Giant-Size Marvels: January 2009 Archives

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.

Marvel’s house ads in May 1974 trumpeted the arrival of their newest Giant-Size monster comic.  By this time, they dropped the pretense of calling it Giant-Size Monsters or whatever…

Giant-Size Man-Thing!  The greatest comic title of all time!

The cover by Mike Ploog was enough to make any Man-Thing devotee want to buy this comic.  We had never seen Manny fight another swamp creature before.  The Glob was an old character from the Hulk, but he was really a take-off on Hillman’s the Heap character.

The story inside did not disappoint.  There were two slimy slug-fights superbly illustrated by Ploog.  Sadly, this was one of the last Man-Thing stories by Ploog.  He left the title soon afterward to draw the Planet of the Apes series.

Steve Gerber created a really funny set of villains called the Entropists.  “Entropy, Entropy, all winds down!”  The Entropists are the enemies of environmentalists, because they state:  “What we wish is unimportant!  Entropy is the natural way of the universe!  We are born…we expend our life energies…we die.  To prolong the life of a man, or a world, is to defy natural law, to instill false hope.”  The leader of the Entropists, Yagzan, looked remarkably like Richard Nixon!

Dean Mullaney commented on this in the letters page of Giant-Size Man-Thing #2.  Gerber seems to indicate in the letters column that there were targeting another president, but I think this must be a red herring.  Yagzan was Nixon. 

There was a few people who could their letter published in nearly every issue of a title, Dean Mullaney was one of them.  Later, we’d watch Dean rise to become the publisher of Eclipse Comics, where he’d publish a number of things by Steve Gerber, such as Stewart the Rat and Destroyer Duck. 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.

I never thought I would ever read a comic about a barbarian in a million years.  I saw Conan on the newsstands and passed it by every time…until one day in 1973, I saw this incredible cover to King-Size Conan Annual #1.

Now that’s a cover that makes a barbarian look super mofo cool.  Conan’s glaring at the reader as if they were his enemy, daring them to take him on.  He’s got gobs of tiny nicks and cuts over his body, beads of sweat, and he is carrying an axe and a bloodied sword as well!  The detailed line work is amazing.  I love the swirling (fog or magic?) around his ankles, the cobblestone streets.  And that signature by Barry Smith!  I had never seen any artist sign his work so creatively.

Here’s another look at the cover with a different color scheme:

I still prefer the original King-Size cover.  It got me to buy that annual and run home to read the stories: Lair of the Beast-Men and Tower of the Elephant!  The latter tale had a shattering ending that left me completely hooked into Conan.  I bought everything from that point on: Conan’s regular title, Savage Tales, Savage Sword of Conan, and, of course, Giant-Size Conan.

But what was this “Academy Award” that Conan had won?  Rascally Roy explains it all in The Hyborian Page!

The Academy of Comic Book Arts existed in the early 1970s.  They did many things for the good of comic book professionals, but they also handed out awards, which Conan won, in 1970 and 1971.  What I really dig about this editorial page is Roy Thomas’ style of explaining all these things to the reader, a bit less egotistical than Stan Lee used to, but it really got me excited.  The map down below definitely peaked my interest in Conan’s world, and that red-head in the panels (Red Sonja) definitely made me want to buy more Conan comics.

Bravo, Barry Smith and Roy Thomas!  Nuff said.

Last month, I wrote about Giant Size Creatures, that introduced Dracula’s daughter, Lilith.  Marvel was determined to expand their line of horror characters with female versions of their famous monsters.  Soon after Lilith appeared, Giant-Size Creatures #1 appeared on the newsstands (which was re-titled Giant-Size Werewolf with issue #2), featuring a female were-creature: Tigra!

The cover was not half-bad, it definitely peaked my interest to see a female werewolf teaming up with Jack Russell to fight a horde of Hydra agents.

This issue was written by Tony Isabella, and drawn by Don Perlin and Vince Colletta. Now I have to say something that almost got me lynched at a con once…Vinnie Colletta is my least favorite inker in the entire world.  Some people love Colletta on Kirby’s Thor, but I do not.  One of the worst art teams that I can think of would have to be Colletta paired with Don Perlin.  I never really cared for Perlin on Werewolf by Night, he killed the book for me after Ploog left the series.  See how they depicted this dramatic scene of Tigra clashing with the Werewolf on a moonlit beach?  This is the best scene in the whole book, true believers!

Tony Isabella certainly took the creation of Tigra seriously.  I was really surprised to discover that Tigra was really Greer Nelson, from Marvel’s short-lived Claws of the Cat series.  Instead of making Greer a woman with a werewolf curse, she joined an underground group of Cat People who saved her life by transforming her into a were-cat.  Unlike Jack Russell, she retained her intelligence and preferred not to change back to human form.

Tigra was awarded a series try-out, starting in Marvel Chillers #3, and her artistic depiction was immensely superior.  Will Meugniot, the artist who would later go on to draw the sexy DNAgents, immediately knocked me out with this splash page.  Meugniot emphasized all of Tigra’s curves, oomphed up that bikini, and gave Tigra some nice cat-bling to go along with it.

The stories in Marvel Chillers #3-7 pushed Tigra firmly into super-hero territory, although the artistic teams shuffled with almost every issue.  Marvel Chillers #4 had a fill-in story by Chris Claremont and Frank Robbins, #5 saw Isabella and Meugniot return, #6 featured a pretty good early job by John Byrne, and #7 finished things off with dynamic cover by Jack Kirby.  Even back in the 70s, Tigra was single-handedly fighting off a Skrull invasion!

Even though Tigra lost her series, she was never forgotten in the Marvel Universe and became more well known that Jack Russell.  Tigra was a founding member of the West Coast Avengers and became a fixture of Marvel’s super-team.  Which leads to the modern era, where Frank Cho doesn’t miss a beat in depicting Tigra as a sex-kitten.  Oh that Frank Cho…exposing the dark underbelly of our Marvel consciousness!

Even though Tigra and Skrull-Pym’s little love-nest got interrupted by an Ultron-invasion, we just learned in Avengers: The Initiative #20 that they hooked up later on.  Tigra confesses to Hellcat that she is pregnant and Skull-Pym was the father!  Perhaps this subplot ends here, with Tigra later saying that she will terminate the pregnancy.  But it is ironic to see Tigra in a scene with Hellcat, since the Greer Nelson started out wearing this costume in the 1970s!  Nuff said.