I’m not a big Lois Lane fan. I never was. Try for the life of me, I could never see what attracted Superman to her. Oh, sure, every once in a while would come a story in which she was a true and helpful friend to the Man of Steel. But far more often than not, she was a genuine pain.



She snooped. She pried. She violated others’ privacy. And I’m not talking about in her professional rôle as a reporter. These things she did to dig into the personal secrets of…

“The Court-Martial of Sergeant Fury”

Editor and writer:  Stan Lee  Art:  Jack Kirby (pencils), George Roussos (inks)

It was January, 1963, and Marvel Comics was a title short.

Publisher Martin Goodman had ordered the cancellation of The Incredible Hulk after its sixth issue. …

Once again, gang, I’m going to blow away some of the commonly held misconceptions about the fictional details of the Silver Age heroes.  As I mentioned the last time I did this, an abundance of continuity errors made in the 1970’s became factoids when writers and fans who came in late accepted the mistakes as legitimate information.  When 1985's Crisis on Infinite…

I have to say, I loved the response to this particular quiz!  The responses were everything I hope for when I gin up one of these brain-teasers:  a reasonable amount of participation, a bit of brilliance from everyone who posted, some correct answers which I hadn’t thought of, and one question which nobody got right. 

(O.K., that last one is my ego speaking…

I try to accommodate my readers.  Sometimes, it’s a snap, especially when the reader himself provides the inspiration, such as when Commando Cody raised the question of why Lightning Lad wasn’t held to task for killing Zaryan the Conqueror.

Other times, the sailing's not so smooth.  Figserello has been waiting for me to do a piece on Animal Man.  The hold-up…

I haven’t bought a comic book, at least not a current one, in over two decades.  But that doesn’t mean my head is in the sand when it comes to what the popular things are.  Fora like the Captain Comics message board keep me posted on that; I may not know the bit-and-piece details, but I am privy to the general ideas.  And one of the things which has vaguely amused me over the…

In the first four days that Part One of this article was on the board, it picked up over six hundred hits.  Wow.

Now, I know it wasn’t because I'm such a scintillating writer.  I’m not the kind of fellow who can write a page-turner.  I’m lucky when I get the subject and verb to agree.

That many hits in that brief a time is a testament to the…

If a rumour is pithy enough, especially if it involves a famous person and provides a cutting irony or a satisfying comeuppance, then the public will clutch it to its collective bosom, regardless of the facts.  H. L. Mencken proved this some ninety years ago, with his Bathtub Hoax.  I learnt it myself for the first time in 1962, one day at a friend’s house.

We…

Stan Lee, as the sole editor and principal writer for Marvel, was able to maintain a tight continuity for all of his characters, even when they appeared in other titles.  This was an advantage over Silver-Age DC, which grouped its titles under various editors.  If a DC hero crossed over into another editor’s title, rarely did that character bring his continuity baggage with…

Man oh man!  I don’t know if it’s because my questions were a bit too easy or because Jeff of Earth-J is a dyed-in-the-wool Silver-Age Marvel expert (I suspect it’s an admix of both), but he nailed most of the correct answers right out of the gate.  And of the two he missed, Philip Portelli picked up half the slack by correctly identifying the right name in question number…

See?  I didn’t forget.  It’s just that when it comes to Marvel Comics and trivia, things are a little tougher for me. 

Part of it is, no doubt, because I didn’t get into Marvel until late in the game, around 1965 or so.  I picked up all of those niggling bits of DC trivia  pretty much by osmosis, because I was there from the beginning.  But with Marvel, I had…

In the Imaginary Story “Clark Kent’s Super-Son”, a rare combination of green and red and gold kryptonite robs Clark Kent of his super-powers as well as his memories of ever being Superman.  He goes on to marry Lois Lane and they have a son, Clark, Junior, who inherits all the mighty abilities that his father once possessed.  Ten years pass and while…

You’ve got the idea, now.

The stories themselves weren’t terribly bad.  They weren’t Kingdom Come, but neither were they ludicrous in the same way that the phrase “Jimmy Olsen story” makes Silver-Age fans wince.  Then, a moment of sheer absurdity got dropped in. …

As I mentioned last time, fans of comic books have to maintain an abundant suspension of disbelief to accept the fictional universe of their four-colour heroes.  To some degree, that’s true for fans of any medium’s fiction.  Even television dramas touted for their attention to realism, such as Dragnet, have to make concessions to reality; limitations in casting and…

In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland, the White Queen tells Alice, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Whether they realise it or not, that’s pretty much the creed of comic-book fans.  In order to buy into the drama of the story, they are required to accept as…

It’s funny how this business of humanity works.  Like it or not, you, me---all of us---are cross-connected to everyone else.   A single, random event can alter the path of one man’s life and, in turn, affect the destinies of so many others. 

That’s why thousands upon thousands of children owe their lives to a rat bite.

It was 1919, and Charles…

“The Hulk Vs. the Thing”/”The Avengers Take Over!”

Editor and writer: Stan Lee  Art: Jack Kirby (pencils), George Bell (inks)

My original title for…

The fifty-pound turkey stood on the grass, panting nervously.  It was as if the fearful creature knew that Thanksgiving was only a little more than a week away.

That, of course, was impossible.  More likely what was giving the turkey fits was the small throng of low-level officials and spectators and newsmen---naturally, newsmen---that hovered around it.  Upon…

Certain things in comic books were handled with a bit more discretion back in the old days. 

Although it seems pointlessly quaint to modern-era sensiblilities, the office of the President of the United States was treated with a special reverence when it…

I came to Marvel Comics late in the game.  While I had been reading DC’s comics since the beginning of the Silver Age, I didn’t tumble to Marvel until about 1965.  Oh, I had seen Marvel Comics.  There had been a few lying around the barber shop where I got my hair cut.  I had taken a look at them, didn’t recognise any of the characters, and tossed them…