It’s great that DC and Marvel have been doing crossovers again recently. I just wish that they would do full-length stories again like the Limited Collectors/Treasury editions back in the 1970s/80s, or even like the Prestige format ones in the 1990s.
I used to buy Eclipse Monthly whenever I would see it in bookstores or in discount bins way back when. This might be around 1986 or 1987, so it has long since ceased publication by the time I was buying it. I think I’ve managed to buy all the issues except for one or two. Among the regular features, my favorite was The Masked Man. It had a great balance of humor, action, and drama. Plus, I like street-level heroes a lot. Strangely enough, I used to see a lot of copies of Eclipse Monthly all over back then in my neck of the woods, but I hardly saw any copies of The Masked Man comic book series.
Kid Colt has the distinction of being the longest running Western themed comic book of all time, with a little more than three decades of publication. I only ever had one issue of Kid Colt (issue number 202), which was a reprint of issue no. 129. And it was also previously reprinted in issue no. 162! I’m not certain if most (or all) of the 1970s issues were reprints, but I guess they were selling well enough for the title to have lasted until 1979.
Jack Kirby’s Fourth World saga began in the pages of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, so I decided to mashup a Silver Age Jimmy Olsen trope with a Bronze Age one. A mind-controlled Giant Turtle Man would be a pretty useful tool for Darkseid.
I think the first movie I saw that had Zorro as a legacy character was Zorro: The Gay Blade with George Hamilton playing the son (or more accurately, sons) of the original who has to take up the mantle. This cover imagines if that happened to Williams’ Don Diego. Who would he have passed the mantle on to?
The new Masters of the Universe movie opened today in my corner of the globe, so it’s the perfect time for another pun that I couldn’t resist making an illustration of. The E-Man series from First Comics was heavily into parody back then, so this is something that the creators might have done, considering both the comic and the Masters of the Universe cartoon both came out in 1983.
I wasn’t following Power Man and Iron Fist when their series ended, so I didn’t know that Iron Fist was supposed to be dead. I only found out about it in John Byrne’s Namor series where he was brought back to life. I’m glad he did because Danny Rand is too good of a character to waste.
And his name Hogarth is obviously a callback to one of the most popular Tarzan comic strip artists, Burne Hogarth.
Captain Strong was a Popeye pastiche who was a recurring character in the Superman titles in the Bronze Age of comics, but I think he only had a total of four appearances.
While I was drawing this, I couldn’t help but think of his visual similarity to Bibbo Bibbowski, who became a much-loved supporting character during the Triangle Years of Superman. Was Bibbo inspired by Captain Strong?
