Wertham apparently got very little from his education, since he was oblivious to the scientific method.  

Just re-read the issues of West Coast Avengers by Byrne that had Jim Hammond the Original Torch in them. I try and get anything with the GA Torch. I thought Byrne did a decent job with Jim.

IMO Jim should be an elder statesman like Jay Garrick and Alan Scott are at DC. Plus everytime someone brings Jim back it feels like editorial has him be de-activated by the end of the story.

I'm kind of glad that Rebellion is getting into the habit of reprinting stuff outside of 2000AD like Accident Man from Toxic!, Third World War from Crisis, and The Last American from Marvel/Epic

I've been trying to read the first Ghost Rider (motorcycle, not horse) series, but it's slow going. Love the concept, but I'm not a fan of Gary Friedrich's writing for the first four issues. That said, how Marvel did him dirty is a pile of garbage. I met him at a comicon here in Pittsburgh years ago, and he, like so many Bronze Age creators, was passed by the majority of fans while guys like him were the main reason I went to shows. He was pleasant to chat with, but he was obviously hurt, both emotionally and financially, by Marvel's insistence that they owned GR's rights and he was basically nothing more than a cog in the machine to them.

Issue #5 was plotted by Marv Wolfman and written by Doug Moench and is better, but the next issue reverts to Friedrich and it's not good. Issue #7 sees Tony Isabella take over writing duties and the series picks up a little bit, but then Deadline Doom hits issue #10 and the GR/Hulk face-off gets delayed a month.

My biggest frustration is that they keep recapping GR's origin issue after issue, even though the book is in the Bronze Age and is more serialized than the usual Marvel Silver Age series where many issues in a series seem almost disconnected from the one before.

Also, holy crap on a cracker, the entire reason Satan can't take Johnny Blaze's soul is because some virginal girl's love for Blaze is "protecting" him? Yeah, that's problematic on so many levels and reads very poorly today.

I read Doomsday +1 #1 and Defenders #107-109.

Doomsday +1 is known as an early Charlton work from John Byrne. Joe Gill writes the lead feature, and there's also a backup story written and drawn by Tom Sutton. My copy is a 1999 black and white reprint. Was the series always in black and white or was the original print run from the 1970s in color?

The lead story from Gill & Byrne concerns a trio of astronauts (two women and a man: Jill Malden, Ikei Yashida, and Boyd Ellis) who fly out to space on the far future date of April 7, 1996. Unfortunately, a crazy dictator hatches a plot that leads to the world's nuclear powers unleashing their full arsenals on each other, apparently killing off humanity on Earth. Our astronaut trio has to return to Earth and figure out how to survive. At first, we've got a bizarre love triangle. But when melting from all the radiation melts some long frozen creatures from the Greenland ice, it become a love trapezoid as caveman Kuno take a liking to Jill.

Byrne's art is already solid. It's his familiar style, although a few of the faces are wonky. I'm less enamored by the writing, as it seems on one hand to want to be gritty and realistic, but on the other hand throw lots of utter ridiculous stuff into the mix. Ikei looks and dresses very much like Arcade's assistant Miss Locke, which is a weird sartorial choice for an astronaut. It feels like a set-up for vamp versus good girl, but I'd need to read more to see how it shakes out.

The backup story about a creature in a cave that some spelunkers stumble upon is very horror-tinged sci-fi. It also has its silly aspects, but the horror is shocking enough to overshadow the shortcomings. I'm on the fence on buying future issues. I'm thinking about whether interest in the art is worth rolling the dice on whether the writing will improve.

I read Defenders #107-109 as floppies because it's a gap between when my prior Essential ended and when an Epic Collection volume starts. It's interesting to consider the editorial choices that led to different cutoffs in the volumes of Essentials versus Epics. Part of the difference is that Essential Defenders contains two more Marvel Team-Up crossovers than the analogous Epic volume. On one hand, all those MTU issues feature Defenders members and are written by Defenders scribe J.M. DeMatteis. On the other hand, the one reprinted in the Epic is much more critical to event in the Defenders own series, whereas you're not really missing much without those other two. Essential vol. 5 ends with a Captain America/Defenders crossover that ends with the apparent death of a member. Should I reveal who and spoil a 40-year-old comic? These three issues are an arc of its own, but also the aftermath to that story. The death in #106 gets compounded by the apparent death of Valkyrie early in #107. I don't mind spoiling that one, because it becomes clear within the same issue that she'll probably be brought back. 

These three issues are fairly solid. DeMatteis (with co-write credit to Mark Gruenwald) takes a crack at further explaining Valkyrie's origin, working off of how Kraft and Hannigan further explained & paradoxically further muddled her backstory. There are some interesting ethical issues involving how saving Valkyrie (now called Brunnhilda instead of Brunnhilde) might negatively impact the soul of Barbara Norriss). Also, a rogue group of Defenders has to decide whether they'll ruin paradise and the Enchantress courts the living embodiment of love (who I thought at first was going to be Jesus). DeMatteis has placed less emphasis on Valkyrie relative to previous writers, so interesting to see what as far as I can recall is his first Val-centric arc. This trio of issues ends with the possibility that the other dead hero might be coming back. We also get some nice moments of mourning for the apparently dead members, especially from Hellcat and Hulk.

On one hand, it makes some sense to put these three issues in a volume of what came before. On the other hand, some subplots in these issues seem like they will payoff in upcoming issues. We get some more bits of the Daimon Hellstrom/Patsy Walker not-yet-a-romance. As part of the "is Satan Patsy's dad" drama, Walker family housekeeper Dolly says that when she knew Patsy's dad, she was under the impression that he was a normal human dirtbag who abandoned his family. At Dolly's suggestion, Patsy's departs on a solo roadtrip to find her dad and alleviate her fears that if she hooks up with the guy who is into her it would be incest. Plus, it would be a bonus not to be the daughter of the prince of darkness (even if she ends up dating his son). I'm interested to see how this turns out.

In my previous post, I pondered whether Beast had become a member yet. Well, he's in all three of these issues and in #106 he mentions that he had joined. Silly me! The rules of the non-team are basically that if you hang out with the non-team for any amount of time, that makes you a member. I guess that means Spider-Man is a member for working with the Defenders in these three issues, which apparently lead to an MTU story (which haven't read) featuring the Gargoyle.

I'm ready for more Defenders!

There are the recent TMNT Compendiums and the Ultimate Collections that retain the original B&W. The Ultimate collections are somewhat better because they have commentary from Eastman & Laird

Also, I don't think that they ever fully reprinted all of the Color Classics in tpb form?