Dan Hagen

1 week ago | firstcomicsnews.com | Dan Hagen

While they may not have rivaled the ever-popular cover gorillas, giant hands clearly had an appeal of their own to DC Comics editors. And not merely giant hands, but giant green hands, for the most part. I grant you that the giant hand looming over a speeding convertible on the cover of Strange Adventures 110 (Nov. 1959) wasn’t green. But we had a giant green hand crawling ominously across the sand on the cover of Blackhawk 115 (Aug.

1 week ago | firstcomicsnews.com | Dan Hagen

In the best superhero concepts, superheroic status comes at a cost — a damaged heart, radiation-induced blindness, the murder of parents or a beloved uncle, the destruction of an entire planet. But though terrible, those are usually one-time costs. In the case of THUNDER Agent Lightning, that cost was ongoing and fatal. “Perhaps the most ambitious and successful non-DC or Marvel superhero comics of the Silver Age were published by Tower,” wrote comics historian David W. Tosh.

1 week ago | firstcomicsnews.com | Dan Hagen

Dick Giordano became editor at Charlton Comics in July 1965 with the idea of creating a line of what he called “Action Heroes.”“I just made that phrase up because I thought we should be distinguishable from DC or Marvel,” Giordano said in TwoMorrows Charlton Companion. “We should publish adventures of heroes that didn’t have superpowers.”Giordano inherited a couple of super-powered heroes, Captain Atom and Son of Vulcan.

2 weeks ago | firstcomicsnews.com | Dan Hagen

You might think that a winged, fire-breathing dragon from the planet Krypton would give even Superman pause. You’d be wrong. The last surviving snagriff arrived to menace Metropolis in Superman 78 (Sept.-Oct. 1952), having been injected with what amounted to an experimental immortality serum by Superman’s father, Jor-El.Although more powerful than Superman, the super-beast posed no direct threat to him because it was distracted by its insatiable appetite for metal, a side effect of the serum.

2 weeks ago | firstcomicsnews.com | Dan Hagen

Just before Marvel was Marvel, the comic book company was a nameless but distinctive and seemingly endless parade of giant monsters. Stan Lee was weary of it, but the talents of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko enlivened the standard twist-ending plots and kept those dimes coming in. Substances and species were switched every month to supply new rampaging creatures. A water monster in April, a smoke monster in May. A giant ant in June’s issue, and a giant lizard in July’s. Disposable, all.