The original artwork for classic stories is always of interest to me. There's a bunch of information that we can discover from it. And even apart from that, it's often fun just to see how these stories were originally drawn, without the added intermediary step of them having to be reproduced and printed in a … Continue reading Lee & Kirby: The First New Captain America Story – From The Original Art
MISS AMERICA MAGAZINE had started out as simply MISS AMERICA COMICS, solo-starring the patriotic character then being featured in Timely's MARVEL MYSTERY COMICS as well. But buying tastes were beginning to change in the marketplace, and so publisher Martin Goodman switched gears, transitioning MISS AMERICA into a hybrid magazine aimed at girls. The super-heroine would … Continue reading The First Patsy Walker Story
The Two-Gun Kid was one of the longest-running characters in the Marvel line. He was created in 1948 in TWO-GUN KID #1 and over the next three decades he'd appear in not only his own magazine but also in stories featured in other western anthologies. This original Two-Gun Kid wasn't a masked cowboy, but rather … Continue reading The Last Two-Gun Kid Story
A short while back, we covered an issue of SUPERMAN that I had purchased in 1988 as a part of my big Windfall Comics buy. That issue featured a single full-length Superman adventure rather than the usual three shorter stories that the title typically ran. (That story was broken up into three discrete chapters so … Continue reading The First Book-Length Superman Adventure
The Blue Beetle is one of the longest running character-concepts in the world of comic books. The character was initially conceived in 1939 as a take-off of the Green Hornet, but the approach swiftly changed to better suit the needs of a burgeoning marketplace. The Beetle got a regulation super hero costume and even a … Continue reading The Last Blue Beetle Story
Amazingly, in the wake of the hugely successful BLACK PANTHER film and the impact it carried worldwide, people around the globe now know and recognize the name Wakanda as that of the fictional African nation which was never conquered, and which is protected from all outside forces by the lineage of the Black Panther. The … Continue reading The First Wakanda Story
As we've covered in a number of different earlier posts, the chain of causality which led to the creation of the Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel Comics' signature creation, is long and tangled. Every once in a while I see people make reference to this story in relation to it. And in fact, there isn't any direct … Continue reading The First Spider Man Story
Given the wide and bizarre assortment of super heroes and adventure characters tossed off during the Golden Age of Comics, it's small wonder that there are antecedents of a kind for all manner of characters who, in a later incarnation, went on to prominence. So it was with the Black Panther, who made his first … Continue reading The First Black Panther Story
We've spoken before about the launch of Captain Atom in the pages of Charlton's SPACE ADVENTURES series at the very beginning of the 1960s. The character failed to catch on at that point, and was eventually pulled from the series. That perhaps should have been the end of things. But the super hero fad just … Continue reading The First New Captain Atom Story
As the Marvel line began to grow in the 1960s, editor Stan Lee decided that he had a problem. He based this supposition on some of the fan mail that he'd been receiving no doubt--mail that would ask questions about how a given Marvel character could be in the midst of life-or-death jeopardy in one … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Simon: Captain America Before and After 1
The Tom Brevoort Experience 