Nostalgic for old comic books

Cafe Society
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I read those early She-Hulk issues back then. The first issue was written by Stan Lee, with art by John Buscema, so they are officially credited as the “creators” of the character. I doubt that Lee had much to do with actually creating She-Hulk, though. Every subsequent issue was written by David Anthony Kraft and penciled by Mike Vosberg, and I suspect that they were the ones who really devised the character and the set-up.

I can remember thinking at the time that the series seemed to be aping the basic situation of the Incredible Hulk tv series, in that the other characters were led to believe that Jennifer Walters was dead, and that She-Hulk had killed her. That only lasted two or three issues, but it was definitely there at the very beginning. Unlike more modern interpretations of the character, where She-Hulk has total control of her transformation, and retains her Jennifer Walters intelligence, Kraft and Vosberg’s She-Hulk was, as the title claimed, “Savage.” While she wasn’t quite at the “Hulk Smash!” level, she was quite short-tempered and had a rather different personality than Jennifer. One aspect I remember was that she had two potential boyfriends. Jennifer preferred one of them, while She-Hulk liked the other one. It was also the first comic series I remember reading in which the characters had (implied) sex.

Or maybe it was just the first time that I was old enough to understand what that passionate embrace followed by a discreet cutaway meant.

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I really liked Thunder Agents, especially Dynamo. Also Metal men from DC. Apparently I liked the lesser known superheroes.

There is a comic where the Ambush Bug travels and time, and Superman goes after him, with the “help” of the Legion of Substitute Heroes- DC Comics Presents #59. Funniest comic i ever read.

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As soon as John Byrne got his hands on Shulkie in 1983 she became “Sensational”.

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I’m surprised no one has mentioned the underground comix from the 60-70’s like R Crumb, Fritz the Kat, other counter-culture characters

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I’m not as nostalgic for things I liked as an adult as when I was a kid. Comix are definitely the former. Despite the nudity and violence, they would have bored the Hell out of me as a kid.

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I never read Savage She-Hulk. My first encounter with her was the issue she joined The Avengers (#221, which was also the first issue of Avengers I picked up new off the newsstand) when she showed up wearing a purple suit, a ruffled blouse, and heels.

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For me, it was especially NoMan. It was a clever take on the “scientist that could transfer his consciousness into an android body”. He could, of course, build multiple bodies.

NoMan gets killed? No problem… except that he’s now in a body back in his lab and miles away from the bad guys.

Loved all of those. We had Denis Kitchen, a Wisconsin boy made good. He’s gone on to be a comics historian, reprinting books like The Spirit (beautifully drawn by Will Eisner… best splash panels ever)!

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He was my second favorite. Very hard to build in a Superhero RPG however.

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DC had kind of the opposite problem, where a lot of their big-name characters were in the doldrums and not that interesting to me. I’d include Superman, Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and Justice League in this group, but that would change in the 2nd half of the decade after Crisis on Infinite Earths.

In the early 80s, DC’s top-sellers were New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman & George Perez and Legion of Super-Heroes by Paul Levitz & Keith Giffen and I was a big fan of both. Other than that, a lot of my favorite DC books at that time were B-list titles. Marvel’s B-list titles were mostly holdovers from the 70s that the company treated like a red-headed stepchild. DC, after the catastrophic DC Explosion and Implosion of the mid-late 70s and then after canceling a bunch of long-running titles (Adventure Comics, World’s Finest Comics, The Brave & The Bold), had slots to fill in its lineup and developed new titles that they would promote in house ads.

Memorable examples:

-The Fury of Firestorm. After Firestorm’s original short-lived series went away during the DC Implosion, DC gave him another shot and he had a solo book until the end of the decade.

-All-Star Squadron. The mainstay of Roy Thomas’ Earth-2/Golden Age fiefdom. Set in World War 2, it had all of DC’s Golden Age characters to use but Roy focused on complete unknowns like Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle.

-Batman & The Outsiders. Yes, it’s a Batman book with him starting his own team full of misfits after quitting the JLA.

-Captain Carrot & His Amazing Zoo Crew. A funny-animal super-hero parody. Well done cartooning. Very punny.

-Atari Force: DC once did mini-promo comes that were included with game cartridges for certain Atari sci-fi games that showed a future saved by Atari! DC then extrapolated on those stories and turned it into a series and it was pretty good. Having Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez doing the artwork didn’t hurt.

-Saga of the Swamp Thing. Kind of missed out on this one. Read an early issue or two, decided it wasn’t for me and then didn’t check it out again until well into Alan Moore’s run after good word-of-mouth.

-Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld: One of the first 12 issue maxi-series that then became an ongoing. Amy Winston was an ordinary 13 year-old living in the suburbs until she is transported to a magical realm and transforms into the adult titular character.

-Arak, Son of Thunder. A swords-and-sorcery book with a historical background. Arak, a Native Canadian, is found alone and adrift in a canoe by exploring Vikings and brought back to Europe. Become a traveling adventurer.

-Arion, Lord of Atlantis. Another traveling sword-and-sorcery adventurer, but the title character is a mage and he is traveling around Atlantis when it was a continent.

110

I eventually discovered comic shops about 2 years after getting back into comics, which opened a whole new world of direct sales-only titles to explore. The problem was that there were no comic shops in my town.

