With this 175th issue of Captain America, the “Secret Empire” saga that had dominated the series’ pages for over half a year finally reached its climax. And as our storytellers picked up their narrative right where the previous month’s episode had left us readers hanging, you could hardly accuse writer Steve Englehart of underselling the occasion in his opening, credits-prefacing caption… Read More
I don’t suppose I need to explain to anyone reading this just why the topic of today’s post is so significant. After all, even if you didn’t know anything about the 129th issue of Amazing Spider-Man before you arrived here, just a look at the comic’s iconic cover by Gil Kane and John Romita would quickly clue you in to its contents. And what other comic-book character’s fiftieth anniversary in this month of October, 2023 could possibly compare in importance to the first appearance of… the Jackal?
Nah, just kidding. I’m talking about the other guy. (Although I freely acknowledge that the debut of the Jackal is significant in its own way, especially for ’90s-era Spider-Man fans who still have nightmares about the Clone Saga.) Read More
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
Hard times at the Baxter Building. Bleak House. Heartbreak Hotel. Is life not ironic? If nothing else? As Annihilus remarked back in issue #140. Love and work had come between the Fantastic Four, America’s greatest superheroes. For almost a year — a year in real time, a year in Paul Hood’s whirlpool teens, but a few days, no more, in the motionless, imperceptible time of Marvel comics — Sue Richards, née Storm, the Invisible Girl, had been estranged from her husband, Reed Richards. With Franklin, their mysteriously equipped son, she was in seclusion in the country. She would return only when Reed learned to understand the obligations of family, those paramount bonds that lay beneath the surface of his work. In her stead, the Medusa had joined the Fantastic Four. Medusa: Tibetan-born Inhuman and cousin of Johnny Storm’s paramour, Crystal, the Elemental…
The mood in the Baxter Building was grim. Besides the Richards’s marital problems, Crystal had recently chosen to marry Quicksilver instead of Johnny Storm. Sue was worried about Franklin’s trances; Reed was worried about Sue; Johnny was worried about Crystal; Ben Grimm was worried about himself.
It was a good period for readers of the F.F….
— from Rick Moody’s 1994 novel The Ice Storm.
In several previous blog posts (most extensively in this one), I’ve described the early 1970s horror boom in American comics as part of a larger wave of interest in monsters (especially among young people) that can be traced back to the arrival of the classic old Universal monster movies on television in the late 1950s, and that flourished in the following decade and beyond, ultimately giving us such enduring cultural artifacts as Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s hit 1962 single “Monster Mash”, the Gothic TV soap opera Dark Shadows (which premiered in 1966, but didn’t really didn’t take off until the arrival of the vampire Barnabas Collins in ’67), and, lest we forget, Count Chocula and Franken Berry breakfast cereals, which first crept onto grocery shelves in 1971. It was a legitimate popular phenomenon, but one that had largely passed American color comics by — at least until the early 1971 revisions to the Comics Code, which allowed for vampires, werewolves, and ghouls to be used “when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high calibre literary works” for the first time since the Code’s adoption in 1954. Before too many months had passed, spinner racks were filling up with titles like Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, Frankenstein, and Swamp Thing — and fifty years ago, in the summer of 1973, new ones were continuing to arrive. Read More
Voodoo.
It’s the current rage, don’t you know. Paperbacks on the subject litter newsstands throughout the world. Voodoo cults are reportedly springing up in major cities throughout the United States. And, figuring on television’s propensity for jumping on a fad with the obliterating properties of an overweight pachyderm, it probably won’t be too long before we see a Voodoo situation comedy laugh-tracking its way across our screens — Loa in the Family.
Leave it to the Marvel Comics Group, long renown [sic] for its many innovations in the comics field, to find a new slant on this late-breaking craze. And the result of this new slant promises to outlive the current interest in Voodoo.
— Tony Isabella, “Introducing Brother Voodoo! The Creation of Marvel’s Most Mysterious Superhero”, in Tales of the Zombie #2 (Oct., 1973). Read More
For artist Frank Brunner and Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange, the third time around would prove to be the proverbial charm.
As we’ve covered in previous posts, Brunner first brush with the Dr. Strange feature came with Marvel Premiere #4, for which he supplied finishes to pencilled art (mostly just layouts) by Barry Windsor-Smith. He returned four months later with Marvel Premiere #6, where his complete pencils were inked by Sal Buscema. But unhappy with writer Gardner Fox’s scripts, as well as with the overall H.P. Lovecraft-by-way-of-Robert E. Howard “cosmic horror” direction of the series (a direction we should note had been inaugurated by plotter-editor Roy Thomas in issue #4, and then continued by Fox), the young artist left again after only a single issue. Read More
As was noted in last Saturday’s blog post, the date of April 17, 1973 saw Marvel Comics release not just one, but two different periodical issues devoted to the exploits of the world’s most famous vampire. But while the color-comics format Tomb of Dracula #10, featuring the debut of Blade, is probably much better known to contemporary comics fans, I’m pretty sure that, back in the day, my fifteen-year-old self was at least as jazzed by the arrival of its black-and-white companion publication, Dracula Lives #2… and probably more so. Read More
Like its immediate predecessor, the 122nd issue of Amazing Spider-Man leads off with a cover by John Romita, which, if not quite as iconic as that of #121, is still an exceptionally arresting image. Not to mention one which, back in April, 1973, would likely have shocked the hell out of any semi-regular reader of the web-slinger’s series who had somehow managed to miss not only that most monumental of issues, but also any fannish discussion of same over the several weeks since its release on March 13th.
If there were any such readers fifty years ago, and if they hoped for some sort of recap to bring them up to speed on the details of how so something so unthinkable as the murder of Spider-Man’s beloved Gwen Stacy had come to pass, they were pretty much out of luck — because the creative team behind both the previous episode and this one — i.e., scripter Gerry Conway, penciller Gil Kane, foreground inker John Romita (who may have also contributed to the plot) and background inker Tony Mortellaro — weren’t about to break their storyline’s headlong momentum with any more exposition than was minimally required, let alone any flashbacks: Read More
Return with me now, if you will, to that long-ago era when the word “zombie” was virtually never paired with the word “apocalypse”… a time when one didn’t worry about having one’s brain (or other bodily parts) eaten by ravenous specimens of the walking dead because, well, those guys didn’t seem to eat much of anything, as far as one could tell from the stories about them… and when the animating agent that could make corpses clamber out of their graves and shamble about (no running or swarming in those days) was almost always associated with the magical traditions of voodoo (or, more properly, what passed for authentic voodoo in popular entertainment media), rather than derived from an imaginary contagion or some other “scientific” cause. Read More
Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books 