Continuing on in our review of this 1947 behind-the-scenes pamphlet published by Timely editor Stan Lee Here, Stan brings back Mario Acquaviva to talk about the skills involved in lettering comics, and he shows off some pages from a recent Sub-Mariner story. I have no idea where this story actually ran, so I can't pull … Continue reading Secrets Behind The Comics 4
More secrets revealed by Stan Lee in 1947! Alan Sulman isn't terribly well remembered these days. So it's nice to have these names and caricatures. It's also nice to see what a script looked like at Timely in 1947. Stan helpfully provides empty panel layouts for the readers of this book. Syd Shores was a … Continue reading Secrets Behind The Comics 3
And so we come to the third and final story that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby adapted in the 1960s from one that Kirby with his then-partner Joe Simon had first produced for the inaugural issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS in late 1940. It should probably be stated right up front that according to the … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Simon: Captain America Before and After 3
Continuing on in our compare-and-contrast between a story originally produced by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for the inaugural issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS, cover-dated March 1941, and it's Marvel Age remake, this one in the pages of TALES OF SUSPENSE #64. The prior issue had featured Cap's origin, and so as to cut down … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Simon: Captain America Before and After 2
As the Marvel line began to grow in the 1960s, editor Stan Lee decided that he had a problem. He based this supposition on some of the fan mail that he'd been receiving no doubt--mail that would ask questions about how a given Marvel character could be in the midst of life-or-death jeopardy in one … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Simon: Captain America Before and After 1
Joe Simon was the editor of SICK magazine, one of the assorted knock-offs of the extremely popular MAD that crowded the newsstands in the late 1950s and 1960s. Simon had largely moved away from his involvement in the comic book field, though around the time this issue was being worked on, he had been drafted … Continue reading Brand Echh – Sick #42
Behind this excellent Alex Schomburg cover (rife though it is with unfortunate racial stereotypes) lay not only a pair of adventures of the Young Allies, the kid gang team led by Captain America's young pal Bucky and his rival, Toro the Flaming Kid, but an after-the-fact account of Captain America's experiences after the bombing of … Continue reading Captain America after Pearl Harbor
In the mid-1960s, Joe Simon began legal action to try to reclaim the copyright to the Captain America stories he and Jack Kirby had written and drawn twenty years earlier, and by extension the rights to the character. In a move apparently made to help re-establish his ownership of the material, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman … Continue reading Your Comics Code at Work: Fantasy Masterpieces #6
Even with the limited output allowed to them under the terms of their distribution deal with Independent News (which only permitted the Marvel of the 1960s to release a certain number of titles every month), Marvel often ran into situations where the talent they had on hand in order to complete everything wasn't enough. During … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Everett & Grandinetti & Friends – The Messy Story of Tales to Astonish #84
The Golden Age craze for super heroes only truly lasted a couple of years, immediately following the debut of Superman and the entry of the United States into World War II. That said, it was a genre that was virtually unique to comic books, and so fortune-minded publishers would continue to toy with it for … Continue reading Brand Echh – Captain Flash #1
