Ron Wilson

Captain America #179 (November, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover art by John Romita.

Cover art by Ron Wilson, Frank Giacoia, and John Romita (?).

At the conclusion of the last issue of Captain America we looked at on this blog, the classic #176, our star-spangled hero, reeling from the revelations about the United States government that had emerged in the wake of the Watergate scandal downfall of the Secret Empire, decided to renounce his costumed identity — “forever!”  As we discussed briefly in the closing paragraphs of our post about that comic, Steve Rogers’ decision held firm throughout the next two issues, as his former partner, Sam Wilson (aka the Falcon), was forced to go up alone against Lucifer — a relatively obscure antagonist of the X-Men who’d upped his game by splitting himself in two.  The Falcon ultimately triumphed over the villain(s), though not without a sudden, spur-of-the-last-moment intervention from Steve, who went into action wearing a ski-mask and slinging a garbage-can lid in lieu of a shield — an action that Sam, having been earlier rebuffed by Steve when he asked him to reconsider his decision to give up being Captain America, wasn’t thrilled about…  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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Avengers #127 (September, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Following their close-shave victory over the mad Titan Thanos in Avengers #125 and Captain Marvel #33, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes barely got a breather before they were beset by the newly teamed super-villains Klaw and Solarr in Avengers #126.  This was a one-off story, and frankly not one of the Assemblers’ most memorable adventures — although it did mark a couple of significant changes in the team’s active roster worth noting before we proceed to the main topic of today’s post.

The most obvious and expected one of these was the departure of Captain America, who, after all, had just renounced his costumed identity over in issue #176 of his own series — a series which, like Avengers, was written by Steve Englehart.  But the leave-taking of the Black Panther was arguably just as necessary, and probably overdue.  Ever since the second installment of T’Challa’s new solo feature, published in Jungle Action #6 almost a year earlier, writer Don McGregor and his artistic collaborators (primarily Rich Buckler, Gil Kane, and Billy Graham) had been chronicling a dense, ambitious, multi-part epic, “Panther’s Rage”, which took place entirely within the hero’s African kingdom of Wakanda.  After a time, it simply stretched reader credulity to the breaking point to have the Panther continue to appear every month with the New York-based Avengers — especially since it seemed unlikely that McGregor’s storyline was going to be wrapping up any time soon.  (For the record, the final full chapter of the epic would see print just over a year later, in Jungle Action #17, with an “Epilogue” following two months later in #18; alas, your humble blogger didn’t have the good sense to pick up this run of comics back in the day, so you won’t be reading too much more about “Panther’s Rage” on this blog, regretfully.)  Read More

Marvel Spotlight #17 (September, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If you were to take a deep dive into the credits page for writer Steve Gerber at the Mike’s Amazing World of Comics web site, you’d be forgiven if you ultimately concluded that, in the summer of 1974, he must have been scripting half of Marvel Comics’ entire line.  He wasn’t — not quite — but given that he was at that time responsible for six ongoing features, while also continuing to contribute the odd one-off short piece for anthology titles like Vampire Tales and Crazy, he was turning out at least as much verbiage for the House of Ideas as any other one writer, and arguably more. Read More

Captain Marvel #34 (September, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

So, how do you follow up a grand, multi-issue crossover superhero epic in which your protagonist and his allies have just barely managed to eke out a win against an insane god in time to save the universe?

If you’re Captain Marvel plotter, penciller, and colorist (maybe we should just go with auteur?) Jim Starlin, you opt for moving straight into a new multi-issue storyline.  Though surely no one will begrudge you taking a few pages at the top of the new narrative’s premiere installment to wrap up a few loose ends, and otherwise provide a nice coda for the tale you’ve been telling for the past nineteen months or so…  Read More

Master of Kung Fu #19 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Back in January, we took a look at Master of Kung Fu #17, a comic which presented the third installment of Marvel Comics’ first ongoing martial arts feature (albeit only the first one under that title, as the two previous episodes had seen print as Special Marvel Edition #15 and #16).  That third installment was also the last to involve artist Jim Starlin, who had been instrumental in conceiving and developing the feature with writer Steve Englehart (although the idea of making the strip’s hero, Shang-Chi, the son of the famous fictional villain Fu Manchu came from Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas).  Read More

Man-Thing #8 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Mike Ploog’s splendidly over-the-top cover for Man-Thing #8 probably calls back harder to the lurid, gory glories of early-1950s pre-Code horror comics than anything else ever published by Marvel in the 1970s (including their Code-free black-and-white magazine line).  Of course, back in May, 1974, my sixteen-year-old self probably didn’t fully comprehend that that was what the artist was up to here; still, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t appreciate the cover on its own merits.  A muck-covered monstrosity breaking free from his lab-table restraints, while nearby a hideous ghoul threatened a beautiful, buxom young woman?  What wasn’t to love?  Read More

Captain America #176 (August, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In his 2016 introduction to Marvel Masterworks — Captain America, Vol. 9, Steve Englehart refers to the cover John Romita produced for the subject of today’s post as “iconic”.  That’s become a rather overused word in today’s culture, I grant you; all the same, I find it hard to disagree with him.  For this grizzled old fan, it’s virtually impossible to think about this particular era of Captain America comics without the image shown above leaping immediately to mind — and that’s close enough to iconic for the word to fit, at least in my book.  Read More

Avengers #125 (July, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

I suppose that Ron Wilson and John Romita’s cover for this issue of Avengers might be taken as misleading by some readers, since, as we’ll soon see, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes never directly confront Thanos himself anywhere within its pages (indeed, the Mad Titan only puts in a personal appearance on a couple of them).  I’m pretty sure, however, that that fact didn’t bother my sixteen-year-old self very much (if at all) when I first read this comic back in April, 1974; after all, the story is unquestionably a part of the “Thanos War” saga that had been being told by artist-writer Jim Starlin and others for the last year and a half, mostly (though not entirely) in the pages of Captain Marvel.  If you took Avengers #125’s cover as “symbolic” of our heroes’ struggle against that epic’s Big Bad, as I was happy to do, you’d have to admit it was pretty much on the money.  Read More