While the early days of Marvel Comics were explosive and ultimately game-changing for the field, on a conceptual level they were not always quite as revolutionary as they sometimes seemed. A lot of the appeal of the line came down to the manner in which familiar ideas were executed, rather than the ideas themselves being … Continue reading The First Watcher
YELLOW CLAW was one of the strangest series published by Marvel, then Atlas, in the 1950s. it feels like a throwback to an earlier time, an era when "yellow peril" adventure stories about Dr. Fu Manchu and his many knock-offs were big business in the pulp magazines of the day. Having done a little bit … Continue reading The First Marvel Mutants
In the early 1940s when war raged across the globe, comic book sales were at an all-time high, thanks in large part to them being one of the few entertainment mediums that were available to entertain children. Sure, there were radio programs broadcast in the afternoon, and the Saturday Morning Matinee at the theater that … Continue reading The First Spider Woman
I had a couple of people rise to the occasion and come back to me with examples of even earlier comic book letters pages than the one that we looked at last week. https://tombrevoort.com/2023/10/21/the-first-comic-book-letters-page/ So I wanted to give these some space here as well, to make sure the record was straight. Comic book historian … Continue reading The First Comic Book Letters Page Redux
Scanned by the Authentic History Center If you were a comic book reader at any time throughout the 1960s through the 1990s, each issue of whatever title you happened to be reading carrying a letters page in which members of the readership could write in and share their opinions about the stories they were consuming … Continue reading The First Comic Book Letters Page
By 1949, the sun was setting for most of the great super heroes of the Golden Age of Comics. In the postwar period, public tastes had shifted to other genres and subject matter in terms of what was popular in the comic book medium. In particular, horror, crime, western, teen humor and romance comics had … Continue reading The Last Bulletman Story
After Superman had opened the floodgates and showed publishers that there was money to be made in comic books by putting out the adventures of costumed heroes, Fawcett jumped into the field with both feet. They were an established publisher already, and so had staff and connections in place to produce and distribute their new … Continue reading The First Bulletman Story
A while ago, when I ran a piece on the first appearance of Captain Comet, certain fans were upset that I'd labeled it as the first Silver Age super hero. And I get what they're saying--the specific codifications of the different eras of comics are hardly universally agreed-upon, and pieces like that one do make … Continue reading The Last Captain Comet Story
It's a fact of comic book publishing that many of the key names of characters have, over the years, been recycled from earlier sources. So while the Marvel Comics Doctor Strange doesn't really have anything to do with his earlier namesake, and while Steve Ditko and Stan Lee were in no way influenced by this … Continue reading The First Dr. Strange Story
KID KOMICS was a bit of a hybrid production of Timely Comics, at least at the start. Launched in 1943, it split its focus between super hero adventure strips like the cover-spotlighted Captain Wonder and comedy series such as the unfortunate Whitewash and Knuckles, starring two of the Young Allies. Eventually, within a few issues, … Continue reading The First Subbie Story
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