The snows have started falling hereabouts, the days are getting ridiculously short, and the cold chill of winter has begun to envelop our souls.
Good excuse, then, for a theme week to distract us from the meteorological winter of our discontent...made glorious summer by Marvel 1974 Week!!!
Set the Wayback Machine for 25 years ago, and let's check out what was hopping in the Marvel Universe in December of 1974...
OK, I have to confess, I'm cheating a teensy bit here. I would normally stick with December cover-dated issues. But, with Shellhead that creates a problem. Due to lackluster sales, Iron Man was demoted to bi-monthly status for 1974 and part of 1975. So there was no December 1974 issue of Iron Man!!
Well, my blog, my rules, and my arbitrary enforcement of said rules. We're going with this issue, if only for the awe-inspiring last panel (be patient!).
So, for a mag that was having sales problems, that sure was a generic cover, eh? Nothing much to goose up sales there. Let's try the splash page:
See? Why wasn't that on the cover?? Yellow Claw was a fairly big player in the Marvel Universe in the early 70s...why not advertise him as your villain??
Who's responsible for this issue?
Of course, we all know the recently-departed George Tuska. Mike Friedrich was nearing the end of a 30 issue run on the Golden Avenger. You know how we can tell it's an early 1970s Friedrich script? The annoyingly self-aware, fourth wall breaking captions:
Man, sometimes, Mike Friedrich wrote like Stan Lee on ecstasy. A little too "call attention to itself" a writing style for my tastes. But maybe that's just me. Anyway, time for the obligatory exposition:
What?!? The Mandarin is dead?!? (SPOILER ALERT: it didn't take) Tell us more!!
Damn. That's one hell of a lot of exposition. And people claim modern comics are too hard for newbies to pick up on....
By the way, do you know how close we came to having "Events" a decade early? In this storyline, the mysterious Black Lama was going around setting up a "War Of The Super-Villains," wherein all the big bads would fight to the death, with the winner being given a grand prize of conquest of the Earth and ultimate power (really for the Lama's own nefarious purpose, of course). This was intended to be a line-wide event, crossing over to most other Marvel books, as this reply in the letter column tells us:
For whatever reason, it never happened, and our "Marvel-wide" story never went farther than the pages of Iron Man. We still got to see Yellow Claw vs. Mandarin and M.O.D.O.K. vs. the Mad Thinker (M.O.D.O.K. got a mecha!!). But apparently we were pretty close to seeing a huge "Event" ten years before Secret Wars was thrust upon us...
Oh, by the way, Black Lama was ultimately revealed to be Gerald Ford. Seriously.
But let's not forget whose comic book this is: Iron Man arrives to confront the Claw (accompanied by more self-aware narration):
Of course, Tony Stark was still Tony Stark, even in 1974. So, the "hero" we know is willing to deny the rights of those who oppose him, violate international law, and attack rather than talk--he was that guy, even then:
Yellow Claw was never as cool as Fu Manchu--who could be?--but when called upon he could be a bit of a badass. How badass??
He employs a "chief mutationist." That's badass.
The big slime thing engulfs Iron Man, but he manages to give us a huge Tuska-riffic escape:
Oh, but the Yellow Claw isn't done yet:
Really. That's his big design: small robots armed with small guns.
Oh, and they blow up real good when you hit them:
Now, this was the 1970's, so now matter how small the threat, you just know that Tony Stark would pull his Fred Sanford act:
Which enables the tiny terrors to dogpile him and prove just how ungeniuslike Tony actually was:
Yup, one single wire immobilizes the whole armor. If only the Skrulls had known it was that easy. But fear not--Iron Man manages to escape, the way he usually does--by blowing stuff up:
And we see the Yellow Claw do the next best thing to a spit take:
But the Claw is not done yet with his little menagerie:
I don't know what the hell that is, but it breathes radioactive fire!!
Tony's solution? Duh--kill it, in the name of dubious Marvel science!!
And now--it's time to blow up things on an even more massive scale:
Man. For supposedly the third smartest man in the universe (ask Eternity!!), Stark sure takes the blunt instrument approach to solving problems, doesn't he? But of course, the Claw gets away:
If he had time to sky write that much, you were never close to catching him, Shellhead...
So Stark returns home, and we resolve a portion of his current soap opera, as Pepper and Happy come back to work for him.
And we conclude with the most 70s panel ever written:
"The iron can only get it on when the man inside is...together...AND BROTHER, NOW HE'S TO-GETHER!" That is so my new mantra.
Next up for Iron Man:
Seriously? The San Diego Comic Con?? And we missed it?? Damn...
ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:
Speaking of bi-monthly...
I know I've mentioned this before, but it's worth keeping in mind: The X-Men used to be hideously unpopular. So unpopular that, not only was it made a bi-monthly, but it was made a bi-monthly REPRINT comic (this particular one reprinting X-Men #43). Despite the presence of Neal Adams, sales on the title sucked swamp water. So from March 1970 until July 1975, there were no new X-Men stories, aside from an occasional guest appearance.
Don't worry, mutant lovers--we were mere months away from the All-New, All-Different rebirth of the X-Men. But let this serve as a reminder: whatever today's sales trends are, whatever the red-hot properties and the bombs, it can all change pretty damn quickly...
Good excuse, then, for a theme week to distract us from the meteorological winter of our discontent...made glorious summer by Marvel 1974 Week!!!
Set the Wayback Machine for 25 years ago, and let's check out what was hopping in the Marvel Universe in December of 1974...
OK, I have to confess, I'm cheating a teensy bit here. I would normally stick with December cover-dated issues. But, with Shellhead that creates a problem. Due to lackluster sales, Iron Man was demoted to bi-monthly status for 1974 and part of 1975. So there was no December 1974 issue of Iron Man!!Well, my blog, my rules, and my arbitrary enforcement of said rules. We're going with this issue, if only for the awe-inspiring last panel (be patient!).
So, for a mag that was having sales problems, that sure was a generic cover, eh? Nothing much to goose up sales there. Let's try the splash page:
See? Why wasn't that on the cover?? Yellow Claw was a fairly big player in the Marvel Universe in the early 70s...why not advertise him as your villain??Who's responsible for this issue?
Of course, we all know the recently-departed George Tuska. Mike Friedrich was nearing the end of a 30 issue run on the Golden Avenger. You know how we can tell it's an early 1970s Friedrich script? The annoyingly self-aware, fourth wall breaking captions:
Man, sometimes, Mike Friedrich wrote like Stan Lee on ecstasy. A little too "call attention to itself" a writing style for my tastes. But maybe that's just me. Anyway, time for the obligatory exposition:
What?!? The Mandarin is dead?!? (SPOILER ALERT: it didn't take) Tell us more!!
Damn. That's one hell of a lot of exposition. And people claim modern comics are too hard for newbies to pick up on....By the way, do you know how close we came to having "Events" a decade early? In this storyline, the mysterious Black Lama was going around setting up a "War Of The Super-Villains," wherein all the big bads would fight to the death, with the winner being given a grand prize of conquest of the Earth and ultimate power (really for the Lama's own nefarious purpose, of course). This was intended to be a line-wide event, crossing over to most other Marvel books, as this reply in the letter column tells us:
For whatever reason, it never happened, and our "Marvel-wide" story never went farther than the pages of Iron Man. We still got to see Yellow Claw vs. Mandarin and M.O.D.O.K. vs. the Mad Thinker (M.O.D.O.K. got a mecha!!). But apparently we were pretty close to seeing a huge "Event" ten years before Secret Wars was thrust upon us...Oh, by the way, Black Lama was ultimately revealed to be Gerald Ford. Seriously.
But let's not forget whose comic book this is: Iron Man arrives to confront the Claw (accompanied by more self-aware narration):
Of course, Tony Stark was still Tony Stark, even in 1974. So, the "hero" we know is willing to deny the rights of those who oppose him, violate international law, and attack rather than talk--he was that guy, even then:
Yellow Claw was never as cool as Fu Manchu--who could be?--but when called upon he could be a bit of a badass. How badass??
He employs a "chief mutationist." That's badass.The big slime thing engulfs Iron Man, but he manages to give us a huge Tuska-riffic escape:
Oh, but the Yellow Claw isn't done yet:
Really. That's his big design: small robots armed with small guns.Oh, and they blow up real good when you hit them:
Now, this was the 1970's, so now matter how small the threat, you just know that Tony Stark would pull his Fred Sanford act:
Which enables the tiny terrors to dogpile him and prove just how ungeniuslike Tony actually was:
Yup, one single wire immobilizes the whole armor. If only the Skrulls had known it was that easy. But fear not--Iron Man manages to escape, the way he usually does--by blowing stuff up:
And we see the Yellow Claw do the next best thing to a spit take:
But the Claw is not done yet with his little menagerie:
I don't know what the hell that is, but it breathes radioactive fire!!
Tony's solution? Duh--kill it, in the name of dubious Marvel science!!
