Len Wein

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

Marvel Premiere #15 (May, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In early 1974, when a slot for a new continuing feature opened up in Marvel Premiere (due to the previous tenant Dr. Strange having vacated the premises to return to headlining his own title), it must have seemed a virtual no-brainer to offer it to a character who could help Marvel Comics cash in even further on the burgeoning martial arts craze than they were already doing with the Master of Kung Fu series (which had debuted in September, 1973) and its brand-new black-and-white magazine spinoff The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu (which launched in early February, just a couple of weeks prior to the release of today’s featured fifty-year-old comic).  But for Marvel to do that, someone was first going to have to invent such a character; and in this instance, that process of invention began with the company’s then-editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas.  Read More

Swamp Thing #10 (May-Jun., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

With the publication of the subject of today’s blog post fifty years ago, the collaboration between writer Len Wein, artist Bernie Wrightson, and editor Joe Orlando on Swamp Thing that had begun with a one-off short story in House of Secrets #92 (Jun.-Jul., 1971) came to a close.  According to an interview Wein gave The Comics Journal in 1979, the trio’s issue-to-issue production of the ongoing Swamp Thing series — which, unusually for DC Comics at the time, regularly began with a joint plotting session between writer, artist, and editor held every couple of months in the latter’s office, followed by Wrightson pencilling the entire story before Wein wrote a word of the script (a version of the “Marvel method”, if you will) — started out as a great working experience… but then, somewhere along the way, it stopped being so:  Read More

Batman #255 (Mar.-Apr., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As of December, 1973, it had been seventeen months since my younger self had bought an issue of Batman.  For the record, that issue had been #245, in which the lead story (as well as the cover) had been drawn by Neal Adams.  The last issue I’d bought before that had been #244, which had also had a lead story illustrated by Adams; the last one before that had been #243, which was drawn by (you guessed it) Neal Adams; and before that came #242, which didn’t feature the art of Neal Adams, but did continue the Ra’s al Ghul saga begun in issue #232 by writer Denny O’Neil and artist… Neal Adams.  You see the pattern, right?  Adams’ art wasn’t the only factor that came into play when I stood at the spinner rack and pondered over whether to buy the latest issue of the Masked Manhunter’s title — but it was definitely the largest factor, and the presence of the artist’s work made it pretty much a no-brainer that I would buy that particular comic book.  Read More

Justice League of America #110 (Mar.-Apr., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

From a creative standpoint, 1973 had been a very stable year for Justice League of America.  Everyone who’d been working on the book as the year began — writer Len Wein, penciller Dick Dillin, inker Dick Giordano, cover artist Nick Cardy, and (of course) editor Julius Schwartz — remained in place as 1973 neared its end.  From a business perspective, however, it was a rather different story.  After having been published on a nine-times-a-year schedule from 1965 to 1971, DC Comics’ premiere super-team title had dropped back to eight issues per year in 1972; and then, with the first issue of 1973, had its frequency reduced even further, to a bimonthly status.

And then, December, 1973 brought a change that was even bigger (in more ways than one), as JLA joined several other DC titles in transitioning to the “100 Page Super Spectacular” format — a giant-sized package that featured some three pages of reprints to every one of new art and story, at a cost of 50 cents — more than twice that of the “standard” format comic JLA had been prior to the change, which sold for 20 cents.  (With the following month, the price of the “Super Spectacular” format would go up to 60 cents, making these comics a full three times more expensive than DC’s standard size books… but of course we fans of the time didn’t know that yet.)  Read More

Justice League of America #109 (Jan.-Feb., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Nick Cardy’s cover for Justice League of America #109 is interesting in that it completely ignores the conflict that drives roughly 80% of the plot of this issue’s story.  Rather, it seeks to hook the prospective buyer by way of a tantalizing mystery — who is leaving the team?  It’s not a bad strategy, really, since even casual fans of the JLA would likely be curious to learn the answer.

