Bring on the Back-ups/Thursday Triple-play: "From the Sky...Winged Wrath!", "...In the Den of the Dazzler!", "To Cage an Angel!" by Seigel, Tuska, and Ayers

 Hey, hey, hey, Groove-ophiles! Tomorrow is the U.S. premiere of X-Men: Apocalypse, and Ol' Groove's got his fingers crossed (which makes typing pretty excruciating) that this new entry into mutant movie-dom is as good as the last two! My fave original X-Man, the Avenging Angel, looks to have a much bigger part in the new flick than he had in the third X-Men installment, so now is as good a time as ever to look back at the Groovy Age Angel. So, whaddya say we dig on those rare Angel back-ups from Ka-Zar issues 2-3 (September, December 1970) and Marvel Tales #30 (January 1970), ugliest-superhero-threads-ever and all.

For an angel, Warren Worthington III had a devil of a time getting his solo-tales into print. In less than a year's time, he had two books cancelled out from under his three-part solo epic. Both the X-Men book itself (for which these stories could have been created as back-up features, but Ol' Groove and others think they might've been intended as an ish of X-Men during the "Death of Professor X" era) and the giant-sized Ka-Zar reprint mags bit the dust in 1969/70 (and yeah, X-Men was quickly revived as a reprint mag, but that's beside the point) before the complete tale could be told.

Still and all, this three-part saga is a pretty important turning point in WWIII's life (hey, was Stan trying to tell us something when he named our winged mutant?). Plus, it introduces us to the original Dazzler (blechh, okay, that one's more of a liability). It's the first solo X-Men story to appear outside the Merry Mutants' own title. Oh, and it's written by Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel (some extremely rare Groovy Age Marvel work) with powerful (if rushed-looking) art by the team of George Tuska and Dick Ayers.

"Groove, shaddup already and get on with the stories!"

Okay, okay. Sheesh.

Black and White Wednesday: "Let the Dreamer Beware" by Siegel and Reese

Check it out, Groove-ophiles! Skywald does it again! In the 1974 Nightmare Yearbook, editor "Archaic" Al Hewetson mixed Golden Age great (co-creator of Superman, fer cryin' out loud!) Jerry Siegel with Wally Wood protege Ralph Reese and we got "Let the Dreamer Beware"! Don'tcha just love how well the Golden Age and the Groovy Age mix? It's outtasite!!

Groove's Faves: Famouos First Edition # C-26--Action Comics #1

Greetings, Groove-ophiles! Well, it looks like the celebration of Superman's 75th Anniversary has begun, and if there's anything Comicdom needs to celebrate it's definitely the debut of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Man of Steel in Action Comics #1 (April 1938). But what has that to do with the Groovy Age, you wonder? Nothing really. Ha! Got'cha, didn't I? No, seriously, we appreciated Superman's Action Comics debut mightily during the Groovy Age. In 1971, t-shirts with that iconic debut cover were sold via ads that ran thru most of the DC Comics line...

...but most of all, t'was the coming of Famous First Edition # C-26 in January 1974 that really turned us on! FFE C-26 allowed us to experience what our parents and their siblings had been able to experience back in 1938 (albeit in a much larger--making it even more awesome!--format): Action Comics #1 in its entirety. For a young comicbook fiend like Young Groove, this tabloid-sized reprint was a revelation. Not only did we get to thrill to the very first Superman mini-epic (which we'd later learn was cobbled-together newspaper strip samples), but we got to see all the other non-superhero (there were no others! Superman was the first!) features starring an exciting array of cowboys, cops, reporters, boxers, adventurers, and magicians. We experienced some "big-foot" humor and were taken back to a virtual "who's who" of Depression Era celebrities. Comics were more than super-heroes, silly teens, scary tales, barbarians, and child-friendly supernatural characters. And they could all appear in one mag! It definitely made its mark on moi, baby! Read that giant-mag over and over. I still have it and pull it out from time to time. I s'pose now would be another good time to check it out!

The ad that got the heart racing!

I never dreamed of taking the outer cardboard cover off of my copy!

 

 

Neal Adams' in-freakin'-credible back cover