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
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
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
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
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
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
When the title was launched by EC in the 1950s, SHOCK SUSPENSTORIES was intended to be something of a sampler series for the line's variety of offerings. So each issue would present an assortment of tales in the horror, science fiction and crime genres. But the stories that gave the series its identity inevitably ran … Continue reading BHOC: EC CLASSIC REPRINTS #8
This issue of WORLD'S FINEST COMICS was another book that I borrowed from my grade school friend Donald Sims to read. I'm almost certain that it wasn't the lead story that made we want to experience it but rather the back-up reprint story. But we'll get there. At this time, WORLD'S FINEST COMICS had transitioned … Continue reading BC: WORLD’S FINEST COMICS #211
It was the horror comics that made EC's reputation, both for good and for ill, and they remained the firm's best-sellers all the way up until the nascent Comics Code put them out of business. Readers were attracted to EC's style in general, but it was in the horror comics, where the bounds of good … Continue reading BHOC: EC CLASSIC REPRINTS #7
To a very great degree, most of the assorted EC anthology titles resembled one another. The only difference between them was genre. So WEIRD FANTASY ran the same sorts of shock ending stories that SHOCK SUSPENSTORIES did, however theirs were played out against a science fiction background. The same was true of THE HAUNT OF … Continue reading BHOC: EC CLASSIC REPRINTS #6
The Tom Brevoort Experience 