Mike Friedrich

Daredevil #105 (November, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In summer,1973, my younger self was still pretty isolated as a comic-book reader.  Good, lasting face-to-face friendships with fellow enthusiasts were on the horizon, but had not yet arrived, and I wasn’t reading fanzines.  Therefore, I generally picked up on hot new titles — or on newly hot streaks on older titles — via the publishers’ own marketing efforts, or by reader buzz in the letters columns… or by sheer happenstance.

So how did I finally catch on to what artist-plotter Jim Starlin was up to in Captain Marvel, some five issues and eight months into his soon-to-be-classic run?  As best as I can tell, it was due mostly to the latter of those three options — more specifically, via a very unlikely tie-in with, of all things, Daredevil.  Read More

Warlock #8 (October, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When last we left Adam Warlock at the end of our Warlock #5 post back in January, the superheroic would-be savior of Counter-Earth had just saved thousands of Northern Californians from dying, either as a result of bomb test-caused earthquakes and flooding, or from the fire of armed missiles — the “Deathbirds” — which the same test had inadvertently triggered… only to have the very man responsible for ordering the bomb test in the first place, President Rex Carpenter, subsequently declare him a menace on national television.

The next issue of the series, sporting a cover by John Romita, picks up very soon after those events, as Adam finds himself under assault by the United States military.  Warlock #6 also sees the partial return of Mike Friedrich as the book’s writer, providing the finished script over a plot by Ron Goulart (who’d written issue #5), who in his turn worked from an “idea” contributed by Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas.

Additionally, issue #6 also features a major changing of the guard on the series’ artistic side, as Bob Brown replaces Gil Kane as penciller.  Kane, who’d co-created the feature with Thomas back in Marvel Premiere #1 (Apr., 1972) and had drawn every installment but one since then, would go on to provide one more cover for the book before its cancellation, but was otherwise done with Warlock as of #5.  Read More

Warlock #5 (April, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in November, 2021, we took a look at Marvel Premiere #1, in which Marvel’s new “Warlock” feature made its debut.  As we discussed at the time, that first installment found writer Roy Thomas and artist Gil Kane dusting off a few old Stan Lee-Jack Kirby concepts from 1960s issues of Fantastic Four and Thor and combining them to create the most overt religious allegory that had yet appeared in superhero comics.  In doing so, they were clearly seeking to tap into the cultural zeitgeist exemplified by the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar both topping both the pop album charts and selling out shows on Broadway, and by the youth-driven “Jesus Movement” being featured on the cover of Time magazine, all of which happened in 1971.  Read More

Astonishing Tales #12 (June, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Any of you out there who aren’t already familiar with this particular comic book may be taking a look at its John Buscema-Joe Sinnott cover right now and thinking, “Nice, but what’s so special about Ka-Zar rasslin’ a big alligator, even underwater, that Astonishing Tales #12 should rate its own blog post?”  The fact of the matter, however, is that this issue (along with its immediate follow-up, Astonishing Tales #13) represents a significant chapter in the histories of not one, but two, semi-major Marvel Comics characters — neither one of whom happens to be the self-styled Lord of the Savage Land.  Read More

Justice League of America #97 (March, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

During the nearly yearlong period (June, 1971 through April, 1972) that DC Comics published most of their books in a giant-sized, 25-cent format, Justice League of America presented a particular sort of challenge for its editor, Julius Schwartz.  The problem arose from the fact that the new, larger format called for a certain amount of reprint material — generally, 13 to 15 pages’ worth — to fill out each issue.  And whereas for Schwartz’s other books, such as Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Superman, there was a ready archive of suitable old stories featuring the titular stars, the same wasn’t true for JLA, which from the beginning had been devoted to issue-length tales of more than 20 pages.  Such stories weren’t going to work as backups in the new format without being either cut in half or severely abridged, neither of which options seems to have appealed to the veteran editor.  Read More

Batman #237 (December, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Batman #237’s “Night of the Reaper!” wasn’t the first comic book story set at the real-life Rutland, VT Halloween Parade; that distinction goes to Avengers #83, which was published one year earlier (and was covered here on this blog last October).  Nor would it be the last such tale.

