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1st Issue Special #13 (April, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

In late January, 1975, DC Comics premiered a new ongoing title called 1st Issue Special with an initial installment starring “Atlas”, the latest creation of writer/artist Jack Kirby.  Almost exactly one year later, DC released the thirteenth — and as it turned out, the last — issue of that same title.  This time, the cover feature was “Return of the New Gods”, featuring some of the earliest creations Kirby had produced for the publisher upon his arrival there in 1970.

There was one major difference this time, however; Jack Kirby himself wasn’t involved, having left DC to return to its greatest rival, Marvel Comics, some months earlier (although his final contracted work for the former company had only appeared a few weeks before this, in Kamandi #40).  But if anyone at Kirby’s former employer found this fact to be at all ironic, they kept it to themselves.  Not only was the “King of Comics” not creatively or editorially included as part of this stab at reviving his “Fourth World” characters and concepts — his name didn’t even appear anywhere within its pages.  Read More

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X-Men #98 (April, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Per its entry at the Mike’s Amazing World of Comics web site, the comic we’re discussing today originally reached America’s spinner racks on January 20, 1976.  But even though one can’t tell it from artist Dave Cockrum’s very fine cover, once we turn to the opening splash page we find that, three weeks into the new year, the All-New, All-Different X-Men were somehow still celebrating the December, 1975 Christmas season:  Read More

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Defenders #34 (April, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Fifty years ago, the cover of Defenders #34 (produced by Rich Buckler and Dan Adkins, but giving off strong Jack Kirby-Chic Stone vibes to your humble blogger) let any regular reader who’d somehow managed to miss the previous issue in on the big news:  Nebulon, the Celestial Man, who (in league with the Squadron Sinister) had almost destroyed the Earth by flood back in #13-14, was back, and he meant business.  Read More

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Metal Men #45 (Apr.-May, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As of January, 1976, your humble blogger had been reading DC Comics publications for over ten years — but never, in all that time, had I read a single comic-book story featuring the Metal Men, those robotic heroes created in 1962 by writer Robert Kanigher and artist Ross Andru.  Not any of their 4 tryout issues of Showcase, nor any issue of their own series (which consisted of 41 original installments released in 1963-69, followed by 3 reprint editions published in 1972-73)… not even any of their 6 Brave and the Bold team-ups with Batman and other DC heroes.  Oh, I knew who they were, all right, through the normal process of comics-fan osmosis (house ads, letters-page references, etc.); I might even have been able to rattle off their names.  But I’d never read a single one of their adventures.  Read More

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Doctor Strange #13 (April, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog will recall from our November, 2025 post about Doctor Strange #12, that particular installment of the adventures of Marvel Comics’ Master of the Mystic Arts ended not with a whimper, but a bang.  Actually, a series of bangs, by the end of which the planet Earth (the “real” one, writer Steve Englehart’s script assured us) had been completely and utterly destroyed, along with all living things thereon.  “But then,” Englehart’s omniscient narrator pointedly asked us readers, “how is it you remain?”  How, indeed?  The answer to that poser was promised for the next bimonthly issue… which, of course, brings us to the subject of today’s post.  Read More

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Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man (1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Half a century ago this week, the new year of 1976 brought comics fans something that would have seemed an utter impossibility just a few years before — a all-new tabloid-sized comic book co-produced by the American comics industry’s two greatest rivals, DC and Marvel, featuring their flagship characters in a single 92-page adventure.  Read More

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Omega the Unknown #1 (March, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re probably already aware that this post is the fourth I’ve published this month.  If, in addition, you’re already familiar with its subject, you may also have noted that it’s the third out of that four to be devoted to a comic book featuring the writing of Steve Gerber.

Of course, if you are a regular reader, you may not consider that latter fact to even be all that notable, as your humble blogger has made it pretty clear that Gerber was (and is) one of my two favorite comics writers of this era (the other being his fellow Steve, Englehart).  And it probably wouldn’t have surprised my eighteen-year-old self, either, back in the waning days of 1975, to learn that Steve Gerber’s work would continue to hold my admiration, half a century on.

What did in fact surprise me way back then, however, was that, per the credits given on the first page of his latest project — a new superhero series called Omega the Unknown — Gerber was sharing the authorial byline… and with a woman, at that, at a time when female comics professionals in general were hardly numerous, and female writers even less so:  Read More

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Howard the Duck #2 (March, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If you were a savvy comics fan scanning the spinner racks in December, 1975, artist Frank Brunner’s cover for the second issue of Howard the Duck would likely suggest that, following his and writer Steve Gerber’s recent skewerings of a couple of popular comic-book genres — namely, horror (in Giant-Size Man-Thing #5) and sword-and-sorcery (in HtD #1) — they were about to turn their satirical sights on the most popular of them all (at least in the American comics of the 1970s); you know, the one that revolves around colorfully costumed people with funny names.

But while that assessment would ultimately prove to be very much on the money, a turn past the cover to the book’s opening splash page would have clued you in that, before taking on the sacrosanct superhero tropes on which Marvel Comics’ hallowed House of Ideas has been built, Gerber and Brunner (joined by Steve Leialoha on inks) had one other genre stop to make first…  Read More

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Astonishing Tales #34 (March, 1976)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As regular readers of this blog might recall, we ended our October post about Astonishing Tales #33 with the observation that with that issue, Marvel Comics seemed to have finally found a solid creative team for “Deathlok the Demolisher”, with the feature’s primary creator, plotter, and artist Rich Buckler now supported by Bill Mantlo as scripter and Klaus Janson as inker and colorist.  Meanwhile, Buckler’s frequently meandering plotline seemed to have found some new forward momentum as well.  Was it possible that this series — which, to be sure, had still generally been entertaining in (mostly) bi-monthly doses, where one might simply enjoy the gritty atmosphere and violent action without being overly concerned with the incoherence of the overall story arc — was finally on the verge of realizing its considerable potential?  Read More