Fifty years ago, the cover of Defenders #34 (produced by Rich Buckler and Dan Adkins, but giving off strong Jack Kirby-Chic Stone vibes to your humble blogger) let any regular reader who’d somehow managed to miss the previous issue in on the big news: Nebulon, the Celestial Man, who (in league with the Squadron Sinister) had almost destroyed the Earth by flood back in #13-14, was back, and he meant business. Read More
Half a century ago this week, the new year of 1976 brought comics fans something that would have seemed an utter impossibility just a few years before — a all-new tabloid-sized comic book co-produced by the American comics industry’s two greatest rivals, DC and Marvel, featuring their flagship characters in a single 92-page adventure. Read More
As was discussed in detail in our post about Marvel Preview #4 several weeks ago, by 1975 all four of the black-and-white comics magazines with which Marvel Comics had made a big push into that market just two years before were winding down. But Marvel was far from throwing in the towel on the B&W format itself. Accepting that the early-’70s horror boom that had inspired the launches of Dracula Lives and its ilk was pretty much over, Marvel now looked to other genres for new titles that could replace those that had made up the “Marvel Monster Group”. Read More
Back in May we took a look at Defenders #26, which ended with our favorite superhero non-team deciding to join the time-traveling Guardians of the Galaxy back to their home century (the 31st, if you’ve forgotten) in the hope of liberating the people of planet Earth (and its colonies and allies) from the tyranny of the Brotherhood of Badoon. That crusade kicked into high gear with the next issue, Defenders #27, whose cover by Gil Kane and John Romita you can peruse at right.
On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t take too close a look at that cover, as its copy gives away a surprise that wasn’t actually supposed to be revealed until the middle of the next issue, #28. Nice going, editor Len Wein (whose culpability would revealed to the world a few months later, in the letters column of Defenders #30)! Read More
As you may recall from our post about Giant-Size X-Men #1 back in April, that landmark comic book concluded with one of the mutant superhero team’s original members, the Angel, posing the query: “What are we going to do with thirteen X-Men?” That question was reflective of the fact that while Marvel Comics had just introduced seven new members to the team (the majority of whom were also brand-new characters), there were still six veteran heroes of the old guard to be dealt with in one way or another. It seemed unlikely that even a giant-sized version of the freshly-revived “X-Men” feature could easily accommodate such a large number of costumed crusaders in every issue — and once Marvel decided to use the existing regular-sized X-Men title (which since 1969 had only presented reprints of old X-stories) as the relaunched series’ primary vehicle instead, that question became even more acute. Read More
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
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
Fifty years ago this month, the Gil Kane-Klaus Janson cover of Defenders #21 heralded the beginning of a new storyline. But as soon as we readers of the time turned to the comic’s opening splash page — not to mention the double-page spread that followed immediately thereafter — it was clear that although the “A”-plot of the recent three-parter that had wound through two issues of Marvel Two-in-One before concluding in Defenders #20 might indeed have reached its end, the series’ new regular writer, Steve Gerber, was in no way ready to drop the plot element that had driven much of the action of that arc — the mystery behind the past life of the superheroine we knew as Valkyrie… Read More
The cover of Captain America #182 — drawn by Ron Wilson and Frank Giacoia (with probable touch-ups by John Romita) — offered few, if any, hints of major surprises to be found within its pages. Here’s Steve Rogers in his new heroic identity of Nomad, continuing his ongoing battle against the Serpent Squad, with a symbolic (and huge) representation of his former (and, of course, much better-known) costumed alter ego looming in the background. Pretty much what anyone who’d been following this title for the past several months would expect.
But upon turning to the issue’s opening splash page, we readers of November, 1974, learned that changes had indeed come to Captain America… Read More
As we’ve discussed in this space previously, Marvel Comics seems to have been in an almighty rush to get as many “Giant-Size” comics to market as possible in the first half of 1974. Along with a multitude of title, frequency, price, and format changes, most seemingly made on the fly, one likely result of this haste was the release of Giant-Size Defenders #1 in April, 1974 as a mostly-reprint package, its only new content (not counting the Gil Kane-John Romita-Frank Giacoia cover) being a 9-page framing sequence. Written by Tony Isabella and illustrated by Jim Starlin and Al Milgrom, that strip unquestionably looked great, and it read just fine; there simply wasn’t enough of it. Read More