Johnny Craig

Eerie 1972 Annual

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The 1972 Eerie Annual (and no, I don’t know why publisher James Warren stuck “1972” on a periodical published in July, 1971, though my guess is that he hoped that at least a few inattentive retailers might leave the item on the stands for a full eighteen months) was almost certainly the very first comics magazine from Warren Publishing that your humble blogger, then fourteen years of age, ever bought.

But it wasn’t the first Warren magazine I’d ever bought.  And it may not even have been my first Warren comic book, either — at least, not if you define the latter term as “a book full of comics”.

Lemme ‘splain.  Read More

Sub-Mariner #22 (February, 1970)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in September, I wrote about buying and reading my first issue of Sub-Mariner, #20, a mostly done-in-one tale (in keeping with Marvel’s new “no continued stories” policy) which nevertheless ended on an inconclusive note — though Namor, Prince of Atlantis, had escaped the clutches of Doctor Doom, he was still a fugitive in New York City, hunted by the U.S. military as well as by the municipal police, and unable to escape to the ocean depths due to having had his gills surgically closed by a forgettable villain from outer space called (checks notes) the Stalker.  I ended the post by asking the question: would my twelve-year-old self be invested enough in Namor’s plight to come back for issue #21?  On the face of it, it seemed a dubious prospect, as I was becoming somewhat less interested in comics in general around this time.  After all, if I was on the verge of dropping titles I’d been buying regularly for a year or more, including Avengers and Daredevil, what sense would it make for me to start getting involved with yet another series?  Read More

Sub-Mariner #20 (December, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Sub-Mariner was the last Marvel solo superhero title of the late ’60s that I got around to sampling as a young comics reader.  As I indicated in my Incredible Hulk #118 post a few months back, it probably took a while for me to warm up to the Avenging Son of Atlantis (as it likely also did for ol’ Greenskin) simply because it was hard for me to see the guy as a bona fide superhero.  After all, when I encountered Prince Namor in other comics — mostly reprints of Fantastic Four and Avengers stories from the early Sixties — he was usually fighting other heroes while attempting to conquer the surface world.  And though I understood that, these days, he was no longer actively trying to overthrow human civilization, the Sub-Mariner still seemed to have such an attitude.  He was a damned imperious sort of Rex, if you know what I mean.  Read More

Avengers #70 (November, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If you’re a regular reader, you may recall that at the conclusion of last month’s post concerning Avengers #69, your humble blogger unburdened himself of a shameful, half-century-old secret — namely, that upon his first encounter with the brand-new supervillain group the Squadron Sinister way back in August, 1969, he had not the faintest clue that they were intended as parodies of the Justice League of America — who were, of course, the Avengers’ counterparts over at Marvel Comics’ Distinguished Competition, not to mention a team that he’d been reading about regularly for almost four years.

Imagine my gratified surprise when, subsequent to that post going up, I heard from a number of fellow old fans that they, too, had failed to get writer Roy Thomas’ joke back in the day.  I’m honestly not sure whether that means that my twelve-year-old self wasn’t all that dumb after all, or simply that a lot of us were that dumb, but either way, I’ll take it as a win.  Read More

Daredevil #52 (May, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When we last saw Matt Murdock, at the end of last month’s post about Daredevil #51, our Man Without Fear was in pretty bad shape.  After undergoing an ordinary blood test in his costumed identity, he’d had a drastic adverse reaction to the due to the radioactive particles in his bloodstream (or something like that), and after wandering around in a delirium for a bit, had collapsed in an alley.  Meanwhile, the New York Police Department, having been clued in about the imminent danger to the Scarlet Swashbuckler, had put out an all-points bulletin for our hero.  And while all this was going on, DD’s current nemesis, a sinister robotics genius named Starr Saxon, had accidentally stumbled onto his foe’s secret identity — and had also, on pretext of being a friend of Matt’s, had convinced the blind lawyer’s almost-girlfriend, Karen Page, to accompany him, leading her into who knows what dread danger.  Read More

Iron Man #14 (June, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By March, 1969, I’d been buying and reading Marvel comics regularly for about fifteen months, and I was gradually working my way through all of their superhero-headlining titles.  This was the month that I finally got around to Iron Man.

While I’d enjoyed the few brief guest appearances of the character I’d seen in Avengers, and also been intrigued by some of the covers I’d seen on the racks or in house ads, somehow I hadn’t bitten the bullet before now.  Maybe my younger self thought Tony Stark’s mustache made him look too old?  I really don’t remember.  Read More

The Brave and the Bold #70 (Feb.-March, 1967)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

For the first several years that I read and collected comic books, I had only the vaguest notion that there ever been a publisher called EC Comics.  I didn’t know that, before the advent of the Comics Code Authority, there had once thrived a skillfully-executed line of horror, crime, science fiction, and war comics that were, beyond their other attributes, much more graphic than anything one would ever find on the spinner racks of the mid-to-late ’60s.  You see, the Code was established in 1954, and EC’s last comic book was published shortly thereafter, in early 1956 — while I wasn’t born until 1957.  And though by 1966 I was a regular reader of Mad magazine, I had no clue that Mad was in fact the sole survivor of EC’s line, converted to a magazine format in 1955 to evade the Code’s strictures.*  All of which I offer by way of explaining that if the 70th issue of DC Comics’ The Brave and the Bold had included creator credits (which it didn’t), I would not have recognized the name of the book’s penciller, the great EC Comics artist, Johnny Craig.     Read More