There was the Passaic Book Center which was a 2 mile walk to the next town. The PBC was one those places that would buy ad space in comics to advertise their extensive back issues. A musty place that had as much or more used books and old magazines than comics. I remember PBC would leave valuable comics in the display window to yellow and fade. You could get the full range of new comics at PBC, but they didn’t even have display racks. Just would dump unbagged new comics right into long boxes for people to paw through.

What became my main comics shop was Collectors Comics Shop at the Bergen Mall in Paramus. The problem was, I needed someone to drive us there. My mom loved malls, but did not love going to the Bergen Mall, at least since I was a little kid. Other area malls were bigger and none of my mom’s favorite stores were there and my mom didn’t like driving on Route 4. Sometimes I would have to guilt her to take me and friends by reminding her how valuable my comics she threw away were and sometimes a friend’s mom would drive us. Trips to the comic shop were about once a month and sometimes not even that often.

Bergen Mall was kind of a weird mall and was built in the 50s as one of the first malls in Jersey, so it had features not typical of later malls. For example, while it was a one-level mall, the Bergen Mall had a basement-level. Tucked in the back of the mall was the one escalator/staircase that led to the basement level, which was a long straight bare bones corridor lacking the mall decor and accoutrements. There was barber shop, a post office, a chapel, a bank branch, and a bowling alley that I remember, but the main attraction was The Village Mall.

The Village Mall was a large indoor space divided into many small individual shops along several corridors. It was kind of like an indoor flea market except the stores had their own doors and windows. The decor was kind of 1800s American Village/Gay 90’s, with wrought-iron light fixtures that looked like gaslights. There were about 60 shops total and one of them was Collectors Comics Shop, which was my comics shop until my friends and I were old enough to drive.

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Of course, once I was able to buy comics at a comic shop (I was still buying at the newsstand, though), there were a lot more companies I could buy comics from. Comic book shops originally sprung up to sell back issues, but soon they were making deals with distributors or publishers to get new comics to sell as well. Comics shops struck deals to order as many or as few issues of a title as they thought they could sell in exchange for the orders being non-refundable.

As the number of comics shops increased in the late 70s and early 80s, it opened the doors for smaller, one-title, indie publishers to sell in small print runs through comics shops. Some early adopter were Wendy & Richard Pini publishing Elfquest as WaRP Graphics and Dave Sim publishing Cerebus as Aardvark-Vanaheim. Both titles lasted a long time and both companies expanded their lines after other indie comic lines popped up.

Eventually, indie distributors realized that comic shops needed more product to sell. The classic example is Pacific Comics, which started as a comics shop owned by two teenaged brothers and then grew into a chain of comics shops and then a distributor to supply their own shops and then the main distributor on the West Coast. They started by publishing art portfolios before starting a comics line, attracting some big names by offering creators ownership of their characters. Jack Kirby did Captain Victory & His Galactic Rangers. Neal Adams did Ms. Mystic (a took a year between #1 and #2) Mike Grell did Starslayer. PC had a pretty short run and is perhaps most remembered for properties that went on to success elsewhere, namely The Rocketeer and Groo the Wanderer.

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The two big dogs of 80s independent comics were First Comics and Eclipse Comics, two very different companies that broke out in the early 80s.

First Comics was more of a slick, professional operation, with former DC guy Mike Gold as President. It started out with a line of titles that were either by well-known pros or titles that were picked up from defunct publishers. Warp by Frank Brunner, American Flagg! by Howard Chaykin, Jon Sable, Freelance by Mike Grell, Starslayer from Pacific, E-Man from Charlton. First also picked up three strong titles from defunct Capital Comics, another distributor-turned-publisher: Nexus, Badger, and Whisper.

I think Grimjack by John Ostrander & Tim Truman, and Mars by Wheatley & Hempel were the only early First titles that didn’t fit the original formula.

The titles listed above were the core of First’s lineup for a few years. First went under in the early 90s after foolishly throng to force themselves into the newsstand market.

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How Asterix the Gaul made modern France | Untitled History Podcast Episode: 27

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Yes.

I was also fond of DC’s Unknown Soldier
and Sgt Rock.

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Anybody remember Gold Key’s MARS Patrol?

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You mean Total War, about an alien invasion? That was another one of my oddball favorites, right up alongside Magnus, Robot Fighter.

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Total War to begin with, but changed to MARS Patrol somewhere along the way.

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I had the first issue of Total War, where it had yet to be revealed that the invaders were extraterrestrials. The writers knew what they were doing by making readers try to guess where they were coming from. As I recall, it wasn’t until the fourth or fifth issue that we found out. (I had just assumed they were Russians.)

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I read a few, but heck if I remember a single plot point of Turok or Magnus or Dr. Solar (“The Man of the Atom”, ooh!).

I was all set to say I don’t remember any Dell comics, either. But looking up my favorite un-costumed super hero, it was a Dell book:

Brain Boy!

Growing up on a diet of “underwear on the outside” heroes, my third-grade self found “Matt Price” refreshing. He wore a brown suitcoat, loafers and a tie, and we meet him as he’s flying up a staircase in a sitting position, legs crossed. SO casual.

But he’s telekinetic, so plenty of brainy action ensued.

It’s a lot of fun, hope you get to read some. Weirdly enough, the first issue is #1330, the second is labeled #01-075-209. None follow normal arithmetic. Dark Horse also did a BB series in 2013.