Mike Esposito

Justice League of America #123 (October, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

1975’s team-up between the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America was the thirteenth such event since the annual tradition had begun in 1963.  Over the years, DC Comics fans had been privileged to vicariously visit such parallel worlds as Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth-Three, Earth-X, and even the short-lived Earth-A.  But there was one particular Earth that had been established as existing in what would eventually be known as “the DC multiverse” that had yet to be glimpsed in any of the JLA-JSA summer shindigs… though readers of those comics could hardly claim to be unfamiliar with the place.  After all, they lived there.

Of course, I’m talking about Earth-Prime.  Read More

Defenders #26 (August, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

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

Captain Marvel #39 (July, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When last the regular readers of this blog saw Captain Marvel, he’d just been defeated and taken prisoner by the Watcher — a formerly benign, self-declared non-interventionist, whose sudden heel turn after over a decade of Marvel Comics appearances seemed to come out of nowhere — who had then proceeded to hand him over to the mysterious, heretofore unseen enemies who’d been giving our hero trouble ever since the end of auteur Jim Starlin’s run on the series — the Lunatic Legion.

Our first glimpse of those baddies (see right) made them look pretty loony, indeed.  But, considering that storytellers Steve Englehart (co-plotter/scripter), Al Milgrom (co-plotter/penciller) and Klaus Janson (inker) were giving us a Captain Marvel’s-eye view of the LL, here — and also considering that Mar-Vell was, at the time, tripping balls on LSD (euphemistically referred to in the story as “Vitamin C”, so as not to draw the unwelcome attention of the Comics Code Authority) — one might reasonably doubt whether the image we saw here was entirely representative of objective reality.  Read More

Giant-Size X-Men #1 (May, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

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

Captain America #186 (June, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Art by Gil Kane and Joe Sinnott.

The last issue of Captain America we discussed in this space, was, as I’m sure you’ll remember, a highly significant one for the series, featuring as it did not only the tragic death of Roscoe, the young man who’d attempted to replace Steve Rogers in the titular role, but also Steve’s inevitable response to that tragedy: the abandonment of his briefly-held “Nomad” identity to once again take up the shield of Captain America, as he prepared to deal with the return of his greatest arch-enemy (and the man who’d brutally murdered Roscoe) — the Red Skull.

Interestingly, however, issue #183’s letters column devoted at least as much attention to the hero who shared the series’ title logo with Cap (even if the book’s “official” title, per the indicia, had been, and would remain, simply Captain America) — namely, the Falcon.  In response to a missive from reader Bob Stenson that included a brief, vaguely critical remark about the Falcon’s decision not to come to the aid of his erstwhile partner Steve Rogers against the Golden Archer back in CA #179, the book’s anonymous letters-page answerer (identified by the Grand Comics Database as series scribe Steve Englehart) took the opportunity to preview some upcoming — and ominous-sounding — developments in regards to Marvel Comics’ first Black American superhero:  Read More

Defenders #23 (May, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The fifty-year-old comic book referred to in the title line of this blog post presents the second chapter of a four-part storyline.  And, seeing how we didn’t feature a post about Defenders #22 here in this space last month, regular readers of the blog know what that means: we’ll be covering that issue before moving on to our ostensible main topic, i.e., Defenders #23.  But wait, there’s more!  Because, although the story chronicled in another half-century-old comic, Giant-Size Defenders #4, isn’t technically part of the same arc, its events do preface those of the main Defenders title’s “Sons of the Serpent” saga in some significant ways.  For that reason, we’ll be spending a little quality time with it before proceeding even as far as Defenders #22.  It’s a three-fer today, folks.  Read More

Doctor Strange #6 (February, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we discussed in this space two months ago, the fifth issue of the second volume of Doctor Strange marked the end of the very successful collaboration of Steve Englehart (co-plotter and scripter) and Frank Brunner (co-plotter and artist) on the feature… more or less.  That “more or less” refers to the fact that Brunner had one last contribution to make to the series before turning his full focus to the upcoming (and eagerly awaited) “Howard the Duck” strip — i.e., the lovely cover shown above, which the artist pencilled, inked, and colored, making for a memorable final bow.

Once we readers of November, 1975 turned past the cover to the opening splash page, however, it was clear that artistic change had indeed come to Doctor Strange — even if it wasn’t entirely a matter of “out with the old, in with the new…”  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

Marvel Two-in-One #7 (January, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As of October, 1974, Steve Gerber had been the writer on Marvel Two-in-One for a year — ever since the series teaming the Fantastic Four’s Thing with a rotating cast of co-stars had jumped from its previous home in Marvel Feature to its own brand-new title, in fact.  Intriguingly (though perhaps also understandably), with the whole Marvel Universe to play with, Gerber had initially opted to choose Benjamin J. Grimm’s partners in adventuring from environs he already knew well — that is, from other series he was already writing.  So it was that in MTiO #1, the Thing had come face-to-face with his half-namesake, the Man-Thing; next, in issue #2 he’d first fought and then joined forces with the Sub-Mariner; and then, in #3, he’d teamed up with Daredevil — a trio of co-stars who were all also headliners in other Gerber titles.  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