Paul S. Newman

Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 (May, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If aging memory serves, it wasn’t long after the subject of today’s post first went on sale that it started to rapidly climb in value on the collector’s market — a phenomenon that was surely almost wholly attributable to the comic’s nine-page backup story, which presented the long-awaited first solo adventure of Howard the Duck.  But as epochal as Howard’s ascent to feature-starring status undoubtedly was half a century ago, the story which occupied the issue’s first thirty pages — “The Kid’s Night Out!”, starring the title’s muck-encrusted headliner, the Man-Thing — could hardly be called an inconsequential piece of work.  Rather, it’s one of the most memorable episodes of the lead feature’s entire original run… and it’s where we’ll begin our coverage of this seminal fifty-year-old comic book today.  Read More

Defenders #21 (March, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Fifty years ago this month, the Gil Kane-Klaus Janson cover of Defenders #21 heralded the beginning of a new storyline.  But as soon as we readers of the time turned to the comic’s opening splash page — not to mention the double-page spread that followed immediately thereafter — it was clear that although the “A”-plot of the recent three-parter that had wound through two issues of Marvel Two-in-One before concluding in Defenders #20 might indeed have reached its end, the series’ new regular writer, Steve Gerber, was in no way ready to drop the plot element that had driven much of the action of that arc — the mystery behind the past life of the superheroine we knew as Valkyrie…  Read More

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. #10 (January, 1967)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

“Batmania” may have dominated the pop culture landscape in 1966, but it was by no means the only thing going on at the time — not even within the smaller sphere of pop-cultural activity that was of special interest to nine-year-old boys such as myself.  For one thing, there was also The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (that’s the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, for those of you who don’t already know, and yet might actually care for some reason), in addition to being something of a mini-phenomenon of its own, was of course also part of the larger wave of popularity of the “super-spy” genre in the early-to-mid-Sixties.  The wellspring of this popularity was author Ian Fleming’s James Bond, the hero of a series of espionage thrillers who’d debuted in 1953, but who’d really taken off (especially in the United States), when it was revealed that President John F. Kennedy was a fan.  By 1966, the enormous success of Agent 007 had yielded a crop of imitators as well as variations on the “spy-fi” concept, including TV’s spoof Get Smart and Western-spy-fi genre hybrid The Wild Wild West, not to mention comics’ Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents series.     Read More