Recently in Marvel Vault Category

Here’s an interview, taken from last June’s E3 2009, with Guha Bala (president of Vicarious Visions) on the new features in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2.  There’s loads of footage on the Thunderbolts (Venom, Songbird, Green Goblin, etc) in the game.  I like what I’ve seen of the game environments, and the character detail is greatly improved as well.

Since this game is loosely based on Civil War, I wonder if it ends the same way?  I’d love to control Steve Rogers and have Captain America peel off Tony Stark’s armor.  Nuff said.

This Marvel house ad announced the coming of an actual book—as in to be sold in real bookstores—called Origins of Marvel Comics.  This hit Marvel fans like me right in the gut.  You see, at that time, actual book collections of comics weren’t available in bookstores or anywhere.  Outside of Jules Ffeifer’s Great Comic Book Heroes, or perhaps Steranko’s History of Comics, or reprints of Dick Tracy, Peanuts, and Little Orphan Annie, superheroes were really scarce.  And I know.  I looked for them every week!

Stan Lee would reveal the secrets behind creating the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk, etc., and reprint their first appearances with the best printing we had ever seen to that point.  I waited months until this finally appeared in the bookstore.  I think when it did finally come out, Stan appeared on the Today Show, which my Mother took note of.  Yeah, comics were finally legit!  Well, not really, until years later with the Spider-Man and X-Men movies.

The bottom half of this ad features a collectible I wish I still had: the Mighty Marvel Calendar for 1975.  That one had great illustrations by Romita, Starlin, Ploog, and others.  Anyone have scans of this calendar?  Nuff said

Marvel often tried to put two characters together in a series of ads or anthologies that often left me scratching my head.  So let’s celebrate those double feature specials!

Morbius and Lilith.  Kind of makes sense, both vampires, right?  Wrong.  Morbius is a scientifically created vampire, while Lilith was magically created.  OK, I’m a nit-picker.

Brother Voodoo and the Son of Satan?  Competing religions right there!  The Mark of Satan was the original title for Daimon Hellstrom’s series. 

Hey, we’re launching Man-Thing #1, and just because you love monsters so much, you should also buy Ka-Zar #1!  Well, both series have characters running completely naked in the great outdoors.

How about putting Ka-Zar in Astonishing Tales along with Doc Doom?  Jungle tales combined with evil dictator conquering tales—peanut butter and jelly!  We just weren’t ready for that jelly.  I just noticed that Zabu’s head is the hyphen in Ka-Zar’s logo.  Too bad Zabu’s head was also the same color as the background!

And then there was Amazing Adventures with the Inhumans and the Black Widow.  That didn’t make sense either; you would think the Inhumans and Doctor Doom would be better off sharing a title!

Amazing Adventures #7 is almost a crime, because you have 2/3 of a great cover ruined by the Widow at the bottom.  What’s more dramatic, some dude with a bionic arm threatening to burn down San Francisco or the lithe Black Widow karate kicking a fat guy?  I think I know which one Neal Adams preferred.  Nuff said.

Every once in a while, I get obsessed with a crazy idea.  Sometimes, it is related to work and that is a good thing, as I will knock myself out trying to write some C# code that makes everything work better.

And sometimes, it is something related to comics.  Like, I have to have a mouse-pad with my favorite Giant-Size cover of all time, Giant-Size Defenders #1:

I'm so happy with this, a little collectible that only I have.  How did I make it?  I tried a number of websites in vain.  Zazzle rejected my content because they were copyrighted images.  Finally I just decided to go to Fedex.com's Photo Services site and create my own.  Just upload the scan of the cover and you are done.  I don't believe it is illegal as I am not selling this to anyone else.

Since you save on postage if you get two mouse-pads at the same time, I also had my favorite King-Size Conan Annual #1 made:

Obsession complete, my mind can go back to something resembling work.  Nuff said.

I love the covers that Gil Kane did for Marvel's western titles.  Here's a great one for Kid Colt 200:

I noticed this black and white inked version over on ComicsFun.  I really like the perspective, taken from the feet of Kid Colt's enemy.  Look at how everything in the background seems frozen in time.  The horse, started by the gunshot.  The people down the street, alarmed by the bullets flying through the air.

Here's the cover in four-color glory:

Notice that Gil Kane's signature,on the sign above the horse in the black and white version, is obscured by the cover blurb "Blazing Western Action."  Nuff said. 

I used to collect artist portfolios that were published in the 1970s and 1980s.  These special items contained anywhere from 4-8 plates of special drawings/paintings from the finest comic book artists of the period.  I foolishly traded or sold these items when I needed money for college.  Big mistake!  What I would not give to still have Brent Anderson’s Ka-Zar portfolio, Marshall Rogers Batman portfolio, or Will Eisner’s Spirit portfolio!

The Michael Golden Doctor Strange portfolio was one of my favorites.  Here was the image on the outside envelope that contained all the plates:

Wow.  The detail on Doc is amazing, but check out how Golden renders the Orb of Agamotto! 

The Eternity plate really captures the mind-bending nature of that all-encompassing entity.

This portfolio appears to have been drawn by Golden in 1982 and published in 1983.  This was during the same period that Golden drew the legendary Doctor Strange #55 in 1982.  I kept hoping that Golden would become the regular artist on Doctor Strange.  We had read rumors of this in various fanzines, but alas, that single issue would be the only one on the regular series.

