Classick's Comic Book Stash
Over the years I've collected a variety of comic books. This is most of that collection....
Permalink
First Serial: Marvel Comics, The Untold Story Drugs, feminism, and blaxploitation superheroes — the moment when Marvel changed forever [Grantland.com]
© Raeanne Rubenstein, 2012
First Serial: Marvel Comics, The Untold Story
Drugs, feminism, and blaxploitation superheroes — the moment when Marvel changed forever
By Sean Howe onOctober 3, 2012
In the early 1970s, a decade after its initial bursts of hip cachet and mass popularity, Marvel Comics was, like the rest of the industry, a victim of flat sales. Artist Jack Kirby, the co-creator of the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and the X-Men, departed for Marvel’s chief competition, and editor-writer Stan Lee considered leaving the industry. After a sabbatical to work on a screenplay, Lee returned to Marvel Comics, taking on the role of publisher and president when founder Martin Goodman — who’d sold the company to a conglomerate called Cadence Industries — retired. (Goodman’s son Chip stayed behind as editorial director.)
Roy Thomas, Lee’s right-hand man in the office since 1965, took the reins as editor, and presided over a revolving door of new talent who’d grown up absorbing the Marvel style and who were eager for work. What did the company have to lose by letting them take a crack at turning around sales? It was, in a more modest way, a repeat of what Hollywood had been experiencing for a few years, after a conflation of big-budget disasters and the successes of Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde convinced the studios that they might as well throw money at scrappy film school graduates and hope for the best. The hard-core comic readers came from all over the country. Among them were Don McGregor, a diminutive, fast-talking, aspiring filmmaker from Rhode Island; Steve Gerber, a chain-smoking Camus obsessive from St. Louis; Gerry Conway, the Brooklyn-born prodigy who’d started writing Superman when he was 14; and Steve Englehart, a bearded and bespectacled conscientious objector from Indianapolis.
Change was coming to Marvel Comics.
Permalink
Understanding Ethnocrunching – How Racism Works In The Comic Industry
Taking a break from comics stash posts to share this insightful piece by Brandon Easton. Brandon Easton writes for Bleeding Cool. He is a current Thundercats and Transformers animation writer and recently had his first graphic novel, Shadowlaw, published.
