The history of Marvel's export to the United Kingdom is a complex and somewhat haphazard thing. While occasional copies of Marvel's American comics might reach England shops carried as ballast, the earliest homegrown reprints of Marvel material were carried by a number of different publishers. One of these was Odhams Press, best remembered as the … Continue reading Brand Echh: SMASH! #38 and a seldom-seen Hulk adventure
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
As comic book conventions began to grow and become a thing in the 1970s, Marvel decided to try their hand at organizing shows specifically dedicated to that one single company. The first Mighty Marvel Comic Convention was held on March 22-24 of 1975 at New York's Hotel Commodore. The event did well enough that a … Continue reading MIGHTY MARVEL COMIC CONVENTION Program Book
The next issue of AMAZING SPIDER_MAN that came out introduced a character who would prove to possess remarkable staying power over the years, though it didn't really seem that way the first couple of years. This was the Black Cat, a sexy sneak thief who would go on to become a recurring love interest for … Continue reading BHOC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #194
Flo Steinberg came to the notice of comic book fandom during the early 1960s, during the initial flowering of what became the Marvel Age of Comics. As Marvel's corresponding secretary, she was, among other things, charged with answering the volumes of fan mail that came in for editor Stan Lee, and so the various active … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: BIG APPLE COMIX #1
As a kid, I didn't really have any way to get information about what new comic books and related publications would be coming out when. I was dimly aware of fanzines, but I never tried to purchase any on the regular--my meager funds were needed to buy actual comics, after all. So I had no … Continue reading BHOC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN POCKET BOOKS Volume 3
It was clear early on that the most important and successful new super hero character introduced during the Silver Age of Comics was Spider-Man. The work that Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and John Romita had put into the series had paid dividends, and the wall-crawler was soon a worldwide icon able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against … Continue reading 5BC: Five Attempts to Replicate Spider-Man
It's been a while since we dropped one of these on you. So here are more photographs taken over the years depicting practitioners of the medium, both editorial and creators. As usual, there's a lot of Stan Lee. One of the earliest photographs that survives of Jakob Kurtzburg, who would come to be called Jack … Continue reading Comic Creators in the Wild 12
It's no great secret that the relationship between editor and scripter Stan Lee and artist and plotter Jack Kirby had grown fraught by 1969. Having at least co-invented the characters who ad saved the company and done the lion's share of the story work that continued to make the Marvel books he worked on shine, … Continue reading Lee & Kirby: THE TROUBLED BIRTH OF THOR #169
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
The Tom Brevoort Experience 