Paul Gulacy

Master of Kung Fu #19 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in January, we took a look at Master of Kung Fu #17, a comic which presented the third installment of Marvel Comics’ first ongoing martial arts feature (albeit only the first one under that title, as the two previous episodes had seen print as Special Marvel Edition #15 and #16).  That third installment was also the last to involve artist Jim Starlin, who had been instrumental in conceiving and developing the feature with writer Steve Englehart (although the idea of making the strip’s hero, Shang-Chi, the son of the famous fictional villain Fu Manchu came from Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas).  Read More

Captain America #173 (May, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In February, 1974, the X-Men hadn’t appeared in a new story in their own title in over four years — but while gone, they were hardly forgotten.  (Actually, they weren’t even gone, since their book had been resurrected as a reprint title by Marvel’s then-publisher, Martin Goodman, eight months after he’d cancelled the series with issue #66.  But you know what I mean.)  That’s because a number of people working for Marvel just plain liked the characters, regardless of their allegedly limited commercial viability; and, as writer Steve Englehart puts it in his 2009 preface to Marvel Masterworks — The X-Men, Vol. 8, “the Marvel Universe was a coherent entity, so the X-Men continued to exist in it even if they had no comic to call their own.”  Read More