My younger brother Ken came along with my grandparents and I on that trip to Ed's Coins and Stamps in the Sun-Vet Mall. And accordingly, he wound up buying a couple comic books as well. Ken was never as into the medium and the characters as I was, but like any kid of that era, … Continue reading BHOC: CONAN THE BARBARIAN #42
By this moment in time PETER PARKER, THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN was past its best days--and even at its highest it had never been a great comic book series. Almost by default, the title was dedicated to providing "more" Spider-Man adventures for readers for whom a single AMAZING SPIDER-MAN release wasn't enough. These stories existed in … Continue reading BHOC: PETER PARKER, THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #32
We're at the point where IRON MAN started to get really good under the creative team of writer David Michelinie, penciler John Romita Jr. and inker and co-plotter Bob Layton. The transformation sort of snuck up on me as a reader at the time. I found that I was enjoying IRON MAN more and more, … Continue reading BHOC: IRON MAN #124
Eventually, my subscription copy of FANTASTIC FOUR #208 turned up in my mailbox, inevitably a week or two after copies had appeared on the spinner rack, frustrating me. This is about the point where the series started to come off the rails a little bit, in part due to the fact that a space epic … Continue reading BHOC: FANTASTIC FOUR #208
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN continued to be Marvel's most popular and consistently best-selling title throughout the 1970s, as the character began to have a larger footprint across popular culture. So it wasn't any surprise that my grade school buddy Donald Sims had a number of issues in his comic book collection. Like the couple of Fourth World … Continue reading BC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #134
I know that I say this every time we roll around to another issue, but it's positively baffling to me just how long I continued to buy DEFENDERS despite not really enjoying the title for years. I'm sure that some of this was simply having the available funds--I was never confronted with a need to … Continue reading BHOC: DEFENDERS #73
Here's some more new business building on old business that has just cropped up. It's been a number of years now since I first wrote about the catastrophic journey of getting the Giant-Man story that saw print in TALES TO ASTONISH #61 to print: https://tombrevoort.com/2020/10/31/lee-ditko-orlando-rockwell-the-multiple-car-crash-of-tales-to-astonish-61/ And also a few years since Dick Rockwell's unused splash … Continue reading Lee & Ditko & Orlando & Rockwell: Another New Discovery in the Multiple Car Crash of TALES TO ASTONISH #61
If there's ever a competition to determine the single most batshit crazy issue of a comic book released during the Bronze Age of Comics, this issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN has a real fighting chance to take the title. Just the cover alone gives you a tiny sample of the absurd and operatic events that are … Continue reading BC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #131
This next issue of UNCANNY X-MEN was a bit of a favorite of mine, possibly down to the fact that the central villain of the piece, Arcade, was a bit closer in tone and spirit to the Flash's rogues gallery members than most Marvel villains. The series had been steadily rising in my estimation, and … Continue reading BHOC: UNCANNY X-MEN #123
I continued to make MARVEL TALES a regular purchase, it being one of the few remaining reprint titles at this point. My circle of comic book reading friends looked down our noses at reprint books, the understood belief was that they were "worthless" because they wouldn't accrue in value as back issues, something that we … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TALES #105
The Tom Brevoort Experience 