Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Making a Splash: Marvel Comics in May 1971

Greetings, Groove-ophiles! Today we're gonna gander and groove to the sensation splash pages Marvel Comics produced 40 years ago this month. This was a really special time for Ol' Groove, as this was the summer I dove headfirst into the deep end of pool reserved for true Marvelites. Besides the far-out times had on the back patio wheeling and dealing with my neighborhood pals for those much-needed back issues, Channel 19, WXIX out of Cincinnati, was delivering the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoons, Adventures of Superman, Prince Planet, Ultra Man, and the Twilight Zone on a daily basis. No longer was I the casual young reader--I was Li'l Groove, comicbook fanatic. And yep, these were all the new, non-reprint super-hero mags Marvel produced for this particular month. Can you imagine? You could by every  Marvel super-hero  mag--plus Conan and Kull!-- that month for a fraction of what you'd pay for a single copy of one of Marvel's mags today! 12 times the fun for less than a third of the price. And it was all by Lee, Thomas, Conway, Friedrich, Kane, Trimpe, Colan, Romita, the brothers Buscema, Smith, Tuska, and the Severin siblings.













Is it any wonder we still love the Groovy Age?
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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousMay 12, 2011 at 8:24 AM

    Oh how good are those splash pages - works of art in their own right. I think I have most of these comics (or read them in the UK reprints) but the Colan one are amazing - Most of todays splash pages are pretty poor these all set up the story brillaintly - thanks again for showing such good stuff.

    McScotty the Scot

    ReplyDelete
  2. M W GallaherMay 12, 2011 at 9:09 AM

    Ah, I see this was the reknowned era of the Quota on Exclamation Points at Marvel. Especially odd are the dialog balloons where they forgot to replace the excised exclamation points with periods, resulting in a strange, child-like quality to the speech. Interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  3. HEHMay 12, 2011 at 9:40 AM

    Quite a nice selection of splashes.

    ReplyDelete
  4. JohnJMay 12, 2011 at 2:53 PM

    The days of 2 or 3 monthly books drawn by Buscema, Colan, Trimpe, and Severin(s). Is there anybody today who can produce half that much great art on that schedule?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Mike MikulovskyMay 14, 2011 at 7:54 PM

    Hey Groovster, I'm with you. I strongly believe 1970 & 71 were my favorite years. The years from 1968-74. Were on a whole probably THE years for me. But 75-79 weren't too shabby either. Each year had it's own high & low points.

    I had problems leaving comments here a few days ago. My blog was down. Happy to see it's back up & running! Keep'em coming Groovster!1976 & 77 were pretty great years also.

    ReplyDelete
  6. giantsizegeekMay 18, 2011 at 11:20 PM

    All that stuff was just classic. I could read them all over again right now!

    ReplyDelete

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Special thanks to Mike's Amazing World of Comics and Grand Comics Database for being such fantastic resources for covers, dates, creator info, etc. Thou art treasures true!


Note to "The Man": All images are presumed copyright by the respective copyright holders and are presented here as fair use under applicable laws, man! If you hold the copyright to a work I've posted and would like me to remove it, just drop me an e-mail and it's gone, baby, gone.


All other commentary and insanity copyright GroovyAge, Ltd.

As for the rest of ya, the purpose of this blog is to (re)introduce you to the great comics of the 1970s. If you like what you see, do what I do--go to a comics shop, bookstore, e-Bay or whatever and BUY YOUR OWN!