Marvel Comics blabbery

http://comicsbeat.com/marvel-sold-original-art-in-1973/

where is the goddamn DCU ipad app?

I'll be surprised if they do an app soon. They just got around to making it non-flash.

I've been using it on the ipad through Safari and it's nice.

Do we really need a Deadly Hands of Kung Fu revival? It's only been 40 years since the last one...let's give it another 40 to really let the nostalgia build up.

Will it feature Shang-Chi? Still waiting on a reprint of Master of Kung Fu, which I think has always been scuppered by rights issue to do with the Sax Rohmer characters.

Love some of the Neal Adams covers on DHOKF

Apparently so.

http://www.newsarama.com/20285-shang-chi-strikes-in-marvel-s-new-deadly-hands-of-kung-fu-series.html

I liked Shang Chi as Moench wrote him, but Hickman making him a spaceship-piloting Avenger was a development so wrong-footed it's sort of put me off the entire company, except for Bendis' Miles Morales, Waid's Daredevil and Wilson's Ms. Marvel.

I just don't get the love for Hickman (in some quarters), everything I've read by him has been a dreary mess with no real feel for Marvel history/characters/style. But I'm totally Team Bendis when it comes to the Avengers - the best run on the title since Englehart.

Manhattan Projects is very good, can't really speak for his Marvel work besides a few FF comics which were pretty seemed fun.

xxp -- I forgot to mention Soule & Pulido's She-Hulk, which is 1001% fun, and beautiful to look at. Hawkeye has good moments but it's inconsistent.

mmm pretty seemed fun

I really like East of West. It's one of the few comics I'm reading month to month anymore.

lol 1985

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Br9h7WFCcAEo1fl.jpg

poor Groo :(

Groo back issues are hard to come by!

I dunno if I have any anymore but that was a great book.

sales must have turned around at some point cuz it had a pretty long run (120 issues?!). I have fond memories of the storylines with his dog, who was even stupider than he was.

yo man, Hama GI Joe was dope can't argue with that
i remember picking up Groo into the late 80s, it went forever

these numbers are from may 85... groo's first marvel issue was march that year.

ah that explains it

and yeah, groo was excellent.

Looks as if Groo was the second-highest selling Epic title after the flagship anthology. That's not too shabby, really.

It's hard to imagine Marvel making so much of their bread off of adaptated properties nowadays. Everybody but them seems to have cornered that particular market of late.

Was the New Universe the first time Marvel attempted the alternate, self-contained universe of titles gambit...? Was there any precedent of a similar approach from DC? (DC was pretty explicit about the separate universes, but they didn't have entire titles devoted to alternate universes, did they? At least not until Vertigo?)

I think Marvel (copying 2000 AD and other sort of indie lines) was ahead of DC with Epic and OGNS and whatnot

Kirby's Fourth World?

that included Superman/Jimmy Olsen

Epic and OGNS titles weren't related to each other tho. What I mean is something like Ultimates or New Universe, where there was a series of titles that were related to one another, but totally separate from the "regular" continuity.

like, DC didn't have a bunch of Earth-2 titles (right?)

There was All-Star Squadron and that's about it for Earth-2 ongoings.

It was the first line produced by Marvel Comics utilizing a pre-conceived shared universe concept.

I have a whole short box of nothing but groo. Can't even get at it rn (lol nyc) but I'm gonna wallow in them again someday.

yeah, groo was awesome

i loved groo as a kid. a bit sad that the collections available on amazon are a tad pricey.

Those figures are for postal subscriptions only, rather than newstand or comic book store sales

Collections were only ever four issues too iirc, they could have gotten the whole series out if Evanier had switched to fat 12-issue tomes

sales must have turned around at some point

subscription figures aren't necessarily exactly proportionate with newstand and direct sales anyway

i remember picking up Groo into the late 80s, it went forever

it's still going, the last series was in 2010 (and there's a Groo Vs Conan that was due in 2011, but Sergio's illness knocked it off track [and Sakai's family troubles probably aren't helping him speed through it rn])

Looks as if Groo was the second-highest selling Epic title after the flagship anthology. That's not too shabby, really.

can't possibly believe the Heavy Metal knockoff magazine sold more than Elektra

Was the New Universe the first time Marvel attempted the alternate, self-contained universe of titles gambit...? Was there any precedent of a similar approach from DC? (DC was pretty explicit about the separate universes, but they didn't have entire titles devoted to alternate universes, did they? At least not until Vertigo?)

