Growing Up In The 70s

Growing up in the 70's I was fortunate enough to be a kid when Marvel Comics was undergoing an transitional phase from their traditional superhero oriented comics of the Silver Age, to more experimental themes. A lot of awesome characters and stories were born during the decade, including some legendary monster comics like Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf By Night, as well as comics like Howard The Duck, which defied easy categorization. It was a time before the market was flooded with X-books, and when you could still get a complete story in a single issue of a comic without worrying about massive, convoluted mega-crossover story arcs between a dozen different titles on a regular basis. Back then, Marvel was still the shining beacon on the hill for comic fans. Corporate greed and inept editors-in-chief (yes, you Joe Q) had yet to taint the hallowed halls of mighty Marveldom. I grew up a Spider-Man fan, largely through the Marvel Tales reprints of Peter Parker's earliest adventures as well as the Amazing Spider-Man comic itself. And, yes, I even read and enjoyed Spidey's Electric Company tie-in comic. Who didn't love the Electric Company as a kid back then? But Spider-Man was an exception. Typically, I was a bigger fan of the monster comics and stories featuring characters like Dr. Strange and the Silver Surfer, which dealt with more macabre and supernatural subject matter.

In the early 1990s I lost my passion for Marvel. The company had began to change from the company I had grown up with, to a corporation with one goal: make as much money as possible, at the expense of quality if need be. The gimmick foil wrap-around covers, the ever increasing cover prices and the increasingly common multi-title crossover story arcs were killing my enjoyment of reading Marvel comics. The storylines were just plain awful. All of the artwork began to look similar, with no one artist really distinguishing his or herself from any of the others. And the X-Men began to take up more and more room on the comic store shelves, meaning that other better titles like Alpha Flight were regularly canceled. I liked the X-Men as well as anyone. Hell, I'd been there from Giant sized X-Men #1 more or less. But too much of anything isn't good. So I did the unthinkable and dropped all of my Marvel comics, and went Indy.

I've never really returned to Marvel. I keep up with company news and eagerly await the day I read about Joe Quesada's departure as editor-in-chief. But I've not purchased any new Marvel Comics since the middle 90's or thereabouts. And I have no plans to do so. But I have grown fond of the great Marvel Essentials line of trade paperbacks. They're cheap, they're huge (most are well over 500-pages), and the black and white format doesn't bother me at all. I think it enhances the art to a certain degree. Thus far I have collected about fifteen volumes. And I've read most of them. This blog will be my review of those books, my thoughts on future books, and just random rambling on subjects myriad and diverse.