Super heroes as a genre were on their way out as the 1960s turned into the 1970s and the super hero fad that had driven success throughout the silver age fell away. But this meant that publishers were more encouraged to experiment than they had been previously in an attempt to stave off cancellation--and every … Continue reading 5BC: The Five Best Comic Books of 1970
When I did the initial wave of these 5 Best write-ups concerning the best comic books of each year, I confined myself to just the years when I was a fan and a reader, 1973-1989. I didn't think that it was proper for me to go beyond that, as I was a participant in the … Continue reading 5BC: The Five Best Comic Books of 1972
The SUPERHERO COMIC PACK that I got for Christmas in 1978 included a copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #185, but I'd already purchased that issue during a previous trip to Heroes World, so it wasn't of any great use to me. https://tombrevoort.com/2020/08/09/bhoc-fantastic-four-185/ Also of limited interest to me was this issue of CONAN THE BARBARIAN #77. … Continue reading BHOC: CONAN #77
Another gift that I received on that Christmas of 1978 was this SUPERHERO GIFT PACK. Ordered from I believe the Sears Catalogue, this Gift Pack was essentially a box containing ten recent-but-not-new Marvel Comics. There may have been a poster as well--I had a Sal Buscema-illustrated Marvel poster that hung in my bedroom at around … Continue reading BHOC: SUPERHERO GIFT PACK
I've spoken before about how the very first comic shop I ever encountered, the Heroes World outlet in Levittown, New York, was situated in the same shopping complex where my father worked for Chase Manhattan Bank. What this meant practically is that I could occasionally prevail upon him to stop by the store on his … Continue reading BHOC: FANTASTIC FOUR #102
This issue of CONAN also came to me inside of a plastic 3-Bag purchased at a department store or toy store. As we've covered before, I wasn't at all interested in sword and sorcery comics--they felt too much like history class to me--and so I typically would have traded this book to somebody for something … Continue reading BHOC: CONAN #79
Here's another book that came into my hands through parlay with my grade school friend Donald Sims. And boy, you can't imagine a cover on a comic today having such an overt plug for a film not connected in any way with the publisher. But in the 1970s, it was fine, all part of the … Continue reading BHOC: PETER PARKER, THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #2
Throughout the 1970s and beyond, one of the foremost new genres in comics turned out to be sword and sorcery. Inspired by the paperback book sales of Conan and his ilk in the mid-1960s, Marvel licensed the character from the Robert E. Howard Estate. After a slow start, the series really took off in a … Continue reading The Coming of Crom!
This is another comic that I'm pretty sure I got from my grade school friend Donald Sims in some long-forgotten trade. We would often swap comics, and I got a number of books from his collection that I really wanted that way. He was pretty much the only other person I knew during this time … Continue reading BHOC: THOR #253
It's a difficult thing to talk about the work of Dave Sim these days. For a start, he's fallen largely into obscurity since his masterwork, the 300-issue CEREBUS series, wrapped up in 2003. And the back half of that run was tainted by Sim's growing misogyny, his strange and often-deliberately-provocative belief that women had been … Continue reading Perfect Game – CEREBUS #36
The Tom Brevoort Experience 