Vertigo wasn't an alternate universe, it was a bunch of DCU and otherwise self-contained books

Essential-style, phonebook Groo volumes wld be a winner, no?

Think Conan v Groo is finally coming out this year.

There was All-Star Squadron and that's about it for Earth-2 ongoings.

Before that there was an All Star Comics, also featuring the Earth-2 heroes, but since 'Flash of Two Worlds' DC have never exactly resisted crossovers between the two universes.

Groo was the first American-style comic I read after a childhood of Tintin and Asterix and The Beano. Anecdotally - it felt like Mad and Groo were much more widely read than the superhero books - maybe a UK thing? There were copies in every newsagent - plus (anecdotally again) it was never just boys who read them.

Groo was always tough to find in my area (NY), never seemed that popular around here. Probably because of the times (late 80s/early 90s). I was often surprised when I was able to find a copy

I think I got into Mad magazine as a kid before most comics but never saw Groo on a newsstand and hardly ever in a comics shop.

Groo was dead easy to find in the UK, but I always suspected we mainly got the leftover comics that hadn't sold in the US

Nah. For quite a while, Marvel US would swap a 15 cent (or whatever) front cover price plate for a 10p cover price place at the end of a run of 'colour' comics, so the Marvel titles in newsagents etc were produced specifically for the UK market, although certain titles (eg The Avengers) that had British Marvel equivalents were 'non-distributed' (ie you could only get them as imports.)

http://www.comics.org/issue/1057795/cover/4/

By the time that the cover price included both a US and UK price, comics were distributed to UK specialist shops just a couple of days after they went on sale in America, so not 'leftovers' either.

paper is heavy, I would imagine shipping comics overseas was at the bottom of their list of strategies

really? woah, I always imagined when I was reading Marvel obsessively (86-88) that they were imports... thanks for clearing that up, Ward.

As a kid, I was always fascinated with Marvel comics from the UK whenever some neighborhood kids got their hands on one (usually Action Force, IIRC). Those larger comics with the different paper stock felt like alien artifacts. Even later, non-tabloid stuff like Knights of Pendragon looked so much different from what I was used to (which was largely due to what I think might've been a completely different color process than what was standard in most US Marvel books at the time).

I have mixed feelings on Kieron Gillen's recent Iron Man run, but using a couple Marvel UK characters (Death's Head and Dark Angel) was kind of entertaining

Stevie, I hope you won't mind if I make things a little clearer, still

The small, colour Marvel comics were always technically 'imports', in that they were printed and published in America. When Marvel comics were first imported to the UK, they would have a cents price on them and over that t UK price stamp, normally bearing a T&P insignia, which stood for the British distributors Thorpe and Porter Lrd. The comics were brought over to this country by sea mail.

At some point in the early 1970s, Marvel in America began to print a certain amount of their color comics with a UK pence price, rather than a cents price. This was done at the end of the printing process, a simple matter of swapping a printing plate, but it meant that UK pence copies traditionally have had shittier printing, more colour mis-alignment etc, which may have contributed to your impression that these comics were somehow 'leftovers'. They are generally deemed less collectible than the 'real' cents comics. But they were American Marvels, printed and published in the US and imported here.

Not every American Marvel title was officially distributed in the UK (these comics are known in British collector circles as 'ND' - not distributed - comics.) When the British Marvel titles kicked off in the 1970s, reprinting the American comics in larger size, black and white (or two colour) weekly editions, lots of the series featured in these UK Marvel titles - Spider-Man, Hulk, Avengers etc - were removed from UK distribution, so as not to distract from the UK sales, or confuse readers with stories from vastly different time periods. The only way for a UK reader to acquire these ND comics would be to subscribe, visit America, order them via a mail order dealer either at home or in America, or buy them from one a dedicated comic book store, like Dark They Were and Golden Eyed in London. Distribution of the Marvel Comics with British prices was always extremely patchy, but there's no evidence that any particular titles were 'dumped' on the UK market.

Again, at some point in the 1980s, Marvel began to print only one version of their American colour comics, with both an American and British (and Canadian) price on the front. These titles would be imported in large quantities by air to UK comic shops, typically going on sale just a couple of days after they went on sale in America. Or you could wait a month or so and buy pretty much every Marvel or DC as a slightly cheaper (cover) price, sea-freighted and officially distributed to newsagents and even comic shops.

