Nestor Redondo

Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-36 (Jun.-Jul., 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By March, 1975, DC Comics had been utilizing its innovative 10″ x 14″ tabloid format for over two years.  Thus far, most of the content for the company’s publications in this format had been reprinted from its extensive archives, although some new material had appeared here and there.  Still, it seemed inevitable that we readers of the time would eventually see DC bring out a tabloid with exclusively new content — though I doubt many of us were expecting that the very first to do so would be an adaptation of the first nineteen chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. Read More

Swamp Thing #13 (Nov.-Dec., 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we covered in a post back in February, the 10th issue of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing marked the end of the award-winning collaboration on the title of writer Len Wein, artist Bernie Wrightson, and editor Joe Orlando, as Wrightson chose to leave the book after that installment.  But of course, that didn’t mean the end of Swamp Thing itself.

According to an interview with Orlando published in Amazing World of DC Comics #6 (May-Jun., 1975), among the artists who were considered to replace the muck-monster’s co-creator on the series were a young and mostly untried illustrator named Arthur Suydam, as well as the veteran Filipino artist Alex Niño.  In the end, however, it was another well-seasoned komiks creator from the Philippines, Nestor Redondo, who got the nod.  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

House of Secrets #109 (July, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in July, 2020, I wrote a post about the 188th issue of DC Comics’ House of Mystery, an issue notable for featuring one of the very first comic-book stories drawn by the Filipino-born artist Tony DeZuñiga to be published in the United States.   As we discussed in that post, DeZuñiga‘s advent at DC in 1970 would ultimately prove highly auspicious — not only for his own individual career, but also for the direction of the whole field of American comics over the next decade or so.  Read More

House of Mystery #202 (May, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In March, 1972, the format change that DC Comics editor Joe Orlando had brought to the company’s House of Mystery title at the beginning of his tenure had been in place for four years.  This format — which emulated the approach of the horror anthology comics of the early 1950s to the extent possible under the strictures of the Comics Code Authority — had proven very successful, leading to similar revamps of other DC titles (House of Secrets and Tales of the Unexpected) as well as the launch of brand new titles cut from the same rotting gravecloth (Witching Hour and Ghosts).  Even DC’s arch-rival Marvel had been moved to try its hand at the “mystery” anthology comics game (though so far without much success).

Through it all, House of Mystery had kept to the course charted by Orlando in 1968, centered on a mix of short stories of supernatural horror (generally featuring twist endings), interspersed with a page or two of macabre cartoons, all “hosted” by Cain the Caretaker.  To the extent that anything had changed in the last four years, it was largely in the makeup of the talent roster that produced the title’s content.  Even so, it was still possible to pick up an issue and be completely surprised — as was the case with the very comic we’re looking at today.  Read More

House of Mystery #188 (Sept.-Oct., 1970)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Fifty years ago, whenever I picked up an issue of one of DC Comics’ “mystery” (i.e., Comics Code-approved horror) anthology titles, I knew I would see work from multiple creators.  Any given issue would feature a mix of talents, most likely including some that I’d been a fan of for quite a while, others who were somewhat less well-known to me (but whom I was becoming more familiar with all the time, due mostly to their frequent appearances in these very titles), and probably at least one or two I’d never heard of before.

This was definitely the case with the comic that’s the subject of today’s post, House of Mystery #188, which started things off with another spooky cover by the very familiar (and always dependable) Neal Adams, and then launched into a story drawn by an artist whose work was altogether new to me (and probably new to most of this issue’s other original readers, as well), though I wouldn’t know this for sure until I got to the credits box on the story’s second page:  Read More