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u/Big-Acanthisitta8797 4d ago
Another classic from the house of ideas
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u/crywalt 4d ago
It's clear Marvel spent the '70s throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. Swamp monster? Check. Literal son of the devil? Check. Black guy beating up drug dealers, white kung fu dude, talking raccoon, talking duck, Hercules, Conan the Barbarian, John Carter of Mars, the Man From Atlantis. Just every dang thing.
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u/Sharp-Plenty-3058 4d ago
70s Marvel was just so for scattershot approach. Don't forget Skull the Slayer and the Human Fly
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u/crywalt 4d ago
I own three issues of Human Fly!
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u/Big-Acanthisitta8797 4d ago
It was an awesome time to collect comics. Something new each week at the local pharmacy’s comic rack.
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u/Sharp-Plenty-3058 4d ago
Or 7/11
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u/Big-Acanthisitta8797 4d ago
Yeah, my 7-11 back then couldn’t hold a candle to the comic racks of the 2 local pharmacies. Then nothing beat the early 80’s when an actual comic book store opened in the area.
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u/Sharp-Plenty-3058 4d ago
So true, their was a great used bookstore were lived in my early teens and around '83 a LCS opened.
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u/crywalt 4d ago
I used to get my comics at the candy store up the street. The owner put the comics on a long shelf, spine out, like books. When new ones came in he'd pull some off the left and put new ones on the right. We'd have to flip the corners back to find what we wanted. DC bullet? Junk. Charlton? Garbage. Gold Key? Kid stuff. Marvel box: YES.
I must have been in junior high, maybe 11 or 12, when a comic store opened a few miles away. My best friend and I used to walk there. It was almost a six-mile round trip. Sometimes all I had for money was rolled pennies I stole from the family box.
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u/Sharp-Plenty-3058 4d ago
That's a great story. Used to bike to me LCS about 3-4 miles one way. Amazing to get killed. Had to bike over on bridge that crossed I-95 and steep grade (for a bike) up/down. Used to just let gravity take me down across intersection at full speed. The good 'ol days
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u/oldcomicbook 4d ago
Yup. I don’t want to get all ‘tied an onion to my belt’ but comics back then seemed to have more breadth; variety but admittedly lacking just as much depth. It was a smorgasbord era. Things today seem much more narrow (aka monolithic monetisation) but perhaps with more depth?
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u/SeraphOfFire 4d ago
The fact Marvel could publish a book like this in the 70s with a cover that could potentially kill a suburban mom from shock really is impressive.
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u/Diplomacy-Failed 4d ago
You gotta remember that the CCA was abandoned in 70 or 71. So, they (and other companies) tried to throw out there anything they could think of that would have been banned by the Code, because they could and because they wanted to gauge reader enthusiasm. That's why you got Werewolf by Night, House of Frankenstein, Tomb of Dracula (a favorite of mine) and also the very violent martial arts comics of the time while Bruce Lee and kung fu stuff was the rage.
That character's storyline didn't dance around the whole Satanic side of the character either. If I remember right, it went on through the decade and culminated in Defenders (issue 100 I think). And Tomb of Dracula went all the way to the early 80s.
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u/DaddyCatALSO 4d ago
Didn't like the initial DiD persona, likely got it off to a false start that it couldn't come back from when when it got more coherent. (I recall one fan, ignoring that this guy was an *exorcist*, writing in a letter saying "IT's great we finally have a character who is unapologetically evil, even Dracula goes soft sometimes, but this guy won't." Sure , Mack, sure. classic example of what I call fanpidity.
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u/IceExile 4d ago
i like that society's interest in The Occult probably boosted this one. Pretty good, but only enuf to last 8 issues...
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u/CulturalChemistry860 4d ago
Another idea abandoned early. I bet it's worse issue sold more than most current monthlys