Both my friend David Steckel and I were huge FANTASTIC FOUR fans--it was our favorite comic book series at the time we met, and one of the things that bonded us together. So in particular, it was issues of FANTASTIC FOUR and its reprint title MARVEL'S GREATEST COMICS that we borrowed back and forth, broadening … Continue reading BC: MARVEL’S GREATEST COMICS #64
When writers Ralph Macchio and Mark Gruenwald took over the reins of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, the series that featured stories of the Thing teaming up with a diverse assortment of other Marvel superstars, they decided to challenge themselves. They didn't really like the contemporaneous FANTASTIC FOUR era, so they set out to make MTIO a better … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #56
It was at some point around this time that my local postal carrier delivered my subscription copy of the latest issue of FANTASTIC FOUR--though not before it had already gone on sale and was available at my local outlet. Not buying the book and waiting for my copy proved to be difficult, especially after other … Continue reading BHOC: FANTASTIC FOUR #210
On my unanticipated trip to the Batcave comic book shop that weekend, I needed to make my meager funds stretch to their furthest. There was a cornucopia of back issues laid out before me. But I had only limited money with which to make my purchases. And so one of the books I wound up … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TALES #20
I had written about this a little bit before, in the context of a broader review of this early issue of FANTASTIC FOUR: https://tombrevoort.com/2022/08/07/wc-fantastic-four-31/ But creator Larry Lieber had held onto a discarded page from this story for all these years. I'd seen a bad photocopy of the page at the time I wrote that … Continue reading Lee & Kirby: An Excised Page From FANTASTIC FOUR #31
At the time when I started getting into Marvel Comics in the late 1970s, WHAT IF was considered something of a special book, at least among my small circle of comic-reading acquaintances. For one thing, it was oversized, meaning that it was both thicker and meatier than the average comic of that period, more like … Continue reading BC: WHAT IF #1
Here's another book that I picked up on my post-grade school graduation trip to Bush's Hobbies in Ronkonkoma. I had been slowly filling in a complete run of MARVEL COLLECTORS' ITEM CLASSICS, the title that eventually changed its name to MARVEL'S GREATEST COMICS and in which the earliest FANTASTIC FOUR stories were reprinted. I wanted … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL COLLECTORS’ ITEM CLASSICS #19
I always preferred buying original books to reprints, in part because many of the reprints of the times were cut down to fit shorter page counts. But this didn't really become a major issue for me for another year or so yet. At the time that I made this post-grade-school-graduation trip to Bush's Hobbies, I … Continue reading BHOC: GIANT-SIZE FANTASTIC FOUR #5
My buddy David Steckel and I were both enormous fans of the Fantastic Four, which was one of the things that brought us together in the first place. So we'd regularly let one another borrow and read the assorted issues that we had that he other did not. Which is how I wound up taking … Continue reading BC: GIANT-SIZE FANTASTIC FOUR #3
As I've mentioned before, my friend David Steckel, whom I'd met through the Sachem School District's gifted student program, was a much a fan of the Fantastic Four as I was. What's more, he had inherited a bunch of comics from an older relative who had outgrown them, so he had an assortment of older … Continue reading BC: FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #10
