Red Guardian | Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books

Defenders Annual #1 (1976)

In last Saturday’s post, we discussed Marvel Comics’ Thor Annual #5 — which, in the summer of 1976, was the first annual starring the God of Thunder to have appeared since 1971. Today, we’ll be looking at another ’76 Marvel annual… although this one has the distinction of being the first ever such comic featuring the Defenders, since the so-called “non-team” hadn’t yet debuted in their own ongoing title at the time Marvel had phased out their annuals publishing program some five years before. Read More

Defenders #40 (October, 1976)

Posted on July 22 by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog are aware, we’ve recently been covering the latter (and, honestly, somewhat lesser) portion of the long-running “Headmen/Nebulon” saga in Defenders a couple of issues at a time. Most recently, in May, we looked at both Defenders #37 and #38; this time out, we’ll be delving into #39 as well as the issue indicated by both the cover and post title shown above, i.e., #40. Read More

Defenders #38 (August, 1976)

Posted on May 30 by Alan Stewart

With this post, we continue our coverage of writer Steve Gerber and artist Sal Buscema’s “Headmen/Nebulon Saga” in Defenders, following our recently established routine of taking on two issues of the lengthy storyline at a time. This go-round, we’ll be starting with Defenders #37, whose cover by Gil Kane and Mike Esposito heralds the imminent return to this title’s pages of Luke Cage, Power Man — a hero who’d first fought alongside Marvel Comics’ premiere non-team back in issues #17-19, and then had renewed his non-membership when the group battled the Sons of the Serpent in #24-25.

As regular readers will hopefully recall, Defenders #36 had ended with three of our heroes — leader Dr. Strange, veteran Nighthawk (in his civilian guise of Kyle Richmond), and newbie Red Guardian — having been captured by Plantman, who intended to hold the wealthy Richmond for ransom. But rather than immediately picking things back up with those characters, our creative team (which in addition to Gerber and Buscema includes inker Klaus Janson) start off issue #37’s “Evil in Bloom!” with another Defender, namely the Hulk. Read More

Defenders #36 (June, 1976)

Posted on March 14 by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, we haven’t had a post about Marvel Comics’ Defenders title since we covered issue #34 back in January — which means that our continuing coverage of writer Steve Gerber and artist Sal Buscema’s “Headmen/Nebulon Saga” must resume here not with the issue whose number and cover are shown directly above, but with the one whose cover you see pictured at left. And that Gil Kane-Mike Esposito number fronting Defenders #35 (May, 1976) is a doozy, isn’t it? If you’ve never read this comic before, I can’t wait for you to find out who that utterly bizarre unicorn-horned, bird-claw-footed, tentacle-armed monstrosity fighting the Valkyrie really is. Why, I bet you’ll be just as surprised as Chondu the Mystic was! (Wait, did I just give the whole thing away? Damn.) Read More