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Post by spoon on Nov 5, 2023 10:48:59 GMT -5
It looks like the months here are cover dates rather than on-sale dates.
I started reading comics in 1985 as a 6-year-old. My older brother and fraternal twin brother were also collecting comics, so I would read the comics they bought, too. I started out reading more DC. At the point this thread starts, I was partway in the transition to becoming more of a Marvel reader. My reading on any given title would be sporadic. I'm not sure how often we went to the store, and sometimes we would buy a title based on the cover.
The Marvel title I was into the most at this point was Transformers. At the time they came out, I think I only read two Fall of the Mutants crossovers. Ironically, since I turned out to be a big X-Men fan, those two were not X-books. It was the Captain America issue when Cap and his sidekicks fight Famine and the double-sized issue of Daredevil where he tries to deal with riots during a blackout. Both made an impression on me. My twin brother bought a handful of Daredevil issues from that era, but after that I don't think I read new Daredevil until Chichester took over as writer. I read quite a few issues of Captain America when he temporarily took on the identity of the Captain. Probably a few months after the point this thread has reached, my elementary school library started carrying new Marvel comics, so I read several issues of Cap that way. I re-read this era of Captain America a couple years back, and I thought it really held up.
Between the three of us, I think we bought four or five parts of Kraven's Last Hunt. My twin brother was the biggest Spider-Man guy. His main title was Spectacular Spider-Man, so I read quite a few of those. He also bought a few issues of Web or Amazing, but my Amazing Spider-Man reading was more from library copies.
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Post by Cei-U! on Nov 5, 2023 16:22:12 GMT -5
Probably a few months after the point this thread has reached, my elementary school library started carrying new Marvel comics... When I was a student back in the Pleistocene, our school librarians would've sooner seen the place burned to the ground than allow comic books within its hallowed halls.
Cei-U! I summon the inconceivable!
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Post by commond on Nov 5, 2023 18:22:12 GMT -5
May 1988
Amazing Spider-Man #300 was the big issue off the racks, notable for the first full appearance of Venom, Spidey returning to his red and blue costume, and McFarlane inking himself. Historically, you'd have to say this was one of the better anniversary issues given its lasting impact on the mythos, however you can also view it as a dividing line between kids who were eating this stuff up and older fans who saw it as a jumping off point.
There wasn't a lot else going on at the time. The Armor Wars were rumbling along in Iron Man (although I believe they were called The Stark Wars in-book.) Daredevil was in the midst of the Typhoid Mary storyline, and is probably my favorite Marvel book from this era. The editors must have thought they had put Avengers and The Fantastic Four in reliable hands with Walt Simonson and Steve Englehart, respectively, but both books were meandering along. Marvel Age was pimping the Shadow Line Saga to fans. I'd be interested to hear if anyone here bought a single issue of that line.
There's a Moebius reprint for comic lovers, but the real curiosity is The Shadow graphic novel by Denny O'Neil, Mike Kaluta and Russ Heath. Not sure how that one ended up at Marvel instead of DC. I'd be curious if anyone knows the timeline on this. I did a quick check and the only info I could glean was that Bernie Wrightson was supposed to be the original inker.
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,197 
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Post by Confessor on Nov 5, 2023 20:06:45 GMT -5
Amazing Spider-Man #300 was the big issue off the racks, notable for the first full appearance of Venom, Spidey returning to his red and blue costume, and McFarlane inking himself. Historically, you'd have to say this was one of the better anniversary issues given its lasting impact on the mythos, however you can also view it as a dividing line between kids who were eating this stuff up and older fans who saw it as a jumping off point. ASM #300 is great, as are the two previous issues leading into it. I bought these issues off of the newsagent's shelf at the time. I found Todd McFarlane's art and his depiction of Spidey a little weird at first, but I grew to like it as time went on. I think his depictions of Spider-Man in full flight are as dynamic as hell, and I love the so-called "spaghetti webbing" (though, as previously mentioned, that was inspired by Michael Golden's depiction of Spidey from Marvel Team-Up Portfolio in 1981). I think McFarlane's popularisation of this style of webbing might be the most important and influential addition to the overall look of the character since the Ditko and Romita days. |
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Post by berkley on Nov 6, 2023 1:25:52 GMT -5
I suspect I don’t have a single book from this era.
The only Marvel comic I recall reading at the time is Steve Gerber's Foolkiller miniseries that I believe came out in the early 1990s. It was pretty good. Not Gerber's best, but for me even a middling Gerber book is well worth reading. The artwork was adequate, i.e. I didn't feel any strong like or dislike of it.
