Late Night With The Avengers

When I was in junior high in 1983-84, two of my favorite things were Marvel Comics and Late Night With David Letterman so I was very excited when The Avengers showed up on Dave's show in issue #239, part of Marvel's infamous Assistant Editors' Month, where all the titles featured wacky and crazy stories cooked by the assistant editors in charge of each book. It was great seeing the so called B team at the time show up to banter with Dave.

Of course hijinks ensued but our favorite late night show had the last word.

All art by Al Milgrom and Joe Sinnott. I need to try and fish out all the other Assistant Editors' month books. I'm pretty sure I have them all but this one was by far my favorite. The new Avengers movie should have a scene where Earth's Mightiest Heroes show up on Dave's show. I would definitely pay to see that!

Holy Infantino, It's The Weather Wizard!

I love the "go-go checks" era at DC. It was filled with a lot of silly stuff that was unmistakably groovy. Arguably the leading artist for DC in this period was the great Carmine Infantino. Carmine took over Detective Comics in 1964 with editor Julius Schwartz in order to make the Caped Crusader a little more serious. For the most part it worked. The art was always great and the stories were pretty good too. Around the time Detective #353 came out in 1966, the Batman TV show was starting to hit big and the comics were trying to capitalize on its success. While the comics weren't nearly as campy as the show, they were still a lot of fun. I've always enjoyed Carmine's unique style and his ability to draw fight scenes was very good, as this page indicates.

Infantino's splash pages were always unique whether it was for Batman or his backup feature at the time, The Elongated Man. He had a fantastic sense of composition and style that was strictly Carmine. You could never mistake him for anyone else.

While the 70's brought a much darker and realistic Batman, I'll always enjoy these mid 60's stories which helped mark the transformation of the Darknight Detective to what we all know today.

Happy 1975 Everybody!

Ooops...I mean 2012 everybody!! From the Mighty Marvel 1975 Calendar with art by the always awesome John Romita Sr.

The Courageous Captain America

I always loved Little Golden Books when I was little so I was surprised and pleased to see that, for the first time in probably 35 years, I got a Little Golden Book for Christmas. My buddy Neato Coolville got me this cool Little Golden version of the origin of everybody's favorite Star Spangled Avenger. The art by Val Semeiks, Scott McLeod, The Storybook Art Group, and Hi-Fi Colour Design isn't bad. It's great to see Cap get the Little Golden Book treatment. Thanks again NC!

Hulk Smash Scrooges!

From the 1975 Mighty Marvel Calendar. Art by Sal Buscema.

Super Santa

From the 1976 DC Calendar. Art by Neal Adams.

A Tale Of Two Heroes

As a lot of you who read this blog know, I'm a huge Jim Aparo fan and my favorite comic as a kid was The Brave And The Bold. Issue #161 from April, 1980 was one of my favorite issues. It guest starred my favorite DC space hero Adam Strange and it gave Aparo a chance to draw some science fiction elements which I always thought he was very good at. This particular story was written by Gerry Conway instead of Aparo's usual B&B partner Bob Haney but it's still a great story with plenty of examples of Jim's fantastic storytelling ability. As usual his splash pages made a big impression on my 10 year old mind and this one was no exception.

Here's an example of Aparo's great sense of sci-fi design. While he wasn't quite as good as Carmine Infantino in this regard, I still really dig how he drew the towers of the planet Rann.

And of course Aparo could draw action scenes with the best of them. I wish he would have drawn more Adam Strange stories.

In addition to all the great action, there were also cool ads and extra stuff in late 70's DC books. I always enjoyed the subscription ads and if they were drawn by Aparo, all the better.

These books were always entertaining and I miss those days tremendously. But I can always dig these gems out of their boxes anytime I want to and enjoy my favorite era of comics , the Bronze Age

Star Wars Infantino Style

Like a lot of kids in the late 70's, I loved Star Wars and comics. So naturally I bought every issue of Marvel's Star Wars book that came out right after the movie. For a lot of those early issues, the legendary Carmine Infantino took care of the art chores, ably inked by Bob Wiacek. At the time, I couldn't stand the art. His style didn't mesh with George Lucas' universe in my nine year old mind. But now I really like it. Carmine was great at science fiction, as his stints on several of DC's sci-fi books in the 50's and 60's proved. This page depicting the Millennium Falcon taking on two TIE Fighters proves Carmine had the material down.

I've met both Carmine and Bob Wiacek at different cons and was lucky to get a Carmine style Darth Vader sketch from Bob.

These issues mean a lot to me. They're wonderful reminders of my two favorite things in childhood, comics and Star Wars.