I was always a sucker for a cover like this one whose background was made up of earlier covers. DC took this approach with some regularity on anniversary issues. Now, one really does have to ask whether a #150 is worth this manner of celebration. At the time, this wasn't really a thing. However, since … Continue reading BHOC: BRAVE AND THE BOLD #150
Even by the year 1943, writer Robert Kanigher considered himself a veteran of the comic book business. He'd been selling stories to various publishers beginning around 1940, and while he considered himself to be a bit too good for the medium he was working in, he was both prolific and always on the lookout for … Continue reading How To Make Money Writing For Comic Magazines, Part One
By this point in time, I was still mostly following SUPERMAN and ACTION COMICS, but I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to them. Under editor Julie Schwartz, they both continued to do exactly what they'd been doing since I first started reading comics years earlier--they were utterly dependable to deliver a certain experience, … Continue reading BHOC: ACTION COMICS #495
It's been a while since we dropped one of these on you. So here are more photographs taken over the years depicting practitioners of the medium, both editorial and creators. As usual, there's a lot of Stan Lee. One of the earliest photographs that survives of Jakob Kurtzburg, who would come to be called Jack … Continue reading Comic Creators in the Wild 12
I have a vague memory of running across this issue in a candy store far from my usual haunts in a shopping mall where my parents had gone to get something. I was very much invested in the ongoing storyline featuring Carrion--probably the first such "mystery villain" plotline that I'd ever read--so i was excited … Continue reading BHOC: PETER PARKER, THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #30
It's no great secret that the relationship between editor and scripter Stan Lee and artist and plotter Jack Kirby had grown fraught by 1969. Having at least co-invented the characters who ad saved the company and done the lion's share of the story work that continued to make the Marvel books he worked on shine, … Continue reading Lee & Kirby: THE TROUBLED BIRTH OF THOR #169
This next issue of IRON MAN was something of a pause in the run, a fill-in issue albeit one that had been integrated into the ongoing story narratives. It was also something of a throwback, recounting the events of Iron Man's origin and updating them slightly. I had already read Iron Man's origin in SON … Continue reading BHOC: IRON MAN #122
It's been a little while, so here are a bunch more old photographs depicting either the comic books of yesteryear on sale at newsstands and candy stores across the world or else shots of readers of the era posing with and perusing their latest purchases.
Every once in a while, my mother would go to a more outlying supermarket when she needed something in particular, something that apparently wasn't carried by our local store. In that same shopping mall there was a card store or a candy store that sold comics. And that's where I came across this issue of … Continue reading BHOC: HOWARD THE DUCK #31
We're almost done with our review of MOVIEMAKING ILLUSTRATED, THE COMICBOOK FILMBOOK, which uses examples culled from the pages of Marvel comics to illustrate different points of film theory. This was a ubiquitous tome among comic book artists in the mid-1970s. A trio of IRON MAN panels from Johnny Craig lead off this final section. … Continue reading MOVIEMAKING ILLUSTRATED: THE COMICBOOK FILMBOOK, Part Six
The Tom Brevoort Experience 