Steve Gerber

Defenders #26 (August, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The subject of today’s post is the first of four regular issues of Defenders that guest-starred the original Guardians of the Galaxy.  But the storyline actually kicked off in the fifth (and last) issue of the non-team’s other vehicle, Giant-Size Defenders, so you can probably guess what that means — yep, we’ll be taking a look at that one first.

Although, considering that we’ve never really discussed the OG Guardians on the blog prior to this post, and given that GSD #5 represented only their third non-reprint appearance overall at the time it was released, maybe we should look at least briefly at the prior history of the team?  Sure, let’s do that. Read More

Man-Thing #18 (June, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last month, we took a look at Giant-Size Man-Thing #4, whose lead story centered around the high school in Citrusville, Florida — the fictional small town built on the edge of the swamp that the muck-encrusted star of the title called his home.  In this post, we’ll be covering a trilogy of issues of the monthly Man-Thing series that not only came out concurrently with “The Kid’s Night Out!”, but also shared its setting, at least in part — and whose storyline in some ways incorporated both the events and the themes of that other story.  Read More

Defenders #24 (June, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last month, we took a look at the first half of Steve Gerber and Sal Buscema’s “Sons of the Serpent” storyline with a single blog post covering Defenders #22 and #23.  Today, we’ll be wrapping things up in a similar fashion, with one post serving for our survey of both the third and fourth chapters of this half-century old graphic narrative.

Before we get into the story itself, however, I invite you to take a closer look at Defenders #24’s excellent (if just a bit crowded) cover by Gil Kane and Klaus Janson (and also by John Romita, per the Grand Comics Database).  Specifically, at the blurb trumpeting the presence within of “5 fearsome Defenders and 3 startling guest stars“.  Five Defenders?  I guess that means that Yellowjacket’s been bumped up to full membership status, huh?  That’s certainly what the anonymous Marvel Comics bullpenner who wrote that copy appears to have thought, at any rate.  (Of course, if you accept the notion of the Defenders being a “non-team”, as your humble blogger has always chosen to do, it’s basically a moot point, since any superhero who shows up in any issue may reasonably be called a member.  Or a non-member.  You know what I mean.)

And now, on with the show…  Read More

Defenders #23 (May, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The fifty-year-old comic book referred to in the title line of this blog post presents the second chapter of a four-part storyline.  And, seeing how we didn’t feature a post about Defenders #22 here in this space last month, regular readers of the blog know what that means: we’ll be covering that issue before moving on to our ostensible main topic, i.e., Defenders #23.  But wait, there’s more!  Because, although the story chronicled in another half-century-old comic, Giant-Size Defenders #4, isn’t technically part of the same arc, its events do preface those of the main Defenders title’s “Sons of the Serpent” saga in some significant ways.  For that reason, we’ll be spending a little quality time with it before proceeding even as far as Defenders #22.  It’s a three-fer today, folks.  Read More

Giant-Size Man-Thing #4 (May, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If aging memory serves, it wasn’t long after the subject of today’s post first went on sale that it started to rapidly climb in value on the collector’s market — a phenomenon that was surely almost wholly attributable to the comic’s nine-page backup story, which presented the long-awaited first solo adventure of Howard the Duck.  But as epochal as Howard’s ascent to feature-starring status undoubtedly was half a century ago, the story which occupied the issue’s first thirty pages — “The Kid’s Night Out!”, starring the title’s muck-encrusted headliner, the Man-Thing — could hardly be called an inconsequential piece of work.  Rather, it’s one of the most memorable episodes of the lead feature’s entire original run… and it’s where we’ll begin our coverage of this seminal fifty-year-old comic book today.  Read More

Defenders #20 (February, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Art by Jim Starlin (and maybe John Romita).

Art by John Romita (and maybe Tony Mortellaro).

Fifty years ago, in November, 1974, Steve Gerber began his tenure as the regular writer of Marvel Comics’ Defenders series with the very issue we’re discussing here today.  But, as we’ve covered in a couple of recent posts, Gerber had already been warming up for his new assignment for several months.  In October, he’d scripted the third issue of the “non-team”‘s quarterly vehicle, Giant-Size Defenders, working from a plot by himself, artist Jim Starlin, and incumbent Defenders writer Len Wein.  But even beyond that, readers picking up Defenders #20 in November found that they weren’t just buying the first issue of the group’s monthly title to carry Gerber’s name in the credits; rather, they were coming in on the third chapter of a continued storyline that had begun back in August in the pages of another Gerber book, Marvel Two-in-One, which regularly featured the Fantastic Four’s Thing teamed up with a rotating roster of guest stars — in this case, the two Defenders known respectively as Doctor Strange, who’d co-headlined with Ben Grimm in MTiO #6, and the Valkyrie, who’d done the same in MTiO #7.  Read More

Giant-Size Man-Thing #3 (February, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

OK, let’s get this out of the way first:  Back in the mid-1970s, Marvel Comics actually published five issues of a series called Giant-Size Man-Thing.

Hahahahahahahahah!

Everyone good now?

As I mentioned in my post about Man-Thing #8 a few months back, there’s really no reason why “Giant-Size Man-Thing” should be exponentially funnier than “Man-Thing” is by itself.  I mean, any double meaning you want to read into the phrase is right there in the regular-sized version, right?  Yet, put those two hyphenates together, in that order, and hilarity — or at least an extended period of snickering — inevitably ensues. Read More

Giant-Size Defenders #3 (January, 1975)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As we’ve discussed in this space previously, Marvel Comics seems to have been in an almighty rush to get as many “Giant-Size” comics to market as possible in the first half of 1974.  Along with a multitude of title, frequency, price, and format changes, most seemingly made on the fly, one likely result of this haste was the release of Giant-Size Defenders #1 in April, 1974 as a mostly-reprint package, its only new content (not counting the Gil Kane-John Romita-Frank Giacoia cover) being a 9-page framing sequence.  Written by Tony Isabella and illustrated by Jim Starlin and Al Milgrom, that strip unquestionably looked great, and it read just fine; there simply wasn’t enough of it. Read More

Tales of the Zombie #8 (November, 1974)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Cover art by Boris Vallejo.

Back in April, 2023, towards the end of my post on Tales of the Zombie #1, I wrote that while I fully expected to cover another issue of the series — more specifically, an issue within writer Steve Gerber and artist Pablo Marcos’ run on the titular lead feature — it was “likely to be a minute or two” before that would happen.

Well, in the end it took 745,000 minutes (give or take a couple of thousand), but we’re here at last.  And just in time, too, as TotZ #8 features the last story of Simon Garth, Zombie, produced by the Gerber-Marcos team.

Over the seventeen-month stretch between the first and eighth issues of this black-and-white magazine (which, as you may remember, was one of four such horror-oriented titles launched by Marvel Comics over an equal number of months in the first half of ’73), the format had been tweaked somewhat — old stories reprinted from 1950s Atlas horror comics had been pretty much phased out, for one thing — but the mix between comics stories and illustrated text features remained about the same, with the continuing, 20-plus-pages-long exploits (for lack of a better word) of the Zombie consistently dominating the proceedings.  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