Sometime in the early 2000s I became curious about Starlin's early-90s Warlock series, the Infinity Watch, so I found the back-issues cheap and read almost the whole series, 40 or 50 issues. It wasn't very good but not as terrible as I had feared it might be. The artwork was very loose and sloppy looking, I remember - and it didn't seem to matter who the artist was, so maybe this was the style of the time? Not sure, not having read many other Marvel comics from that era. The writing felt a bit aimless and certainly wasn't nearly as fun or interesting to me as Starlin's '70s Warlock and Captain Marvel. But I'm probably making it sound worse than I intend - I must have found something entertaining in it or I wouldn't have kept going all the way through. And of course, when comparing it to Starlin's '70s work I'm setting a high bar, because those are some of my favourite comics.
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Post by commond on Nov 6, 2023 6:58:54 GMT -5
June & July 1988
Not a lot going on in during these months -- a Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D. limited series with painted Steranko covers and a Black Panther limited series with Denys Cowan art. I tended to avoid limited series when I was a kid so I have no idea whether they were any good. There's a What If? special with pencils by Ditko that's a bit of an oddity. The name Peter B. Gills keeps popping up everywhere. It was super busy during this time period but appears to have dropped out of comics in 1990.
Apparently, there was an X-Men cartoon in 1989 that was made by Toei animation and based on Russ Heath model sheets. Anyone seen it?
The July Marvel Age hypes up the Evolutionary War. Boy did I eat up those annuals when they came out. I even began scrounging through my parents' loose change to buy more, which landed me in hot water. As an adult, it seems like a complete waste of money, but as a kid I was blinded by the covers. I think they may have come out a bit later in New Zealand since our summer begins in December. I'm not really sure how comic distribution worked at the time. There was a period where I was visiting comic book shops during school holidays, buying up whatever they had on the shelves, then filling in the back issues as they came out on the newsstands.
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Post by codystarbuck on Nov 6, 2023 11:22:08 GMT -5
June & July 1988Not a lot going on in during these months -- a Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D. limited series with painted Steranko covers and a Black Panther limited series with Denys Cowan art. I tended to avoid limited series when I was a kid so I have no idea whether they were any good. There's a What If? special with pencils by Ditko that's a bit of an oddity. The name Peter B. Gills keeps popping up everywhere. It was super busy during this time period but appears to have dropped out of comics in 1990. Apparently, there was an X-Men cartoon in 1989 that was made by Toei animation and based on Russ Heath model sheets. Anyone seen it? The July Marvel Age hypes up the Evolutionary War. Boy did I eat up those annuals when they came out. I even began scrounging through my parents' loose change to buy more, which landed me in hot water. As an adult, it seems like a complete waste of money, but as a kid I was blinded by the covers. I think they may have come out a bit later in New Zealand since our summer begins in December. I'm not really sure how comic distribution worked at the time. There was a period where I was visiting comic book shops during school holidays, buying up whatever they had on the shelves, then filling in the back issues as they came out on the newsstands. There was a pilot made, Pryde of the X-Men, in 1989, by Marvel Productions. They did 12 episode of the animated Robocop series and used the budget for what would have been the 13th to fund the pilot and got Toei to animate it. Will Meugniot and Rick Hoberg produced and did the storyboards and Heath did provide model sheets. Unfortunately, it was in production when Marvel Entertainment Group started having financial issues and they stopped working on any superhero-oriented projects and concentrated on Muppet Babies. It was a while before it was broadcast and a lot of people, like me, only saw it when they released it on home video. It features Kitty Pryde joining the X-Men and the models were done in a more detailed style than previous Marvel cartoons. As in his appearances in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, Wolverine has an Australian accent, which Hoberg said was due to the Australian fad of the time, kicked off by the Paul Hogan tourism ads and his subsequent success in Crocodile Dundee. Nightcrawler infamously sounds lecherous when he speaks to Kitty, in a bad German accent. You can see the whole thing (from the video cassette) on Youtube.... Story is pretty good and animation is mostly good and voicework is about average, for the 80s, aside from the Wolverine and Nightcrawler issues. The X-Men had been seen in at least 2 episodes of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, as had some other Marvel heroes. The 90s X-Men animated series was a step up (except the voice work wasn't much better), though it felt clunky, to me, compared to Batman TAS and the other Warner material. |
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Post by badwolf on Nov 6, 2023 11:22:47 GMT -5
I bought the first few issues of Doctor Zero, but it didn't hold my interest.
I used to have a couple Evolutionary War annuals, but don't remember anything about them. This was when I was getting out of the mainstream books.