Looking at a gallery of Groo covers, it seems that the first one with a joint US/UK price was issue 16, cover dated June 1986:

http://www.coverbrowser.com/image/groo-the-wanderer/16-1.jpg

I was not very pleased w/the last Spider-Woman series (though I bought all the trades), but I am pleased to see a new one (with different creative team) is coming: https://www.fandompost.com/2023/08/08/marvel-comics-sets-new-spider-woman-solo-series/

Jess is my favorite character, fwiw

Can anyone recommend a good 1980s Spider-Man run for a boring January evening? I know (and enjoy) the early 90s DeMatteis run — is there anything else like that?

I’m mildly intrigued by this

https://leagueofcomicgeeks.com/comic/4373093/avengers-twilight-1

But is the Dream?

Chip-written alternate reality? I'll give it a shot at some point

Disappointed at the lack of shiny vampires.

Zdarsky's career is so weirdly split between fun stuff and glum journeyman product. I like his Batman run right now, it's very silly but very readable. The first issue of Twilight was fine, but everyone's read a billion of these things by now and this one isn't anything special.

(FWIW the Cliff Chiang Catwoman miniseries from last year was a actually pretty fun, original take on "what if superheroes but dystopia and they're old so their back hurts")

since I enjoy reading random stuff on Marvel Unlimited, I started reading through the original Alpha Flight series from 1983. John Byrne might be a notorious shithead, but he could at least do a little X-Men style Canadian spinoff that had some interesting, if very dated by 2024 standards, moments

I guess it was subtle for the time since people weren’t looking for obvious tells, but any summary (see Wikipedia) that tries to say it took a while for the series to hint about Northstar’s sexuality is… wrong

I’ve been cracking up because every time he shows up there’s some obvious “hey did you know this guy is gay? he’s gay!” setup

I've always found Byrne to be vastly overrated. Most of his art is just so static, and there is a bland sameness that he brings to everything. I consider him the anti-Kirby.

I did enjoy the Doomsday +1 book he did for Charlton very early in his career.

yeah, I wouldn't say he's good per se compared to my favorites, but I think he's generally cohesive/consistent

with the whole Marvel Unlimited deal I've tackled a pretty broad swath of comics and tapped out more than a few times. so, I'm putting that caveat on my comments

When I was a kid in the 80s, I found Marvel Comics annoying because they had too many captions compared to DC.

That is probably... not true, but it's how it seemed at the time.

Anyway - I was reminded as I'm rereading Byrne's Superman run, for the first time since the UK reprints came out in the early 90s. They seem way more zippy and readable than his Marvel comics (although possibly more hacky - and his Superman is a real prude!)

I think the Marvel Method often leads to overwriting - scripters trying to fill every available space on the finished artwork. Claremont never could resist a lengthy thought balloon or two. Once Byrne wrote full scripts for himself, he could let more of the artwork do the talking.

I do think it's a shame that the thought balloon has pretty much vanished from modern comics storytelling, tho - it's one of comics most distinctive literary devices!

Claremont never could resist a lengthy thought balloon or two.

Orzechowski's lettering is so nice, it's probably hard to resist...

Claremont having a little catchphrase to describe the powers of each individual character, and the fact it was deployed about once per issue, makes you start to go a little insane after a while. I guess that in theory this would make it easier to start reading a comic at any point during the run, but it also makes a certain portion of each issue this background framework

Steve Gerber could go on at length like nobody's business.

I mean, all these Marvel writers are taking their cues from Stan the Man, who overwrote like crazy as a way of asserting himself on the product (and lol at the 'story' credit on this one):

https://www.comicsbookcase.com/features-archive/daredevil-comic-1966

https://i.imgur.com/LOYDFzn.jpg

How will you know that some real shit is going down if Betsy isn’t talking about the focused totality of her psychic powers?

LOL at Foggy already scheming about Karen.

xp lmao

Stan did have a flair for titles.

I may be alone in this but I think Claremont and Ann Nocenti are two of the better over-writers in comics. They can be purple and weird but they're very readable. Gerber, on the other hand...

Meanwhile I'm also rereading Milligan's Shade and some of those Vertigo titles are just as bad as Marvel.

... how would you be alone in liking Claremont in Nocenti, they're fairly beloved

I mean, it's a cliche that they're both a bit prolix. But I don't really see that - I think they're some of comics better sentence writers, i.e. wordy but easy to read. So often, reading comics feels like wading through sludge, and I don't get that with them.

I think it's relative. Compared to Alan Moore or some later writers, maybe they read as corny. But compared to the writing in most of the mainstream comics at the time they were on another level. Definitely soapy and wordy, but they helped bring more nuanced emotions into superhero books.

