Leer Comics

I LOVE COMIC BOOK COVERS , especially those of the 1950s and 1960s. And because I look at so many, I can't help but notice trends, tropes and cliches in the cover concepts of the decade of my childhood. By far the worst offender was DC Comics, the company that was my introduction to American comic books. But as they were firmly aimed at 10-year-olds, they can be forgiven for assuming readers in 1958 wouldn't be readers in 1963. For my part, I began switching over to Marvel Comics around 1964, and later back-filled the issues I'd missed, so I probably only followed DC for about three years. But here, then, another batch of oft-repeated comic cover idea from DC Comics, with the occasional offering from Marvel. Let's start with ... LION'S-HEAD REVISITED Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, DC's dark overlord Mort Weisinger struggled to know what to do with the omnipotent character Superman had become. So he manufactured a whole supporting mythology around DC...

HERE'S SOMETHING A LITTLE MORE LIGHT-HEARTED than my more recent posts ... another look at the many tropes, cliches and chestnuts that show up over and over again in the cover designs of our favourite comics. I'd barely scratched the surface of this subject on one of my very early entries in this blog, so I'm giving the subject another outing. I should clarify that Marvel and DC comics took quite a different approach to how they created their covers. DC had always traditionally created their covers first, often using the idea behind a "grabby" cover to drive the plot of the story inside the comic. Both Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz took this approach with the DC books they edited. Marvel, though, did exactly the opposite, creating their covers after the interior art was completed. This meant that Marvel would often create symbolic covers that might not illustrate a scene from the story inside. But you'll see what I'm getting at as we go along ... IDE...

ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS about the comics of Marvel's formative years is how Stan instinctively understood how to connect with his audience. Every bit as important as the exciting scripts and art of the comic stories were the Marvel editorial pages, starting with the letters pages which would soon spin off the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins. The Marvel Bullpen Bulletin pages started in some November 1965 cover-dated Marvel comics (above is the first one to appear in Amazing Spider-Man , issue 31) ... but the foundations for this were laid much earlier in the letters pages that began in early 1962. Editor Stan Lee would evolve and build on the way he talked back to his readers and finally make a feature of it, a page that many fans (including myself) would read before the story. The first Marvel letters page was in Fantastic Four 3 (Mar 1962). When you think about it, that's pretty soon after Stan made the conscious effort to up his game and do something a bit more engaging than Godz...

I was going to do an overview of Marvel's Thor, starting from the earliest days of the Journey into Mystery issues, for October's blog entry, but having the builders in the house has meant my scanner is packed away, which was a bit of a roadblock.  So I've decided to offer a pictorial special instead. Back in the early days of my obsession with comics, before I stumbled across Marvel's titles, I was a reader of Batman and Superman comics. Looking back on those early 1960s DC covers I've noticed some weird tropes and trends. One of the oddest was Sheldon Moldoff's ever-present drawings of "Scaredy-Robin". Nearly every cover of Detective Comics from 1959 to 1963 had a profile image of Robin, apparently frozen in terror at the situation depicted on the cover. Sheldon Moldoff's trademark Robin portrait found its way onto too many Detective and Batman covers at the beginning of the 1960s. Why this was is anyone's guess. Perhaps it was Moldoff...