This was another book that I bought out of my drugstore's Big Bin of Somewhat Older Comic Books, all issues that had been reported as destroyed but instead which had been sold on the secondary market for a cut-rate price. This was one of a pair of DOCTOR STRANGE issues that I picked up at … Continue reading BHOC: DOCTOR STRANGE #21
As the 1960s wound down, the super hero fad that had driven much of the decade was beginning to cool. It's maybe hard to realize today, when many of these characters have been in continuous publication for 60-80 years, but at the time, super heroes were seen as just another cyclical fad. And now that … Continue reading MY LOVE #3 and the Penciling of John Buscema
You know the drill by this point, right? It's old pictures of comic book creators from back in the day! Bob Layton at a convention, 1980s. Me, Tom Brevoort, and Jack Kirby at a New York convention, 1990. I had only been at Marvel for six months. A trio of photos of Joe Sinnott from … Continue reading Comics Creators in the Wild 6
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
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
An entry from my defunct Marvel blog of the 00s, first of a series on bad comics that I worked on. Ran into some connectivity problems late yesterday, so our special series on Bad Comics I Had A Hand In is beginning a little bit later than planned. But we'll be running this exciting new … Continue reading Blah Blah Blog – Bad Comics I Had A Hand In, Part One
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
Another batch of vintage photographs of comic book creators taken in years past. As usual, there are a number of these that revolve around Stan Lee, probably the most photographed creator of the era. Roy Thomas wearing the first Spider-Man personal appearance costume at a comic convention in 1966 A sleepy Herb Trimpe in the … Continue reading Comics Creators in the Wild 5
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
At this point, I expect that most of you know the drill here. But to hastily recap for those who do not: in the early 1970s, demand for Spider-Man stories was so strong in Mexico that the Mexican publisher of Spidey's translated adventures, La Prensa, got permission from Marvel to produce all-new adventures of the … Continue reading Forgotten Masterpiece: EL SORPRENDENTE HOMBRE ARANA #150 and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #8
The Tom Brevoort Experience 