Well Nocenti is really a post-Claremont writer - she’s at the very tail end of the ‘overwriting’ era, a Shooter writer (whereas Claremont is very much a Roy Thomas writer).

Steve Gerber a million times better than either of them, of course.

I've ragged on Shooter for 45+ years for sanding down all the rough edges that made Marvel comics interesting in the 70s

― WmC, Tuesday, July 1, 2025 3:09 AM (sixteen hours ago)

Can you elaborate on this in the Comics board?

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Tuesday, July 1, 2025 1:24 PM (twenty-two minutes ago)

Sure, got some stuff to do but later. The short version is this:

Dreaded Deadline Doom notwithstanding, I loved the auteur years between Stan and Shooter as E-I-C. Shooter's ascension = the day the music died.
― Malibu Stasi (WilliamC), Saturday, September 6, 2014 6:18 PM (ten years ago)

A lot of stuff in that Sean Howe book about the weirdness of the 70's, Jim Starlin, Steve Gerber and so on.

Agreed, Howe's book is great.

I must have read all the worst Marvel Comics of the 70s because I'm frequently perplexed by the acclaim for that era.

I guess all I can do is mention my favorites and hope you haven't read them yet.
Everything Steve Englehart wrote from 1972-1976
Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck, Man-Thing and Defenders
Don McGregor & Billy Graham's Black Panther run in Jungle Action
McGregor/Craig Russell on Killraven in Amazing Adventures
Jim Starlin's Captain Marvel and Warlock runs
Doug Moench & Paul Gulacy on Master of Kung Fu
to a lesser degree, Rich Buckler's Deathlok series, which had some strong visuals though it was a storytelling mess
The b&w non-code horror and kung-fu magazines

Would add:
Tomb of Dracula by Wolfman and Colan (and Tom Palmer)
Conan by Thomas and Smith
Kirby's return, especially 2001, Captain America, Eternals

But over and above all the 'good' comics, 70s Marvels as a whole just have a fantastic VIBE, which you probably had to experience at the time to fully appreciate. Also, whether by accident or design, Roy Thomas and subsequent editors-in-chief assembled a fantastic group of creators who all offered something different - Gerber was a very different writer from Englehart, who was different to McGregor, who was different to Moench etc. And you had that moment when 'veteran' artists like Sal Buscema and Jim Mooney found themselves working on more stimulating scripts from younger writers and really raised their game, which was quite inspiring to see (if Vince Colletta didn't ruin their pencils).

I would say that by the time of Shooter's elevation to EIC, that 70s vibe and cohort had pretty much gone from the comics anyway, and people like Roy Thomas had got rather too comfortable as a Writer-Editor with nobody to really push them creatively. And again, whether by accident or design, there were still good Marvel Comics under Shooter's watch - Miller's Daredevil, Simonson's Thor, Claremont and Byrne's X-Men - that still had a personality and a style.

I've read a little bit of some of them. I have all that Gene Colan in black and white Essentials but couldn't stick with the story. I'm a big fan of the cosmic side of Marvel (at least from a visual standpoint) and a lot of that was happening in the 70s.

Once again: there are stacks of Marvel stuff I would buy just for the artwork if they would do good scans and were affordable. The Taschen collections look wonderful but they are super expensive and released at a snails pace.
https://www.taschen.com/en/collection/marvel-comics-library/

Is there any links to scans of Marvel Comics Presents 175? It goes for stupid money now, I probably could have had it for buttons when I was a teenager.

https://readallcomics.com/marvel-comics-presents-v1-175/

Thanks very much, I thought that site was gone.

I did too, but I checked a few weeks later and there it was.

I met him at NYCC two years ago, and he was REALLY fun to talk to… and I will say that my favorite work he ever did were capsule character sketches of every member of the Legion of Super Heroes, which centered around important details like which male Legionnaire is hung like a donkey and which female Legionnaire is the most wanton slut…

in 2011, he posted a lot of very nifty insider-y if also self-serving shit, like this

http://jimshooter.com/2011/06/rooting-out-corruption-at-marvel-part_14.html/

I'm pretty sure Shooter must have been behind what otherwise appears to be a particularly unhinged defense of his record

https://rsmwriter.blogspot.com/2016/06/jim-shooter-second-opinion.html

I don't know that when he became EIC it went totally to shite, as the first part has some of the most iconic Marvel comics. The thing he did was get the comics out, it's amazing how small a company and kind of ramshackle Marvel really was considering the entertainment behemoth is now.

