Sol Brodsky | Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books

Thor Annual #5 (1976)

Three months ago, in our post about Avengers #150, we discussed at length the circumstances surrounding writer Steve Englehart’s decision in the spring of 1976 to leave Marvel Comics. While the most immediate effect of his decision was that, come May, Marvel was forced to release that milestone issue of Avengers as a hybrid of new and reprinted material, Englehart’s overall departure from the House of Ideas took another few months to completely play out. In more recent posts, we’ve covered the writer’s final contributions to Doctor Strange and Captain Marvel, both of which saw the light of day in June, 1976; his last issue of his other regular assignment, Super-Villain Team-Up (not covered on this blog, sorry) was released a month later, in July. But Englehart’s final story from his first and best-regarded stint writing for Marvel didn’t come out until August, which is when the topic of today’s post arrived in spinner racks… a fact that’s somewhat ironic, given that Englehart’s script for this extra-long story was likely completed over a year prior to its release. Read More

Not Brand Echh #9 (August, 1968)

Posted on May 6, 2018 by Alan Stewart

I gotta say, I sometimes have a hard time figuring out what was going through my younger self’s mind when I made certain choices at the spinner rack half a century ago. The subject of today’s post is a case in point. I mean — why would I put down 25 cents for a giant-size humor comic filled with satirical versions of Marvel characters I was only now getting to know in their “serious” incarnations?

I’m guessing that it was partly because Not Brand Echh, with its parodies of current movies and TV shows as well as comic books, reminded me of Mad magazine — which was one of my most regular comics purchases in the late Sixties, despite the fact that I haven’t yet devoted a blog post to it (probably because back in my younger days, I didn’t think of Mad as a bona fide “comic book”, due to its black-and-white magazine-size format). And, hey, my inclination to go for the “bargain” of getting multiple heroes for the price of one (which, in contrast to Mad, I’ve often noted on the blog), may have figured into my purchasing decision as well — even if these were parody version of the heroes, there were still a lot of ’em. Read More