Flash #178, the 80-page Giant, is a cheat since that WAS a special despite being part of the regular numbering, but… it was the First.

Of course these rules are all made up rather arbitrarily anyway, mostly so the list would have variety from usual best-of compilations and also to make the point about compression. Kurt’s original game on the Classics Forum was a lot looser.

That Star Lord special edition is great– partially because it gives an epilogue after the Claremont/Byrne reprints (written by Claremont and drawn by Michael Golden) that pretty much ignores all the stuff successive writers did to the character, so it’s nice and self-contained. I think it’s highly underrated.

Why? Because this self-same issue of Amazing Adventures was reprinted in the Avengers a couple of years after it’s first go, and was one of the first 3 or 4 comics I ever bought.

You perfectly described the late Tom Sutton’s appeal in your summary, and Englehart’s script was my first real awareness to Marvel style humor. I thought Iron Man asking Beast if he wanted “a light” while blasting him with his chest thingy was the hight of hilarity in 1975. I vividly recall acting this scene out after kindergarten with a friend while we were waiting for our rides to arrive.

Sutton’s creepy art of the melting latex scared me as a kid, making the Beast both attractive and horrifying at the same time. I couldn’t decide if he was a misunderstood monster, or a villain.

All the other comics on your list have been fantastic as well, but this one really stands out for the powerful imprint it made on my mind as a kid. I haven’t read it since around 1980, but it’s all still right there in my head.

Anyway Greg, any chance of a “top” list of annuals from around that same era?

No reason not to. But probably not for a while. We’ll change it up next week. Probably something about Linda Medley and Comicstravaganza. Which I have to run off and get ready for, it starts in an hour or so…

Anyway Greg, any chance of a “top” list of annuals from around that same era?

And I have a bit of a quibble with the Marvel Adventures and Johnny DC lines being held up as the successors to compressed storytelling (not necessarily by you, but your comment about them made me think of it). They are done in one and they are enjoyable, but they don’t have much of a story to them. If you compare the amount of action and characterization going on in any one of your choices, you won’t find anything close to that depth in those two lines. Most of the kids in my elementary library would rather read an 80s issue of Transformers or Superman, current Sonic, Marvel Star Wars or Godzilla, or Richie Rich than the Adventures or DC line because there’s more happening in them. It’s kind of hard to build a comic book reading audience when your 7 year olds think the new comics being offered to them are too babyish.

Also: I really dig the rendering of The Thing on that Strange Tales cover. I don’t know if the coloring is a product of weathering with age or some old school printing technique or what, but the smudged, burnt tans really play up his rocky hide. There’s almost a water color quality to the colors. Very cool.

Also, much love for the Wein/Dillin Justice League run; I faithfully bought all of them.

With the recent sucess of Marvel’s “cosmic” line, I’m sure that sooner or later the classic Starlord stuff will be collected in one of those Premiere hardcovers, like the Guardians of Galaxy are now.

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

but…why is Manhunter so good? I was kind of disappointed by it.

Part of it’s context. No one had done any of that stuff back in 1973. No one had heard of ninjas or cloning or any of the things that are cliches in modern comics, and also, Manhunter was a DC superhero that shot people or threw knives into them. He was doing the Wolverine-Punisher-hardcase thing a decade before it was trendy, in a book from the company where we all thought it wasn’t allowed.

So there’s that. The other half of it for me is the sheer craft of what Goodwin and Simonson could do in eight pages. I was talking a little about how I miss compression sometimes in modern comics, and Manhunter is ULTRA-compressed. Every square centimeter of every page is engaged in moving the story forward and foreshadowing things to come and building on the previous chapter and illuminating some facet of character, and it never went where we thought it was going, there was always a twist. Moreover, each eight-page piece worked as an actual story as well, they were individual units.

Finally, it was a serial that ENDED. That was unheard of in DC superhero comics in the 1970′s. It came to an actual conclusion.

I could go on and on– Simonson’s art was a revelation to me at that age– but those are the reasons I love it so. It was the prototype for a lot of what has come to characterize modern superhero comics. But it happened thirty-five years ago. Today it looks perhaps a bit pedestrian because EVERYTHING looks like that now. But it was the first and for quite a while, it was also the only. It took about a decade for other superhero comics to catch up.

I love Simonson’s work, but…why is Manhunter so good? I was kind of disappointed by it. I will say, it does look more exciting in color than in the black and white version I have.