Marvel Two In One was one of the titles of the era that got me hooked on comics. The Thing was so awesome back in those days, easily one of Marvel's most popular characters. Gerber did some of the early issues and I think Englehart maybe too. I was more into the later ones when Byrne, Perez, a really young Mark Gruenwald and others was doing the book. They picked up Deathlok and the Project Pegasus story line blew my mind as like an 8 year old. The book was always a good read and really Byrne's The Thing series was a good read too I remember.

I think part of my negative perception about 70s Marvel is that it might be the time when the house style seemed most restrictive? And a strong feeling of writers not knowing what to do with some of the older characters.

Starting to wonder if Stan Goldberg's coloring choices are actually a bigger part of Marvel's appeal than I had seriously considered before. But I find it hard to imagine the pencillers weren't getting a say in the colors of the costumes a lot of the time. Ditko was displeased when Spiderman's blue parts started getting too purple.

It taken me a bit too long to start thinking in color and I think a lot of comics fans are like that (partially explains DC and Marvel's hideous reprint recoloring jobs going on for decades) but now I see how much of Marvel's edge over DC is in the costume color sensibility, and so many of the toys that were great in the early 90s had great color combinations.

And a strong feeling of writers not knowing what to do with some of the older characters.

Yeah, the legacy characters are def not what you go to 70's Marvel for - it's all the weirdness and Cormanesque attempts to cash in on various trends.

I dunno - to me the real creative nadir at Marvel comes when Kirby has left for DC but Stan Lee is still notionally 'writing' the big characters, but in reality leaning heavily on artists like John Buscema, John Romita and Gene Colan, none of whom were any kind of match for Kirby or Ditko's Marvel Method plotting skills. They're just aimless, empty comics, hopelessly lost with the counterculture and the underground while trying to be 'relevant', and most of the titles only revive when the next generation take over, specifically Englehart/Buscema on Captain America and Gerry Conway/Ross Andru on Spider-Man.

But yes, I agree about the 'weirdness and Cormanesque attempts to cash in on various trends' being a big part of the appeal, the vibe. I've been reading some of the early 70s 'horror' titles - Ghost Rider, Son of Satan, The Living Mummy - and it's amazing how drenched in the occult some of these Comics Code approved books are.

I don't know - and am not sure anybody living now knows - who exactly coloured what on pre-colouring credits Marvel Comics. Yes, Stan Goldberg was key, but George Roussos and Marie Severin were also important. And Sol Brodsky, who was Stan's go-to production guy until the early 70s, knew an awful lot about repro. The printing/colour on American Marvel Comics seemed to reach a peak in the early 70s, again - compare a comic from 1972 with one from 1979 and the decline in print quality is absolutely shocking. In the mid 1970s both Marvel and DC switched from metal to paper printing plates and the comics looked like shit, muddy, ugly shit, from then on. I agree that some of the computer recolouring on the old stuff is pretty terrible but quite often the original printing is just as much of a travesty of the artwork.

xp see also Mike Ploog on Monster of Frankenstein and Werewolf by Night

Mike Ploog on Werewolf by Night succeeded by Don Perlin and Vince Colletta has to be one of the biggest drops in artwork quality of all time.

to me the real creative nadir at Marvel comes when Kirby has left for DC but Stan Lee is still notionally 'writing' the big characters, but in reality leaning heavily on artists like John Buscema, John Romita and Gene Colan, none of whom were any kind of match for Kirby or Ditko's Marvel Method plotting skills. They're just aimless, empty comics, hopelessly lost

― Ward Fowler, Friday, July 4, 2025 4:05 PM (yesterday)

This sounds about right to me, but I think I read the first 20 issues or so of Spectacular Spiderman (mid70s) and there was just nothing happening, but randomly choosing an issue of any legacy title would probably give you this kind of crap where there is no sense of inspiration or direction.

Steve Englehart has a good run on Silver Surfer?

there was just nothing happening

Lee often talked about the 'illusion of change', where something dramatic happens - The Thing quits the FF - but is reset six issues later. I think after the death of Gwen Stacey, Lee/Marvel were extremely wary of making similar seismic changes to their best-selling titles, Spider-Man in particular. Hence the stasis, the endless recycling.

I don't particularly rate anything Englehart wrote after about 1979 tbh. There's a lot of horrendous Ron Lim art on those Surfers.

I believe some other higher ups (maybe even Shooter?) actually kept that Illusion Of Change advice for writers and editors.

What went wrong with Englehart after the 70s?

I haven't read enough of either to compare, but he definitively quit comics and gave angry exit interviews, so certainly would have had a different perspective on returning.