This post wasn’t originally supposed to be a postmortem on Mad. In fact, I’d originally planned to run it on July 1st — which, if I’d followed through, would have seen it beat the news of Mad‘s impending demise (at least as a purveyor of new material) by a couple of days. That would have made for a timely, even prescient post, rather than one that may seem like it’s bringing up the rear, commentary-wise — and at some distance, at that. Read More
I gotta say, I sometimes have a hard time figuring out what was going through my younger self’s mind when I made certain choices at the spinner rack half a century ago. The subject of today’s post is a case in point. I mean — why would I put down 25 cents for a giant-size humor comic filled with satirical versions of Marvel characters I was only now getting to know in their “serious” incarnations?
I’m guessing that it was partly because Not Brand Echh, with its parodies of current movies and TV shows as well as comic books, reminded me of Mad magazine — which was one of my most regular comics purchases in the late Sixties, despite the fact that I haven’t yet devoted a blog post to it (probably because back in my younger days, I didn’t think of Mad as a bona fide “comic book”, due to its black-and-white magazine-size format). And, hey, my inclination to go for the “bargain” of getting multiple heroes for the price of one (which, in contrast to Mad, I’ve often noted on the blog), may have figured into my purchasing decision as well — even if these were parody version of the heroes, there were still a lot of ’em. Read More
Last month I blogged about Daredevil #39 — the first issue of Ol’ Hornhead’s series that I ever bought, as well as the first chapter of a three-part tale featuring a return engagement between Daredevil and the “Unholy Three” — a trio of animal-themed villains our hero first battled back in issues #10 and #11, when there were actually four of them, and they went by the collective moniker of the “Ani-Men”. (O Frog Man, Where Art Thou?) If you weren’t around for that post. or would just like to refresh your memory on the details, feel free to click on over there to get caught up. Or — you could just pretend that you’re a brand new Daredevil reader, circa March, 1968, and hope that scripter Stan Lee has provided enough exposition via captions and dialogue on the first couple of pages to bring you up to speed on what’s going on.
You know what? That latter option will probably work just fine. Read More
By August, 1967, I’d been buying and reading comic books for two years — and the books that I had bought had almost exclusively been those published by DC Comics, with an occasional Gold Key issue for variety. But in that month, as the Summer of Love (or the Long Hot Summer, take your pick) wound down — I finally broke down and bought my first Marvel Comics Group comic book.
So what the hell took me so long?
It’s entirely possible that I just didn’t see that many Marvel comics on the spinner racks in those first two years of comic-book buying. Prior to 1968, the publisher’s newsstand distribution was controlled by Independent News (a company owned by National Periodical Publications, aka DC Comics — and no, that doesn’t sound like an ideal competitive situation, does it?), which restricted the number of titles that Marvel could release per month. That restriction would be all but completely lifted by early 1968, but in the summer of 1967, it was still in place. Read More
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
Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books 