Alter Ego #131 March 2015 (magazine review).
As you can tell by the cover, this ‘Alter Ego’ from 2015 is devoted to Gerry Conway’s early career and his desire to become a comicbook writer from a young age. Initially breaking in at DC Comics, he shortly after worked exclusively for Marvel Comics. After Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, Conway was the next one in line for work as these two writers went on to other projects and he was still in his early twenties. He dealt with a lot of the second-tier characters, creating or co-creating Werewolf By Night, Man-Thing, and the Punisher. He also worked on Thor, The Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man and wrote about Gwen Stacey’s death. Even nine years on, Conway’s observations about Carmen Infantino’s odd way to cancel comicbooks simply because they aren’t reaching the numbers he wanted and why are insightful. Equally, the number of editor-in-chiefs at Marvel in the 1970s dealt with many more books on their own without sub-editors working as well.
The ‘Mr. Monster’ feature shows Michael T. Gilbert finding a story from an obscure four-issue comicbook series ‘The Man in Black’ by Bob Powell in the 1950s. Not seeing print does highlight a dream of any collector, namely finding something everyone’s missed and has quality. We all live for such dreams.
Picking out another highlight is a piece by Otto Binder about padding out sentences, and he gives an example of expanding an 8-word sentence to 42 words. In a day when you were paid by the word, it was understandable that you would learn to do things that way. I’d probably have made quite a living in his day, but it would be annoying to use so many adjectives.
Writer Paul C. Hamerlinck, with his father, Judge Brian Clemens, looks over the original court proceedings with co-creator William Parker over the creation of Captain Marvel in the court proceedings of DC Comics suing Fawcett Comics. I never considered that among the people cited in the Shazam acronym, Solomon was out of place. I just assumed that there wasn’t a mythological equivalent among the Roman and Greek gods. It doesn’t exactly answer the question as to what came first, Shazam or finding beings to match the letters.
There is always a learning curve.
GF Willmetts
March 2024
(pub: TwoMorrows Publishing. 82 page illustrated magazine. Price: varies. ISSN: 1932-6890. Direct from them, you can get it for $ 6.27 (US))
check out websites: www.TwoMorrows.com and https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_55&products_id=1176
