And another issue of MARVEL'S GREATEST COMICS reprinting Fantastic Four stories from earlier in the group's history, made its way to my regular 7-11 haunt. This era in which there were still monthly reprint titles for most of the major Marvel series was a godsend to me in terms of allowing me to get a … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL’S GREATEST COMICS #78
Well, not really Jim Shooter's directly, not in the same was as the Irwin Donenfeld sales charts we looked at last week. But I'm reasonably certain that I cribbed these newsstand tracking sheets from Jim Shooter's old web page a decade or so back, and he would have been there when they came in--so we'll … Continue reading The Sales Figures of Marvel’s Jim Shooter
Now this is an interesting one to look at, and just a little bit mysterious. Marvel (well, pre-Marvel, they were still operating without a particular company identity at this point for the most part) had launched a revival of their earlier character, the Rawhide Kid, in 1960, a response in part to the popularity of … Continue reading Lee & Kirby: The Two Origins of the Rawhide Kid
You know the drill by this point, right? It's old pictures of comic book creators from back in the day! Bob Layton at a convention, 1980s. Me, Tom Brevoort, and Jack Kirby at a New York convention, 1990. I had only been at Marvel for six months. A trio of photos of Joe Sinnott from … Continue reading Comics Creators in the Wild 6
An awful lot of the production work materials from the comic books created in the formative years of the industry are long gone, discarded as unimportant "work product" on the way to producing finished comic book issues, which were the goal point all along. Fortunately, a lot of the original artwork has survived (though far … Continue reading Lee & Kirby: The Pencils of FANTASTIC FOUR #49
Yes, I know we covered a portion of this issue before, but there's still some fascinating stuff to look at in the other stories contained in FANTASY MASTERPIECES #6. To recap a bit; Marvel had begun reprinting the earliest Captain America adventures from 1941 within the book's pages. But, because the Comics Code had come … Continue reading Your Comics Code at Work: Fantasy Masterpieces #6
I was sampling all sorts of random Marvel books out of my drugstore's Big Bin of Slightly Older Comics. Since they were selling these treasures at five for a dollar, it was always fiscally advantageous to pull five books at a time--if you went to the register with fewer than that, the outcome would depend … Continue reading BHOC: INHUMANS #9
This was another book that I picked up out of my local drugstore's Big Bin of Somewhat Older Comic Books. It wasn't my usual fare on the surface of it--at the time, Marvel had a full line of monster/horror titles, to say nothing of reprints of 1950s Atlas suspense tales and their 1960s giant monster … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL CHILLERS #7
Another batch of vintage photographs of comic book creators taken in years past. As usual, there are a number of these that revolve around Stan Lee, probably the most photographed creator of the era. Roy Thomas wearing the first Spider-Man personal appearance costume at a comic convention in 1966 A sleepy Herb Trimpe in the … Continue reading Comics Creators in the Wild 5
From the vantage point of hindsight, we view the Hulk as a super hero, the second in a string of new creations unleashed in the earliest years of the 1960s on an unsuspecting public, the building blocks for what would become known as the Marvel Universe. But that's really an impression that has been colored … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Ditko: The Development of INCREDIBLE HULK
The Tom Brevoort Experience 