And now--it's time to blow up things on an even more massive scale:
Man. For supposedly the third smartest man in the universe (ask Eternity!!), Stark sure takes the blunt instrument approach to solving problems, doesn't he? But of course, the Claw gets away:
If he had time to sky write that much, you were never close to catching him, Shellhead...So Stark returns home, and we resolve a portion of his current soap opera, as Pepper and Happy come back to work for him.
And we conclude with the most 70s panel ever written:
"The iron can only get it on when the man inside is...together...AND BROTHER, NOW HE'S TO-GETHER!" That is so my new mantra.Next up for Iron Man:
Seriously? The San Diego Comic Con?? And we missed it?? Damn...ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:
Speaking of bi-monthly...
I know I've mentioned this before, but it's worth keeping in mind: The X-Men used to be hideously unpopular. So unpopular that, not only was it made a bi-monthly, but it was made a bi-monthly REPRINT comic (this particular one reprinting X-Men #43). Despite the presence of Neal Adams, sales on the title sucked swamp water. So from March 1970 until July 1975, there were no new X-Men stories, aside from an occasional guest appearance.Don't worry, mutant lovers--we were mere months away from the All-New, All-Different rebirth of the X-Men. But let this serve as a reminder: whatever today's sales trends are, whatever the red-hot properties and the bombs, it can all change pretty damn quickly...
Re. your remarks about the X-Men: IIRC Roy Thomas said that near the end of his run with Neal Adams sales actually picked up enough to have warranted a continuation of the series, unfortunately the sales figures (which were then collected a lot less quickly than today) only came in after the decision to turn X-Men into a reprint title had already been made.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it depends a bit on what you mean by "pretty damn quickly"; back in the 1960s and 1970s a year was still considered a long time in comics, since most of the creators were still well aware that the original superhero boom of the 1930s and 40s had fizzled out after only about a decade. The original X-Men were cancelled because they always sold pretty badly, which was in part due to them being considered a second or third rank title by Stan Lee & co. and treated as such (co-created by Jack Kirby, but abandoned by him soon so he could focus on the FF, Thor and other projects, while Stan Lee would take Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch out of the feature to the Avengers' benefit). So AFAIK The X-Men was plagued by below-average sales throughout most of its first run and it took two years to make the jump from bimonthly to monthly publication 1963/65. And the success of the All-New, All-Different X-Men also did not come overnight - they took from 1975 to 1978 to be upgraded from bimonthly to monthly and only became Marvel's top-selling title in the early 1980s. In comparison to many of Marvel's other success stories, the road to the top was a lot slower for the X-Men.
Roy Thomas would certainly know better than I, but it needs to be pointed out that there was a 9 month gap between the last new content issue of X-Men and the reprints, and sales data certainly didn't take that long to come in. If the sales justified a continuation, there was ample time for Marvel to do that...instead they chose, after the sales data came in, to revive X-Men as bi-monthly reprints, rather than continue the series. And the fact that decision stuck for over 5 years suggests that, just perhaps, Roy is mis-remembering or indulging in wishful thinking (unless you think Marvel was ignoring the sales information because they were against making money).
ReplyDeleteInteresting to see you go back to these issues Snell, as I started collecting as an impressionable 7 year old in the summer of "73, so these issues were formative in my childhood years. I can't recall how many of these stories i read, over and over and over, because that's waht a 7 and 8 year old does. I'm rather blown away by the fact the conway was 22 when he wrote all that... there's alot of bad in these issues, but you must, you must read the san diego con issue of Iron Man if you haven't before! Classic!
ReplyDeleteYes, it is noticeable that Marvel in fact did relaunch The X-Men after that 9-month gap and thus continued to make money off the franchise, they just didn't spend money on producing new material.
ReplyDeleteI now found one printed source where Roy Thomas talked about it, The X-Men Companion I (Fantagraphics 1982), so it is only about 12 years after the end of the Thomas/Adams run. Here, interviewed by Pete Sanderson, in the context of the 1973/74 conferences preceding the launch of the All-New, All-Different, he stated that The X-Men "had actually been selling well right around the time Neal [Adams] and I finished up doing our last few issues. Two or three issues around that time sold rather well, but and the others didn't sell that badly, just not quite well enough for the book to survive. However, Martin Goodman, the publisher at the time, was on an economy kick. He wanted to bring the book back but he didn't want to spend the money [laughter] so he just did reprints for a while. Since obviously there was some sort of market for The X-Men at various times, under [Jack] Kirby and Neal and myself and Stan, we should be able to revive it."
Thomas also mentions that the X-Men relaunch with its international team was intended to increase Marvel's overseas sales (that in the end did not turn out as planned).
hi
ReplyDelete