This is the back half of the fourth and concluding installment of the Final Fantastic Four story that Italian creator Leonardo Ortolani produced for the tenth issue of the Italian fanzine MADE IN USA in 1994. It was set immediately after the last FF issues produced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and was intended … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Ortolani: The Last Fantastic Four Story, Part Five
This is the fourth and final installment of the final Fantastic Four story that Italian creator Leonardo Ortolani produced for the tenth issue of the Italian fanzine MADE IN USA in 1994. It was set immediately after the final FF story produced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and was intended as a climactic finale … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Ortolani: The Last Fantastic Four Story, Part Four
Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby famously introduced the mighty Thor in JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #83 in 1962. But before that, there were a number of antecedents for that story and that character, based as he was on actual Norse mythology. For example, here's an obscure story from OUT OF THIS WORLD #11 in … Continue reading The Hammer of Thor
This is the third installment of Italian creator Leonardo Ortolani's fan-created wrap-up of the FANTASTIC FOUR mythos created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. This chapter was published in the fanzine MADE IN USA #9 in 1993. We're getting to the meat of Leo's Alan Moore-style reinterpretation of the events of the series here. As … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Ortolani: The Last Fantastic Four Story, Part Three
It's been a little while, but who could ever forget our old friend Ego-Man, the ridiculously inside baseball strip parodying Stan Lee in the pages of SICK Magazine in the late 1970s. Exactly who these stories were meant for (apart from creators Arnold Drake and Jack Sparling) is anybody's guess, but they didn't run for … Continue reading Brand Echh – Sick #124 – The Death of Ego-Man
This is the second installment of Italian creator Leonardo Ortolani's four-part fan-drawn final adventure of the Lee and Kirby Fantastic Four. It was originally published in the fanzine MADE IN USA #8 in Italy in 1993, and hasn't ever been made available in English as it was an unlicensed production. While the first episode was … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Ortolani: The Last Fantastic Four Story, Part Two
This is a bit of a forgotten masterpiece, both because it saw limited distribution, and because it was published in a non-English speaking country. Between 1992 and 1994, in the pages of the Italian fanzine MADE IN USA, devoted to American comics, cartoonist Leonardo Ortolani (often better known by his simple signature, Leo) was such … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Ortolani: The Last Fantastic Four Story, Part One
EC Comics were never the biggest sellers even during their heyday, but they were consistently the market leader in terms of the quality of the material they were routinely putting out and the manner in which they attracted a dedicated audience of somewhat-older readers. There's a reason why those five years' worth of EC Comics … Continue reading THE LAST MAN
One of the things that John Romita used to say is that Stan Lee based a lot of his theories on how to grab comic book audiences and how to speak to the readership from Charles Biro, who co-edited the Lev Gleason line of titles in the 1940s and 50s. Biro was a pioneer who … Continue reading Daredevil is Exposed
I've got a piece percolating on the assorted roads to Marvel's Thor--but before I get to that (and because it would be too unwieldy to post the whole of this story amidst a whole other article) I thought I would whet your appetite by posting the first Thor story done in comic books. When the … Continue reading The First Thor Story
