Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.
Yet another bank holiday's come and gone.
And that means it's my duty to, once more, press my nose to the time grindstone and discover just what Marvel can offer us that had a cover date of exactly 40 years ago.
That awesome basket of menacing malevolence Plant-Man manages to take over SHIELD, thanks to his plant replicas of its agents. Needless to say, the Avengers are soon on hand to dispose of such vegetabletastic villainy.
After all these years, Conan gets a comedy episode, as, on a drunken night out, he ends up helping a trio of sex-starved witches to achieve something or other before they return to their own dimension.Does Cap never learn? After the disasters that were his alliances with the original Bucky and then Rick Jones, he now decides it's a good idea to team up with the 1950s Bucky who's out to turn over a new leaf and not be a psycho anymore.
Elsewhere, Spider-Woman discovers Viper's not really her mother.
Not that it does Cap and Bucky any good. After barely any time at all together, they're captured by the Constrictor.
The FF are still in the Negative Zone and find themselves in a tale called The Minds of Mantracora, a title that must have been inspired by the Doctor Who story The Masque of Mandragora. I may believe in coincidence but I certainly don't trust it.
Regardless, Reed has his psyche sucked out of his head and used to power the bad guy's spaceship.
I'm not totally sure but I think the Hulk and his chums spend an entire issue laying siege to the Leader's giant, hidden space base.
Only to find out he's not there.
With Tony Stark too drunk to do anything, Rhodey has no choice but to don the Iron Man armour and battle the deadly attack of Magma who's out to destroy Stark's factory.
Fortunately, Rhodey then discovers he has help from an unlikely source. None other than Iron Man's deadliest enemy.
The Black Cat remains in hospital - and Doc Ock's out to kill her!
Thor continues to battle the faith-based zeal of the Crusader - and proves startlingly ineffectual when confronted, for once, with someone who can actually hurt him. Fortunately, Odin gives him a good pep talk and then it's business as usual.
The X-Men have to travel into the world beneath New York, after the mutant gang known as The Morlocks captures the Angel.
And he's not the only one with problems, because a disease-stricken Kitty's abducted by her weirdo subterranean stalker Caliban.
The Vulture's back in town and out for revenge against some bloke or other.
When a notorious but repentant crimelord is dying, Daredevil sets out to protect him from the murderous intents of the Amish-like community that spawned him.
And this is my pick for Cover of the Month.
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12 comments:
Love that issue of DD.
It has some peak Janson art inside - pencils, inks and colour - that goes from the sublime [look at this spread! https://www.comicartfans.com/gallerypiece.asp?piece=1846987] to the well dodgy in places.
And it's a pretty good story, as well.
Uninteresting fact: I bought this second-hand one winter evening after school, on my way to see Jaws 3 [though not in 3D].
I did not enjoy that film.
Matthew, I saw JAWS 3 on its original theatrical release and the 3D didn’t help one bit. It still looked like a crappy TV-Movie — in fact, the dodgy 3D may have made it look even worse. It’s not “Enjoyably Bad”, it’s “Just Plain Bad”.
Steve, “The Minds of Mantracora” might possibly be a play on a series of TV commercials for Minolta 35mm cameras. The slogan at the end of the ads was “Only From the Mind of Minolta”.
Is it just me, or is this is an exceptionally weak batch of covers? JRJR’s AMAZING SPIDER-MAN cover is decent, but the rest… I dunno.
b.t.
You might well be right about FF #254 and 'The Masque of Mandragora', Steve - when that character on the cover in the black robe takes his (its?) mask/helmet off, there's no face or head there, which iirc was how one of the episodes of that Dr Who serial ended. I could picture John Byrne being up on Who, and making the reference.
Although the idea of the FF heading off into a different universe was promising, that run of stories set in the Negative Zone was a disappointment. Previous writers had already turned a universe where you had to be as tough as the Thing just to survive (according to FF #51) - and produced strange, hostile lifeforms like Annihilus and Blastaar - into the sort of place where even a plonker like Rick Jones could casually hang around on a regular basis.
So you can't blame Byrne for making the Negative Zone boring... but you can complain about the fairly run of the mill, forgettable sci-fi stories he came up with, straight out of an average episode of Star Trek (or - seeing as it's Byrne - maybe Space 1999 would be a better reference point).
I liked his FF run up to this point, but it did become increasingly apparent that while he could do good stuff with existing characters like Doom, Galactus, the Inhumans and the rest, it was a different story when he tried to come up with anything new. There were still good issues to come, but for me diminishing returns had started to set in...
-sean
Can you young’uns recommend the Spidey, Cap, or DD ar this time 40 years ago?
Charlie is always (!) looking for some good comic runs to read!
Particularly curious about Cap. Is this sort of where the seed of Winter Soldier is planted?
It’s hard for Nostalgic Charlie not to be pulling in to the two Spidey’s. I mean Doc Ock and Vulture are creme de la creme, A list, original villains.
The only negative is PPtSSM will always be a non-canonical, money-grab book in Charlie’s eyes. (The money grab started with Marvel Team Up in my 62 year old eyes lol.)
Although b.t. is right about this being a fairly uninspired month for covers. If forced to choose a best, I'd pick the Conan one. Drawing a group of full figures like Conan and those three women, from a raised viewpoint behind the approaching geezers with swords in the foreground - and getting the spatial relationships to look right - is not that easy to pull off. And Buscema makes it seem effortless.
It's fairly low key... but thats unusual for Conan, which creates some interest too.
-sean
Steve! Glenn (Heaven 17 front man) Gregory’s dad celebrated his 90th in Sheffield this weekend. Guess it was a “seen and be seen” type of fete! Were you there by chance?
Charlie, just because Steve lives in Sheffield doesn't mean he knows everyone who lives there.
I was once asked when I was working in Nicaragua (Managua) " Your Scottish do you know Jim O'Donnell from Hamilton? " turned out I did know the guy he was my pals neighbour.
Charlie, sadly, I was totally unaware of Glenn Gregory's dad's birthday. I can only assume my invite to his party was lost in the post.
I'd agree with Matthew that DD is probably the best of the comics featured above.
Bt, thanks for the Minolta info. And I agree, this crop of covers is not impressive.
Sean, I agree. Byrne's Negative Zone story arc was not at all interesting.
I can't get that excited about ASM around this time to be honest Charlie.
People rave about Roger Stern's writing and I suspect that people in their early 40s will love this era as it's what they grew up in, but:
– the Romita Jnr artwork just doesn't excite me. Peter Parker doesn't look like Peter Parker and the colours everywhere all look washed out. Is there also maybe a feeling of loads of back to back individual panels without the flow that Ditko, Romita, Kane and even Andru used to evoke?
– there's no soap opera feel, no interesting supporting characters. Where's Flash? Harry? MJ reappears here after being gone for a while. There are some Uni and Bugle characters around but they're not very interesting. Spider–Man may be suffering at this point from being split over two comics and having the soap element either split between the two or all in PPSSM. Reading ASMs without the concurrent PPSSMs feels like a pretty flat experience.
Regarding the covers - eeeehhhhhhh. Not the best lot, but I do like the ASM cover. As for Spectacular Spider-Man, it seemed at the time that artists Al Milgrom and Ed Hannigan were trying a definite Ditko vibe. I kinda liked it.
Dangermash- regarding the washed-out appearance of those books, there were numerous complaints about the printing quality. Seems they had changed printing techniques and the look suffered in many comics from that era. I recall some pretty flat looking Justice League stories...
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