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Post by codystarbuck on Nov 6, 2023 11:28:14 GMT -5
Re: Crash and Shatter. Both were by Mike Saenz, but he did Shatter first and it was rendered on a computer, which, by definition makes it the first computer-generated comic book. Doing color on the computer is hardly that much of a change, since the technology was still too young for production when Shatter was done. Marvel, true to form, was busy trying to market themselves as the innovator, as they had also tried to do with the graphic novel, when they had been beaten to the punch by both Will Eisner and Eclipse, with Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy (Sabre). Regardless of how you want to define it, Mike Saenz is the first to produce a commercial comic book using computer graphics.
Personally, I thought Pepe Moreno did it better, when he produced Batman: Digital Justice. He had more advanced computers and graphics programs and better modelling. I also felt he was a better storyteller. The finished story of either was a mixed bag, though, with the CGI gimmick kind of detracting from developing the story better.
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Post by codystarbuck on Nov 6, 2023 11:30:35 GMT -5
After 1983, I bought very little Marvel, as the combination of house style and the artists they had working for them didn't really do much for me. Their story content was a pretty mixed bag, especially as they went into the 90s. Every once in a while something popped up, like Iron Man: Crash, and I picked it up (or some of the Epic projects); but, nowhere near as many as DC or the indies (especially Eclipse and First Comics).
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Post by MDG on Nov 6, 2023 14:24:59 GMT -5
Re: Crash and Shatter. Both were by Mike Saenz, but he did Shatter first and it was rendered on a computer, which, by definition makes it the first computer-generated comic book....Regardless of how you want to define it, Mike Saenz is the first to produce a commercial comic book using computer graphics. Joe Staton--who i think was still Art Director at First at this time--said that the tech wasn't quite there yet at the time of Shatter to digitally produce a book on a realistic schedule. While the original intent was to develop a set of digital assets that could be used over and over, after a couple of issues, the art was essentially drawn traditionally, scanned, and touched up. |
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Post by commond on Nov 6, 2023 17:45:18 GMT -5
August 1988
Marvel Age is gearing up for the summer with the debut of Marvel Comics Presents, the Evolutionary War running through their annuals, and popular titles Uncanny X-Men, Amazing Spider-Man and G.I. Joe going biweekly. There appears to be a real content push during this period of DeFalco's tenure.
The 'Nam gets its own reprint magazine this month, which is a testament to how successful the book has been. Larry Hama tries his hand at the urban teen superhero genre with Wolfpack. Marvel keeps trying to cash in on the movie Willow. Bob Layton releases a Hercules graphic novel to complete his trilogy of Hercules works, and Marvel gives us one of my favorite books of the era, What The--?? I have no idea if What The--?? holds up, and I'm not sure I want to know. I thought it was hilarious as a kid and that's the way I'd like to remember it.
Flying under the radar, but gaining more traction as Spidey grows in popularity is Sal Buscema's work on Spectacular Spider-Man. I'm not sure how the Conway stories hold up decades later, but Buscema goes from strength to strength on the book and goes on to have one of the great unheralded Spider-Man runs with J.M. DeMatteis, which we'll get to later on. 1988 saw the debut of Tombstone, who along with Venom and Typhoid Mary was one of the better characters created in '88. I always dug his character design.
The Brood are back in the X-Men. Those Brood covers captured my imagination as a kid, but I couldn't afford the back issues. I'm also kind of intrigued by Simonson's Council of Kangs, and the art by Buscema and Palmer makes it look like Stern era Avengers, but a voice in the back of my head keeps telling me it's not Stern's Avengers.
Finally, Epic begins releasing Akira this month. There's no way I can argue for it being Marvel's best comic. That would be like claiming a Moebius reprint is the best comic coming out of Marvel. However, it was important in terms of bringing manga to America and creating an audience for the movie, and as a kid I looked on those Akira books in awe. I could never afford one, but the packaging design was so intriguing to me. If I'd been a teenager at the time, that's definitely something I would have been buying.
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Post by badwolf on Nov 6, 2023 18:20:48 GMT -5
What The--?? doesn't hold up.
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Post by commond on Nov 6, 2023 19:25:41 GMT -5
::covers ears::
Worth noting that the price on the best selling books has risen by a quarter to cover an increase in printing costs. Those X-Men, Spidey and G.I. books are now going to cost you a buck a piece.
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Post by codystarbuck on Nov 6, 2023 21:27:12 GMT -5
What The--?? doesn't hold up. I'd say it depends more on the individual issue. Most of them, like other Marvel attempts at satire, were very hit and miss. Issue #19, which was a satire of the old Strange Tales issues, with half of it spoofing Dr Strange and half parodying Nick Fury, is still pretty damn funny. Both segments were done by Hilary Barta and Doug Rice, who knew how to do the stuff and were funny. |
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