Fifty years and three months ago, DC Comics’ releases for November, 1974 featured this house ad, hailing the upcoming debut of a new hero…
So new a hero, in fact, that the guy apparently didn’t even have a name yet. Read More
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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In February, 1974, the X-Men hadn’t appeared in a new story in their own title in over four years — but while gone, they were hardly forgotten. (Actually, they weren’t even gone, since their book had been resurrected as a reprint title by Marvel’s then-publisher, Martin Goodman, eight months after he’d cancelled the series with issue #66. But you know what I mean.) That’s because a number of people working for Marvel just plain liked the characters, regardless of their allegedly limited commercial viability; and, as writer Steve Englehart puts it in his 2009 preface to Marvel Masterworks — The X-Men, Vol. 8, “the Marvel Universe was a coherent entity, so the X-Men continued to exist in it even if they had no comic to call their own.” Read More
It’s been over a year since we last looked in on our favorite teenage werewolf, Jack Russell, so we have a bit of catching up to do before we get into our discussion of today’s main topic. Following issue #3‘s conclusion of the extended plotline concerning the Darkhold — the mystical bound volume that had acted as a MacGuffin for most of the series’ early run — subsequent installments had seen Jack involved in a succession of one or two-part adventures that usually involved his younger sister Lissa (who learned Jack’s lycanthropic secret in issue #4) and/or his best friend Jack Cowan (who had to wait until issue #12 to get clued in regarding that vital info). On the creative end, the feature’s original writer-artist team of Gerry Conway and Mike Ploog, who’d been on board ever since the Werewolf’s three-issue tryout in Marvel Spotlight, came to an end with #4; while Ploog remained the book’s penciller for three more issues, Conway was succeeded by Len Wein, who served as writer through #8. That last issue was drawn by Werner Roth as his one and only effort on the title; the next saw the arrival of a new artist — Tom Sutton — who was joined by an “old” writer — Gerry Conway. (As a side note, the same month that Werewolf by Night #8 came out saw the Werewolf meet Spider-Man in Marvel Team-Up #12 — a Conway-Wein collaboration that firmly established Jack Russell’s adventures as taking place in the main Marvel Comics continuity.) Read More
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
When last we left Adam Warlock at the end of our Warlock #5 post back in January, the superheroic would-be savior of Counter-Earth had just saved thousands of Northern Californians from dying, either as a result of bomb test-caused earthquakes and flooding, or from the fire of armed missiles — the “Deathbirds” — which the same test had inadvertently triggered… only to have the very man responsible for ordering the bomb test in the first place, President Rex Carpenter, subsequently declare him a menace on national television.
The next issue of the series, sporting a cover by John Romita, picks up very soon after those events, as Adam finds himself under assault by the United States military. Warlock #6 also sees the partial return of Mike Friedrich as the book’s writer, providing the finished script over a plot by Ron Goulart (who’d written issue #5), who in his turn worked from an “idea” contributed by Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas.
Additionally, issue #6 also features a major changing of the guard on the series’ artistic side, as Bob Brown replaces Gil Kane as penciller. Kane, who’d co-created the feature with Thomas back in Marvel Premiere #1 (Apr., 1972) and had drawn every installment but one since then, would go on to provide one more cover for the book before its cancellation, but was otherwise done with Warlock as of #5. 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
Back in November, 2021, we took a look at Marvel Premiere #1, in which Marvel’s new “Warlock” feature made its debut. As we discussed at the time, that first installment found writer Roy Thomas and artist Gil Kane dusting off a few old Stan Lee-Jack Kirby concepts from 1960s issues of Fantastic Four and Thor and combining them to create the most overt religious allegory that had yet appeared in superhero comics. In doing so, they were clearly seeking to tap into the cultural zeitgeist exemplified by the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar both topping both the pop album charts and selling out shows on Broadway, and by the youth-driven “Jesus Movement” being featured on the cover of Time magazine, all of which happened in 1971. Read More
In previous posts, we’ve discussed a couple of early “unofficial” crossovers between DC and Marvel Comics that appeared in 1969 and 1970. Both involved an issue each of DC’s Justice League of America (#75 and #87) and Avengers (#70 and #85), and both were built on a conceit of each super-team series parodying the stars of the rival company’s book during the same month. Part of the fun — at least for the creators responsible — was its mildly illicit nature, as none of the writers involved (JLA‘s Denny O’Neil and Mike Friedrich, Avengers‘ Roy Thomas) informed their bosses (DC’s Julius Schwartz, Marvel’s Stan Lee) what they were up to. The results were perhaps something of a mixed bag (both as crossovers and simply as stories), but for the most part, these books made for a good time for comic-book fans. Read More
If you read my post about Vampirella #18 back in June, you may recall that I promised at that time that I would eventually let you know how things ultimately turned out for Count Dracula, who’d begun a quest for redemption that was just getting started when that issue’s installment of the magazine’s titular lead feature reached its end. Well, faithful readers, the time has come at last. But please be advised that in order to do so properly, I’m first going to need to fill you in on the key events of the storyline’s chapters from Vampirella #19 and #20, so that what transpires in issue #21’s “Slitherers of the Sand!” will land, dramatically speaking, in the way its creators intended. Also, as it turns out, this issue doesn’t really fully resolve the Dracula arc either, so we’re also going to be taking a quick look at some later appearances of the Count in Eerie as well as in Vampirella, just so we can say we’ve wrapped things up properly.
Oh, and of course we’ll also be covering the other three stories published in Vampirella #21 — the ones that don’t have anything to do with the lead feature or with Dracula. After all, I wouldn’t want to shortchange you on that material, would I? Read More