The week brought another issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, this one featuring an assortment of special guest stars hanging out with Ben Grimm. Part of the reason for that is that this was one of those stories commissioned as an emergency fill-in that could be used in multiple places given the need. So it could have … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #51
MARVEL COMICS #1000 was by far the most difficult editorial and coordination challenge that I've ever undertaken in my 35 years editing comics, and a book that I'm inordinately proud of. It was released in 2019 to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Marvel as a comic book publisher, and as such, it was designed from … Continue reading Personal Best: MARVEL COMICS #1000
It was an exciting day when this Fantastic Four-themed MARVEL TREASURY EDITION showed up at my local 7-11. Because of their size, the Treasury Editions were racked with the general magazines rather than by the comic book spinner rack, meaning that you needed to know to go and look for them. As FANTASTIC FOUR was … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TREASURY EDITION #21
Marvel's first title, MARVEL MYSTERY COMICS (called simply MARVEL COMICS in its first issue--nobody quite knows how or why MYSTERY was added to the title, or for what reason) was something of a surprise success for publisher Martin Goodman. He'd initially printed up only 80,000 copies and the print job was so bad that he … Continue reading The Second Human Torch Story
I picked up the next issue of MARVEL SUPER-HEROES on my next weekly Thursday trip to my local 7-11. This was probably the heyday for this reprint series. While most of Marvel's other reprint titles had fallen by the wayside, MSH continued on without pause, buoyed by the popularity of the Hulk's weekly CBS television … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL SUPER-HEROES #80
MAGAZINELAND, USA was a giveaway comic book designed for the celebration on June 18, 1977, which had been proclaimed World Color Press Day. World Color were the printers for virtually all of the comic books that were then available on the nation's newsstands, including the output of DC, Marvel, Archie, Harvey and others. Accordingly, those … Continue reading Lost Crossovers: MAGAZINELAND, USA #1
I come from a family of readers, and so every time we'd go out to the mall or to another shopping center on the weekends, as typically happened most Saturdays, we almost always stopped into any bookstores that happened to be around. Our main destination, the Smith Haven Mall, had three if you can believe … Continue reading BHOC: INCREDIBLE HULK POCKET BOOKS Volume 2
I've been meaning to write a little bit about these French-produced Spider-Man stories for a while, but when Newsletter reader Mark Bowen posted a link to this one, which he'd translated over on his blog, I thought that it was worth cross-posting. Mark's original post can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/french-spider-man-16-t-v-crazy-telejunior-1978-AdKR5nP The French publication TELEJunior had … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: The French TV Terror and the French Spider-Man
Well, I'd known this day was coming for several months now, but it was somehow always a surprise when it happened--typically because I was used to budgeting against a particular amount, and now all of those calculations were in the wind again. This issue of DAREDEVIL was the first book I bought where the cover … Continue reading BHOC: DAREDEVIL #158
As I indicated a bunch of entries back, at around this time my younger brother Ken had become passingly interested in CONAN THE BARBARIAN. So he'd bought issue #97 at our local 7-11 and seemed to like it well enough. At some point, on one or another shopping expedition, our family must have ended up … Continue reading BHOC: CONAN THE BARBARIAN #96
The Tom Brevoort Experience 