1) Jack Kirby created new universes for DC & Marvel that are still being mined 40 years later! If The King hadn’t invented Darkseid and the Fourth World for DC, we wouldn’t have the most important super-villain since Doctor Doom! In fact, the Fourth World is so important that the producers of TV’s Smallville decided to mine the mini-series Legends (which featured Darkseid, Granny Goodness and Desaad trying to turn the world against the super-heroes) for its current (and last) season! Plus, without that initial storyline in Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, the world would have forgotten how cool a Jimmy Olsen story could be!
2) Jack Kirby also gave us the best 2 things to happen to an apocalypse: Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth and OMAC: One Man Army Corps! The King was on fire during the ’70s with ideas about how even during a dystopian future post-apocalypse, humanity would have a chance to succeed! And it was that idea which permeated from these books and lead to a branch of post-apocalyptic entertainment that contained a nugget of hope!
3) Villains finally got their own comics in Secret Society of Super-Villains, Super-Villain Team-Up and The Joker! Seriously – until the 1970′s, no one had thought that a villain could carry a book past the first issue and yet these examples showed that stories could be told, AND ENJOYED, even if the lead characters were not good guys. Plus, we all know that the Joker rules, but now we know why he rules!
4) Roy Thomas gave us the anti-Justice League with the introduction of the Squadron Supreme and showed how bad-ass the League could be (decades before Grant Morrison showed how it could be for the real Justice League) against the Avengers! The Squadron were a hit from the minute they appeared but they also gave us a glimpse into the future when they battled the Avengers, decades before Marvel and DC put the two super-groups against each other for publishing gold. The Squadron also were later used in one of the best storylines from the run of Avengers comics that included part of the team being sent to the old West to associate them with heroes like The Two-Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid and Kid Colt. And some of the best Avengers stories were told during the 1970′s due to the creative work of Steve Englehart, Jim Shooter and George Perez!
5) Denny O’Neil and Neil Adams join forces to bring Batman stories that others would try to emulate for the rest of time! Classic work from this duo included the introduction of Man-Bat, Talia al Ghul and Ras al Ghul. This incarnation of the Dark Knight was so vivid that it inspired filmmakers years later when Tim Burton took on the task of bringing his adventures to the big screen and then 20+ years later when Christopher Nolan took those O’Neil/Adams stories and worked them into 2 of the most successful films to be made in the 2000′s: Batman Begins and The Dark Knight! Bonus: this was also the time period the duo produced the revolutionary Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories that changed comics forever by injected real-world social issues into the four-color
6) Horror comics grew up and became showcases for truly great stories unseen since the demise of EC! The creation of Swamp Thing (and then Man-Thing), plus the emergence of Werewolf By Night and the wonderful anthology series House of Mystery and those wonderful Marvel/Curtis magazines Dracula Lives!, Monsters Unleashed and Vampire Tales. Finally, stories could be told that went beyond simple “scary” and had the ability to be exquisitely scripted tales of suspense and drama as well as morality plays that left the reader gasping for more! In fact, if it weren’t for these comics, the world would not have found out how wonderful creators like Berni Wrightson and Marv Wolfman truly were! We got to see a side of comics that had been unmined for far too long and that is why adults as well as kids were able to pick up comics again!
7) Howard the Duck! Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik created this wonderful fowl and injected his adventures with enough style and charisma to outlast his detractors and cement Howard into the human conscious for the rest of time! If ever there was a comic character that defined a decade, it may very well have been this anthromorphic funny animal whose stories spoke volumes about this time period! Plus, his adventures were enough to warrant a celluloid interpretation by George Lucas featuring that 1980′s babe-of-the decade, Lea Thompson! And bonus points – it was in Howard’s original comic series that KISS made their first comic appearance (which lead to the excellent color magazine adventures that featured the real band’s blood being mixed into the printer’s ink to create a truly historic comic!
