Michael Kaluta

Batman Family #1 (Sep.-Oct., 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

A couple of weeks ago, I noted that when I picked up Detective Comics #450 in the late spring of 1975, it had been well over a year since I’d bought an issue of that title.  As it happens, I could have said the same thing about most of DC Comics’ other Bat-books of the time.  The last issue of Batman itself that I’d purchased had been #255, which had come out at the end of 1973, and I hadn’t been paying any attention at all to World’s Finest (which of course was technically Superman’s book at least as much as it was Batman’s) since well before that.  Granted, I was a somewhat more frequent consumer of Brave and the Bold, where every new issue arrived possessing the baseline advantage of Jim Aparo’s reliably fine artwork, then might pick up additional interest based on who the Masked Manhunter’s co-star happened to be this time around.  Still, you get the basic idea; while I continued to like the character of Batman just fine, DC’s “Batman family” of comic-book titles was mostly leaving my younger self cold.  Read More

Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1 (January, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In February of last year, we ran a post on the first issue of Worlds Unknown — a four-color anthology title from Marvel Comics devoted to the science fiction genre, with a special focus on adapting short stories and novels by well-known SF authors.  As we discussed at the time, this passion project of Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas, saw just six issues released in this format before it took a hard turn in a decidedly different direction (an adaptation of the fantasy film The Golden Voyage of Sinbad) for its final two issues, the last of which came out in April, 1974.

Given its poor performance in the marketplace, Thomas’ project could hardly be called a success; still, in October of the same year, it became clear that the editor hadn’t given up on the basic idea behind it, as that month saw the debut of a brand new entry in Marvel’s ever-growing, and ever more genre-diverse, line of black-and-white comics magazines:  Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction.  Read More

Tales of the Zombie #8 (November, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover art by Boris Vallejo.

Back in April, 2023, towards the end of my post on Tales of the Zombie #1, I wrote that while I fully expected to cover another issue of the series — more specifically, an issue within writer Steve Gerber and artist Pablo Marcos’ run on the titular lead feature — it was “likely to be a minute or two” before that would happen.

Well, in the end it took 745,000 minutes (give or take a couple of thousand), but we’re here at last.  And just in time, too, as TotZ #8 features the last story of Simon Garth, Zombie, produced by the Gerber-Marcos team.

Over the seventeen-month stretch between the first and eighth issues of this black-and-white magazine (which, as you may remember, was one of four such horror-oriented titles launched by Marvel Comics over an equal number of months in the first half of ’73), the format had been tweaked somewhat — old stories reprinted from 1950s Atlas horror comics had been pretty much phased out, for one thing — but the mix between comics stories and illustrated text features remained about the same, with the continuing, 20-plus-pages-long exploits (for lack of a better word) of the Zombie consistently dominating the proceedings.  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

The Shadow #6 (Aug.-Sep., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last November, we took a look at the third issue of DC Comics’ The Shadow — the first issue by the team of writer/editor Denny O’Neil and artist Michael W. Kaluta to carry a credit for another creative talent.  In this case, it was Kaluta’s friend and fellow artist, Bernie Wrightson, who stepped in to help out his pal when the former artist ran behind on his bi-monthly deadline.

Kaluta ended up having some uncredited help on issue #4, as well — this time from Howard Chaykin and Stephen Hickman as well as Wrightson — although this seems to have been a case of the other artists just wanting to pitch in for the fun of it, rather than a matter of necessity.  Kaluta drew the cover solo, however, just as he had the previous three; like them, it was enhanced by the special washtone process utilized by colorist Jack Adler.  (For the record, this issue also featured an additional writing credit for the first time, as Len Wein co-scripted the story with O’Neil.)

Then, in March, 1974, The Shadow #5 brought the largest creative shakeup yet, as Kaluta was entirely absent from the issue; instead, both the cover and story were illustrated by an artist with a diametrically different style, i.e., Frank Robbins.  Read More

Detective Comics #439 (Feb.-Mar., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As of November, 1973, it had been twenty-seven months since the last time I bought an issue of Detective Comics.  (For the record, that issue was #416, featuring the fourth appearance of Man-Bat.)  There hadn’t been any conscious “drop” decision involved in this long dry spell between purchases; like a lot of other titles, Detective was simply one of those books I made an individual buy-or-not-buy choice about every time I saw a new issue on the stands.  I’d check out the cover, glance at the credits for the Batman story, note who Bats was fighting this go-around — maybe even see who was starring in the backup feature (there was always a backup feature back then) — and if one or more of those aspects grabbed me (or, if the spinner-rack pickings were really slim that week, even just mildly interested me), I bought the comic book.  Read More

The Shadow #3 (Feb.-Mar., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In November, 1973, the third bimonthly issue of DC Comics’ The Shadow arrived on newsstands as scheduled, sporting yet another instantly-classic cover by regular series artist Michael W. Kaluta and colorist/washtone-process master Jack Adler.  Turning to the opening splash page, a prospective buyer might have noted that the creative lineup for the book’s interior contents remained basically consistent with the title’s previous installments as well, its story having once again been scripted by writer/editor Denny O’Neil, and drawn by Kaluta and… Bernie Wrightson?  Read More

Weird Worlds #8 (Nov.-Dec., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Fifty-one years after the fact, it seems at least possible that the DC Comics title Weird Worlds might never have come into existence at all, had that publisher kept up its “Bigger and Better” experiment — i.e., a standard comic-book format of 48 pages, which sold for 25 cents — for a while longer than it did.  After all, the earliest DC issues of Tarzan and Korak had seemed to have ample space not only for the adventures of author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ famous jungle hero and his somewhat less well-known son, but also for backup features based on what were arguably even less familiar ERB properties, such as “John Carter of Mars”, “Carson of Venus”, and “Pellucidar”.

But with the shift back to 32-page comics as DC’ standard size (“Now Only 20¢”), Tarzan and Korak could no longer accommodate all of those backups — let alone add any of the other properties that DC had access to via their Burroughs license.  And so, while “Carson of Venus” continued to appear in Korak (and a new feature, “Beyond the Farthest Star”, took up residence in the back pages of Tarzan), John Carter and David Innes (the protagonist of “Pellucidar”) each found a new home in a brand new title: Weird Worlds, the first issue of which arrived on stands in June, 1972.  Read More

The Shadow #1 (Oct.-Nov., 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover to Shadow Comics #1 (1940). Art by Jerome Rozen.

Cover to The Shadow #8 (Sep., 1965). Art by Paul Reinman.

As memory serves, my younger self had very little knowledge of the Shadow when DC Comics first started promoting their upcoming title about him in the fall of 1972.  If asked, I probably could have told you that he was an old-time crime-fighting hero who had appeared both in pulp magazines and on the radio, though I doubt I could have told you which had come first.  And I’m all but certain that I had no knowledge that he already had a comic-book career behind him, with not only 101 issues of a titular series that ran from 1940 to 1949 (and that featured work by his primary writer in the pulps, Walter Gibson) but also a short-lived (and notoriously unfaithful) revival from Archie Comics in 1964-65 (the eighth and final issue of which coincidentally happened to come out just one month prior to my buying my own first comic book; from most reports, I was lucky to have missed this one, which might have put me off comics forever — who can say?).  Read More