I had a weird love/hate relationship with BRAVE AND THE BOLD throughout almost the entirety of its existence. I bought the book more often than not, the matching up of the Caped Crusader with other stalwarts from across the DC Universe proving too enticing too often. Plus, there was the superlative artwork of B&B artistic … Continue reading BHOC: BRAVE AND THE BOLD #147
Every so often, BRAVE AND THE BOLD would pair the Caped Crusader up with one of DC's war comics heroes such as Sgt. Rock. In some instances, the stories would be set in contemporary times, with the guest star seemingly well-preserved despite the passage of years. In other instances, Batman would be alive and active … Continue reading BHOC: BRAVE AND THE BOLD #146
This is another comic whose contents I barely remember, whose story didn't really make much of an impact on me, and that I likely bought simply because it was there and I had the forty cents to spare. I was still lukewarm on BRAVE AND THE BOLD in general--it still felt "off" to me as … Continue reading BHOC: BRAVE AND THE BOLD #145
In the late 1970s, before he would go on to be hired by Marvel Comics as an assistant editor, Mark Gruenwald published two issues of his fanzine OMNIVERSE. Unlike most other fan publications, OMNIVERSE was dedicated to examining a single principle when it came to comic book fiction: the consistency of continuity across fictional realities, … Continue reading OMNIVERSE #1
I bought a lot of issues of BRAVE AND THE BOLD (or as this cover would have it, THE NEW BIG BRAVE AND THE BOLD) despite the fact that I was never really all that wild about it. I liked the Jim Aparo artwork well enough, and I liked a number of the characters who … Continue reading BHOC: BRAVE AND THE BOLD #144
This issue of BRAVE AND THE BOLD was the first released under the auspices of the DC Explosion, which saw the line increating its cover price to 50 cents a copy from 35 while adding additional pages of material. Here, the Human Target, a feature that briefly ran in the back pages of ACTION COMICS … Continue reading BHOC: BRAVE AND THE BOLD #143
The Marvel revolution of the early Silver Age took those toiling in the field entirely by surprise. That's entirely due to the fact that, prior to 1961, Martin Goodman's publishing enterprise, whether it was known as Timely or Atlas or Marvel had been producers of enormous amounts of shlock. Goodman's professed publishing strategy was to … Continue reading The First Spider-Man Parody
By the mid-1960s, BRAVE AND THE BOLD had morphed into a pretty strange comic book. It had started out, as its name implies, as a venue for stories of adventures in medieval times, starring characters such as the Silent Knight and the Viking Prince. When interest in those sorts of adventures waned, the book segued … Continue reading WC: BRAVE AND THE BOLD #55
As Dave Lister explains to Arnold Rimmer in an early episode of the British science fiction comedy series RED DWARF, "Death isn't the handicap it used to be." Today, it's a given that, in the world of super heroes, death is, at worst, a revolving door, and any character who breathes his or her last … Continue reading 5BC: Five Best Silver Age Character Deaths
This one would have been an impulse purchase, I think, when it arrived at my local 7-11. I wasn't reading BRAVE AND THE BOLD religiously, though I had picked up a number of the recent issues. Typically, it would all depend on who the guest star was, because I'd worked out that the style of … Continue reading BHOC: BRAVE AND THE BOLD #142
The Tom Brevoort Experience 