THE DEFENDERS was always a bit of a weird series to me. On the outside, it looked like any other regular Marvel comic of the period. But crack the cover and get into the contents and the stories were almost all unrelentingly weird. This was definitely the case for the run of stories masterminded by … Continue reading BC: DEFENDERS #33
UNCANNY X-MEN was on a roll at this point in time, and while this latest issue was something of a transition story, moving events in the direction of resolving some long-percolating plotlines, it was still ultra-enjoyable. These days, this whole era is considered a classic period, but at the time, we just looked at it … Continue reading BHOC: UNCANNY X-MEN #125
I continued to pick up MARVEL TALES every month to help fill in the gaps in my knowledge of Spider-Man's history. By this point, the series was only reprinting issues that were a couple of years old--there were a bunch of issues from around this period that I'd already read, borrowed from like-minded comic book … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TALES #107
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
The appearance of this book constituted something of a surprise. I seem to recall that it showed up on the spinner rack of my local 7-11, which I still continued to frequent in addition to the new Stationery Store. INVADERS had been a title that i had followed regularly, but a number of months earlier, … Continue reading BHOC: INVADERS #41
In the early 1980s, Frank Miller had a transformative run on DAREDEVIL. Starting out as only the book's penciler, he began to shift it in tone, moving it away from the ersatz Spider-Man clone it had been towards something with a bit more of a noir sensibility to it. This process accelerated when he took … Continue reading FSC: DAREDEVIL #192
AVENGERS #150 was another book that was in the collection of my friend David Steckel, and which I borrowed from him to read at some point or another. It was a noteworthy issue for a couple of reasons, most of them not great. First off, it was one of if not the first comic book … Continue reading BC: AVENGERS #150
INCREDIBLE HULK had kind of hit its stride for what would remain of the 1970s and the early 1980s. it was a solid and entertaining read, but not anything extraordinary. Well-crafted but forgettable. And much more attuned to the impulse buying audience in terms of not getting too bogged down with ongoing storylines than many … Continue reading BHOC: INCREDIBLE HULK #239
I picked up the newest issue of AVENGERS on my now-weekly Thursday trip to the Stationery Store. The book was on something of a roll right at that moment, in the midst of a three-part adventure sorting out the backstories of the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver (or trying to--later developments would overturn some of the … Continue reading BHOC: AVENGERS #187
By 1982, Marvel had been making inroads into establishing itself as a children's book publisher as much as a periodical comic book publisher. This was apparently Marvel president Jim Galton's plan for where the future of the organization should lie. He had no idea how the emerging Direct Sales marketplace was going to explode, nor … Continue reading FSC: X-MEN MARVEL ILLUSTRATED Paperback
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