In 1969, when the Merry Marvel Marching Society was phased out in favor of a new Marvel fan club the rights to which were licensed to a fellow named Don Wallace (as talked about in the piece below:) https://tombrevoort.com/2022/05/28/marvelmania-catalog-1/ one of the new club's endeavors was to put out a regular Marvel-themed fanzine, a subscription … Continue reading MARVELMANIA Magazine #1 (#0)
Continuing with more comics that I bought in plastic 3-Bags from either a local department store or else a toy store in the area. This issue of MARVEL TALES, reprinting an issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN from only a few years earlier, was one such book. I had read the first part of this story the … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TALES #85
Continuing our look through the first issue of FOOM, aka Friends Of Ol' Marvel, the fan magazine published by the House of Ideas throughout much of the 1970s. The first four issues were put together by artist and graphic designer Jim Steranko, and his visual approach is apparent throughout. Having failed twice under publisher Martin … Continue reading FOOM #1, Part Two
This issue of MARVEL SUPER-HEROES featuring the Incredible Hulk was another book that I got in a 3-Bag purchased at one of the department stores or toy stores that my family visited on one of our shopping expeditions. While the Hulk wasn't my favorite Marvel character, I enjoyed his escapades well enough--in particular when scripted … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL SUPER-HEROES #67
FOOM, a.k.a. Friends Of Ol' Marvel, was the successor operation to the haphazard Marvelmania International once teh latter had gone belly-up. Stan Lee, now Marvel's publisher, still saw value in having a fan publication that could further ingratiate the readership with Marvel, as well as a place where the assorted licensing efforts that they'd begun … Continue reading FOOM #1
This issue of STRANGE TALES was another book that was in that long box of about 150 Silver Age comic books that I bought in 1988 for $50.00. As the Marvel super hero line began to expand, certain strips tended to stagnate. They also got used a lot of the time as a place to … Continue reading WC: STRANGE TALES #112
The series was only nine issue old, and already somebody--presumably editor/scripter Stan Lee--felt it necessary to raise the stakes even further. This SGT FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS cover promises something unbelievable--and without even reading the story, you can likely intuit the outcome. SGT FURY was a weird title. It was created in response to … Continue reading WC: SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS #9
So as I've related before, it came out at some point that the branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank that my father worked out of was situated in the Levittown Mall--the same Mall that contained the first comic book shop that I ever went to, Heroes' World. What this amounted to in practice is that, … Continue reading BHOC: FANTASTIC FOUR #107
I bought this issue of MARVEL TALES from my usual spinner rack at the local 7-11. It reprinted, as usual, a story from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN published about six years before. At that time, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN was in the midst of one of its more seismic changes: Stan Lee, having been promoted to publisher of the … Continue reading BHOC: MARVEL TALES #94
One of the myths about the Marvel Age of Comics is that it pretty much happened all at once--that as soon as FANTASTIC FOUR #1 hit newsstands coast-to-coast, the paradigm of comic books changed completely. And that's clearly not the case. In fact, it took a few years for the Marvel approach to storytelling to … Continue reading WC: JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #91
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