August 25, 2013

This Week In My Merry Marvel Read-Thru

The Amazing Spider-Man #44 (January 1967)

"Where Crawls the Lizard"
By Stan Lee and John Romita.

Dr. Connors has a relapse, sending the Lizard on a spree to frame Spider-Man for robberies. Meanwhile, Aunt May is on a trip Peter can't currently pay for, and the gang at college goes ga-ga when they meet Mary Jane for the first time.

August 9, 2013

My Merry Marvel Read-Thru: The Mighty Thor (1967)

As I'm not going back to re-read the earlier issues of Thor, just wanted to quickly say this is a series that started off pretty lousy, with Larry Lieber and the rotating artists - mostly Don Heck - often not having a clue what to do with the material beyond having Loki ridiculously manipulate every single villain who showed up each month. When Stan and Jack took over, it settled into a decent, if still bland, rhythm, but then I became hooked as, through 1965-1966, Jack started expanding on the mythology of the series and took us away from the Earthly boredom of Dr. Don Blake and Jane Foster to powerful hero ballads set among the massive and mysterious forces of the cosmos. Some of Jack's most awesome and powerful art of the time is in the pages of this book, even if it's often filtered through the inks of Vince Colletta.

August 1, 2013

My Merry Marvel Read-Thru: A Miscellaneous Beginning

I want to state up front that this isn't really a formal project. I've been working my way up through the superhero titles of the Marvel Silver Age for a while now, and don't have any intention of looping back and re-reading the stuff I've already finished. Since I know several of my followers have been interested in discussing things as I've slowly progressed, I figured I'd just jot down general thoughts so they'd have a better sense of where I am with each book and what I'm feeling.

After this post, I'll largely be going year by year, series by series - i.e. doing all of Thor from '67, then Spider-Man from '67, so on and so forth. As you can see below, before I started the year-by-year system, I read more deeply into Hulk and Dr. Strange (as well as Fantastic Four and X-Men), and will start chronicling them once I get to the point where I've left off. They're here because I wanted to round them to the end of the years where I stopped. As for Daredevil and Avengers, those were the last bits of '66 I had, and so we'll be picking up the next post firmly in 1967.

And at the moment, I'm only doing the series which started in the '60s, so as we get to 1970 and beyond, I'm not going to be adding any other series until I get past the point where all of these ended in the late 90s.

[Midnight Movie Exchange] Rad (1986)

Check it out here.