The Tom Brevoort Experience

In the early 1980s, after having spent a couple of years working outside of the field in animation, Jack Kirby was making a bit of a comeback.

As I’ve related before, my buddy David Steckel had inherited a bunch of assorted comic books from older cousins who had outgrown them, and so his haphazard collection reached all the way back into the 1960s in a scattershot fashion.

MARVEL SUPER-HEROES continued in reprinting Incredible Hulk stories from a couple short years earlier, but which were old enough that they were still new to me.

The final series that got launched under the DEFIANT comics banner was PRUDENCE & CAUTION.

I was very surprised to come across this second volume of Doctor Strange adventures in the Pocket Books line of paperback reprints in a local bookstore.

A few years back, I wound up on an X-MEN convention panel along with Louise Simonson, and I was able to express just how impossible a bar she’d set for everybody who came after her as an editor on that particular line.

And so we come to the end of the run of SHAZAM that I borrowed from my grade school buddy Donald Sims so many years ago.

In addition to now being able to regularly get my hands on Annuals and other oversized comics such as Anniversary issues or WHAT IF and the like, my new Stationery Store outlet also gave me access to titles that I didn’t even know existed, such as this re…

We’d previously devoted a piece to spotlighting and examining two of the lost pages from a story intended for INCREDIBLE HULK #4 that Marvel mainstay Larry Lieber had fished out of the trash after an irate Jack Kirby had torn them in half and discarded th…

PETER PARKER, THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN had settled into a nice rhythm.

The early 1980s was a wild time to be a comic book reader, in that the establishment of the Direct Sales marketplace as a viable alternative to mainstream Newsstand distribution for comic books opened up the floodgates, with all sort of publishers with big

As I’ve mentioned before, my friend David Steckel had inherited a chunk of his comic book collection from older cousins who had outgrown comics, so he owned a handful of issues that dated back to the 1960s.

One of the immediate benefits of having switched my shopping for new comics to the recently-opened Stationery store was that I once again had access to Marvel’s upsized titles and Annuals.

Marvel veteran Larry Lieber has been divesting himself of portions of his collection, and the bounty, listed at Heritage Auctions, has uncovered some amazingly wonderful things.

Quietly and without fanfare, IRON MAN had become one of the most reliably entertaining comics in the Marvel line.

One of the new mainstay players in the emerging Direct Sales market comprised of comic book specialty stories in the 1980s was First Comics.

Now this next issue of SHAZAM was something of a shock to the system, and one that was only slightly blunted by the fact that I’d seen this cover in contemporaneous house ads when it had come out.

It was at some point around this time that my local postal carrier delivered my subscription copy of the latest issue of FANTASTIC FOUR–though not before it had already gone on sale and was available at my local outlet.

The last two series launched by Jim Shooter’s new company DEFIANT were both direct spin-off of the firm’s inaugural title WARRIORS OF PLASM.

My family were big fans of the Muppet Show every since it first premiered in 1976.

As the Direct Sales marketplace of comic book specialty shops became a larger and larger part of the marketplace in the 1980s, any number of new young publishers threw their hats into the ring.

Just as he was an enormous fan of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, my friend David Steckel was also a hardcore acolyte of STAR WARS, and he purchased each monthly issue of the Marvel comic based upon that storied film with almost religious zeal.

I also bought TALES OF SUSPENSE #66 during that trip to the Batcave comic book shop, and I did so for the most obvious reason: the copy I picked up was cheap.

One of the last series launched by Jim Shooter’s ill-fated venture DEFIANT, CHARLEMAGNE was a title that a obvious amount of effort and expectation had clearly been spent on.

One of the things that I was very obsessed with as a young comic book reader was age.