As I've recounted before, during this period my younger brother Ken had developed a passing fascination with Conan the Barbarian, such that he'd begun to follow the regular monthly comic title. But he also branched out to the other regular source of Conan material available at this point: the black and white magazine SAVAGE SWORD … Continue reading BHOC: SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN #40
I picked up this issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE during my regular weekly comic-buying run to my neighborhood 7-11 on Thursday, another issue of a book that was mostly just there, and which I kept buying largely because of how much I loved the Fantastic Four. In just a couple of years, Moon Knight would become … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #52
Thinking about this episode, and the season it's following up on, I've landed on a bit of an observation. And it is this: the current DOCTOR WHO had entered its version of the 1980s, a period when, concerned about pushback that the show was too dark and violent for young viewers, it instead steered more … Continue reading Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution
Once again, here's a look at writer/editor Robert Kanigher's 1943 how-to book on writing material for the comic book market. It's a good snapshot as to just what the prevailing wisdom was during the Golden Age of Comics in terms of the material that was being generated. That should cover things for the moment. But … Continue reading How To Make Money Writing For Comic Magazines, Part Three
As a kid, I didn't really have any way to get information about what new comic books and related publications would be coming out when. I was dimly aware of fanzines, but I never tried to purchase any on the regular--my meager funds were needed to buy actual comics, after all. So I had no … Continue reading BHOC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN POCKET BOOKS Volume 3
We are once again a week away from the start of a new season of DOCTOR WHO, and so tradition demands that I put down a few of my thoughts about the state-of-play and my expectations for the show going into this new set of episodes. There's been a lot of chatter across the last … Continue reading Doctor Who: Season Pregame
DC in the late 1970s had a bit of a problem, one that they'd start to correct for in the coming years. And that was the changing make-up of the primary audience for comic books. People at DC had realized that there were more older readers than had generally been thought--up to this point, the … Continue reading BHOC: SUPERMAN #335
Continuing our look at editor and writer Robert Kanigher's 1943 volume on writing for the comic books of that era. There's more to come in future weeks as we delve further into this volume.
This was around the point where I dropped off in my brief dalliance with SUPERBOY AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES after following it again for a few issues. Somehow, the future time period and the stakes therein didn't speak to me, and the odd schizophrenic conflict between the futuristic environment and the more dated aspects … Continue reading BHOC: SUPERBOY AND THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES #251
It was clear early on that the most important and successful new super hero character introduced during the Silver Age of Comics was Spider-Man. The work that Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and John Romita had put into the series had paid dividends, and the wall-crawler was soon a worldwide icon able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against … Continue reading 5BC: Five Attempts to Replicate Spider-Man
The Tom Brevoort Experience 