Steve Gerber

Tales of the Zombie #1 (July, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

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

Sub-Mariner #62 (June, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In our post last October regarding Sub-Mariner #57, we discussed how Subby’s creator Bill Everett, who’d returned to write and draw the series in 1972 with issue #50, began to have trouble keeping up with the book’s monthly schedule due to chronic health issues; this situation eventually led to occasional fill-ins by other creators, as well as to ongoing help for Everett on both the writing and artistic ends of things.

During this period, the continuing uncertainty over Everett’s status month-to-month was evidenced in the title’s letters pages, where the anonymous Marvel Bullpener(s) responsible for answering reader correspondence would be telling fans in one issue (#55) that Everett probably wouldn’t be handling every story going forward, as “getting back into the swing of a monthly deadline is harder than you might imagine”; then, a few months later (in issue #58), explaining that “due to deadline problems, Bill will now be doing final art over the layouts of Irv Wesley [i.e., Sam Kweskin, who occasionally used the Wesley pen name], while Steve Gerber, working closely with the ebullient Mr. Everett, who will continue to plot the yarns, handles the scripting chores”; and then, finally, acknowledging (in #59) that “Bouncin’ Bill Everett has, indeed, moved on to other projects for Mighty Marvel (the monthly deadline on Subby’s book, sadly, proved too much for the compulsively conscientious Mr. Everett to handle)”.  Read More

Daredevil #100 (June, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

It’s been a while — sixteen months, to be precise — since this blog checked in with Marvel Comics’ Man Without Fear.  Granted, our last Daredevil-themed post was something of a marathon, seeing as how it attempted to cover writer Gerry Conway’s entire “Mister Kline” saga — a complicated (and ultimately unsuccessful) continuity that encompassed not only a whopping eight issues of DD’s own series, but also five installments of Iron Man, and even one random Sub-Mariner — in a single go.  It was a long post, in other words; one in which no one could seriously claim we hadn’t given Matt Murdock and his alter ego a lot of quality time.  Still — it has been a while.  So, before we get on with the business of marking the milestone of ol’ Hornhead’s first hundred issues, we have some catching up to do in regards to what our Scarlet Swashbuckler been up to for the last 1 1/3 years.  Read More

Dracula Lives #1 (May, 1973)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In February, 1973, Marvel Comics published 42 individual comic books — a 75% percent increase in production from the previous year, when the second month of 1972 had seen the company release a mere 24 new issues.  And notwithstanding such a prodigious expansion in production, the company (which had recently surpassed arch-rival DC Comics in sales numbers for the first time ever) wasn’t nearly done.  But Marvel’s next major phase of growth — which in fact began in that very month of February, 1973 — was to be in a different area than the full-color comics line in which it had made its mark.  Read More

Fear #11 (December, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Last month, in our epic Swamp Thing #1 post, we covered at some length the parallel creation and development of Man-Thing and Swamp Thing, two swamp monsters who were both introduced to the comic-book-reading world in early 1971 by the two largest American comics companies, Marvel and DC.  As noted in that post, while both characters received their own ongoing color-comics series in the summer of 1972 — well over a year after their respective introductions in Savage Tales #1 and House of Secrets #92 — Man-Thing managed to make it out of the gate a month before his distinguished competition, with the July release of Fear #10.  Read More

Daredevil #41 (June, 1968)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

My blog post about Daredevil #40 last month ended — as did its subject — by promising that the following month would bring  “The Death of Mike Murdock!”  And if you read that post — or have read, and can recall, the fifty-year-old DD #40 itself — you’ll know that that’s going to be a hard trick for writer Stan Lee, penciler Gene Colan, and inker John Tartaglione to pull off in issue #41 — because, even in the context of the fictional Marvel Universe, “Mike Murdock” is himself a fiction — a false persona invented by blind lawyer Matt Murdock to keep his friends and co-workers, Foggy Nelson and Karen Page, from learning that he, Matt, is actually the superhero Daredevil.  Improbable as it may seem, Matt has managed to convince Karen and Foggy that he has a twin brother named Mike, and that Mike is Daredevil — and, as things have progressed, has also found himself actually enjoying playing the role of the more flamboyant and freewheeling Mike — though he’s beginning to have second thoughts, as we’ll see in a minute.   Read More

Hawkman #13 (Apr.-May, 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Hawkman was the fourth member of the Justice League of America on whose solo adventures I eventually decided to gamble 12 cents, his having been preceded by Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, and the Flash.  (Wonder Woman, the Atom, and Aquaman would eventually follow, though unfortunately Green Arrow had already lost his supporting slot in World’s Finest by this time, and I wouldn’t get around to checking out House of Mystery until well after its doors had shut on the Martian Manhunter.)  Most of what I knew about the Winged Wonder came from Justice League of America #41, where I’d learned that both Hawkman and his wife, the similarly attired and identically powered (but perhaps slightly smarter) Hawkgirl, were alien police officers from the planet Thanagar, operating undercover on Earth for reasons I didn’t quite understand yet. Read More