Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts

Monday, September 29, 2025

Monday Monster Madness MONSTERS TO LAUGH WITH / MONSTERS UNLIMITED & MONSTER MADNESS

Besides comic books, Marvel made occasional forays into the b/w magazine market...
..with this seven-issue 1965-66 title being their longest-lasting Silver Age series!
(Note: with the second issue, Stan Lee's name was added to the cover as a selling point!)
Other mags had used the gimmick of captioning old movie and tv photos for a feature in a magazine...but never an entire magazine!
At this point, the book changed it's title...
...nobody's really sure why, but it seemed to work!
One of the koolest aspects was that Stan Lee wrote the captions...
...bringing the same kitchy vaudville-level humor that he used for decades in Marvel's humor comics!
I'm not sure if declining sales or Stan Lee's increasing workload caused the cancellation!
(Besides his writing/editing duties, he was now the public face of Marvel, giving interviews, making appearances on tv, even touring college campuses where Marvel Comics were the "in" thing!)
In 1973, when Marvel unleashed an entire line of b/w magazines, ranging from horror to kung fu to Planet of the Apes...
...they revived the concept, still written by Stan Lee!
...but this time, the book was the least-successful of the b/w line!
It was re-tooled into a Famous Monsters of Filmland/Castle of Frankenstein format, adding features about both old and current films and tv shows...
...but the alteration didn't help and the book was cancelled.
Marvel tried again, later that year with a Famous Monsters of Filmland/Castle of Frankenstein clone called Monsters of the Movies, which lasted for eight regular issues and an Annual.
Starting next Monday, through the rest of October, you'll be seeing the best (IMHO) of Monsters to Laugh With and Monsters Unlimited!
Don't Miss It!

Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Best of Wednesday Worlds of Wonder MARVEL CLASSICS COMICS "War of the Worlds"

We Wind Up Our Month-Long Retrospective with a Halloween Season Treat (No Trick)...

...HG Wells' best-known novel, The War of the Worlds...told the Marvel Way!

Adapted by Chris Claremont, penciled by Yong Montano, and inked by Dino Castrillo, this almost half-century-old book-length tale is a pretty straightforward adaptation of the original novel, which was the basis for Marvel's just-cancelled KillRaven: Warrior of the Worlds series, which was a sequel featuring a second Martian invasion in 2001!

Note: this was not meant as a tie-in to that series, so Dave Cockrum, who was aiding Art Director John Romita Sr as his Associate Art Director while also drawing the All-New X-Mendeliberately designed the tripods and Martians to look different from the ones appearing in KillRaven and other Marvel Universe titles!

Monday, September 22, 2025

Monday Mecha Madness SHOGUN WARRIORS "Into the Lair of Demons" Conclusion

It's a Trap!

Who, when sitting in a movie theatre doesn't yell at the screen when a character does something incredibly-dumb, like walking into a pitch-black room...alone...with a flashlight whose batteries are dying?
Genji, the pilot of Combatra, is doing something similar...






But, you'll have to wait until November to see it because Nnext week Monday Mecha Madness will become Monday MONSTER Madness for the spooky month of October!

Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Reading Room / Tales Twice Told TERROR TALES "Flesh Ripper"

We Present Another Pair of Stories with the Same Script...

...drawn two decades apart, this time with the re-worked, gorier, version first!





Taking the script almost verbatim from the original 1953 four-color comic book, Argentinian artist Martha Barnes totally-redrew the story, using different "camera angles" and lighting effects as well as re-imagining the visuals for the creature in Eerie Publication's Terror Tales V6N6 (1974)!
It's damn near impossible to figure out where the tale was derived from!
But you'll see the original version...by one of the "Big Names" in the field...on Thursday!
Note: Martha Barnes was the premier female horror/crime/war illustrator in the Argentinian comics industry from the late 1940s to the late 1970s.
Besides Eerie Publications, she also did work for another American publisher, DC Comics
on G.I Combat!

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Monday, September 15, 2025

Monday Mecha Madness SHOGUN WARRIORS "Into the Lair of Demons" Part 1

The Shogun Warrior Known as Combatra Has...

...well, lets let our in-comic narrator explain the whole thing!










Genji!!!
NO!!!

To Be Continued...Next Monday!
Writer Doug Moench, penciler Herb Trimpe, and inker Dan Green certainly know how to keep you on the edge of your seats in this never-reprinted tale from Marvel's Shogun Warriors #5 (1979), eh, True Believers!
BTW, is there a nickname for Shogun Warriors fans?
Note: Since Genji is the sole human piloting this version of Combatra, unlike the Japanese version which has a pilot for each module...
...the Shogun Warriors version has an AI which can telepathically-interact to receive her commands...and then act independently!
Presumably, it possesses strategy and combat programming/skills to do so!

Friday, September 12, 2025

Friday Fun HARVEY "Saps on Skates!"

This Ain't the Movie Rollerball...

...which wouldn't even come out until three years after this never-reprinted story from Marvel's Harvey #4 (1972)!


Written and laid out by Stu Schwarzberg, finished pencils and inks by Henry Scarpelli!
Stan Lee wrote and Stan Goldberg illustratd the first couple of issues, then turned it over to Schwarzberg as writer and Scarpelli as artist for the remaining four issues!
Trivia: Marie Severin did touch-ups on Scarpelli's first issue to keep characters "on-model".

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Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Reading Room / Tales Twice Told WEIRD WORLDS "Terror on Station One!"

Here's an early 1970s sci-fi space opera tale...
...that reads and "feels" like a 1950s sci-fi space opera story!
And there's a good reason for that!
Wonder why this Cirillo Munoz-rendered tale from Eerie Publications' Weird Worlds V1N10 (1970) feels so...out of date in an early 1970s magazine?
Perhaps because it's almost a line-for-line, panel for panel, re-do of a 1950s story!
Be here Thursday to see the original four-color version by a different artist!
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