Rich Buckler

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.
Read More

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

Astonishing Tales #25 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Marvel Comics’ first official mention of the feature that would eventually become known as “Deathlok the Demolisher” seems to have been a brief blurb in the fourth issue of the company’s self-produced fanzine FOOM (cover-dated “Winter, 1973”, but bearing a date of “Winter, 1974” in its indicia; Mike’s Amazing World of Comics offers an “approximate on-sale date” of January 1, 1974).  After hyping a 2-part adaptation of the movie The Golden Voyage of Sinbad that would be coming up soon in Worlds Unknown, FOOM‘s anonymous news columnist went on to add:  Read More

Savage Tales #3 (February, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we covered in our discussion of Savage Tales #2 back in June, the promise made on that magazine’s last page — that the following issue would be on “on sale September 25 A.D. 1973 in this the Marvel age of swords and sorcery” — turned out to be off by almost exactly one month.  Savage Tales #3 would in fact not come out until October 23rd — its delay being a result, according to editor Roy Thomas, of business-based concerns over the title’s overall commercial viability.  And even now, the book’s future was far from secure — though we’ll wait and let Mr. Thomas deliver that fifty-year-old bad news himself per his ST #3 editorial, coming up later in this post.

For the moment, however, we’ll move right into the main event of the issue — the reason that my younger self would have continued to wait for ST #3 as long as required back in the day, and still considered the result to have been worth it: the conclusion of Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith’s adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s final story of Conan the Barbarian, “Red Nails”. Read More

Daredevil #107 (December, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in July, we took a look at Daredevil #105, in which a plotline involving a series of mysteriously-empowered new supervillains — one that had meandered through the generally street-level-set series for the past nine issues — suddenly took an unexpected turn for the cosmic, as our Man Without Fear found himself involved with Moondragon — a woman who, though Earth-born, presently called Saturn’s moon of Titan her home.  In other words, DD had somehow managed to wander into the outskirts of the “Thanos War” saga being chronicled by artist-writer Jim Starlin over in the pages of Captain Marvel.  Read More