The question of who did what on the early Marvel books is going to be something that's debated and argued ad infinitum, so long as the characters remain worldwide icons as they've become in recent years. Speaking for myself, while I enjoy weighing in on certain aspects of these questions, I'm of the broad belief … Continue reading Lee & Ditko: The Storytelling Snafu of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #30
On my unanticipated trip to the Batcave comic book shop that weekend, I needed to make my meager funds stretch to their furthest. There was a cornucopia of back issues laid out before me. But I had only limited money with which to make my purchases. And so one of the books I wound up … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TALES #20
In 1982, I was still ordering my comics through the mail order service offered by Geppi's Comic World in Maryland. I didn't yet have a driver's license, and my family's new homestead was in a new development that was too far away from any center of civilization to get to easily by walking or bike-riding. … Continue reading FSC: MARVEL AGE #1
My pal David Steckel had gotten a bunch of his comic books from some older relative who was over them, passed down as such things often were in those days. Consequently, he possessed an assortment of random older issues of various titles, and this was inevitably of interest to me. For example, for no particular … Continue reading BC: DAREDEVIL #68
Larry Lieber, the last surviving member of the original Marvel Bullpen, has been recently divesting himself of some of his possessions, selling off artwork and mementos that he's carried with him for decades. And among what he put up for auction at Heritage Auction House recently is a pair of discarded pages intended for a … Continue reading Lee & Kirby: The Discarded Pages from INCREDIBLE HULK #4
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
