In a box in a dusty corner of Paper Heroes, I found a bunch of Marvel black-and-white comics magazines from the mid-1970s. I never got a chance to read these when I was a kid; newsstand distribution was spotty in those dark days before the direct market and the local comics shop, and these books were both expensive (a dollar even, or half of my weekly pocket money) and vaguely disreputable.
I'm not nostalgic by nature, but I picked up a fistful of these and found myself channeling the spirit of the late, lamented Cheeks the Toy Wonder website (don't bother looking for the site, cos it just ain't there anymore, having been crushed beneath exploding bandwidth cost).
Comics, in those days, had not yet sealed themselves in an impenetrable bubble of self-referentiality, and still partook of the oxygen of the larger pop culture—particularly the culture of the pulps.
That's the work of Earl Norem, above: his stuff showed up in the Marvel books every so often, back in those days when painted covers were not so common. Compares favorably with the work of James Bama, whose version of Doc Savage has become definitive.
[This is probably the best place as any to link to a massive gallery of pulp and paperback covers, as maintained by the Mighty (Yet Modest) Two Tub Man.]
More to come...