The only real problem with hanging the cover’s whole pitch on this mystery is that the answer is given immediately, on the story’s very first page.  So if our hypothetical prospective buyer was only interested in that bit of information, and they so much as flipped past the cover while still standing at the spinner rack, they might well have opted to put the comic back rather than spend two dimes on it.  But, hey, see for yourself:  Read More

Swamp Thing #7 (Nov.-Dec., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

A few months ago, I wrote about the “house dress” that, by mid-1973, had become common on the DC comics edited by Joe Orlando.  It was a look that included a solid color banner that ran behind the title logo  and other necessities (e.g., the price tag, Comics Code seal, etc.) and took up roughly the top third of the cover area.  Not every Orlando cover followed this format (see, for instance, Plop), and other DC editors used it on occasion as well.  Still, in the period of comics history we’re presently discussing, it was a prevalent enough feature to count as an editorial signature for Orlando, if not precisely a trademark.

At the time of my previous comments, I wrote that giving over a third of the cover’s real estate to a single solid color effectively reduced the canvas available to Orlando’s cover artists.  But while that statement was true enough on its face, it really should have been accompanied by an acknowledgement of how Orlando routinely mitigated the negative effect of that design choice by keeping the amount of verbiage used on his covers to an absolute minimum.  Nowhere was that truer than with Swamp Thing, the covers of whose first thirteen issues included no blurbs or other typography (other than the necessary elements mentioned earlier) — depending entirely on the strength of Bernie Wrightson’s artwork to sell the comic. Read More

Justice League of America #108 (Nov.-Dec., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In August, 1973, the second half of the 11th annual team-up event between the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America led off with a cover (by Nick Cardy) that clearly called back to a particular predecessor — namely, the cover that had graced the second half of the 5th such summertime event, way back in July, 1967.  And why not?  That Carmine Infantino-Murphy Anderson number is an all-time classic, which, aside from its own individual excellence, arguably established the motif of “two line-ups of superheroes charging each other” that has been a staple of super-team comic book covers ever since.

That said, it rankled me just a bit at the time — and, what the hell, I guess it still does — that to make the idea work in the context of JLA #108’s story by writer Len Wein and artists Dick Dillin and Dick Giordano, editor Julius Schwartz had to fudge the cover copy a bit.  After all, there aren’t just “two different Earths” represented among the eight costumed stalwarts heading towards blows whom we see on the cover above — there are three.  The JLA’s Earth-One, the JSA’s Earth-Two, and — as had been introduced to DC Comics’ readers just one issue before — Earth-X.  A world inhabited by yet another team of heroes, newly dubbed “the Freedom Fighters”, who had been published during the Golden Age of Comic Books by DC’s now-defunct rival, Quality Comics… and also a world where the Nazis had won World War II.  Read More

Strange Tales #169 (September, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Voodoo.

 

It’s the current rage, don’t you know. Paperbacks on the subject litter newsstands throughout the world. Voodoo cults are reportedly springing up in major cities throughout the United States. And, figuring on television’s propensity for jumping on a fad with the obliterating properties of an overweight pachyderm, it probably won’t be too long before we see a Voodoo situation comedy laugh-tracking its way across our screens — Loa in the Family.

 

Leave it to the Marvel Comics Group, long renown [sic] for its many innovations in the comics field, to find a new slant on this late-breaking craze. And the result of this new slant promises to outlive the current interest in Voodoo.

— Tony Isabella, “Introducing Brother Voodoo!  The Creation of Marvel’s Most Mysterious Superhero”, in Tales of the Zombie #2 (Oct., 1973).  Read More

Justice League of America #107 (Sep.-Oct., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in June, 1973, there was very little chance that my fifteen-year-old self, upon seeing Justice League of America #107 in the spinner rack, would have passed on buying the book.  For one thing, I was following the series regularly during this era (although I’d somehow managed to miss the previous issue, #106); for another, I’d been partaking of the annual summer get-togethers between the JLA and their Earth-Two counterparts, the Justice Society of America since 1966’s iteration, and I wasn’t about to stop now.  (Indeed, I’d continue to follow the JLA-JSA team-ups even through periods when I was otherwise ignoring the JLA title, all the way up to the last one in 1985, when Crisis on Infinite Earths rang down the curtain on the tradition.)  Read More