BHOC: IRON MAN #124

We're at the point where IRON MAN started to get really good under the creative team of writer David Michelinie, penciler John Romita Jr. and inker and co-plotter Bob Layton. The transformation sort of snuck up on me as a reader at the time. I found that I was enjoying IRON MAN more and more, … Continue reading BHOC: IRON MAN #124

Lost Crossovers: AIRBOY v3 #12

Airboy was one of the more popular and long-lasting series of the Golden Age of Comics. Created by Charles Biro in the pages of AIR FIGHTERS COMICS #2, Airboy was young Davy Nelson, the heir to a robotic batwinged plane named Birdie developed by his late father, who used it to fight the Axis in … Continue reading Lost Crossovers: AIRBOY v3 #12

BHOC: FANTASTIC FOUR #208

Eventually, my subscription copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #208 turned up in my mailbox, inevitably a week or two after copies had appeared on the spinner rack, frustrating me. This is about the point where the series started to come off the rails a little bit, in part due to the fact that a space epic … Continue reading BHOC: FANTASTIC FOUR #208

BC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #134

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN continued to be Marvel's most popular and consistently best-selling title throughout the 1970s, as the character began to have a larger footprint across popular culture. So it wasn't any surprise that my grade school buddy Donald Sims had a number of issues in his comic book collection. Like the couple of Fourth World … Continue reading BC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #134

BHOC: DEFENDERS #73

I know that I say this every time we roll around to another issue, but it's positively baffling to me just how long I continued to buy DEFENDERS despite not really enjoying the title for years. I'm sure that some of this was simply having the available funds--I was never confronted with a need to … Continue reading BHOC: DEFENDERS #73

Lee & Ditko & Orlando & Rockwell: Another New Discovery in the Multiple Car Crash of TALES TO ASTONISH #61

Here's some more new business building on old business that has just cropped up. It's been a number of years now since I first wrote about the catastrophic journey of getting the Giant-Man story that saw print in TALES TO ASTONISH #61 to print: https://tombrevoort.com/2020/10/31/lee-ditko-orlando-rockwell-the-multiple-car-crash-of-tales-to-astonish-61/ And also a few years since Dick Rockwell's unused splash … Continue reading Lee & Ditko & Orlando & Rockwell: Another New Discovery in the Multiple Car Crash of TALES TO ASTONISH #61

BHOC: EC CLASSIC REPRINTS #10

And finally we come to the last of the box of eight classic EC reprints issues by the short-lived East Coast Comix organization that I purchased from the Superhero Merchandise catalog. Reading through this lot was somewhat transformative for me, in that it expanded my tastes just a little bit. I was still primarily interested … Continue reading BHOC: EC CLASSIC REPRINTS #10

BC: SHAZAM #4

I had continued to read through the accumulated run of SHAZAM that I had borrowed from my grade school pal Donald Sims across the course of a couple of days. The stories never quite captured the flavor of the character's original run, and there was an undercurrent that the creators involved simply didn't buy into … Continue reading BC: SHAZAM #4

BHOC: EC CLASSIC REPRINTS #9

If you were to ask me today about what constituted the best work that EC put out during its short but well-remembered time, I'd say without question the war titles edited and overseen by Harvey Kurtzman. They followed the EC tradition of tightly-plotted stories with punch endings, but they also had a point of view … Continue reading BHOC: EC CLASSIC REPRINTS #9

Lost Crossovers: ADVENTURE COMICS #85

This is a little bit of a cheat, but only a little bit in my eyes, as the crossover element in this story is big and prevalent, even though it doesn't quite entirely qualify as a bona fide crossover in the way most others do. As we've spoken about in the past, DC (then known … Continue reading Lost Crossovers: ADVENTURE COMICS #85