As I've talked about in the past, I was completely invested in the new comic book companies that started to appear once the Direct Sales marketplace had developed enough to make such entities a potentially-profitable concern. In particular, I was a stalwart supporter of Pacific Comics, the firm that had started putting out new series … Continue reading FSC: GROO THE WANDERER #2
In the late 1970s, there likely wasn't a format for comic books that I loved more than the Pocket Books series of early Marvel reprints. Getting chronological collections of the earliest Marvel stories was a godsend to me, something that I never quite thought I'd get to experience, and so I pursued them avidly. But … Continue reading BC: SPIDER-WOMAN POCKET BOOKS
My new Stationery Store source for new comic books proved itself to be valuable even beyond the typical swath of new releases. It also wound up carrying the relatively few remaining Treasury Editions that came out after this point, as well as the new format that DC was expanding into and testing out: digests. The … Continue reading BHOC: DC SPECIAL SERIES #19
One of the more overused concepts in comic books in the 1980s and 1990s was that of "Everything You Know Is Wrong"; which is to say, some new revelation is about to change some or all of the fundamental beliefs about a particular character's backstory or origin. This trope gained popularity after author Alan Moore … Continue reading The First Time Everything You Knew Was Wrong
Another new series that I was given access to for the first time was DC COMICS PRESENTS, the Superman-led team-up title that had been launched during the hoopla of the SUPERMAN THE MOVIE film. I was aware of the book, having seen the many ads for its launch issue, which co-stared my favorite hero, the … Continue reading BHOC: DC COMICS PRESENTS #14
A combination of switching my shopping to the new Stationery Store and having a bit more coin in my pocket (it was during this time that I'd decided to forego school lunches, instead channeling the dollar-a-day I was given by my parents for sustenance into funds for buying more comic books) got me to finally … Continue reading BHOC: BATMAN #316
Among comic book fans, the legend of EC Comics loomed large. Even among readers who'd never experienced the books firsthand, there was an awareness of how the company had set a high benchmark for quality, and how they'd been undone and destroyed by the implementation of the Comics Code. There's been occasional attempts to recapture … Continue reading FSC: TWISTED TALES #1
One of the reasons why I got along so well with my buddy David Steckel is that we tended to like a lot of the same Marvel comics. Like myself, he was a huge fan of the Fantastic Four, and that affection carried over to the golden age Human Torch who was being featured in … Continue reading BC: INVADERS #16
The various assorted issues of SHOGUN WARRIORS have all mostly blurred in my memory after so many years. It was a title that I liked, and which I bought regularly all throughout its 20 issue run. But it wasn't an especially deep series, and its essential structure, which amounted to robots battling giant kaiju-style monsters … Continue reading BHOC: SHOGUN WARRIORS #9
When writers Ralph Macchio and Mark Gruenwald took over the reins of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, the series that featured stories of the Thing teaming up with a diverse assortment of other Marvel superstars, they decided to challenge themselves. They didn't really like the contemporaneous FANTASTIC FOUR era, so they set out to make MTIO a better … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #56
