In 1968, around the time that 2001: A Space Odyssey was in theaters, booksellers had Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, by Erich Von Daniken. It was such a big seller that I had no trouble acquiring a second-hand copy for 25 cents in the mid-1980s, and even as a thirteen-year old, I couldn’t make it more than a few pages into its soft-headed nonsense.
Von Daniken’s thesis of course was that the pyramids, Stonehenge, the Nazca Lines, and so on were beyond the abilities of previous civilizations, and required visiting space visitors to explain their existence.
Part of Von Daniken’s “evidence” is that the artistic styles we see in previous civilizations are better explained as ancient peoples depicting the space suits of their alien visitors. Big toke time.
A number of toy properties have been re-imagined in comic books. Some examples are the Shogun Warriors, The Transformers, Rom the Space Knight, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and G.I. Joe.
My own personal favorite was Marvel’s/Mego’s The Micronauts. The story of how Mego’s Micronaut toy line got turned into a comic is unexpected.
It turns out that Marvel writer Bill Mantlo’s son was opening up his Christmas presents in 1977, which included a haul of Micronauts (something that happened in my house that year too).
Mantlo was inspired by the toys and asked Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter to get his hands on the comics rights, and voila!
In a blog post of some weeks ago, looked at the one of my favorite Dr. Strange periods, when they’d established his overall mythos. The early 1970s was another kick-ass period for Dr. Strange, when the Master of the Mystic Arts became the Sorcerer Supreme.
In 1971, after the end of the series Strange Tales, Marvel’s Master of the Mystic Arts found a home in Marvel Premiere with issue #3. Marvel was just beginning an eerie period that mirrored the monster movie craze of the 1970s.
This period brought into prominence Marvel’s werewolves, zombies, Morbius the Living Vampire, Ghost Rider, Son-of-Satan, Dracula, Satana, Blade, and even ended up turning one of the X-Men into a furry monster. This tone seeped into Dr. Strange too.
Marvel’s Iron Fist has not traditionally been one of those characters that attracted me. I first encountered him in a second-hand Power-Man and Iron Fist I got in my first year of collecting comics in 1981.
I didn’t get the odd-couple humor, nor the 1970s movie aesthetic that drove the creation of these heroes. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to dig a character who wore slippers. In my defense, I didn’t cotton to Karnak of the Inhumans either. So maybe it’s was the karate chops.
As a teen, I was briefly and underwhelmingly exposed to the black and white magazine-sized martial arts books Marvel published in the 1970s. The only positive sound I ever made when Iron Fist showed up on my radar was when he was drawn by John Byrne and when he briefly crossed paths with the X-Men.
That all changed for me in a 2006-2009 run of The Immortal Iron Fist written by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and Duane Swierczynski, and pencilled by Travis Foreman and David Aja. Why?
Before 2006, a few things were clear about Danny Rand, the Iron Fist. He was trained in the mystical city of K’un L’un after the deaths of his parents. He is one of a long line of successive possessors of the Chi force that he got from the Dragon of K’un L’un. His arch-enemy is the Steel Serpent, a bit of a bad apple from K’un L’un. It’s a tight superhero set-up, and to my taste, a bit tepid.
But in “The Last Iron Fist Story” (issues #1-6 of the Immortal Iron Fist), Brubaker and Fraction reveal that Danny is not the only living Iron Fist. His predecessor is still alive and kicking (sorry…); he’s been hiding in an opium haze for decades.
When the enemies of K’un L’un find him, he has to leave opium, in anticipation of something called the Tournament of the Seven Capital Cities.
While interviewing Associate Editor Jake Thomas of Marvel Comics for my last blog post (see Middle Child) , we also talked a bit about horror in comics and where it fits, what fans are looking for, etc. It turns out that until recently, I hadn’t gone all the way to thinking about comics as a horror medium, partly because I’d never found them scary.
Human side versus devil side plus sister thrown in for family angst, and a guy on a flaming motorcycle. Freud! Help!
The old saw is that, other than superheroes, comics chased movies and TV, so that when westerns were popular, the comic industry produced cowboy books, and when SF movies were popular, they made SF comics, etc. And the 70s of course was the era of The Exorcist, The Shining, Jaws, and so on.
Some of the grotesqueries of the 1950s drove the creation of the Comics Code, but I guess I’d looked at the post-Code books like Tomb-of-Dracula and Man-Thing and Werewolf by Night as monster books, rather than horror.
There’s only so much you can do within the code, which was part of the reason why Marvel experimented with magazine-sized black and whites in the 1970s, which, by today’s standards (ex.: Severed or Wytches, from Image) look like a tea party… the little kid play, not the political movement.
However, despite being not scary, there was a rich subtlety in some of Marvel’s spooky books, an unreliability of perception, that drew me in, as a pre-teen and teen, and probably helped form some of my tastes.
In the summer of 1981, my mother gave me four comics, one of which was Doctor Strange #43. Doctor Strange was soooo wierd, but good, knock-off Chthulhu good.
And I hunted down Doctor Strange everywhere I could find him, which led me to the Defenders, another oddball child of the 1970s.
While Bram Stoker’s infamous vampire count has been prevalent in comic books whenever the prevailing bluenoses of each generation have deigned to allow horror books to be printed, there have been surprisingly few attempts to faithfully adapt the classic novel in comic book form.
Classics Illustrated tackled the book shortly before Dr. Frederick Wertham got his dirty little hands on the comic business and did his best to keep the children of the world safe from twisted people just like himself. The Classics Illustrated adaptation was professionally produced, if somewhat anemic.
Marvel Comics would later reprint it in the 1970s with new cover art to make it appear consistent with Gene Colan’s magnificent portrayal of the character for Marvel’s long-running Tomb of Dracula title. Happily, a superior adaptation was brewing in Marvel’s companion magazine, Dracula Lives.
Roy Thomas and Dick Giordano teamed up to provide a faithful, elegant, and leisurely-paced adaptation of the Stoker novel as an ongoing feature in the black & white comic magazine.
Unfortunately, sales were not on their side and the title was cancelled. The one unpublished chapter they had completed turned up in the pages of another magazine title, Legion of Monsters, before it too was cancelled. Their masterful adaptation was left incomplete for nearly thirty years.
In a 