Check out the other plates in the Golden portfolio over on Gallery Photon.  Nuff said.

I described about how I fell in love with the world of Conan the Cimmerian after buying that King-Size Annual.  I was surprised, when I started reading the regular Conan series, that Barry Smith no longer drew it.  The art was handled by John Buscema, who I also liked, but I wanted Barry Smith.  Would he ever return to Conan?  I only had a to wait a few months in 1973 to see this Marvel house ad…

Whoa, big news!  I had heard fables and whispers about Savage Tales #1, which appeared two years earlier.  Apparently few people were able to buy it.  Savage Tales #2 was a very big deal indeed, as we read on the Bullpen Bulletins page…

If this did not stoke the fires enough to get us excited, there was Roy Thomas’ special editorial in Conan the Barbarian #30…

Note that in the editorial, Roy makes reference to a common occurrence in comics.  Whenever a popular artist leaves a series, no matter how good the replacement is, the readers always hate him and demand the previous guy come back.  John Buscema turned out to be very good indeed on Conan and drove sales to record heights.

I was on the lookout for Savage Tales #2 for at least a month, and then I saw this cover in the magazine section of The Book Cache in Anchorage, Alaska:

Now there’s a remarkable thing about this cover.  It’s painted by John Buscema!  I think this may be the only painting he did for the Marvel magazines.  I thought I had read somewhere that John Romita had done a cover rough sketch and Buscema did the rest.  Now open up the cover and see the table of contents page…

This was done in the style of many Marvel magazines, with a nice illustration accompanying the contents listing.  The drawing of Conan on a moonlit night is wonderful, drawn by Pablo Marcos, who I already knew about from Tales of the Zombie.  Now let’s flip forward a few pages to see if Barry Smith is really in this issue…

Oh.  My.  God.  Not only is Barry back, he’s better than ever.  The composition on this splash page is spectacular.  Smith’s detailed line work can be appreciated in full glory, without the four-color process muddying it up in any way.  I’ve seen Red Nails colored for both the Marvel Treasury and Dark Horse collected editions, but the color just seems to me to mess it up.  Red Nails must be appreciated in black and white, just like Citizen Kane or Manhattan.  The Red Nails logo and lettering are amazing.  Now as far as the story itself…

Better than most movie-blockbusters at the time.  The longer format of the magazine allowed Thomas and Smith to slow down the pacing and make the action more intense.  There’s a scene where Conan and Valeria are chased by a dragon.  Valeria stumbles and twists her ankle.  Conan carries her and runs, then when the dragon is almost upon them, hurls Valeria away, turns around and slices into that creature’s head.  Wow!  Each page of this story was worth drooling over.  The story had a kinky turn when Conan and Valeria stumble into a castle, where a witch has plans to make them human sacrifices.  And it was only part 1.  Part 2 would appear in Savage Tales #3.

When Red Nails took a break, there’s was still plenty more to read.  There was this Robert E. Howard poem, illustrated by Barry Smith.  These were reproduced from Smith’s pencils:

I don’t think I appreciated poetry until I read this.  You can judge it as a good or bad poem, but somehow Smith made poetry look cool.  I remember from this point on, wanting to explore more poetry from people like TS Elliott and Gary Snyder.  Robert E. Howard must have a been a man who suffered from depression, as he committed suicide shortly after his mother died.  The words in this poem sound very bleak, I think there is some indication here of his mental outlook.

If Barry Smith wasn’t enough to set this issue on fire, there was an additional story featuring King Kull, drawn by Berni Wrightson!  It was a reprint, but I had missed it the first time it appeared in Creatures on the Loose #10.  Creatures on the Loose used to be called Tower of Shadows.  Wrightson originally drew a cover for the original title, but it had to be replaced when the title was changed.  Thomas reprinted the cover here.  It’s early Wrightson, but early Wrightson is better than most people today.  Later, Wrightson would join Barry Smith at “The Studio” where they would share space for their drawings/paintings.

Now let’s go to the end of Savage Tales #2, for the cherry on top of the cake…

Even the next issue teaser page was incredible!  I cannot get over how good this looks.  Perhaps it was an illustration that Smith did for something else and it was used here.  You can see here Marvel’s aggressive scheduling in effect, promising that the next issue would be available the end of September 1973.  Savage Tales #3 would not appear on newsstands until late February 1974.  The delay was well worth it, Red Nails was completed by Smith and turned out to be a masterpiece.

I cannot tell you how many times I read this issue as a kid!  So much entertainment, well worth the “six bits” I spent.  I have bought many different collections with Red Nails in it, but no edition is better than the original Savage Tales magazine.  Nuff said.

Marvel published a number of Treasury-sized Holiday Superhero Grab Bags back in the 1970s, which I’ve seen discussed everywhere on the web this year, most notably on the LA Times blog, Hero Complex.  Marvel Treasury Edition #13 in 1976 featured a holiday cover by Gil Kane.  Here’s the rough layout:

I really love the fluidity of the figures in this one.  Notice that in this layout, Daredevil is positioned just about the Thing.  Also, note the Hulk’s expression, he’s kind of angry—maybe Santa did not visit him this year? 

Here’s the final colored and inked cover:

Daredevil was removed to make room for that giant-sized logo, which the characters are already spilling over.  It looks to me like John Romita probably changed the Hulk’s face to get him in the holiday spirit.

Now I feel like it is Christmas time!  Happy Holidays and Nuff said.