It's been a while since we did one of these round-ups of vintage Marvel merchandise from years past, primarily the formative 1960s and 1970s. So what say we look at a few more pieces of this stuff? This INCREDIBLE HULK/AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ADVENTURE CITY playset from 1978 features cardboard stand-ups of teh Green Goliath, the wall-crawler … Continue reading Make Mine Marvel Memorabilia 3
This was yet another back issue that I picked up during my first trip to the Batcave, the very first full-on comic book specialty store that I had ever been in. I was drawn to this issue for a single, specific reason: somewhere in my travels, I had learned that this issue reprinted the 1950s … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL SUPER-HEROES #20
This issue of MARVEL TEAM-UP was yet another book that I got from my comic reading grade school friend Don Sims. And it was a weird issue of MARVEL TEAM-UP as well, the concluding chapter to a four-part saga the rest of which I wouldn't read for many years, and which is about as far … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TEAM-UP #44
There's a long-storied tradition among comics of having the writers and artists of those stories themselves be depicted within the very pages they are producing--creating an idealized heightened version of reality. While this was common across all companies, nobody did it as often or as brazenly as the creators working for Marvel. They truly went … Continue reading 5BC: Five Times Marvel Self-Mythologized
When she first arrived at DC as the new publisher, Jenette Kahn instituted a pet format that she hoped would help reverse DC's fortunes in the mainstream newsstand market: the Dollar Comic. As it said right in the name, a Dollar Comic cost a buck, but you got an awful lot of material for that … Continue reading BHOC: BATMAN FAMILY #17
1989 was the year in which I entered the field, so this will be the final installment of this topic, as I don't think it's possible to be objective past this point. Grant Morrison begins his revelatory run on DOOM PATROL by hearkening back to the earliest stories and remembering that thees characters are more … Continue reading 5BC: Five Best Comics of 1989
It was one of the most exciting days of my young comic book collecting career. I found it in the bookstore in the Smithhaven Mall, a regular stop whenever my family went out shopping there, which was often. I had no idea that it was coming out--which is strange, because ads for it appeared in … Continue reading BHOC: FANTASTIC FOUR POCKET BOOKS
1981 was a year of many anniversaries, and many anniversary issues as a result. This 25th anniversary issue of FLASH was built around a premise that was even then a bit old: Barry Allen wakes up in a hospital room, his body paralyzed and horribly scarred from the accident when lightning struck his police laboratory. … Continue reading 5BC: Five Best Comics of 1981
The other issue of MARVEL’S GREATEST COMICS that had turned up in my drug store’s big bin of slightly-older comics was this one, the start of a four-part Doctor Doom sequence inspired by the television series The Prisoner. I hadn’t seen the Prisoner at the time when I first bought this issue, so it seemed … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL’S GREATEST COMICS #66
The Tom Brevoort Experience 