YouTube video by Mike Troiano

YouTube video by Erin Shoop

I was still making my way through the complete run of SHAZAM that I had borrowed from my grade school friend Donald Sims. SHAZAM #6 featured the series' second photo cover, and it was a bit less successful and convincing than the prior one which had run on issue #2. But there was something appealing about the fact that it was set up as an "infinity cover", with the cover appearing within the image as the cover of the comic book that Captain Marvel is reading. The kids in this image are the grandchildren of DC production man Jack Adler, whose skills are what made doing a photo-cover of this sort possible in the first place.

It speaks to the essential appeal of Green Lantern as a character that I continued to follow his series for long stretches of tie even when I wasn't really enjoying it all that much. And this period that we're in right now is something of a nadir. Hal was still paired up with Green Arrow in emulation of the impactful relevance issues of several years prior, but this wound up meaning in practice that Green Lantern became almost a spectator in his own series, as writer Denny O'Neil was clearly more comfortable working with Green Arrow and his girlfriend the Black Canary.

In 1988, Eclipse comics was celebrating its ten-year anniversary as a publisher. Founded by Jan and Dean Mullaney, Eclipse was one of the earliest entrants into the nascent Direct Sales marketplace of Comic Book specialty shops. The company was also a proponent of creator-ownership and offered a better publishing arrangement than the mainstream outfits of the era. Over that decade, Eclipse had put out a lot of good work, though of late their efforts had been shifting away from what had once been their bread and butter. At the beginning, Jan and Dean as well as their editor Cat Yronwode, had been fans of the comic book scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I picked up another idiosyncratic issue of BRAVE AND THE BOLD when it arrived at my local 7-11 spinner rack. By this point I was buying the series semi-regularly, even though I typically found its contents to be a bit weird and off-putting. There were no other writers in the field at that point like Bob Haney and the manner in which he wrote stories and the way that he treated established characters in those stories was one-of-a-kind. If you were picking up an issue of BRAVE AND THE BOLD, you were agreeing to sign on to a voyage to Earth Haney, where absolutely anything could and probably would happen.

There were some relatively professional fanzines published by the late 1970s. One such fanzine was Woweekazowie, the fourth issue of which concerns us today. It was produced by Pete Iro and was sta…

Another old post from my Marvel blog in which I answer questions posed by the audience. Viewer Mail April 28, 2007 | 1:00 AM | By Tom_Brevoort | In General Got a lot of feedback the last couple of …

Another book I got out of a 3-Bag during this time. I had only just started reading THOR and I was still on the fence about it. In part, this was because, during the 1970s, while it carried some of…

Just the same as the last three times: here’s a collection of the covers to more international editions of Marvel material that I’ve gathered over the years. These are often fascinating…

A post from my ancient Marvel blog concerning sales figures from the year 1990 The Year That Was–1990 April 28, 2007 | 1:00 AM | By Tom_Brevoort | In General Once again dipping into the files…

Here’s another book I got out of a 3-Bag. This was likely the reason I bought the 3-Bag in the first place, as FANTASTIC FOUR had become my favorite comic book series and the Thing was on his…