8) Comic Fandom grew up at this time! This was the decade that introduced us to the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide (establishing prices for long out-of-print comics that tried to make it easier to put a value on the fan’s collection) as well as the advent of full-scale conventions devoted to the art of comics themselves. While conventions had occurred in the years before the 1970′s, it wasn’t until Phil Seuling’s Comic Art Conventions as well as the convention that would become the San Diego ComicCon! In fact, I remember my first convention in 1978, the Atlanta Fantasy and Sci-Fi convention that was slowly evolving from Sci-Fi/Fantasy and going towards being mainly comic books. This was the time when you could finally fill in holes in your collection much more easily than before and meet fans who were as devoted to the art form as you were. Plus, fandom hadn’t been taken over by the media yet, so it was still about having fun with your fellow fanatics and not trying to do/look like something outrageous to get some camera-time!
9) Mike Grell’s Warlord was created! Truly a masterpiece for DC, this sword & fantasy was part-Jules Verne and part-Edgar Rice Burroughs, while being all Mike Grell! Grell had cemented his place in fandom by doing a fantastic job on Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, but his true claim-to-fame was this story of Travis Morgan, an Air Force Pilot crash-landing in a forgotten world of Skartaris! When other fantasy titles couldn’t last 10 issues, Warlord lasted 13 years! And it was a fun title that in later issues carried on Jack Kirby’s OMAC storyline.
10) Cerebus started being published! One of comic-dom’s greatest success stories, Dave Sim and his creation of Cerebus outlasted 2 comic implosions (one from too few sales and the other from speculators ruining comics with variant covers and over-inflated secondary-market prices). The aardvark may have started as a parody of Conan and his compatriots, but Cerebus grew into a tale that solidly told a real epic. And 6 years after the book ended at issue #300, the collections still sell extremely well and are just as relevant as when the book was originally published!
11) Creator rights were finally won for the true heroes of comics: the artists and writers of such works as Superman and Batman! No longer were characters considered just the property of the companies they were published at, but rather the true creators received credit and compensation for their long-standing and impacting work. Neal Adams, Steve Gerber and many more fought hard to get the rights to their characters and creations back from the companies and the most important battle was won by Siegel and Schuster for their creation of Superman and would be given “created by” credit on all comics, television episodes, movies and video games as well as a yearly stipend. This allowed the two to retire and not die penniless as many other comic creators had done over the years.
12) Super-heroes on television and in the movies were no longer a laughing matter! After the Batman television show in the mid-1960′s, comics were relegated to the laughing bin. But then came Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Wonder Woman and more on television and finally Christopher Reeve as Superman! And with them, the laughing stocks were now the heroes of all-media! And from there came the opportunity to have big screen adventures of Captain America, Fantastic Four and most importantly Batman (thank you, Tim Burton, for taking it seriously!).
13) Comics were published in digest and tabloid formats, making collectors search high and low for the issues in the best condition possible! The digest comics were extremely nice for the comic fan who was on a long vacation ride with limited space and they also allowed you to read new as well as reprinted material. Without these wonderful gems, you would have to wait 2 decades to get the stories reprinted and that would have hurt the fans. Plus, the tabloid format was so nice, as it brought comics art up to a well-deserved art form. You could finally see the art in almost the same size as a piece of original art and it was fabulous! Seeing the line work of Neal Adams on Superman vs. Muhammad Ali was fantastic and the diagrams of the Baxter Building for the Fantastic Four and the Batcave for Batman were extra nice for future architects or simply obsessive-compulsive detailers of all-things comic related!
14) Fan press zines were begun that carried fandom into a new age of excitement! Zines like The Buyer’s Guide To Comics Fandom (later renamed to Comics Buyer’s Guide) The Comics Journal were begun in the 1970′s and lead to the industry finally having a voice beyond the panels and balloons of four-color comics and instead offered reviews and analysis of various aspects of comic fandom. While not always done with the betterment of comics in mind, the Journal was actually noteworthy for covering things like creator’s rights and the literary applications for graphic novels. The Buyer’s Guide was instrumental with bringing the average fan together with the fledgling comics retailers, like Bud Plant and Mile High Comics.
