Tag Archives: Stan Lee

The Saturday Comics: Generic Comic Book

28 Apr

April 28, 2012

The time was 1983 and Marvel Comics was on top of the world. In fact, they put out a series of bizarre comics in the mid-80’s that I will detail  over the next couple of weeks. Each of them sold, and sold well. In this era Marvel could do no wrong and their fanatic Marvel Zombies gobbled up anything Marvel put out, including this thing.

Back before store brands were marketed as niche foods, generic cans and boxes of plain food were all over the aisles of your big chain grocery stores. Marvel, in what appeared to either be a parody, commentary, or an attempt to show that their fans would buy any piece of crap  anything they published, put out the Generic Comic Book. It was so generic that it did not even have creator credits. Check out their house ad that month:

It is probably good that the artist remained anonymous. However, Steve Skeates has claimed the writing credit.

Here are the rest of the details from mycomicshop.com:

22 page Generic Superhero story “A Superhero!”

Characters generic characters.
Genre parody; super-hero

It also claims that Stan Lee edited this issue himself. If only this guy would turn up in the Avengers movie. C’mon Stan! Make it happen!

Next Week: More mid-80’s Marvel.

The Saturday Comics: Lyndon B. Johnson

17 Mar

March 17, 2012

Back in 1964, comics were in their heyday. It was the height of The Silver Age and take a look at the variety of titles you could have found at your local newsstand.

So with such great comics- Cary Bates working on Superman, Lee and Kirby on Fantastic Four- would you have bought this if you found it nestled between Sgt. Fury and The Flash?

Batman! Spider-Man! LBJ! Doesn’t he just scream super hero?

I know that today some low-rent publishers eke out a small profit making comics featuring political figures, and even Marvel shamelessly jumped on the bandwagon by putting President Obama on the cover of an issue of Spider-Man, but at least it was Spider-Man’s book! And this is no low-rent publisher, this was Dell! They were huge in their day.

None other than the legendary Dick Giordano worked on that book.

So if you were a young comic buyer, and saw that on the spinner rack, would you have spared a single second for that, let alone shelled out 12 cents for it?