I bought a lot of issues of BRAVE AND THE BOLD (or as this cover would have it, THE NEW BIG BRAVE AND THE BOLD) despite the fact that I was never really all that wild about it. I liked the Jim Aparo artwork well enough, and I liked a number of the characters who … Continue reading BHOC: BRAVE AND THE BOLD #144
As we've spoken about over the past couple of weeks, given the overwhelming success of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, even before that series had run its course, DC Editorial had been soliciting concepts for a sequel series of the same sort. The development of this project went through a lot of gyrations and reversals of … Continue reading Crisis on Captive Earth
I had come to really enjoy NOVA over the course of the first batch of issues I had read featuring the character. Which was a bit of a turn-around for me. There were a bunch of titles in the Marvel line that I studiously avoided for a bit thinking that they weren't really for me. … Continue reading BHOC: NOVA #22
The excitement was building, at least for myself and my small collection of comic book reading friends, as FANTASTIC FOUR neared its big issue #200. The build-up had been going on for almost a year, and now that inker extraordinaire Joe Sinnott had returned to teh series after missing a couple of issues, everything was … Continue reading BHOC: FANTASTIC FOUR #199
Continuing our look at the two-volume X-MEN COMPANION published by Fantagraphics in 1982, just as X-MEN was expanding from being the darling of the Direct Market to a full-on juggernaut across the whole of the industry. Writer and historian Peter Sanderson interviewed pretty much all of the principle writers and artists involved in the creation … Continue reading THE X-MEN COMPANION #1: Len Wein Interview
In 1982, there was simply no hotter book in the Direct Sales marketplace than UNCANNY X-MEN. Riding off of the tremendous success of the Dark Phoenix Saga, the series was rocketed to the absolute pinnacle of the sales charts, at least in comic book specialty shops. X-MEN was super hot, and so the publishers of … Continue reading THE X-MEN COMPANION #1: Roy Thomas Interview
This issue of BRAVE AND THE BOLD was the first released under the auspices of the DC Explosion, which saw the line increating its cover price to 50 cents a copy from 35 while adding additional pages of material. Here, the Human Target, a feature that briefly ran in the back pages of ACTION COMICS … Continue reading BHOC: BRAVE AND THE BOLD #143
One more comic book that came to me in a plastic 3-Bag bought at either a toy store or a department store. It has a very typical cover for the era, one in which all of the characters have word or thought balloons explaining everything that is going on, and on which the hero is … Continue reading BHOC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #175
It's more of the same story. This issue of THOR I got in another one of those 3-Bag bundles of recent comic books that were sold through toy stores and department stores during this period. I was still on the fence somewhat as a THOR reader--over the next couple of years, I would fall off … Continue reading BHOC: THOR #265
I got this issue of INCREDIBLE HULK, with its very nice Jim Starlin-drawn cover, in one of those 3-Bags sold in department stores and toy stores. The books in those bags were always about nine months old, so this was a way, at least during the first year of my starting to read Marvel books, … Continue reading BHOC: INCREDIBLE HULK #217
The Tom Brevoort Experience 