Eternals #6 (December, 1976)

It’s been a while since we last discussed artist/writer/editor Jack Kirby’s Eternals in this space — so, as will come as no surprise to regular readers of the blog, prior to jumping in to the issue referred to both by this post’s title and by its featured cover image (the work of Kirby and Frank Giacoia, by the way), we’re going to spend some time catching up with the episodes of the ongoing saga which had appeared in the intervening months between the release of issues #2 and #6, way back in 1976… beginning, naturally enough, with issue #3, whose cover (also by Kirby and Giacoia) is shown at left.

Eternals #3’s “The Devil in New York!” (featuring the inks of John Verpoorten, who’d also done those honors for the title’s first two issues) picks up right where the previous installment had left off — which, in case you need a reminder, was with the full-page reveal of the awesome Arishem, leader of the Fourth Host of the space gods known as the Celestials.  The present chapter opens as “Ike Harris” — originally introduced in issue #1 as a mere guide to archaeologist Daniel Damian and his daughter Margo, but who’d quickly outed himself as Ikaris, a member of an immortal, super-powered sibling race to Homo sapiens who call themselves Eternals — poses the question to his fellow Eternal, Ajak: “Does this Arishem herald the coming of disastrous times, such as befell man in the distant past?”  Read More

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

Captain Marvel #29 (November, 1973)

As I’ve shared in previous posts, your humble blogger was a relative latecomer to Jim Starlin’s run on Captain Marvel.  While I’d bought a few issues of the title way back in 1969, I had abandoned it after Roy Thomas and Gil Kane’s Fawcett-inspired makeover in issue #17 and hadn’t paid much attention to Mar-Vell since, save for his guest appearances in Avengers.  For my younger self in the summer of 1973, Jim Starlin was the guy who’d drawn a pretty good “Doctor Strange” story in Marvel Premiere earlier in the year, just before Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner took over that feature and made it really good.  But then, he showed up in the middle of Daredevil #105, having drawn (and almost certainly also plotted) an origin for that issue’s ostensible villainess, Moondragon, which introduced me for the first time to the epic storyline concerning Saturn’s moon of Titan, and its most dangerous denizen, Thanos, that the young creator had been chronicling in Captain Marvel since coming on board that series with issue #25, back in December, 1972.  And then, only a couple of weeks after that, Marvel Feature #12 had arrived in spinner racks, with an even more Thanos-centric yarn, this one drawn (and also at least co-plotted) all the way through by Starlin.  If DD #105 hadn’t already 100% convinced me to check out Starlin’s Captain Marvel the first chance I got, MF #12 surely must have clinched the sale.  Read More

Avengers #100 (June, 1972)

The final panel of Avengers #99 had promised that “this hour” would see an imminent invasion of “the hallowed halls of Olympus!!“, as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes prepared to mount a rescue of their amnesiac comrade, Hercules, who’d just been snatched away by servants of Ares, the Greco-Roman God of War.  So you’d naturally expect the next issue to begin with such a scene — or if not, then maybe a scene of something happening simultaneously to the invasion, just to draw out the suspense a little bit longer.

As we’ll see momentarily, that’s not quite what happens in the opening pages of the Avengers’ hundredth issue.  But our heroes’ delay in launching their assault on the home of the gods turns out to have some justification behind it.  After all, it takes a little time to gather all of the characters on view in artist Barry Windsor-Smith’s instant-classic cover image — a first-time-ever assemblage of every Marvel character who’d ever been an Avenger as of March, 1972. Read More