People seem to have really enjoyed that first column written by Pete Hamill about a comic book collector whose life goes wrong, so I also wanted to share this earlier piece by Hamill, which was dug up by Ken Quattro. This piece saw print a decade earlier, at a time when the Silver Age of … Continue reading Batman Got Busted In Brooklyn
It's relatively commonly known that rock newspaper Rolling Stone did a big cover story on the Marvel Comics phenomenon in 1972, emblazoning a Herb Trimpe Hulk on the cover of the magazine. What is less known (and I didn't realize this myself until just recently) is that the United Kingdom version of Rolling Stone ran … Continue reading Marvel Comix: Rolling Stone (UK edition) October 18, 1969
I first read this Pete Hamill column when it was first published in the New York Daily News on June 5, 1978. In those days, I read and collected any mainstream articles about comic books that I came across, keeping them all in a three-ring binder, scrapbook-style. This piece in particular always stuck with me … Continue reading A Sad Life That Was Dedicated Entirely To Comics
1972 was an election year, and as the various campaigns got underway during this tumultuous period in American history, the Sunday magazine of the NEW YORK TIMES reached out to a bevy of top cartoonists to provide single page strips featuring their characters and commenting on the battles being waged in the political arena. For … Continue reading Spider-Man Takes On The Candidates
Superman has been with us for more that 80 years at this point. He's become an icon, he was the flash-point for the success of an entire industry and he set the standard and the style for the myriad of costumed super heroes who would come after him. He's been the subject of a myriad … Continue reading The Greatest Superman Story Ever Told
Here's another interesting novelty sent my way by Mark Waid. It's got a bit of an interesting history to it, which is why I'm featuring it. We're going to look at a 1940s Captain Marvel story the way it saw print in Canada back in 1942. As you'll see, this wasn't a straight reprint of … Continue reading The Canadian Captain Marvel Comics #10
Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies was a documentary comic strip that ran in the pages of the Village Voice for just over twenty years starting in 1974. Its creator and author, Stan Mack, created the strip by overhearing and transcribing conversations between real people and then dramatizing them on the page. And in this particular … Continue reading Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies: Inside Marvel Comics
As many know, and as we've talked about here in the past, the Marvel characters first came to television in 1966, in the form of a syndicated animated series produced by Grantray-Lawrence. The series ran five days a week and featured five Marvel characters: Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Captain America and the Sub-Mariner. But … Continue reading The Imaginary Spider-Man Episodes of the Grantray-Lawrence Marvel Super Heroes 1966 Cartoon
The wrap-up to our sequence on this self-published book Stan Lee put out in 1947 giving detailed information about the comic book business (albeit detailed information aimed at a relatively young readership.) Al Jaffee just celebrated his 100th birthday last month, and was a regular and celebrated contributor to MAD Magazine for many decades, responsible … Continue reading Secrets Behind the Comics 6
More from the pages of this how-to pamphlet that Stan Lee self-published in 1947 Morris Weiss was a writer and artist for Timely in 1947, and here his working day is fictionalized by Stan. Apparently Morris and his wife Blanche would routinely talk about Stan Lee day to day. This definition of a synopsis is … Continue reading Secrets Behind the Comics 5