15) The Legion of Super-Heroes was still super! The teens had yet to be plunged into a cataclysm of unknown paradoxes and were riding high on the art of Dave Cockrum and Mike Grell with stories by wunderkind Jim Shooter. And the 1970′s were that period of time that allowed the team to grow to an almost unwieldy size that would go on to almost match the X-Men for amount of members. Plus, these were stories that are still having their effects felt decades later and after numerous Crisis’s that were supposed to “fix” the continuity of so many paradoxes in history. And the Legion were the feel good team, which is why so many people still consider themselves lifelong Legion fanatics!
16) Comics were still fun and easy to read! This was before long epic, length stories told over multiple issues of various comics were standard fare! Comics during the 1970′s were fun and not at all sinister. The “Dark Age” had not begun, and you could still pick up an issue of Superman without worrying what had occurred last month or within the last 4 months causing you to need a separate set of books just to explain it all prior to reading! True, the fans like epic-styled stories, but simplicity is also extremely good. Especially for introducing new fans to a medium that is going to die in the next 20 years unless we do something now! You could still pick up a copy of Archie, Richie Rich or Little Dot at the grocery store, which was nice for the kid who wanted something to read while his mom was shopping! Now you can’t find kid comics unless you have a store order them for you, since most kid comics will never make the retailer money in the back issue market!
17) Every day was new comics day because (1) there weren’t any comic shops so they were in grocery & convenience stores and (2) they were handled by news agents so they were returnable. You could go to a Kroger’s and find a new Superman and a new Incredible Hulk then go next door to the gas station and find newer (or older) issues of both titles! This was nirvana for some and maddening for others. I was split: I loved the excitement but hated to have holes in my collections! And the joy of tracking down issues was also kind of why comic collecting was so much fun: the hunt is always better than the possession!
18) Comics were almost 4 for a dollar!! Now days, comics are $3.95 or more and for the cost of one comic now, you could have almost 16 comics back in the 1970′s! True, there were 50 cent and $1 comics back then, but they were very large and worth the cost. Plus, being able to turn in some empty Coke bottles at the gas station gave you money for a comic and a new Coke sometimes. Man, not having a lot of money was fun!
19) The Uncanny X-Men were born! This was going to be the last thing on the list, simply because it went without needing to be said, in my opinion, but that turns out to not be true. The first time you read Giant-Size X-Men #1, you were transfixed on a group of individual heroes that were unlike anything in the Marvel (or even DC) universe. Remember, Wolverine wasn’t yet in 100 different books a month and Colossus and Nightcrawler weren’t even around before that wonderful comic was published! And after that was released, Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum (and then John Byrne) gave us stories that were so wonderful that they built the empire that became the X-Universe! True, they didn’t envision Marvel over-saturating the market with X-everything, but they were instrumental in creating a vision that was truly revolutionary! AND THEN DC tried to do them one better and rekindle the Teen Titans, since the X-Men redux was so successful – and for a few years, The X-Men and The New Teen Titans were #1 and #2 every month in sales and fans!
20) Some of the greatest characters were created during this period! This is the last item on the list because truthfully, nothing else really matters. Characters like the Punisher, Wolverine, Kamandi, Darkseid, Etriganteh Demon, Adam Warlock, Ghost Rider (the Johnny Blaze version), Wildfire (Legion of Super-Heroes), Mister Miracle, Drax the Destroyer, Shang Chi, Thanos, Deathlok (Luther Manning version), Foolkiller, Ragman, Iron Fist, Sabretooth, Moon Knight, Isis, Kobra, The Eternals, Captain Britain, Bullseye, Star Lord, the Human Fly, Black Lightning, Black Goliath, Dawnstar (Legion of Super-Heroes), Doctor Bong, Machine Man, Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew version), Firestorm, Count Vertigo, Madame Xanadu, Devil Dinosaur, Moon Boy, Ben Urich, Firebug, Luscius Fox, Alpha Flight, Scott Lang (Ant Man), Quasar, Rom the Spaceknight, War Machine and last but certainly not least, Howard the Duck! This was the true Golden-Age of comics – not just for business, not just for fans, but for everything there was and is about comic books!
Excelsior!!!
