Red Skull

Astonishing Tales #3 (December, 1970)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As I’ve discussed in a previous post, when Marvel Comics brought back their mid-Sixties double-feature format with two titles in 1970, my younger self promptly jumped on one of them — Amazing Adventures, co-starring the Inhumans and Black Widow — picking up both the first and second issues.  For some reason, however, I put off sampling the companion title — Astonishing Tales, headlined by Ka-Zar and Doctor Doom — for several months, so my first issue was the series’ third.  Yes, reader; that does indeed mean that I turned up my nose at new work from not just one, but two giants of comic book art — Jack Kirby (who already had one foot out the door at Marvel) and Wally Wood (who was just putting a foot back in).  What can I say?  I was a callow youth, who pretty much took Kirby for granted (he put a couple of new books out every month, after all; if you missed one, there’d be another one along in a couple of weeks) — and, truth to tell, I didn’t yet know who Wood even was, or why I should care.  Read More

Amazing Spider-Man #85 (June, 1970)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In July, 1969, Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee announced in his “Stan’s Soapbox” column that the company was instituting a new “no continued stories” policy for all its titles.  Today, that policy (which remained in place for about a year and a half, at least officially) is widely considered to have been not Lee’s own idea, but rather one that was imposed on him by his then-boss, publisher Martin Goodman.  Assuming that’s true, it’s interesting to consider how much Lee flouted the policy in one of the relatively few books he still wrote himself, The Amazing Spider-Man — which, as it happens, was also the company’s best-selling title, and thus probably the one most likely to be noticed by Goodman.  Read More

Avengers Annual #3 (September, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

I know there must have been plenty of Marvel Comics fans who were dismayed when, in the summer of 1969, that year’s crop of giant-sized annuals arrived — and they were all 100% reprint material.  And perhaps I was a little disappointed, myself, as I’d very much enjoyed the brand new double-length stories and fun bonus features in the previous year’s Amazing Spider-Man and Avengers annuals (not to mention the same year’s Fantastic Four Annual #6, or 1967’s Avengers Annual #1, both of which I’m pretty sure I’d read by this time, having bought or perhaps borrowed them from a friend). Read More

Captain America #116 (August, 1969)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

After having bought Captain America for five months straight (or almost straight, as I somehow managed to miss issue #111), in early 1969 I took a couple of months off from reading the Star-Spangled Avenger’s adventures.  Five decades later, I can’t quite remember why I did so.  Obviously, beginning with #114 there was a considerable stylistic shift in the look of the book, which had just seen the end of Jim Steranko’s brief but epochal run as the series’ artist — but it seems unlikely that I would have turned up my nose at the work of either John Romita (who drew both the cover and interiors of #114) or John Buscema (who contributed the interior art for #115, behind a Marie Severin cover), considering how much I enjoyed their work on other titles.  Admittedly, the Romita cover is a little dull, at least in comparison to the Steranko (and Jack Kirby) jobs that immediately preceded it, but it’s hard for me to believe I would have passed on Severin’s dramatic rendition of a shrunk-down Cap being held prisoner within a transparent cube by the Red Skull, while Sharon Carter looks on helplessly.  Perhaps I never actually saw that issue on the stands (or the one preceding it, for that matter).  Read More

Amazing Spider-Man Annual #5 (November, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Marvel Comics’ original summer tradition of publishing “King-Size Special!” annual issues featuring (mostly) new material had a relatively brief heyday in the Sixties — just six years, really.  I’ve known that for decades, but before digging into my collection to do the research or this blog, I hadn’t realized how very few of those annuals I actually bought new off the stands.  While I’d bought my first Marvel comic book in the summer of 1967, I didn’t pick up any annuals until the summer of 1968 — and that was the last year that the specials featured all-new material, at least for a while.  As it turns out, I just managed to catch the very tail end of this golden era of Marvel annuals.  And I’d end up buying all of two off the spinner rack  Read More