It was a sad reality of the 1970s that for most of that decade, IRON MAN was a book that just wasn't very good. Today he's at the forefront of worldwide consciousness about Marvel thanks to Robert Downey Jr's performance as Tony Stark in the films--but in the 1970s, his series trundled along, a lower-middle … Continue reading BHOC: IRON MAN #81
It was one of the great, mythic misfires of the Marvel Age of Comics. Looking for ways in which he could spread his wings and move from being just a comic book editor and writer, Marvel's Stan Lee presided over a one-night-only event at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan on Wednesday, January 5th 1972. Reportedly, the … Continue reading A Marvel-ous Evening with Stan Lee
Another week at my local 7-11 meant another flight of new release comics for me to buy and read. I was a regular purchaser of DAREDEVIL by this time, so I was right there when the next issue showed up. This issue represented the return of long-time series artist Gene Colan to its pages--a return … Continue reading BHOC: DAREDEVIL #153
An awful lot of the production work materials from the comic books created in the formative years of the industry are long gone, discarded as unimportant "work product" on the way to producing finished comic book issues, which were the goal point all along. Fortunately, a lot of the original artwork has survived (though far … Continue reading Lee & Kirby: The Pencils of FANTASTIC FOUR #49
MS MARVEL was another title that I sampled out of the Big Bin of Somewhat Older Comic Books at my local drug store, and for the same reason: the need to hit a total of 5 purchases so as to be able to get them for a dollar, as opposed to risking the whims of … Continue reading BHOC: MS MARVEL #4
A post from my Marvel blog of long ago, part of a series discussing my early Marvel purchases which failed to make me a fan. Bad Comics I Bought pt. 4 April 28, 2007 | 1:00 AM | By Tom_Brevoort | In General Continuing our exploration of Marvel books I sampled in the 70s but … Continue reading Blah Blah Blog – Bad Comics I Bought, Part Four
I was sampling all sorts of random Marvel books out of my drugstore's Big Bin of Slightly Older Comics. Since they were selling these treasures at five for a dollar, it was always fiscally advantageous to pull five books at a time--if you went to the register with fewer than that, the outcome would depend … Continue reading BHOC: INHUMANS #9
This was another book that I picked up out of my local drugstore's Big Bin of Somewhat Older Comic Books. It wasn't my usual fare on the surface of it--at the time, Marvel had a full line of monster/horror titles, to say nothing of reprints of 1950s Atlas suspense tales and their 1960s giant monster … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL CHILLERS #7
Another Thursday meant another trip to my regular 7-11 hangout for new comic books, plus possibly a Clark bar or maybe even a Slurpee. I had fallen into following the adventures of the wall-crawler, and so I picked up this new issue of PETER PARKER, THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN when I saw it. I recognized the … Continue reading BHOC: PETER PARKER, THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #19
From the vantage point of hindsight, we view the Hulk as a super hero, the second in a string of new creations unleashed in the earliest years of the 1960s on an unsuspecting public, the building blocks for what would become known as the Marvel Universe. But that's really an impression that has been colored … Continue reading Lee & Kirby & Ditko: The Development of INCREDIBLE HULK
