Superheroes love fighting each other. It’s a trope of the genre and can be irritating at times when the heroes spend their time fighting amongst themselves instead of fighting evil. So far, I’ve actually been surprised at how often it happens. It seems that almost anytime heroes meet for the first time, they will fight. I thought it was a relatively newer trope, but it really has been around as long as the modern Marvel universe.

Hot on the heels of the formation of the team, the Defenders square off against the Avengers in a twelve-part arc spread out over…

As a more recent Marvel reader, I only thought of the Defenders as the team of street-level heroes Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and Jessica Jones. This lineup aligned with the eponymous Netflix show. It was only a couple of years ago that I learned there was a Defenders team long before the Netflix-inspired one, and it consisted of some of Marvel’s biggest names. I really knew nothing about this team but I’ve learned they were a mainstay of the Marvel universe for over ten years, from 1972 until the Defenders book was cancelled in 1986. They appeared sporadically over…

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, along with other Marvel writers and artists, were at their most prolific through the 60s. They created character after character that has lasted into the 2020s. While Kirby left Marvel and Stan moved on to a publishing role, they passed the torch to a whole new generation of creators who emerged in the 70s. The next step on my read-through was checking out the origins of new characters created throughout the 70s, some of which have gone on to be some of Marvel’s most enduring characters.

Lots of changes took place at Marvel in the early 70s, at least that’s what I learned from my most recent readings. The Avengers had major lineup changes, Captain America had his powers changed, and most surprisingly to me, the Fantastic Four’s lineup changed after Sue left Reed. I can tell that the writers and editors were trying new things, now over ten years since the modern Marvel universe debuted. Some of them worked and some didn’t, let’s get into it.

In my last post I wrote about the changes to the Comics Code Authority that occurred in the early 70s. For this post, I will be focusing on one of those changes: supernatural/horror characters being permitted. While not crucial to the Marvel universe, these genres were a large part of the company’s output in the 70s. Horror anthologies were all the rage at Marvel and I believe at DC as well. …

Amazing Spider-Man #121 is one of the defining moments of comic book history. The death of Gwen Stacy changed everything. It is a symbolic end of the Silver Age and start of the Bronze Age, when mainstream superhero comics began to explore darker topics and explored social topics with the loosening of the Comics Code Authority rules. Of course, I’m not quite there just yet.

I’ve been excited to get this story arc since I started this read-through. The Kree-Skrull War as a war itself is a mainstay of the Marvel universe and such a defining part of the cosmic side of things, and I have always heard such great things about the original story arc. At first, I was slightly letdown. The first four issues all take place on Earth and barely even touch on the Kree-Skrull War and even the next five issues have little to do with the war and more to do with the Avengers’ journey during a small part of…

Editor’s Note: I started this blog in part to keep me occupied while unemployed but I’ve actually ended up working full time since the end of September. I used some of this money to get a Marvel Unlimited subscription which gave me a three-month period waiting for new issues to be posted where I was only reading old comics for this blog. It’s been three months and I will resume reading new issues weekly, but I’m still committed to this journey.

One of the most confusing parts of comics is following a character’s individual arc across multiple different titles. Between…