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?
I quite enjoyed the Armageddon 2001 event from way back, but they kind of dropped the ball with the ending. DC had to change Monarch’s secret identity to Hawk because of leaked info that it was gonna be Captain Atom. But the whole thing with Monarch forcing Hawk to kill him in order to take up the armor and become Monarch himself was a huge plothole for me. If it had worked the way he intended it to, then he would just have been trapped in a time loop of going back in time to get killed over and over again.
Part two of our crossover! At the end of the DNAgents series, all of the team members were put in suspended animation. Rainbow, in particular, had a romantic relationship with Crossfire which started in the miniseries Crossfire and Rainbow. To top it off, it was revealed that Rainbow was pregnant before being put in storage! That was quite a bummer of an ending, and I would have preferred that these characters had a happier one.
I didn’t read She-Hulk’s first series, and only got familiar with her when she joined the Fantastic Four during John Byrne’s run. I really liked her relationship with Wyatt Wingfoot. They seemed perfect together. Too bad it didn’t last.
I would also read some issues of her second series. At first I didn’t appreciate the humorous fourth wall breaking because I found the sitcom style humor in the Justice League titles at that time more to my liking. But eventually it grew on me.
I wasn’t really into the Image Comics craze back in the early 1990s. Maybe because I was reading more DC Comics at that time, that I never really followed the hype with the hot Marvel artists who jumped ship and eventually formed Image.
All of the Image Comics I own are from back issue bins. The only Image issue I bought fresh from a comic shop was the Spawn issue that guest-starred Cerebus. I guess I found it intriguing enough to have such different characters appear together in a single issue that I had to read it immediately. Nowadays, that trope has become very common.
Also, I’m not an admirer of Rob Liefeld’s work. But I must admit that there’s something about it that’s hard to ignore. You just can’t resist looking at it, at least.
Today marks the 90th anniversary of The Ghost Who Walks, The Phantom! He really is The Man Who Cannot Die. Happy birthday, Kit Walker!
Japanese Bat (by Hal Santiago) and Judoka Warriors (by Vicatan) were two separate features that I decided to team-up for this cover. Japanese Bat was just basically Batman in Japan, and Judoka Warriors was about two secret agents, a Japanese and a Filipino, who join forces to track down stolen Imperial treasures that were smuggled into the Philippines.
