For now, let’s begin with a fact that’s not in dispute — to wit, that the flaming-skull guy who debuted in the 5th issue of Marvel Spotlight half a century ago was not the first comic book hero to bear the name “Ghost Rider”.  Read More

Kull the Conqueror #3 (July, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In April, 1972, the third issue of Marvel Comics’ Kull the Conqueror arrived on stands — a full eleven months after the release of issue #2.

Of course, as folks who’ve been regular readers of this blog for a while already know, while Kull, the comic book, had been absent for almost a year, the same could not be said of Kull, the character.  Marvel’s associate editor Roy Thomas, who in 1971 had launched this second series based on a Robert E. Howard fantasy hero in the wake of Conan the Barbarian‘s success (as relatively modest as that was, so far) was evidently determined to keep Conan’s literary forbear in the public eye — perhaps in hopes of eventually resuscitating the cancelled Kull title, or maybe just because he liked the hero and his milieu and/or was enjoying his collaboration (as the series’ writer) with sister-and-brother art team Marie and John Severin, who’d both come aboard Kull with issue #2.  Read More

Monsters on the Prowl #16 (April, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

You know, Marvel may have never quite licked the horror/mystery/fantasy/science fiction/what-have-you anthology format during the Bronze Age of Comics — at least not in the color comics arena — but you’ve got to give them points for trying.  From 1969 to 1975, the publisher launched at least sixteen titles that can be grouped within that admittedly broad category (more, if you include all the title changes).  It’s quite the bewildering array of funnybooks to try to get a handle on half a century later, even if you were buying and reading Marvels all through the era (as your humble blogger indeed was).  Trying to account for all those Loose Creatures and Dwelling Monsters, not to mention the Shadowy Towers and Crypts and the Chambers offering you a choice of either Darkness or Chills, can feel like a real Journey into Mystery at times; honestly, it can be hard to know if you’re coming or going.  Or Prowling or Roaming, if you catch my drift.

But never Fear, faithful reader — Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books is here to help.  While I can’t promise you’ll possess a comprehensive understanding of all the varied aspects of this little chapter in comics history by the time you finish reading this post, I believe that I can at least relieve you of feeling like you’re trapped within a Tomb of Darkness, informationally speaking.  Something like that, anyway.  At least for the first couple of years of the phenomenon.  Read More

Conan the Barbarian #10 (October, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

One week ago, in our post about Amazing Spider-Man #101, we shared the two lead items from the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page that ran in that issue (as well as in other Marvel comics shipping in July, 1971), which explained how, due to editor Stan Lee taking a couple of weeks off his comics-scripting duties to work on a screenplay, other writers would be temporarily stepping in to handle his titles.

But Stan’s sabbatical wasn’t the only big news out of Marvel that month, as was indicated by the very next Bulletin:  Read More

Kull the Conqueror #2 (September, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In the waning months of 1970, with the early sales reports on their new Conan the Barbarian series good enough to warrant bumping the title up from bi-monthly to monthly publication, Marvel Comics — likely driven at least in part by the enthusiasm of Conan writer (and Marvel associate editor) Roy Thomas — decided to take a chance on another sword-and-sorcery barbarian hero created decades earlier by pulp writer Robert E. Howard: King Kull.

Though he’d almost immediately come to be seen by comics fans (well, by this one, anyway) as Howard’s “number two” hero, Kull was actually the earlier creation, predating the author’s imagining of Conan the Cimmerian by some three years.  Kull could even be seen as the prototype for the later, more commercially successful hero, as the very first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword” (published in the magazine Weird Tales in 1932) was a reworked version of an unsold Kull yarn, “By This Axe I Rule!”  Read More

Hulk #118 (August, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By May, 1969, I’d been reading Marvel comics regularly for about a year and a half, and had sampled at least one issue of most of their superhero-fronted titles — most, but not quite all. This month, I finally got around to checking out The Incredible Hulk. 

At this time, my knowledge of the Hulk was pretty much limited to what I’d been able to glean from his guest appearances in comics I had read, the most substantial of which had been in Avengers Annual #2 (Sept.,1968) and Captain America #110 (Feb., 1969).  From those, I’d learned at least some of the basics regarding the character — I knew, for instance, that the Hulk was the super-strong alter ego of Dr. Bruce Banner, an otherwise “ordinary” human being.  I even knew a bit about his past history with a teenager named Rick Jones.  But I also knew that he was belligerent, dangerously uncontrollable, and — at least sometimes (especially as depicted by artist Jim Steranko in CA #110) — rather frightening.  Based on what I’d seen so far, I didn’t quite understand what made the Hulk a superhero.

But Marvel certainly seemed to be positioning him as a superhero, as best as I could tell; and I liked Marvel superhero comics.  Thus, it was inevitable that I’d give the Hulk’s series a shot sooner and later; and when Hulk #118 came along, it probably seemed like an ideal opportunity to take the plunge, if only because the issue guest-starred the one other Marvel heroic headliner whose title I still hadn’t sampled: Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner.  Read More