Rich Buckler

Man-Thing #22 (October, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

When we last checked in with the Man-Thing back in March, at the end of his 18th issue, it was for the finale of the three-part “Mad Viking” trilogy — one of the most intense and memorable storylines to have yet appeared in the feature, perhaps matched only by “The Kid’s Night Out!” (which had in fact been published concurrently with it, in the Man-Thing’s quarterly Giant-Size vehicle).  As you may recall, Man-Thing #18 concluded with Manny, his human friend Richard Rory, and a distressed teenager named Carol Selby abandoning the small Florida town of Citrusville in the wake of a book burning incident at the town’s high school in which people as well as pages had perished.  That downbeat ending presaged a significant change in direction for the series — one which writer Steve Gerber and artist Jim Mooney would manage to explore in depth for only three issues before having to abruptly wrap up everything as best they could in the title’s terminal release, Man-Thing #22. Read More

Thor #240 (October, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before on this blog, Thor was my favorite Marvel superhero back in the 1970s.  (Just for the record, he still is.)  That didn’t mean that Thor was my favorite Marvel superhero comic book for most of that decade, however — at least, not so far as the new issues coming out then were concerned.  The reason for that disparity stems from the fact that, while my enthusiasm for the Son of Odin might have originally been inspired by a general affinity for myth and legend (and for modern heroic fantasy fiction derived from them), it was based at least as much on my admiration for the work that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had done on the feature in the mid-to-late 1960s.  Thor/Journey into Mystery was the one major Marvel title I endeavored to acquire a complete run of back in my collecting heyday (I eventually made it back as far as JiM #96, if you’re curious).  So I had those Lee-Kirby classics — which I was picking up sporadically, just a few at a time — to compare the current issues to.  And despite regularly featuring a high quality of artwork (usually by John Buscema, working with a variety of mostly sympathetic inkers), the new stories (which for most of the first half of the 1970s were written by Gerry Conway) just didn’t measure up in my eyes… neither to those great old Thor/JiM comics, nor to the best of what Marvel was offering elsewhere in the superhero genre in those days.  Read More

Demon-Hunter #1 (September, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last November, in our post about Grim Ghost #1, we discussed the origins and early days of Atlas/Seaboard — the comic-book company launched in 1974 by the founder and previous owner of Marvel Comics, Martin Goodman, and his son Charles (aka “Chip”).  In this post, we’ll be covering the upstart publisher’s decline and fall, as well as taking a close look at one of Atlas/Seaboard’s very last releases — a comic which, ironically, was not only one of the company’s better efforts, but also one of the very few to have any sort of afterlife following its abrupt demise. Read More

Astonishing Tales #31 (August, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The last time we checked in with Marvel Comics’ cyborg antihero, Deathlok the Demolisher, it was September, 2024.  (Or, if you prefer, September, 1974).  That’s been a good long while in comics periodical publishing terms, even taking into account the bi-monthly publication schedule of Astonishing Tales back then; so you might figure we have a lot of catching up to do before digging in to the character’s “latest” adventure.  But, as it turns out, the eight-month gap between issues #27 and #31 of the Astonishing Tales brought just two new Deathlok stories rather than three, as issue #29 was a fill-in featuring an unplanned reprint of the first Guardians of the Galaxy story, which (as we discussed in last week’s Defenders #26 post) had originally appeared in Marvel Super-Heroes #18 back in 1968.  Read More

Astonishing Tales #27 (December, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in May, we covered Astonishing Tales #25, featuring the premiere outing (and origin story) of Deathlok the Demolisher.  Our main topic of discussion today is the third Deathlok story — but since this particular feature went in for serialized storytelling in a big way (not to mention doing more than a fair amount of jumping around in time, especially in the earliest episodes), we’ll first need to spend a bit of time and space recapping the major events of Astonishing Tales #26 (whose cover by primary creator Rich Buckler is shown at right) before moving on to the main event.

As discussed at some length in the aforementioned AT #25 post, later decades would find the question of just how much Buckler contributed to the creation of the Deathlok character, as well as to his earliest adventures, versus what the series’ first scripter, Doug Moench, brought to the enterprise, to be a matter of considerable contention; with that in mind, your humble blogger invites you to peruse the credits on the following splash page, where we find Buckler credited for “art/concept/plot”, while Moench gets a double nod for “script/plot”.  This is in contrast to AT #25, where we were told Buckler had “conceived, plotted, & drawn” the work, while Moench had only “scripted” it. Read More

Thor #228 (October, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The primary subject of today’s blog post is the advent of artist Rich Buckler as the regular artist on Marvel Comics’ Thor (and despite the post’s title, we’ll be spending at least as much time on issue #227 — Buckler’s actual debut on the series — as we will on #228).  But as it’s been a while since we last checked in on the God of Thunder (at least in his own book), it’s probably advisable that we take a few moments here at the top to orient ourselves to the current lay of the land in Thor, in terms both of its ongoing storyline and of its creative team.  Read More

Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #1 (September, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

While this blog has briefly touched on the matter of Marvel’s 1974-75 line of “Giant-Size” comics in a few previous discussions, this is the first time we’ve devoted a post to a book in that fairly short-lived format.  So, I hope you all won’t mind if we take a little time here at the top of the page, before we flip past Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #1’s Ron Wilson-Mike Esposito cover to take a look at this issue’s specific contents, to get into a little background on the introduction and early days of the “Giant-Size” format in general.  It’s an interesting story (at least in my opinion) that seems to indicate a certain degree of disorder in the Marvel offices around this time — disorder which might rise to the level of full-on chaos, but then again might not, depending on your point of view.  Read More

Planet of the Apes #1 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In June, 1974, my sixteen-year-old self was well-primed for the debut of a comic book series based on the Planet of the Apes media franchise.  True, at the time I’d seen only two out of the five extant movies — Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), both of which I saw in theaters (to this day, I have no idea how or why I missed catching the fifth film, 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes, at the movie house, but there it is).  But I’d read the English translation of Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des singes, the 1963 French novel on which the first film was based, as well as Michael Avallone’s paperback novelization of the second film, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, and, most recently, David Gerrold’s corresponding effort re: Battle.  So I was about as up-to-date on my “Apes” lore as it was possible to be in those pre-home video days, given that I’d missed the broadcast premieres of the first three films on The CBS Friday Night Movie the previous autumn (perhaps because I was out with friends, but more likely because my parents wanted to watch something else, and we were a one-TV household at the time).  In any event, I was more than ready for more Apes content.
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Fantastic Four #150 (September, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

A week ago, we took a look at Avengers #127 (Sep., 1974), the first half of a two-part crossover story set to conclude in the comic book that’s the main subject of the present post.  But while Fantastic Four #150 does in fact pick up immediately from the cliffhanger ending that closed out its predecessor, we’re going to be taking a somewhat circuitous route today to get to the splash page of “Ultron-7:He’ll Rule the World!”.  Why?  Well, as regular readers of this blog will surely recall, our Avengers #127 post promised that this follow-up would provide an explanation for that issue’s depiction of a happily reunited Reed and Sue Richards, who’d been very much on the outs the last time we’d encountered them in this space.  So that’s where we’ll begin.  Read More