Michael Fleisher

Phantom Stranger #41 (Feb.-Mar., 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover to Phantom Stranger #11 (Jan.-Feb., 1971). Art by Neal Adams.

By the time that the 41st issue of Phantom Stranger arrived in spinner racks in November, 1975, I had been buying the title regularly for a full five years — or, to put it another way, for an unbroken run of thirty issues.  That made it unique among the DC Comics offerings I was picking up regularly at the time, as none of the others — Beowulf, Claw the Unconquered, Hercules Unbound, Kong the Untamed, Warlord, and the just-revived All-Star Comics — had even been around just one year before, let alone five.  As for the other DC books that I’d been routinely buying back when I first sampled Phantom Stranger in November, 1970 — these included Green Lantern, House of Mystery, Jimmy Olsen, Justice League of America, Superman, and World’s Finest — while most of them were still going concerns, a couple weren’t; and those that were still being published had become occasional purchases for me, at best.  Phantom Stranger was the only DC comic I’d bought continuously for the last half-decade — the sole survivor of my own personal DC Comics class of ’70.

And after this month, it would be gone, as well… because the 41st issue of Phantom Stranger was also to be the final one.  Read More

Adventure Comics #440 (Jul.-Aug., 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Arriving in spinner racks in late April, 1975, the 440th issue of DC’s Adventure Comics featured an updated look, as the title’s current lead feature — the Spectre — finally got a cover logo of his own.  A number of artist Jim Aparo’s earlier covers, excellent as they were, hadn’t even featured the character’s name anywhere in their copy… which was perhaps not the best call ever made by editor Joe Orlando.  But now, finally, we had the return of the classic logo that the great Ira Schnapp had designed for the Spectre’s Silver Age revival in Showcase back in 1965, which had then gone on to grace most of the issues of his subsequent titular series.  It was a good move — though one that came a little late, given that Adventure #440 would be the last to feature the Spectre as the book’s headliner.  Read More

Adventure Comics #438 (Mar.-Apr., 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The issue of Adventure Comics we’re going to be looking at today was the eighth in a row to feature the Spectre as its headliner, and as such, might well have been taken by a casual browser of the spinner racks in December, 1974 as simply offering more of the same.  Yet this issue departed from its immediate predecessors in at least a couple of respects, beginning with its title logo.  In response to recent commercial trends, as of the Spectre’s third outing (issue #433), DC Comics had started slapping the word “Weird” above “Adventure” on the venerable series’ covers.  That was an adjustment which made good sense as far as the Astral Avenger was concerned… but wasn’t quite as good a fit with the King of the Seven Seas, Aquaman, who began a run as Spec’s backup in issue #435.  Read More

Grim Ghost #1 (January, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In November, 1974, your humble blogger was pretty much a “just Marvel and DC, please” kind of guy where color comic books were concerned.  But, naturally, that didn’t mean I was unaware of the wares of other companies.  How could I have been?  All of the spinner racks I can recall from the first decade or so of my comics buying didn’t sort the new books by publisher (or by any other system, for that matter).  So if you wanted to make sure you got a look at every new DC or Marvel book out in any given week, you generally got at least a cursory glance at every new Archie, Charlton, Fawcett, Gold Key, and Harvey, as well.

And if a brand-new publisher showed up?  You noticed — especially if one of their books sported a cover by Neal Adams, like Atlas/Seaboard’s Ironjaw #1 did.    Read More

Phantom Stranger #33 (Oct.-Nov., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover art by Michael W. Kaluta.

Cover art by Nick Cardy.

It’s been quite a while since we covered an issue of Phantom Stranger on the blog — more specifically, since May, 2023, when we took a look at PS #26.  As I wrote at the time, that issue’s crossover between the comic’s lead and backup features (the latter then being “The Spawn of Frankenstein”) represented the end of an era for the Joe Orlando-edited title, as the very next issue, #27, would bring a complete overhaul of the creative teams for both strips.

Gone from the front of the book were writer Len Wein (who’d written every Phantom Stranger story since issue #14) and artist Jim Aparo (whose association with the character went all the way back to #7); replacing the duo were Arnold Drake and Gerry Talaoc, respectively.  Meanwhile, writer Marv Wolfman and artist Michael W. Kaluta had departed the back pages, leaving the chronicling of the modern adventures of Mary Shelley’s classic creation to Steve Skeates and Bernard Bailey.  Read More

Adventure Comics #435 (Sep.-Oct., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

About a year ago, in a post about Plop #1, we spent some time musing about the flourishing of the word “Weird” in the titles of various DC Comics series of the early-to-mid-1970s.  As Joe Orlando — who was the editor of the majority of these titles — would later put it in a 1998 interview for Comic Book Artist #1:  “I started using the word and [publisher] Carmine [Infantino] decided that ‘Weird’ sold anything. Weird War, Weird Western, Weird Worlds, Weird Mystery.”  Read More

Adventure Comics #431 (January, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

It may be hard to believe, but despite having been a DC Comics reader since August, 1965, I’d never bought a single issue of Adventure Comics — the second comic-book series ever to have been released by the publisher, way back in 1935, and one of its longest running — prior to October, 1973.  What can I say?  I evidently had a huge blind spot in regards to the super-team who’d held the lead feature spot when I first got into comics in the mid-1960s — i.e., the Legion of Super-Heroes (a quirk I wouldn’t really get over until the team’s Paul Levitz-Keith Giffen era kicked off in 1982), and I also wasn’t much of a fan of Supergirl (who took over from the LSH in 1969).  Nor did I give Adventure a nibble when, following Supergirl’s graduation to her own title, editor Joe Orlando briefly switched the venerable series formerly known as New Comics to an anthology format with #425, then introduced a mysterious new superheroine, the Black Orchid, who held the cover spot for three issues (#428 to #430).

But the Spectre?  The Ghostly Guardian had been one of my favorite DC superheroes ever since I picked up his third tryout issue of Showcase, back in 1966, and I’d been missing him ever since his apparent “death” (how do you kill a ghost, anyway?) in Justice League of America #83 (Sep., 1970).  So once I learned that DC was bringing the Astral Avenger back in Adventure Comics, I became a buyer of Adventure Comics… at least for the duration.  Read More