Peerless Power of Comics!

Continuing my look back at a very early fanzine, Hero , the fourth installment focuses on another Point of View article, with commentary by fans Bob Butts, Buddy Saunders and Al Kuhfeld. Rick Weingroff supplies the questions to the trio, which focuses on the newly christened Marvel Comics Group and their superhero features.   A little background: publisher Martin Goodman's superhero revival was less than two years old when Hero # 2 was mailed out to fans in May of 1963. Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four started the ball rolling and was one of their best sellers. The FF was soon followed by The Incredible Hulk (which failed to achieve adequate sales and only ran six issues), "The Mighty Thor" (in Journey into Mystery ); "The Astonishing Ant-Man" (in Tales to Astonish ); "The Human Torch" (in Strange Tales ), "The Invincible Iron-Man" (in Tales of Suspense ) and The Amazing Spider-Man . With six super-heroes either starring in their own comi...

Hero # 2, Spring 1963 (my issue is post-dated May 25th) had a circulation of 150 copies. Buddy Saunders cover art.   In my previous two posts I examined  Hero # 1, focusing on a few choice articles from that obscure fanzine. The second issue continues to investigate Marvel Comics' early superhero line-up as it was slowly finding its way; stumbling in places, but developing from month to month. Richard Weingroff, a knowledgeable fan, once again leads off the issue with his observations on that fascinating period.  Let's look back to a distant, and - for many of us of a certain age - dreamlike moment in time, when wide-eyed kids gazed in anticipation at the wire-bound comics waiting to be placed on sale by their local newsdealer. Alongside long-running favorites such as Action Comics, Jughead  and Uncle Scrooge  they   stumbled upon a few unusual surprises, including  Tales of Suspense # 39 and The Amazing Spider-Man # 1.         ...

In my last post I presented an article on the superhero revival of the 1960s that appeared in an early fanzine, Hero . In this installment I follow up with another piece from Hero # 1; a discussion on DC’s popular  Justice League of America . The team concept was not only a proven financial success, but garnered robust support from a majority of fans, including a portion that had collected All Star Comics in the 1940s and early 50s, a comic book that starred the original “Justice Society of America".   Justice League of America # 16 (December 1962), published a few months before the article in Hero # 1 appeared, is an example of the industry's growing awareness of fandom. A character in the story, Jerry Thomas, is a nod to both Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas, two well-known fans whose missives were published in editor Julie Schwartz's letter columns. Murphy Anderson art; Ira Schnapp letters. Image from the Grand Comic Book Database: http://www.comics.org/issue/17301/   ...

My next few posts will focus on an early fanzine, Hero , sampling articles by comic book enthusiasts at the dawn of the superhero revival. Many fans, both teenagers who might not have experienced that era firsthand and adults who had actually grown up in the "Golden Age" - a period of time that began in the late 1930s with the debut of Superman in Action Comics # 1, and lasted into the early 1950s - yearned for a return to the fantastic characters that were in short supply for nearly a decade.  By the 1950s comic book content was dominated by genre material, the most popular being war, western, humor, mystery and romance. The once unbeatable superheroes who dominated the newsstands in the 1940s faded from popularity in the following decade, although a few of National/DC's long-running characters survived, specifically Superman (and related characters), Batman and Wonder Woman . In a period of four years (1956-1960) DC's attempts to update/revise once popular charac...