But it was almost certainly the best of the bunch.

That’s really not surprising, given that the story was crafted by one of the most outstanding creative teams of the era — writer Denny O’Neil, penciller Neal Adams, and inker Dick Giordano — as well as that it, more than most of its fellows, aspired to be about something more than either the Parade itself, or conventional superheroic goings-on — something decidedly more serious, in fact — and was largely successful in achieving this aim, ultimately addressing the subject of the Holocaust in a dramatic, but sensitive, manner.

Nevertheless, the origins of this classic story in certain actual (but not very serious) events — and the appearance within its pages of several equally actual persons who either already were, or would soon become, well-known comics industry professionals — can’t help but be responsible for a certain amount of “Night of the Reaper!” lasting appeal.  And it’s with those events, and persons, that we begin.  Read More

Justice League of America #94 (November, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

A half century ago, when your humble blogger picked the object of today’s post up out of the spinner rack and eyeballed the cover for the first time, I was awfully curious as to who — or what — that wraithlike, red-tinged figure descending into Aquaman’s body might turn out to be.  At the same time, I wasn’t the least bit curious about the identity of the cover’s artist — since, with the exception of the usual left-hand column’s worth of floating JLA heads rendered by Murphy Anderson, the cover was the obvious work of Neal Adams.  And as Adams had either pencilled, inked or provided complete art for more Justice League of America covers than any other artist in the three years since his very first (for issue #66 [Nov., 1968] ), that was no surprise at all.

But interior art by Adams in an issue of JLA?  That was unexpected; nevertheless, on turning past the cover to the book’s opening splash, that’s exactly what my fourteen-year-old self beheld:  Read More

Justice League of America #92 (September, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

July, 1971 brought DC Comics fans the second half of the year’s Justice League-Justice Society team-up (the ninth such event since the institution of the annual summer tradition in 1963).  Like the first half, it was produced by the regular JLA creative team of Mike Friedrich (writer), Dick Dillin (penciller), and Joe Giella (inker).  And, as you might expect, it began with a recap — though in this case, a bit more time and space were spent recapping the basic concept of the inter-dimensional assemblage of superheroes than the specific events of the story’s opening chapter:  Read More

Batman #234 (August, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Over the course of writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams’s classic early-’70s collaboration on Batman, the team was responsible not only for introducing one major new adversary (Ra’s al Ghul) to the ranks of the Darknight Detective”s greatest foes, but also for reclaiming and refurbishing of two vintage baddies who’d fallen out of favor in recent years.  The second of these restorations to appear, “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge!” (Batman #251 [Sept., 1973]), is doubtless the best-remembered of the two, due to its ultimately having had such a dramatic impact not only on the Bat-mythos, but on the DC Universe as a whole — rehabbing what had become a joke of a character (no pun intended) during the camp “Batmania” era of the mid-Sixties into the comics medium’s quintessential avatar of psychopathic evil — a character arguably more popular than all but a small handful of DC’s best-known superheroes, and one with enough cultural gravitas for screen portrayals of him to have earned Academy Awards for two different actors.

I didn’t buy that one.  Read More

Justice League of America #91 (August, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

It’s summertime!  The most wonderful time of the year — especially if you’re a fan of DC’s original super-team, the Justice Society of America, and the year happens to fall within the range of 1963 to 1985 — ’cause that means it’s time for the annual team-up between the JSA and their pals in the Justice League of America.  1971 brought the sixth of these events that I’d personally enjoyed since becoming a comic-book reader, and the ninth published overall.  And judging by the cover heralding this year’s team-up — more specifically, the two columns of floating heads flanking the dramatic central image by Neal Adams — 1971’s iteration of this beloved tradition was going to offer us something new: for the first time, the featured rosters of the two teams would be identical.  We were going to get two Supermen, two Flashes, two Green Lanterns, and so on — all for the price of one.  (Of course, as heralded by that “only 25¢ Bigger & Better” slug at the very top of the cover, the “price of one” had just gone up a substantial amount.  But more about that in a bit.)  Read More