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
In the early 1980s, after having spent a couple of years working outside of the field in animation, Jack Kirby was making a bit of a comeback. Pacific Comics, one of the new independent publishers that had begun releasing titles into the emerging Direct sales market of comic book specialty stories had agreed to publish … Continue reading FSC: SILVER STAR #1
As I've related before, my buddy David Steckel had inherited a bunch of assorted comic books from older cousins who had outgrown them, and so his haphazard collection reached all the way back into the 1960s in a scattershot fashion. Among the books that he had, and which he let me borrow and read at … Continue reading BC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #5
MARVEL SUPER-HEROES continued in reprinting Incredible Hulk stories from a couple short years earlier, but which were old enough that they were still new to me. To be honest, I often enjoyed these older tales more than the new ones appearing in the Jade Giant's current series--that isn't surprising, I had a real connection to … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL SUPER-HEROES #84
The final series that got launched under the DEFIANT comics banner was PRUDENCE & CAUTION. Like the previous DOGS OF WAR, this title was also a direct spin-off of the company's core WARRIORS OF PLASM book. And as I said when talking about DOGS OF WAR, there doesn't seem to have been any indication that … Continue reading Brand Echh: PRUDENCE & CAUTION #1
I was very surprised to come across this second volume of Doctor Strange adventures in the Pocket Books line of paperback reprints in a local bookstore. These releases had seemed to have been tied to the appearances of the Marvel characters on television, and while the initial Doctor Strange volume had been released to capitalize … Continue reading BHOC: DOCTOR STRANGE POCKET BOOKS Volume 2
A few years back, I wound up on an X-MEN convention panel along with Louise Simonson, and I was able to express just how impossible a bar she'd set for everybody who came after her as an editor on that particular line. In the space of a very short time, she'd finished up the DARK … Continue reading FSC: MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVEL #5
