Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man, seemed in 1976 to fill distinct market and story-telling needs. There was enough demand for Marvel’s mascot hero and enough room in his well-developed life for a second title devoted to telling it. Already, he headlined most months in Marvel Team-Up, a commercial vehicle widely used to pare him with lesser known and new characters, but these adventures were first and foremost action stories that rarely played upon developments in his life as student/photographer Peter Parker. Marvel Tales kept a steady supply of his five year-old adventures, already paid for, in print and selling better than a lot of new material of other characters- not to be confused with his adventures for five year-olds, the easy-readin’ Spidey Super-Stories. PPSSM filled another need for a while, too: a Spider-Man title for then-editor-in-chief Gerry Conway, without evicting Amazing Spider-Man scribe Len Wein. His campus-oriented stories carried over the supporting ...

Happy Birthday this week to DAK- Many happy trips more 'round the sun, many howls at the moon! Part One: Man-Wolf! Wait...Man-Wolf? Lue Lyron: So the story goes, one day working as an assistant editor at Marvel Comics Group, you’re walking past Roy Thomas, after hearing you’d get a series to write one day for a while, and he stops his conversation with Steve Englehart, who was visiting from California. Roy just turns casually to you and says, “I’ve been meaning to assign you a book. I have your first series for you to write.” Then he picks right up talking to Steve, while you walk away savoring that bombshell. (DAK’s account of how he and George became the new creators on the ongoing Man-Wolf series appeared in Creatures On The Loose #33, a personable text piece of that sort that delights we readers. This is the team’s introduction in their first color comics issue at Marvel in 1974.) DAK: Everyone likes to use the phrase, “break into comics”- but I like to say, I...

The story goes, a motorcycling youth fresh from a stint traveling with the carnival came to New York City, all of 20, 21, hoping to join Marvel Comics Group. David Anthony Kraft arrived with counter-cultural rebellion and a head full of imagination. His high school years spent reading science fiction paper backs in the back of the classroom led straight to a professional status: he took the initiative and inquired about becoming estate executor to pulp writer Otis Adelbert Kline! (I discovered Kline's initials presented as OAK and wondered if that wasn't the inspiration for the "DAK" nomenclature.) Science fiction writer Leigh Brackett (who famously drafted The Empire Strikes Back script) and Marvel's Stan Lee were also formative influences. Fictioneer also published hard back editions of Jack London, Frank Baum, the autobiography of A.E. van Vogt, Robert E. Howard, and E. Hoffmann Price, a colorful ex-soldier and pulp writer who became an early ...

Science that's more art than science! How today's tall tales are told with Rick and Morty! by C Lue t's fun to think Rick's interdimensional career kicked off about the same time as Reed Richards did as a fictional character in 1961. If Rick's 80 and 54 years have passed, then a breakthrough like the prototypical portal gun by the time he's 26 sounds credible. Super geniuses, particularly in more abstract mathematical fields, physics, etc, that is to say, IQ's over 180 that manifest in anything but the self-destruction of the person in question, tend to have their signature breakthroughs fairly early in life. Many of our most accomplished minds complete their most difficult concentration to a breakthrough of sorts before 35. For skills where supply overwhelms and washes away one's contribution until the right attachment arises, like writing, it's all bullshit, anyway; objectively speaking, critical reflections of your work are possible, an...